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    You've Got 8 Seconds: Communication Secrets for a Distracted World
    You've Got 8 Seconds: Communication Secrets for a Distracted World
    You've Got 8 Seconds: Communication Secrets for a Distracted World
    Ebook240 pages2 hours

    You've Got 8 Seconds: Communication Secrets for a Distracted World

    By Paul Hellman

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    About this ebook

    The average attention span has dropped to 8 seconds. To break through to people, you need to focus on your audience, be slightly different, and deliver with finesse.

    Every day at work, people do three things: talk, listen, and pretend to listen. Through fast, fun, actionable tips, You've Got 8 Seconds explains what works and what doesn't, what's forgettable and what sticks. With stories, scripts, and examples of good and bad messages, communications expert Paul Hellman reveals three main strategies:

    • Focus: Design a strong message - then say it in seconds
    • Variety: Make routine information come alive
    • Presence: Convey confidence and command attention

    You'll discover practical techniques, including the fast-focus method that Hellman uses with leadership teams; how to stand out in the first seconds of a presentation; and 10 actions that spell executive presence.

    Whether pitching a project, giving a speech, selling a product, or just writing an email, You've Got 8 Seconds will make sure you get heard, get remembered, and get results.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Nelson
    Release dateApr 13, 2017
    ISBN9780814438312
    Author

    Paul Hellman

    Paul Hellman consults and speaks internationally on how to excel in high-stakes communications. His columns and advice have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNBC.com, The Boston Globe's online Job Doc column, and on public radio's Marketplace and CNN's Business Unusual.

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    Reviews for You've Got 8 Seconds

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Great book for anyone who wants to present, communicate, respond greatly and engage your audience.

    Book preview

    You've Got 8 Seconds - Paul Hellman

    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    I’m grateful to my consulting clients—I’ve worked with some of you for a shocking number of years. Thanks for the opportunity to test and refine these techniques, and for not being at all surprised when they work.

    Thanks to CNBC.com, especially Allen Wastler, and to boston.com for publishing my fast tips, and to all those who subscribe to these tips from my website, and then occasionally email me about their value.

    Thanks to my agents Janet Rosen and Sheree Bykofsky. It’s always a delight to work with you both.

    I’m grateful to Ellen Kadin, probably the most responsive editor in NYC, and certainly the most collaborative. Also to Barry Richardson, Miranda Pennington, and Jenny Wesselmann for moving things along with such grace. And to Rosemary Kane Carlough, an old friend, whom I’m so pleased to be working with again.

    Thanks to Aimee Levy, a gifted designer, always generous with advice.

    A book is a long, complicated project. There are many at AMACOM I will never meet. You work behind the curtain in editorial, production, marketing, and creative. And you make books like this happen. Thank you.

    ABOUT THE TITLE . . .

    8 Seconds

    In 2015, Microsoft did a study on attention spans.¹ The conclusion?

    You now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish . . . eight seconds.²

    Communication Secrets

    Here’s what is not a secret: First, you’ve got to capture attention. Then, you’ve got to keep it.

    The trick is how to do that. The trick is what this book’s about.

    SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK?

    WHAT IF YOU DON’T HAVE TIME?

    I tend to make up my mind about people within thirty seconds of meeting them.

    —RICHARD BRANSON

    , founder of Virgin Group

    Warning: Others Are Making Split-Second Decisions about You—Right Now

    They’re deciding whether or not to listen to you, or read your emails, or, in general, give you the time of day.

    Are you the speaker? people sometimes ask me before a meeting.

    Yes, I say. Or at least I’m going to pretend to be.

    But the truth is, every person in that room is on stage, because you and I present ourselves every day. And even if you’re working at home, the moment you get on the phone and say hello, people will infer all sorts of things about you—your intelligence, your attitude—just by your voice.

    Same thing with your emails.

    The point is, small moments aren’t so small.

    Back to our meeting. Suppose it begins with self-introductions. A small moment? Maybe not.

    When it’s your turn, you say:

    1. I’m Harriet. But you speak softly, as if you were wanted by the FBI and you suspect that half the room is working undercover.

    Your volume speaks volumes. Speak up, send the message that your message is IMPORTANT.

    2. I’m Harriet. But while speaking, you fidget with your hair, or your jewelry, or you touch your face—these are known as grooming gestures. Not recommended, although preferable to fidgeting with other people’s hair or faces.

    3. I’m Harriet??? You make routine assertions sound like questions by ending every sentence on a higher note. As if you believe that, in this universe, nothing is certain and you just discovered, much to your surprise, that you are, in fact, Harriett. Or at least you could be Harriet. The whole thing is bewildering . . .

    The premise of this book is that people’s attention spans are ridiculously short, that sometimes all you get is a moment, and that these moments count.

    Let’s seize them.

    No Time?

    Let’s talk about your time. In the next 24 hours, everyone in your organization—in every organization—will do one of three things:

    1. Talk

    2. Listen

    3. Pretend to listen

    You definitely don’t have time. No one does, it’s the information age, which means you’re flooded with meetings, emails, and breaking news, every second of every day.

    But consider: your colleagues and clients don’t have time either. For sheer survival, they’ll screen out anything that sounds like noise.

    Let’s make sure that you get heard.

    Back to the book: As you’ll see on page xxi (How This Book Works), you don’t necessarily have to read it in the traditional start-to-finish way.

    You need something fast. You’ve got 8 seconds.

    Pretending to Listen?

    At a meeting, while others talk, your inner experience may look like this:

    1. Why does everyone at this meeting, you wonder, have such enormous water bottles? How long is this meeting going to last?

    2. Chocolate donuts! The ones on the table look tasty. But wait, you’re on a diet. Oh, who cares?

    3. Focus, focus, focus. Good.

    4. Right now, you’re extremely focused on the word focus.

    5. Oh look, a tweet: A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, according to Herbert Simon.

    6. Who’s Herbert Simon?

    7. You’ve heard rumors the company is about to be reorganized, or downsized, or sold, or something. How will that affect you?

    8. Time for another donut.

    9. Why are you even at this meeting? And who’s that person over there? Is that Herbert Simon?

    10. You just realized something bad, there are 79 slides left. Is it too late, you wonder, to go to clown college?

    p.s. Herbert Simon was a Nobel Prize–winning economist, and one of the first to talk about the attention economy.

    HOW THIS BOOK WORKS

    3 Key Strategies, with 100 Tactics, Based on 25+

    Years of Experience

    I work with leaders at global companies. My focus? How to excel in high-stakes communications. For example:

    Executives at a biotech company need to explain the company strategy to thousands of employees. If the employees don’t get it, the strategy won’t work.

    Leaders at a consumer products company need to make a dynamic presentation to senior executives about the results of a complex project. The project took a year. The audience wonders, was it worth it?

    Analysts at a mutual fund company need to tell a roomful of colleagues and executives why to buy a specific bond. Time to talk: one to two minutes.

    The challenge is always the same: how to get heard, get remembered, and get results. I’ve developed three strategies. They work.

    1. Focus

    2. Variety

    3. Presence

    Focus doesn’t just mean to say less, but also to design a compelling message. I’ll show you several methods, including fast-focus™, which I use with leadership teams and individual executives to make their messages stick.

    Variety means to be slightly different. With variety, you’ll make routine info come alive, you’ll know when to shift gears—from announce to discuss—and engage others with smart questions. If you’re giving a presentation, you’ll stand out in the first few seconds.

    Presence matters because there are certain people you listen to just because of their presence, and others you tune out. But what is presence? We’ll look at 10 actions that you can use right away to boost your reputation.

    The book illustrates these strategies with fast, fun, actionable tactics. Each tactic is self-contained, so it’s easy to skip around. And there’s a headline on top, so you know the point right away.

    Let’s get going.

    | PART I |

    Capture Attention with

    FOCUS

    If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever . . . Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack!

    —WINSTON CHURCHILL

    ROADMAP FOR PART I, CHAPTERS 1–4:

    How do you design a message that gets heard, gets remembered, and gets results?

    One solution: say less. For example, tell them what you’re not going to tell them. Saying less requires practice, and we’ll discuss some easy drills (chapter 1).

    Fast-focus™ (chapter 2) is the methodology I use with leadership teams and individual executives to design critical messages. We’ll go through it, step-by-step.

    Then we’ll look at designing messages for special situations, such as how to talk about your accomplishments without bragging, and how to give difficult feedback without getting pushback (chapter 3).

    Words are the raw materials of a message, so we’ll end this section with how to make your words sparkle, whether speaking or writing, even if you have writer’s block (chapter 4).

    | CHAPTER 1 |

    Say Less

    In Maine we have a saying that there’s no point in speaking unless you can improve on silence.

    —EDMUND MUSKIE,

    former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State

    Don’t Over-Salt

    Detail is like salt. You can always add more. (If others want more, they’ll ask questions.) But once in, you can’t take it out.

    Consider what your audience wants to know. But also, and every bit as important, what they don’t want to know—because they’ve got no time, no interest, they’re preoccupied with 10,000 other things, and they’d gladly pay you a boatload of money if you simply didn’t tell them.

    Describe yourself, one CEO asks job applicants, in three words or less.

    What would you say? Probably not wordy and repetitive.

    But how focused are you?

    You seem to have 29 ideas at once, an exec told one of his managers. And I feel like I’m hearing them all, right this minute.

    Ever gotten feedback like that?

    I work with several companies where executives, after taking a communication assessment, will gladly tell you their preferred styles. Each style has its own color.

    Let’s say you walk into an office and see the color red. That means, in essence, Get to the point. Then get out.

    But most execs aren’t that direct.

    Your boss probably hasn’t asked you to say it in three words or less, or given you feedback about your 29 ideas, or flashed the color red in your face.

    Maybe she hasn’t said a thing about valuing conciseness.

    Assume it.

    Avoid Mentioning All Your Children—Ditto for Lists Longer than Three Items.

    Imagine standing in front of a huge televised audience, with only a minute to introduce yourself.The stakes are enormous.

    You’re running for U.S. President.

    What do you say, and what do you leave out?That’s a problem that you and I, on a smaller stage, face daily.

    At a 2016 Democratic debate, one of the candidates, a former U.S. senator, told us that he had five daughters and one son. Fine.

    Then he proceeded to name each one, plus tell us their occupations.

    But after the first two daughters, he paused, as if he couldn’t remember a single thing about daughter #3.

    Now I’ve only got two children. But clearly, as you have more and more kids, at some point—I don’t know the exact number—your mind turns completely to mush.

    Then the candidate recovered: Julia! Massage therapist! (Luckily, daughters #4 and #5 were both in school, so they were quickly dispensed with.)

    But here’s the question, and it’s the same one your audience has: why do we need all this info?

    Sometimes, when providing information, you and I fall in love with the details, as if they were our children. We want everyone to know all about them.

    But this candidate’s main message was clear, without the details: Look, if I can raise six kids, I can obviously run a country.

    Meanwhile, at a 2016 Republican debate, one of the candidates, a current senator, said he’d eliminate five federal agencies. Then he proceeded to name each one.

    Same trap. Same result.

    He listed the Commerce Department twice, as if to say, You can’t just get rid of the Commerce Department once. Any idiot can do that. No, I’m going to get rid of it, and then I’m going to get rid of it again . . .

    If the details are too much for you, the speaker, to remember, your listeners don’t stand a chance.

    Tell Them What You’re NOT Going to Tell Them

    There’s mystery in what people don’t say. Let’s use that to our advantage.

    When you ask someone, How are you? you get the mysterious answer, Fine.

    No one says, Well, my spouse just ran off with the plumber, and ever since she left, I’ve been despondent. Also, the upstairs sink hasn’t been draining properly.

    But in other conversations, the border between what to disclose vs. what not to, gets murky.

    I recently patrolled that border with a group of research scientists, while working on their upcoming presentations. Every presentation lives, or dies, at that border.

    We all know what it’s like to be in the audience. I often advise clients to imagine an unpleasant dental procedure.

    Suppose your presentation is 10 minutes. That’s a 10-minute procedure. And if you’re one of eight people presenting that day, you’d need to multiply those 10 minutes by eight dentists.

    That’s a long time.

    The Gettysburg Address, as you’ve

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