Video

Notes with timestamps

What is communication skills

5:30: So, I thought, okay, get really good technically. Spent thousands of hours in my bedroom by myself, in front of the mirror practicing magic. Got nowhere. I was missing ingredient: magicians call it “showmanship”, a fancy word for communication skills. … let’s say, for example, you are 10/10 technically, but you are 3/10 with your communication skills. Do you think people will perceive you 10/10 or 3/10?

7:20: It’s it’s not their responsibility to see the brilliance that exists within you it’s I believe your responsibility to learn how to shine your light brightly.

13:55: Most people in their entire lives will never change the way they sound, they will never change the way they communicate. They’ll change the way they dress, they’ll change their hair, they’ll change their glasses, they’ll change all these things about themselves but the way they communicate and the way they sound stays consistent.

Voice as insturment

14:58: My vocal teacher, she would always challenge me, she goes, well if you could make the sound and you play the key on your piano, you describe to me then how is it fake. How is it fake if you were able to make that sound that is you, that is your instrument, that is just you playing with keys you’re unfamiliar with. That’s it. You’ve gone through this entire life being so familiar with this key that anytime you press any other key you go, oh it’s not me. No, no, no, you’re just familiar with this key and you’re unfamiliar with the others.

16:04: The voice you have right now is not your natural voice: you lost access to your natural voice when you were two or three. Question: if I asked you to scream at the top of your lungs right now for about 10 minutes, what would happen to your voice? Oh, I’d lose it. Yeah, my daughter 12 months old can scream for 3 hours Steven, and she does not lose her voice because they have this beautiful access to their instrument. They can naturally access that in instrument whereas as we grow older at the age of three or four we start to be inspired by certain people in our circles. As a result of being inspired by people what do kids do they emulate, they copy so the voice that you’ve developed, you’ve copied that based on the people you were inspired by when you were young. It’s just a series of habits: the way you speak, the way you sound is just a series of behaviors. It’s how you manipulate your vocal cords, how you move air through your body, how you shape your lips, where you place your teeth, how you maneuver your tongue, how you maneuver your soft pallet. Depending on how you do all of that you create a certain sound.

18:10: I often tell my students, I say all the time, I say: don’t be so attached to who you are in the present, you don’t give the future version of you a chance.

20:30: What does vocal image mean? It came about when I realized I spend, and I think most of us spend a lot of time on, our visual image, right? How we look, our body language, the way we dress, but very rarely do people spend time on their vocal image. Now, I will make it make sense: when people see you and you reveal your visual image, they make assumptions about you pretty quickly. So they form assumptions: oh this person seems friendly, maybe they’re confident because they got good posture, maybe they’re smiling they’re friendly and then all of a sudden when you open your mouth and you speak they now turn these assumptions into beliefs. So, what may be assumptions before, now they go, oh you are friendly, you are confident, right, or they might think, oh no, bit of a wanker, right? I’ve had them before, where you assume you see someone you go, oh that person seems nice, so you go meet them, ah, not really nice. That’s weird, so, it’s another layer that we don’t think about, though, because, we again, think we’re stuck with our voice, we think we’re stuck with the way we communicate, we think there’s no way for you ever change this.

21:40: It’s a metaphor, but I believe that we can create so many different songs with our voice if we learn to treat it as an instrument. And we can play with the technique to help you increase your vocal range if you want. There’s something called a siren technique. The siren technique is when you read something with a low voice and then you go towards a high voice and you go back down to a low voice.

26:54: What’s even more interesting is they’ve done studies where they had five or six people talking at the same time and the person heard was the person who had more melody in their voice. The person who is more melodic, what they say, becomes more memorable, whereas if all of us were speaking like this, me, yourself, Jack, everyone all of a sudden, you wouldn’t be able to hear the difference.

27:20: How do you know you’ve not played with it too far? By playing with it too far and then getting feedback. People are so afraid of that though and they don’t realize that they don’t go too far, they underplay. The risk if not going far, the risk is not going far enough. Again, at this point when people heard me, of course, squeaking like Mickey Mouse they’re going to say “you’re going to have to remind me again Vin why this is worth it?” You’ll be able to make people feel more connected to you they will feel what you’re saying, not just hear what you’re saying.

29:28: When you think about rate of speech, there’s a way to use it and the way you use rate of speech is if you really want to highlight a point creating an auditory highlight slow down. That creates an auditory highlight. It’s like a highlighter with your words and if you want to be able to show charisma, energy, you speed up. And if it’s not as important, you can speed up. And that’s fine: this simple rule gives you vocal variety with your rate of speech that’s simple rule. What does changing my rate of speech then do to the message I’m communicating: it makes it more memorable, clear and there’s more clarity in it.

33:25: People who are confident, take their time.

34:20: When you use volume there’s two ways to auditorily highlight something with volume. Volume is fascinating because with rate of speech you slow down, but with volume to highlight something you could go very quiet. So if all of a sudden I wanted to say something scary, I could lower my volume and say it" but then all of a sudden notice what happens if I just stay here now. What’s started as a great verbal highlight, now just kind of doesn’t seem effective anymore. Because if you make something default it becomes non-functional.

Storytelling

41:16: I believe stories are more sticky than me just throwing you a bunch of tips and hacks and tricks. Do you have a storytelling formula? I do. I think the way most people tell stories is they report stories. So I’ll share a story with you, okay, and reporting a story is, this is one of my favorite stories, let’s say you ask me how I met my wife. Reporting a story is just me saying, oh I met my wife at a bar and I did some magic to her she didn’t like it and that was cool and then I gradually was able to win her in the end, but I met her at a bar that’s me that’s me reporting the story.

Whereas, this is the story of how I met my wife. So I still remember this, because this happened in 2009, I crashed a girl’s graduation party named Vivien. It was at a this beautiful bar called Distill and there was two levels to this bar. On the bottom was for everybody and on top was the high rollers. You had to buy expensive drinks to get to the top and I got to the top and I saw this beautiful Malaysian girl sitting by the bar. So, I said to my friends, I said, watch this and I take a pack of cards out of my pants, cuz I’m magician, so I walk up to her and I say would you be impressed if I transformed this king of hearts into the Queen of Hearts like yourself? Disgusted, and that’s how she reacted: she looked at me as if she smelt a bloody fart, she looks at me she goes: I’d be more impressed if you transformed into a real man had a conversation with me. Boom and I’ve never had that reaction before. Normally, people say, “wow you’re amazing”, so I said to her no thanks and I left tail between my legs. The boys all teased me and everything, but I was so drawn to her confidence, just oh there was something there. I went back to the bar four times in a row she wasn’t there, she wasn’t there, she wasn’t there, then she was there and I walked up to the second time and I said: Hey listen what if I transformed into a real man and I took you out for a coffee? And we fell in love. You know and that’s the story of how I met my wife: whereas the way I would normally tell that story is just “oh I met her at a bar, did some tricks, she didn’t like it, and then that was fun, yeah”. But all of a sudden there was so much life so much zest in that story.

43:56: When you think of the storytelling formula, if you just give the “who? what? where? and when?” that’s the basics people need. But what turns up from reporting to reliving, because that’s what you want to get to, is the ingredients that you just called out: V.A.K.S., which stands for Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic and Smell. So I’m just describing those few things for you, right, and it doesn’t always have to have all the ingredients, but you want to add some of those ingredients, right, so the visual I describe to you, the visual the auditory what I said: I did my voice, I did her voice, I gave you dialogue, right, so all of a sudden you bring those the story to life. Now, it goes from reporting to reliving. So if I told that story, it’s to do with improv as well, instead of just going out and saying: here’s three ways to show up authentically when you’re trying to pick up someone, yeah, instead of doing that I share the story first. I get you to engage, I build rapport, I build chemistry, now you’ve heard the story, now you have rapport with me, you feel more relaxed, you feel more creative, right, then I link that story to “so the very next time you walk up to a girl if she does say no, she may not be saying no to you, she may just be saying no to your approach. Here are the three ways you can show up more authentically as a man I believe that is a much more powerful way to then go into the three tips”.

47:25: Go out and try tonality with your kids and read them a children’s book because those books are naturally emotive. And if you don’t have kids, borrow a niece or a nephew and just watch the impact on the other human being as you play with your instrument. Watch them smile, watch them giggle, watch them react to the way you play your instrument because then it wakes you up to the fact that you’ve got access to this and that I can change the way someone feels. What a power! Yet we don’t use it.

48:27: Whatever emotion comes before the pause, once you pause it intensifies that emotion. So if you got the feeling of anger and you pause, oh, that is a pause of anger. But, if all of a sudden I’m sad and then I pause, I prolong the sadness, it’s a pause of sadness. Think about how important the pause is in music, and I love the world of music, I love listening to orchestral music, and when you think about it, what happens right after a crescendo, it’s a pause. Silence is the most important note that they play during that piece, yet we barely use it. And what else does the pause do, when you pause, you give me time to process what you’re saying, yet we are so afraid of the pause.

51:46: If I wanted to be really boring, I should just kill all variety, kill all the foundations, nothing, give nothing. And it’s what happens is, because they go: “I’ll let my work speak for itself” and I say: “that’s great, that means you do great work, but why not speak for your work too, why can’t we do both? Why does it have to be one or the other?”

Improving

52:57: If you just go oh this is something I need to work on, then this is the three-step process you have to commit to. And just by doing this it’s going to dramatically change the way you talk, it’s going to dramatically change the way you show up: I call it “record and review”. And I learned this as a magician and it’s so practical when it comes to magic and communication skills.

  1. Record a video of yourself speaking for 5 minutes. A full 5 minutes. And they always immedeately say, “oh what do I say though”. Google or ChatGPT are great conversational starters and then use those for yourself and just talk. But it has to be impromptu because I’m trying to tease out core behaviors. I don’t want you to give me a pitch that you’ve delivered 20 times already, I want you to just be in the moment to speak. I’m trying to tease out some non-functional behaviors. So once you’ve recorded that video of yourself for 5 minutes leave it for a day. You want to be standing while you’re doing this, okay, once you’ve got that video recorded leave it for a day, because when you watch it straight away, “I’m fat, I’m ugly, I don’t like myself, I hate the way I sound”. You leave it for a day, you’re thinner, you’re better looking, you love yourself, more time and space it’s amazing. So leave it for a day then when you watch it back, you review it in three different ways.

  2. The first time you record on your phone, you turn the sound all the way up, press play, turn your phone over: just listen. Here you’re doing an auditory review and just listen to your voice. And now, because you’ve listened to this podcast you also have five vocal foundations can think about. So now, auditorily think about “how’s my rate of speech, how’s my volume, oh my default rate is around a three, oh I speak really and I stick to that, oh my default volume is, oh my goodness, it’s one, oh wow, there’s no tonality, there’s no emotion in my voice, there’s no pitch, oh I am not pausing”. You’ll be able to take so many notes and you’ll be able to hear things you’ve never been able to hear before because most people avoid filming themselves because “I hate the way I look, and I hate the way I sound right”. So once you do that you have you’ll have a page of notes and a whole new level of awareness of your auditory communication skills.

  3. So the next step is now you turn your phone back around, you turn the sound and put it on mute, you press play and you just look at yourself. And then, as you’re watching yourself, because most people don’t do this unless they’re creators, (that’s why creators are such great communicators, is because they do this) that’s why you’re a great listener in a podcast because you watch yourself back. So now, as you just watch yourself back without the auditory feedback all of a sudden, now you’ll see things you don’t normally see: “oh wow I’m swiveling a lot on my chair, oh wow I don’t use my hand gesture, oh I put my hands behind my back, (oh this is my big tick I keep touching my glass, I can’t help it, oh I need to work on that), I keep touching my face, I keep touching my mouth, I keep fiddling with things. You’ll see a whole bunch of non-functional behaviors that you’ve never seen before because you’ve avoided it and also because you have this idea in your head that you’re stuck, you’re not. It’s just a series of behavior.

  4. And then afterwards, the final form of review don’t listen to it and don’t watch it: get it transcribed. Because now you’ll see the way you communicate from a different perspective and you go “oh my goodness I ramble, I talked about the same thing over”. Because you see it from a different perspective sometimes you don’t hear that, it’s easier to see it. And then you see it and I can see you reacting right? But that’s what people do is they go “oh not only do I ramble, (because when you get a transcribed leave in all of the nonwords and the filler words: nonwords being the sounds we make to fill the silence, filler words being the words we use to fill the silence) and so like do you know what I mean. This transcription is immediately going to reveal to you all of your auditory clutter the things that you say (again nonwords and filler words are auditory clutter) that’s the again, “and”, “like”, do you know what I mean, “um”, “uh”. Highlight it with a red highlighter, because it might not just be those. One of my big ones was “okay”. I taught online during COVID, as a result of that, because I didn’t get the in-person feedback from my students, I would always say “okay” at the end of my sentences because I wasn’t getting any feedback. So I say “that’s the vocal foundations, okay, all right now that’s body L okay okay okay” and I didn’t even notice I was doing it but that process revealed to me immediately. Oh wow, I didn’t know that. I was able to remove that because it didn’t serve.

57:43: (The filler words) decreases the clarity of the message. It’s okay to have some, be human, it not about none, but it’s about having some and not having your speech littered with them. Is it easy to overcome that? Yeah, it is, because, to get rid of that habit, you just need to learn a new habit. And the new habit is pause. So the very moment you want to say “um”, we are not lagging, we are just pausing. That’s why as part of the vocal foundations you have to learn to be comfortable with… what we’re doing right now, just pausing.

58:38: Normally what happens after you do that I know because my students have done it and then what happens is, overwhelm. Because they go, “oh my goodness there’s like 26 things I have to improve, which one do I pick?” and then they’ll have to DM me on social “which one do I pigment?” and then analysis paralysis. It doesn’t matter pick one so what you do is you create yourself a little 12-week plan and you plan it one week at a time. So first week, rate of speech. Great, the whole week you just look at rate of speech. At the end what do you do of that week record and review again. Did it change? no, guess what you’re doing next week, rate of speech. And it’s that commitment and I love this Japanese word called “kaizen” (relentless improvement) and you all do this here amazingly, that’s what you got to commit to and you focus on rate until you see change.

Presence

1:06:17: I learned this (power sphere) from Mark Bowden. Mark Bowden is an incredible body language expert and I was lucky to do some coaching with him when I lived in the US. He taught me this concept of the area between your belly button and your eyes, yeah, and that’s the Power Sphere. So when you’re gesturing to people, a lot of people who are shy gesture below the power sphere. They are doing that because they’re playing small, okay, scared to take up space. Again, I get a lot of my female students ask me this question, they say, “oh Vinh, I feel like I don’t have enough presence and I get the feedback, I don’t get executive presence”. What is this elusive thing called executive presence? It’s simple, it’s two things: it’s vocal presence and physical presence. How you use your hand gestures allows you to level up your physical presence. So if you’ve got better physical presence because you’re using your hand gestures within the power sphere, all of a sudden you’ve got that executive presence that they’re talking about. So you need to get your elbows off your sides, I think of myself as having this sphere around me. The way that I remember Mark sharing this with me and don’t be afraid to go to the edges of the sphere, otherwise, we tend to. A lot of people T-Rex it right, don’t T-Rex it, just have your arms nice, out and big. Don’t be afraid to take up the space.

1:07:32: There are foundational gestures you should learn paired with this (power sphere).

  1. Virginia Satia came up with these, and she was a family therapist and she came up with the foundation to hand gestures. This is placator: so you have palm face up. Palm face up and out: beautiful gesture, to show that, hey, I have no weapons, I have nothing to attack you with. So this is play: you’re showing your palms to greet people as they come in. However, it’s closely related to its cousin, “I don’t know”.

  2. So if you want more authority you use, what’s the second one called, leveler. Leveler is hands facing down. Feels a bit we’re doing sitting down, but this is leveler. It’s an element of control, yeah, well, the hands face down.

  3. The next one is called blamer. Have a guess at what blamer is? Pointing? Yes, correct, this is blamer, a very strong jest. Then a softer version of that is the full finger point. You point with all your fingers. Politicians get taught this, they soften it a bit with their full finger point.

  4. You’ve also got this wonderful one, they call the computer. Computer is a wonderful, extra thing you can do when you’re on a podcast. You can react with your face but you can respond with your body too. You can kind of go into computer. Computer is just one arm under the armpit and the other one at your chin and you go “huh”. Some people call this the thinking pos. But you can go with this and you go combine with a head tilt, soften it. Straight up is a little bit straight, soften it. It’s like, okay, I feel what you’re going through. And the reason they call it computer is I’m processing what you’re saying, I’m leaning in, I’m showing you that I’m processing, as opposed to sometimes we’re unaware we don’t move our face and we just sit there and they’re talking and we’re like, this, and they don’t know if you’re there.

  5. The final one is distractor which is a pattern break. It’s an auditory and visual pattern break. For example, if you’re on stage and you’re talking and you’ve got gone on a tangent, I’ve done this, maybe you’ve done it, and you realize the audience they’re all on their phones. Instead of continuing, you can execute distractor and do distractor to get their attention back: oh I’m sorry, oh, I’ve gone down that tangent, let me bring you back, let me use a different analogy. So auditory, that there’s a clap involved, visual in that I’m shooing bees, imagine me shooing bees, as I was doing that so clap and shooing bees there’s an auditory and visual pattern break that now allows me to get your attention back. If you’re doing this more than once in a presentation you need to work on your rehearsal process, you need to work on you delivering the presentation in a way that’s more coherent.

1:15:05: When you have to do it virtually, you have to give more of yourself. If you want them to feel valued, you have to adopt the mindset of (energy) generosity.

1:16:45: Now make sure your camera placement is well placed. A lot of people, when they appear on Zoom, all you see is their head. Now that makes you less visually dynamic, this is why you need the external mic. Push the laptop back, external camera, wider lens, let them see your whole torso. I learned this from Vanessa van Edwards: such a powerful concept, where it’s the idea of proxemics. There’s the study of distances: most people when they appear on Zoom, appear in the intimate space and the intimate space is when your head is right next to your partner at night where you’re doing pillow talk and that’s how you appear on Zoom. And when you appear that close you feel self-conscious, everybody else goes oh, that’s a bit too much. So if you all of a sudden, now learn to appear in the personal and social space, which means they can see your full torso, that people feel more comfortable and now you also have access to your hand gestures. Light yourself well, something very simple. If you’re doing Zoom meetings all the time and it’s critical for you in your work then learn three-point lighting. Three-point lighting is essentially three point lighting: you’ve got a key light, you’ve got a fuel light and you’ve got a hair light, behind you.

1:25:45: And I remember this quote from Steve Martin, that inspired me: Be so good that they cannot ignore you.

1:29:35: The “yes, and” technique is just when you acknowledge what they’re saying and you’re just building on top of it. It’s like “yes, and you’re right, sometimes I can be a bit of an idiot”. It requires you to remove your ego though. Because again you have to be okay with that because we’re all flawed human beings. Aren’t you letting them win though in that situation? It depends on how you define win. To me I’m just not going to be hooked into this, whereas before I would defend myself, like, “oh what have I done that made you think that”, but I’m not interested. I love this quote from Brene Brown where she says, it’s I think from Theodore Roosevelt: if you’re not in the arena with me, I’m not really that interested in your feedback.

Conversation/Small-talk tips

1:33:12: How do we start a conversation with another human being? I’ve got a favorite technique that I use and it requires courage. So you have been warned, it requires courage and it’s a game simple game called “High Low Buffalo”. In the world of improv “High Low Buffalo”: High is something that’s going great for you, Low something that’s not so great for you, Buffalo something interesting about you. Now there’s a reason why this game is so great: because if I play “High Low Buffalo” and you play “High Low Buffalo” and we’ll play it in a second then what we’re doing is we’re creating something called conversational threads. Now, I have given you three conversational threads that you can pull on. …so all of a sudden I’ve got three threads to choose from. I’m giving myself three chances here, I’m giving three opportunities for a conversation to spark but in actuality there is six threads here because there’s three from me there’s three from you.

1:39:46: I tell my students 3-2-1, which is three steps, two types or the one thing. So just have that in the back your head, there are three steps to something, there are two types of something or the one thing is. So when someone’s talking to you, you want to keep it fairly brief and you want to kind of minimize that small talk and you know you don’t want to turn it into big talk, they’ll talk to you about something and you go the one thing about building a personal brand is XYZ or just X. So you go: the one thing about personal branding if I could share with you now is the importance of being consistent, hey, so good to meet you let’s take a quick selfie and then you go. Again you have that framework in your head.

1:41:54: Do you know why it (people interrupting) happens though? Because of low levels of physical and low levels of vocal presence. The first thing I would say at a foundational level is what you want to fix and again that’s to do with volume, that’s to do with hand gestures, power sphere, all the things we’ve spoken about and by leveling that up it’s much harder to interrupt. Another simple story: if everyone’s sitting around a team meeting, stand when you’re about to deliver your point because when you stand, you now have more physical presence so all of a sudden people won’t interrupt you as long as you’re standing. Because I’m still talking and pause it’s clearly a pause for effect, I’m still taking the floor right.

1:45:49: F.O.R.D. we’re talking about Family, Occupation, Recreation and Dreams. These are the points of conversation that I could talk about if I wanted to engage with that person for a longer period of time instead of just thinking about what they do. FORD is just a wonderful acronym to go, well, there’s so many other things we could talk about, right, I could talk about family, recreation, occupation and your dreams. Why does having a broader set of things to talk about cause more resonance and connection? Because interaction feels different to every other one, otherwise it always feels like occupation, it’s always about occupation. I just love having extra things to go to, like dreams, again I love asking people that question.

Energy

1:49:01: I’ve done it wrong many times before and again, that’s how you learn, but people don’t want to learn that way anymore. They don’t want to pay the price of failure, that’s the only way you learn.

1:51:42: I asked my vocal teacher this and I said like what’s the difference (between introvert and extravert). She asked me this question in return, where she said that pianist you saw at the concert I took you to if they’re an extrovert how would it be different when they play the piano and if they’re an introvert how would it be different? I said I have no idea, she goes it’s the same thing. The only difference between introverts and extroverts is an introvert lose energy from social interaction so you have to be highly diligent when you’re expending that energy and you’re playing the music for people you have to be extremely diligent. Whereas those who are extroverts can play it for a longer, extended period of time.

1:56:54: Energy is a limited supply that’s why it’s so beautiful when someone is willing to sit and be present and play their instrument with you because it’s a conscious thing. …You get so much more out of life when you give more, not just with money and time, but with your energy.

2:12:02: My dad called and he just said a sentence that brought me. The sentence was, and I’ll preface this because he knows I love medieval movies, he said a king that knows the limits to his desires will rule a lifetime. You’ll notice kings that want to continually conquer more land and gradually what happens to them is they die or they get killed. Whereas the kings that know the limits to their desires, they rule an entire lifetime and that’s what I really connected with and that’s what brought me back and I walked away from a speaking career to go back to south Australia.