Dave's Journal

You show up for a lunch date with an old friend you’ve not seen in awhile. You share a hug or a hand shake, sit down, and start catching up.

You friend asks how you’ve been and what’s been going on in your life and career. You start telling them about some of the things that have happened since you last connected. When you’re done talking, your friend says:

That was a great opening statement.

If ever you heard something like that from a friend in conversation, I think you’d find it quite a bit awkward. Why are they grading you out loud on their opinion of the quality of what you’ve just communicated?

Yet, for some reason, we’ve decided, at least here in North American business culture, that it’s perfectly fine to do this all time when somebody asks us a question.

Multiple times a day, I witness someone fielding a question in a professional context and then responding to that question first with a phrase this sounds something like this:

That’s a great question.

As a Dale Carnegie instructor I was taught that this is called, “grading a question” — and was coached hard to avoid doing it.

Telling people that they asked a great question before you answer it is problematic for a number of reasons.

First, it’s verbally inefficient. Saying, “that’s a great question” to everyone in the room each time you are asked something doesn’t add anything to the dialogue and just wastes time.

Second, it’s almost never equitable. If you’re fielding a question and answer session with a group of people, you’d better grade every question with the exact same wording and the exact same body language and facial expression. Otherwise, you quickly establish inequity.

Since it’s virtually impossible to grade each question the same, it’s worse than just wasting time. What ends up happening is that you tell four people in the room that that had a “great question,” but then you don’t say it to the fifth person who asked the tougher question you didn’t want to get.

I’ve seen it happen multiple times where someone was facilitating a question and answer session and they told almost everyone else in the room that they had a “great question,” but then didn’t say “great question” to the key customer, vice president, or other decision-maker in the room. Super awkward to watch.

When you grade questions, it gets really obvious pretty quickly who you are enjoying talking with in the room and who’s questions you really don’t want.

Third, at its worst, grading questions can be perceived as manipulative. This is especially troublesome if you’re handling a situation where there is some hostility in the interaction or some kind of difficult issue being addressed. Showing up and telling everyone that they are coming with “great questions” can look like you are hoping to win favor instead of just responding.

While I don’t recall seeing a situation where someone was intentionally trying to manipulate in this way, there’s something that feels really awkward about showing up for a meeting to address a major issue and the point person who’s supposed to be addressing the problem keeps repeating “great question” to everyone’s inquiries.

When I see this happen, I wonder why the person is putting such emphasis on making value judgements around what their stakeholders are asking instead of just addressing the problem.

Most of the time, we don’t mean anything bad by saying, “great question.” It’s just an unfortunate habit that unintentionally projects things we often don’t want to communicate.

My invitation to you is to stop this madness by simply responding to a question without grading it. If you must, restating or repeating the question in your own words is a better option than grading it.

If you will reduce the amount of grading you do in your interactions, you will allow people to more clearly hear what really matters in your responses — and leave all this other baggage behind.

Dave's Journal is available by audio on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Between high school and college, I took half a dozen courses in economics. The details of these courses have long since faded from memory, but I remember well one principle that was repeated:

Good enough is best.

Economics is, after all, the study of how we make decisions with scare resources. Since resources are always scarce, we constantly need to make decisions to say yes to some things and no to others.

“Good enough is best,” is a principle that reminds us to stop when it no longer makes sense to invest more resources.

The classic example of this is washing a car. You could spend 7 hours on a Saturday washing your car. However, for most people, spending 30 minutes washing a car is “good enough.”

Does a car look better after washing it for seven hours than it does after 30 minutes? Yes — but not enough to be noticeable to most people. That’s why 30 minutes is “good enough” — so you avoid the diminishing returns of increased time.

Sensible? Yes. Way harder in practice.

The problem is that while all these economics professors taught that “good enough is best” they reported grades like B+ when you just did just “good enough” in their classes.

I’m not sure what things were like in your schooling, but among my peer group, school system, and most importantly my own expectations, B+ just wasn’t good enough.

I wanted to get A’s. I expected to get A’s. Getting an A meant that you had things figured out — and that you were successful.

But the hard reality of effective leadership is that it’s not possible to knock out A’s all day long. There are never enough resources - especially time.

This precipitates a problem for leaders. Often, those of us who step into roles of increasing visibility and responsibility are the people who were the “A players” in our prior positions — or in school. Or often, both.

And then we get hammered with the realities of defining priorities in an environment of scare resources.

So, we do one of three things:

For a lot of us, our first inclination is to keep getting A’s.

We work crazy hours. We do things that probably aren’t in our job description but really we need to do, just this once or twice, because nobody else does it quite as well as we do. We drive people nuts by micromanaging, to make sure that the A’s continue. We don’t take many vacation days. We convince ourselves that we are indispensable.

When that doesn’t work, some of us learn to opt out. We don’t pitch the new idea to the executive team. We don’t start the business. We don’t ask to change our role. We don’t take quite as much initiative as we could or should. Because, we know there are B, C, D, and F grades along those roads.

It’s easy to stay on the road where you only get A’s.

The better option is to stop obsessing over the A itself and to start obsessing over the choices made about what gets A work and what gets B+ work — or perhaps even C work.

The reality of leadership is that you have to decide what’s really important, what’s good enough, and what isn’t worth the time.

I’m not arguing for sloppy work. I’ve had many situations in my career when nailing an A+ result was essential.

But it retrospect, there have been way more times when A work was a waste of everybody’s time and the only thing driving the A work was me not even stopping to consider that any other way we prudent.

What’s something right now that others or you are putting A work into, where B+ work would be perfectly fine — and free up more of your time to do what’s really important?

Dave's Journal is available by audio on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.

You already know about Neil Armstrong’s most famous landing on July 20, 1969.

It’s his other landings you might have missed.

Before becoming an astronaut, Neil Armstrong was a naval aviator and test pilot. In 1951, he lost part of a wing in his F9F Panther during combat in Korea. Miraculously, he was able to land the plane.

In 1956, he lost three of four engines in a B-29 after one engine disintegrated and damaged the rest of the aircraft. Quick thinking by both pilots allowed the plane to land on a single engine.

In 1957, his nose gear failed while landing in an X1-B. He was forced to bring it in for a controlled crash — one he was fortunate to walk away from.

In 1962, he misjudged his altitude and damaged an F-104 while attempting to land in Nevada.

After becoming an astronaut, Armstrong was selected as the commander of the Gemini 8 space mission in 1966. It was a critical mission in the space race, since it was the first ever attempt at docking two spacecraft.

It nearly ended in disaster.

After the docking, a thruster malfunctioned, causing both crafts to spiral into an uncontrollable spin. The roll reached 296 degrees per second — a rate that would cause most humans to blackout.

The crisis was ended only by Armstrong’s quick thinking to fire the re-entry thrusters. This finally slowed the spinning and brought the capsule back to Earth for an unexpected, early landing.

Just 14 months before landing on the moon, Armstrong was nearly killed again.

NASA had commissioned the production and use of two lunar landing research vehicles. The vehicles were designed to train the mission commanders here on earth to fly and land the lunar module on the moon.

A single jet engine was mounted vertically onto a metal frame and the astronaut, strapped into the top of this frame, would hover at several hundred feet above the ground, simulating the gravity on the moon and what flight might feel like in the lunar module.

The controls malfunctioned on Armstrong during his training flight in one of these vehicles on May 6, 1968. He just barely ejected from the vehicle, which crashed in a fireball. Investigators later concluded that had Armstrong hesitated only a half a second, he would have perished.

Neil Armstrong had no less than six close calls with death before landing on the moon. It’s one of many reasons he kept his cool during the final descent on July 20, 1969 when they discovered their original landing spot was covered with boulders.

Armstrong took manual control to find a better spot. That took way longer than any simulation anticipated, which is why you’ve heard that they landed with little fuel to spare.

The part that’s often left out though, is this:

Before it almost killed him, Armstrong had landed that training vehicle on Earth with even less margin of fuel than he did on the moon. He claimed the training was so valuable that the lunar landing would not have been possible without it.

We rightfully celebrate incredible human achievements like landing on the moon.

We rarely see up close the tremendous learning, resilience, and perseverance that those achievements required.

Should you dare attempt great things, expect — and perhaps even embrace — a few rough landings along the way.

Dave's Journal is available by audio on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.

A little over twenty years ago, I was completing my final year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In my last semester, I teamed up with two other seniors to launch a new student organization focused on leadership development.

All three of us had significant campus leadership experience and we wanted to create something that would be a catalyst for future students. Since we’d had success in other capacities, we were able to get a bit of marketing behind our new idea.

On the week of our first event, an article ran about our new organization on the front page of the student newspaper, an achievement in itself at university of over 30,000 students. We even had the perfect name: I-LEAD (Illinois Leadership Education and Development).

David Ogilvy once said:

Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.

And boy did we fail fast.

Almost nobody showed up for the launch meeting. Those that did seemed a bit skeptical, partially because they didn’t know us but mostly because we didn’t articulate a clear path forward.

We had relied almost entirely on the newspaper article to market the event instead of reaching out to engage people personally. It also wasn’t clear to us where we were going with things after that first event, so it obviously wasn’t clear to anybody else.

We were a flash in the pan. The organization ended even faster than it started.

In retrospect, we made a critical error that many people make when beginning: we were more captivated by the idea of starting than in doing the real work.

In 1989, Kevin Costner starred in the movie Field of Dreams. This dramatic, sports fantasy ends with a row of cars approaching the new business built by the main character. It became a cultural image that transformed how many of us view starting something new.

The cultural manta that was coined at the time, and still continues today, is this:

If you build it, they will come.

But it’s a lie. First, because it’s almost never true. And second, because it’s not even the actual phrase from Field of Dreams. The quote that’s repeated in the movie is this:

If you build it, HE will come.

As in one person, who does indeed show up at the end of the story.

This is a perfect example of how we hear what we wish was true. It’s literally been thirty years since the movie opened and I only discovered today, in researching this entry, that I’ve had the quote wrong all this time.

I suspect that’s because we’d much rather believe in a world where if we would just have courage to take the first step, everything else will fall neatly into place.

If we’ll just start the business, the financials will all work out. If we’ll just launch the online forum, people will show up and start contributing. If we’ll just get married, we’ll live happily ever after.

Thankfully (I can gladly admit today) it doesn’t work that way.

If you build it, he or she may come, but if you want “they” to come - and more importantly, to stay — the real work comes well after the start.

Dave's Journal is available by audio on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.

My first full-time management job was as a center director for an education business. Part of my role was to supervise all the part-time instructors at our location.

Like most managers who get promoted up, I inherited a team I didn’t select. I gradually hired the team I wanted as positions opened, but one person I inherited was annoying me. While he was friendly to me and our customers, he was (at best) a mediocre performer.

When I’d give him feedback, he would improve slightly. Enough to meet the basic standard of whatever I had most recently reiterated. Then, he’d gradually slide back into mediocrity, just slowly enough for nobody to really notice.

You’ve met this person too. Perhaps they are on your team now. They drive us nuts.

That’s why I was thrilled when finally, one gloriously beautiful day, he showed up and gave his two weeks notice. I thanked him publicly, but of course I was thrilled to see him go.

Two weeks later, he arrived for his final shift. It became apparent that he was just phoning it in on his last day. He wasn't paying much attention to our customers. He didn’t seem to be helping out any of his colleagues.

With about 45 minutes to go in his shift, after watching this go on for hours, I finally had it.

I pulled him into my office, told him in no uncertain terms what a lousy employee he had been for the past several years, and kicked him out. He packed up his stuff — and stormed away in anger.

I hope at this point you are thinking how stupid I was and what an obvious mistake this is in a person’s last hour of work. All the reasons to not do something this stupid could be the subject of another journal entry.

What you may miss, is the rest of the story. Cause I missed it.

While regretting a bit how I’d handled the incident, I nevertheless concluded that it was over. And it was, in a way. I never had to worry about him again, or see him, or talk to him.

Yet, I still had a team of great part-time employees, several who witnessed the incident, and one or two who were friends of the former employee.

(Somewhat related side note: anytime you fire somebody, no matter how disastrous their performance, there is always a contingent of their peers who will be surprised and troubled with your decision.)

My high performing employees didn’t say much to me in the coming weeks. They didn’t volunteer as much to help me with things. They didn’t pick up as many shifts as they had before. My top employees didn’t engage with me the way they had before this happened.

They saw me lose my temper and concluded they could be next.

What I failed to recognize at the time, and only saw in retrospect, was that I had taught my best employees that I was unpredictable. That team was never quite the same again — and while I’ll never know if it was specifically the result of this incident, a few of my top people left in the months afterwards for other jobs.

Set expectations, yes. Give people the feedback they need to hear. Hold people accountable, of course.

First and foremost, treat every last person with respect. Because it’s the right thing to do. And because people are watching you. Always.

Dave's Journal is available by audio on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Fifteen years ago, I was hired by the franchise owner of a Dale Carnegie office to help grow the business — and eventually develop into an instructor myself.

Tom, who hired me, was the kind of person all of us hope to work for in our careers. He cared about people so much that you could barely ever get him talking about himself. Just as important, he lived and breathed the values of Dale Carnegie.

Carnegie offices have always been on the conservative side in business attire and Tom was on the conservative side of conservative attire. He showed up every day in a dark suit, traditional tie, and a white shirt.

I heard someone joke the first week I was there that you’re allowed to wear any color dress shirt you want, as long as it’s white.

Not thinking much of the comment, I showed up a few weeks later to a staff meeting wearing a dark suit, a tie, and an ecru shirt (a very light, beige color).

While Tom said nothing himself, I noticed a few stares from others during that day’s staff meeting — including a senior college who pointed out my “brown” shirt when the focus of the agenda had turned to me.

Turns out the joke about white shirts wasn’t a joke after all. I got the message, and it was fine. I bought some more white shirts and everyone was happy.

The bigger issue eventually loomed with clients. I’ve called Southern California home for 20 years now. I’m don’t think there’s ever been a time that suits and ties have been the norm here. There was also a broader, cultural shift happening here in the United States about the time I started with Carnegie to dress more casually at work.

As time went on, it became increasingly apparent that our conservative dress was becoming an obstacle. A valued client approached me one day and said, “We love working with your team, but it’s really odd that you all look like the Secret Service every time you show up.”

I knew it wasn’t likely that Tom would entertain a formal policy change out of the blue, so I decided on a different approach. I starting wearing brightly colored ties to work, while going out of the way to ensure every other item of clothing I wore was as conservative as possible.

Still technically in line with the dress code, nobody could say much. Since we were a small office, everyone noticed. Once in awhile, I’d through in an ecru shirt or a blue shirt when there were no client meetings or it wasn’t likely I’d run into Tom.

One day, someone else wore a colorful tie. After awhile, a few more colors started showing up from others. Finally, the glorious day arrived when the senior colleague who had commented on my “brown” shirt a year or two earlier, showed up for a formal meeting in a blue shirt and a sweater vest.

Shortly after, the policy changed. When working with clients who had causal dress cultures, we could ditch our ties.

Looking back, it seems like such a tiny thing. At the time though, in the midst of working in a very traditional organization with generations of history, it was a fairly significant shift.

There’s a time and a place for a good protest or boycott. Too often though, that’s the starting point instead of the ending point. When it comes to long-standing cultural norms grounded in identity, transitions come slower.

If you show up as a leader in an organization and look and act really different than everyone else, most of the time that’s a mistake. People aren’t likely to take you seriously, even if they don’t dismiss you outright.

If you show up as a leader and don’t do anything different than the norm, then the norm stays the same. When Jurgen Appelo appeared on Coaching for Leaders awhile back, he made this invitation:

Be a little bit weird.

If you’re playing the long-game, being a little weird today may open a door tomorrow.

It’s a lot harder to dismiss someone who’s being just a little bit weird. As Seth Godin points out, “People like us, do things like this.” An individual who doesn’t quite fit in one way, but who is “like us” in most other ways, is still seen as part of “us.”

If you’re in the “people like us group” and you start to shift a tiny bit on the “things like this,” — and it’s a helpful change, then the rest of the “people like us” may transition, too.

If you want to shift a long-standing cultural norm for the benefit of the organization, consider taking on the identity of being just a little bit weird. If you do that while honoring the culture overall, you may just open up the door for lots more.

Dave's Journal is available by audio on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Last week, a few minutes before I arrived to pick up our kids at summer camp, our 5-year-old daughter had fallen and hit her head.

By the time I walked in, the nurse had already checked her out and she was perfectly fine. Her camp counselor, a teacher, the nurse, and our son all told me what happened in a whirlwind of several conversations as the kids were getting dismissed. Our daughter also told me the story.

All five stories were different. There were similarities, but they were different enough that, without context, you might have thought five different accidents occurred.

Ask any police officer who’s interviewed witnesses to an accident or crime scene and they will tell you that they often hear different stories. That’s because, there are four different kinds of truth.

The first truth is my truth. What I think happened that is colored by my experiences, biases, and emotions.

The second truth is your truth. What you think happened that is colored by your experiences, biases, and emotions.

The third truth is our shared truth. This emerges when we’ve come to some kind of mutual understanding of what happened.

Finally, there’s the actual truth, which hopefully is reflected in each person’s own truth and, if it emerges, a shared truth, but not always. Sometimes, everybody is off the mark.

A lot of the time, it’s not that important if or how a shared truth emerges. In the case with my daughter, it really didn’t matter that there were five different versions of the story because she was fine and everyone clearly intended well. Case closed.

But sometimes it’s critically important that one person’s truth doesn’t become the shared truth by default.

The most common way I see this emerge in organizational politics is that someone claims their truth in front of a group of people, most often in a meeting, and nobody else challenges it.

When a truth is left unchecked among a group of people, it often becomes the shared truth.

That means that if your colleague claims at the weekly staff meeting that your team dropped the ball on a recent project, and you stay silent, that statement, right or wrong, becomes everyone’s truth.

Once you’ve stayed silent, it doesn’t much matter what you say later, how many people you pull aside to explain yourself five minutes after the meeting, and all the charts in the world you’ve got, proving how right you are. Because it’s not about what’s right. It’s about what’s true.

When a claim of truth goes unchallenged, most people in most places will quickly accept that as shared truth and move on. It’s simply too much mental work to do otherwise.

If someone else’s truth doesn’t at all align with your truth — and it matters to the organization, to your team, or to you, what you say in the moment is critical.

Here’s a few phrases you might consider starting with:

I have a different recollection of the events.

You must have access to some information I don’t have.

It’s not clear to me what evidence you’re using to conclude this.

Based on the evidence I’ve seen, I’ve come to a different conclusion.

Your aim is not to throw the other person under the bus, or to get into a heated debate, but to indicate to them — and more importantly — to everyone else present, that there is more than one truth in the room.

Be polite, be curious, be respectful, and be clear that you are inviting them and everyone else to come to an accurate, shared truth.

Respect does not equate with silence. Right or wrong, silence from you indicates to everyone else that the other person’s truth is yours too.

Dave's Journal is available by audio on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.

The airspace above our home is at least partially designated for pilots in training on small, single-engine planes. About once a week, I hear a small plane above us, that suddenly cuts its engine…only to restart it, shortly after.

The pilots and their instructors are practicing engine failure procedures so that, should an engine actually fail in flight, a pilot is more likely to be able to land the plane.

Recently, someone asked me:

How do I keep things from bothering me so much at work?

I asked a few questions about his situation and discovered a whole slew of reasons that things were quite bumpy right now. While he was making good progress on turning those issues around, the current challenges were eating at him. Worse, even in a best-case scenario, it would be some time before his professional situation was substantially better.

As the conversation went on, it came up that he wasn’t doing much to engage with friendships, wasn’t working out regularly, and was putting in tons of hours. Since I was asked for advice, I offered this:

You’re flying a single engine plane.

A single engine plane can be a lot of fun to fly, but you are out of options if your engine fails. You’re going down — hopefully in a controlled glide onto a field or road — but going down, for sure.

Just like a lot of us go down, at least in our psychological well-being, when something really bad happens at work.

Two ways around this:

One way is to never have anything go badly at work. Funny, I know, but don’t think that I haven’t deluded myself into thinking I could control this, at a few points in my career. I still even occasionally attempt this delusion today.

It’s easy to live the dream when the weather is great and you’ve been flying successfully for years. But even if you’re on the safest, most reliable engine in the world — a large bird could strike and take it down in seconds.

The better option? Fly with more engines.

Rather than attempting to control the uncontrollable, get more engines on your plane. Investing in new friendships, exercising better, volunteering in the community, taking up a new hobby, and spending time with children are just a few things that have worked for me and others.

If you find yourself riding on a single engine, your tendency may be to invest your effort to make it most efficient. That’s good work to do, but not at the expense of the bigger picture. In addition, consider more power, somewhere else. If you’re willing to be a little less Cessna and a little more 747, you’ll keep yourself aloft when the failures come.

Dave's Journal is available by audio on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.

A decade ago, I was instructing a communication and human relations course for Dale Carnegie. We were about halfway through the multi-week program when a participant asked a question of me in front of the class:

What do you do when your wife claims that you’re just being nice to her because you’re taking this course?

When the laugher stopped, I offered this:

If you stop being nice to her when this course is over, then she was right.

I appreciated the bravery of what that individual asked all those years ago, because he captured a reality that so many of us run into when trying to become better leaders, employees, parents, and spouses.

When we change our behavior, even for the better, people are naturally suspect. It’s the same kind of feeling that parents get when they see their children are suddenly sitting quietly in a chair, grinning at them.

Why do you look so suspicious?

…is the question our kids often get from me.

It’s hard to fault others when they have the same reaction to a behavior we’ve just changed. One of our Academy members reminded me of that this week, when she asked a colleague:

Will this “improvement” you're planning catch your team off guard?

In the absence of other data, it’s human nature for us to view sudden behavior change with some suspicion. However, you can reduce that a bit up front — and almost entirely, in the long-run.

Start by telling people what you are doing. If you have rarely given constructive feedback but now recognize that you should do it more to develop people, tell them what you're changing. I often use this mantra:

Why before what.

Point out why you’re doing something, followed by what that something is. Here’s how it might sound:

I’m working on getting better at developing people when I see opportunities for learning. You’ll hear me giving more real-time feedback so I can do this for you, too.

That won't change the discomfort you both have the first few times you do this, but it doesn’t lend itself to as much suspicion if you tell people in advance.

But, the bigger question is this:

Do you keep going?

It’s not that hard to change behavior for a single interaction. In fact, we all do this at least some of the time, in order to precipitate an outcome, which may or not not be aligned with the other person’s interests.

That’s why behavior change breeds suspicion, and why we’ve all leaned to be cautious when it comes as a surprise from someone else.

If, however, you keep going, then eventually you are not just taking an action. You have changed who you are.

When you decide to make a behavior change for the better, expect people to be suspicious. Assuming the new behavior is a positive change for everyone, the fact that people noticed something changed is actually an early indicator that you’re moving forward.

Then, keep going.

Don’t simply act to achieve an immediate outcome. Take on a new identity and decide before you start to keep going when it doesn’t yet feel like you.

When you demonstrate that you are willing to keep going on something worth doing, you not only make things better for others, you become the person you want to be.

Dave's Journal is available by audio on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, and Stitcher.

For years, I’ve heard countless people give this well-intended advice on structuring a briefing or presentation:

Tell 'em what you're going to tell them. Tell 'em. Tell 'em what you've told them.

I bet you’ve heard that too. It might be advice for someone who’s giving a presentation for the first time. That’s because it’s a simple outline that most people can follow successfully.

But most professionals should move beyond this fairly quickly. That’s because, it’s awfully boring to listen to someone follow this framework.

Think of an individual in your professional network who engages you when they present. I bet they don’t typically start their presentations with a table of contents.

You can do a lot better, especially in high-visibility situations. Here are three ways to start that will engage people right away:

1. Tell a Story

People find stories compelling and want to know how those stories resolve. It's the reason books like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People* became popular. The concepts were not new, but they were presented through a set of powerful stories that most anybody could relate to.

Tell a quick story that relates to the overall message of your presentation. Just say what happened and how the lesson, conclusion, or action leads into your message. Keep it to just a minute or two and then transition to your main points.

Also, resist any urge to use a dramatic voice from your high school acting class. Just tell the story like you would to a friend you ran into outside of work. Virtually all of us already do lots of storytelling in our everyday lives.

2. Congratulate Your Audience

Get the audience's attention by congratulating an individual or the audience as a whole on a recent accomplishment. Cite a specific incident or situation you know they are proud of. For example, I recently began a presentation by congratulating the team of a larger organization on an impressive rise in their stock price.

There are two benefits to starting this way:

First, you get the audience's attention, since you just made them the star of the show. After all, if you have earned the right to present, you are there to serve them (not the other way around).

Second, you increase credibility since people recognize that you've taken time to do your homework. A lot of speakers think only about their message during preparation, so this sets you apart almost immediately.

3. Appeal to a Shared Goal

Start where you can find common ground. While useful in many presentations, it's especially valuable as a starting point when you might not be on the same page as your audience.

If you're responding to a frustrated customer, appeal first to what everyone can agree to. Speak to the fact that while there may be disagreements on the solution, everyone in the room wants the problem resolved and the project to succeed.

When you start by appealing to a shared goal, you position yourself as a problem-solver. The audience still may not agree with what you suggest, but is far more likely to give consideration to what you have to say.

If you’ll begin your next presentation by appealing to people’s humanity, you’ll earn their attention — and then the opportunity to do a lot more.

Dave's Journal is available by audio on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, and Stitcher.