How To Speak Like A Leader With John Bates

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Do you want to speak like a leader? There are two key things you need to remember. One, make sure you’re giving some context as to where you’re coming from. Two, be aware of the tone of your voice. John Livesay’s guest today is John Bates, the CEO and Founder of Executive Speaking Success. John is an in-demand executive coach and is one of the most prolific TED-format coaches in the world. And he’s here to help you out so you can communicate with confidence and credibility. So tune in to discover the science behind communication and how to use it to enhance your leadership skills. You wouldn’t want to miss this episode!

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Listen to the podcast here

How To Speak Like A Leader With John Bates

Our guest in the show is John Bates, who’s an expert at communication and works with leaders at companies like NASA. Find out what the final criteria are on whether you can become an astronaut or not. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is John Bates, whose mission is to bring out what is awesome inside people so that they can have the impact they want in the world. He’s an in-demand Executive Coach. He is also one of the most prolific TED-format coaches in the world. Executives from organizations like Johnson & Johnson’s, JLABS, NASA, including the astronauts, US Navy Special Ops, and Boston Scientific and more recommend him to their colleagues as the best leadership communication coach working. He knows the power creating a TED-like Talk can bring to anyone in business and life. John, welcome to the show.

[bctt tweet=”There is scientific proof that you get what you put out. People always mirror you. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

Thank you, John. It’s great to be here with you.

You and I have been personal friends for quite a while, and I’ve always admired your energy, passion, and your incredible ability to get people energized and discover their story to make it TED-worthy. Take us back to your own story of origin, if you will. You can go back to childhood or how did you know that this was something you wanted to make your career?

The short answer is I failed at everything else but that turned out to be a big benefit in the long run. I was always the guy, maybe a little bit like you who had the soft skills. I always worked with a lot of people who had the hard skills because I was always an early-stage employee or a Founder or Cofounder at companies that were in the internet space.

Starting in 1994, I was working with a lot of people who had hard skills. I would always end up being the Chief evangelist for my companies. I raised several hundred million dollars in Silicon Valley and beyond with my teams, and I still felt I was less valuable than the people who had the hard skills. I go around trying to prove I was valuable.

Your Amazing Itty Bitty Guide to Being TED-Worthy: 15 Essential Secrets of Successful Speaking Based in Human Neurobiology

They called what I did fluffy, even though I brought in hundreds of millions with my team. I had a chip on my shoulder and I was frustrated about it. I was going around trying to prove I was valuable. I didn’t think I was. I then went to the TED Conference for the first time in 2009. I saw person after a person gives the most amazing talks I’d ever seen in my life.

To my credit, I remember thinking, “I’ve been a public speaker my whole life but I’ve never done that. That was something else.” I came home and I got involved in the TED and TEDx community and at one of the first-ever TEDx events, which were in Santa Monica. That was TEDx Santa Monica was one of the first TED events but not the first. We had this guy who had all the hard skills. He had the most exciting topic and he was the one I was looking forward to.

When he got up on stage and started to speak, everybody in the room checked out because he was so nervous and awkward, we all thought we were going to throw up. It was unpleasant. I remember thinking how sad that was. I was incredibly sad because I’d seen that so much, often with many other people that I’d worked with.

Somebody who’s smart, has education and so much to offer but can’t quite communicate it. The evil part of me kicked in and I was sitting there going, “Laughing quietly to myself, of course. Hard skills guys blowing it. Calls what I do fluffy.” As I was doing that, my buddy walked over, Michael Weiss and he said, “We got to do something to help people like this.”

I remember it was like the V8 commercial. I could have had a V8. I swear the heaven’s pardon, the angel sang and it hit me like a ton of bricks that if I got over my freaking self, I could totally make a difference for that guy. I went home that night and started working on what I now get to deliver to all those places that I pinched myself when you read in my bio.

What I did differently because of that moment, is I realized if I wanted to talk to that guy and people like that, I would need to base everything I did in human evolutionary biology and human neurophysiology so I could show people, not what works but also why it works based in science. That’s where that all came from was doing public speaking for a long time. Having this epiphany at TED, and then having that moment when I was like, “Let’s look at the science of why this works.” I’m such a soft skills guy. It took me years to realize why this always works and it does always work because it’s based on science and that’s why we like science.

Gravity is gravity. It treats everybody the same. You’ve written a book about this called Your Amazing Itty Bitty Guide to Being TED-Worthy, and there are some secrets in here, as you said, based on human neurobiology. We all know what Biology is from being in school but what’s neurobiology?

Neurobiology is the specific subset of biology that’s like our brains, nerves, how our brain works and how it’s all structured up there, particularly in the brain but we have mirror neurons throughout our bodies. All kinds of things that it’s related to that cognition, mental behavior and how our nerves work.

For those who aren’t sure what mirror neurons are, it’s when you watch a scary movie and everybody in the theater jumps at the same time. We’re in the story. That’s what you want to do when you’re speaking. You want to mirror them. You want them to mirror you and go on the journey with you. You don’t have time to go into all these wonderful secrets. Do you have a favorite one or one that you see people need badly, so they don’t make a certain mistake from your book?

Maybe we could jump into the one you mentioned and we can unpack it a little more. Mirror neurons are neurons and all this neurobiology stuff. There’s always new cutting-edge work that points in different directions. The fundamental workable takeaway doesn’t change whatever the physiology exactly is, and the calcium pathway or whatever pathway. That’s not so important to me.

On some level or another, we have mirror neurons in our bodies. Mirror neurons helped us feel and experience what we see other people going through. If you watch me and I was doing a cooking show and I was chopping up big purple carrots off, and I cut my finger, everybody would jump because they would feel that because we’re human beings and we have mirror neurons.

[bctt tweet=”Being likable is a criterion to being an astronaut at NASA. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

I tell people that this is scientific proof for the fact that you get what you put out. The thing most people don’t think about nearly enough is that they are always mirroring you. When you walk in the door and you’re happy, everybody feels happy. When you walk in the door and you’re sad, everybody, “What’s wrong?” We do that with each other.

I always remind people to think about that person who’s grumpy. The person doesn’t say it out loud, and that person walks in and everybody gets grumpy. They grump around for a while and everybody acts grumpy and then they leave, and the minute they’re gone, we’re all fine again but everywhere they go, they think everyone’s grumpy.

It’s that Charlie Brown character where he’s always walking under a cloud of dirt.

That’s the grumpy person, and they think everybody’s grumpy but it’s not true. Everybody’s grumpy when they’re around because they’re grumpy.

This also applies not to speaking, whether you want to give a TED Talk or not, but also to leadership, because that saying, “One bad apple, causes everything to spoil.” You work with leaders, some of these big companies we talked about earlier. How do you help them get rid of that person whose energy is bringing down the whole group?

That can be dicey depending on where you are and all the things like that but the first thing that I would say with a person like that is if I were working with a leader who had someone like that on the team. First of all, don’t even hire that person. The final test to become an astronaut they told me is, “Are you likable?”

I didn’t know that. We’re going to be stuck in that little container with you.

Apparently, they didn’t necessarily check for that in the earlier days, and it led to some problems. Now the final test for a long time has been, you come up, you sit with the astronauts, you talk with them and when you leave, they all talk about, not only did they like you personally but do they think you are likable? You can pass that entire binder full of tests, and if you don’t pass that, are you a likable test, that final test to become an astronaut, people don’t become an astronaut. That is great for any entrepreneur and any leader. If it works for NASA and the astronauts, why wouldn’t it work for you?

We talk about this in terms of fitting into someone’s culture. Where you’re being interviewed or you’re interviewing people. I wanted to have these people over to my house for dinner, go for a drink or whatever it was. Our mutual friend, Tim Sanders wrote a book on this very topic, The Likeability Factor. There are tons of research on doctors spending more time with patients that they like and all of that stuff.

If someone has a little bit of self-awareness and they are very left-brain, hard skills person and they go, “I would like to be more likable or I would like to not be so negative but my mind is wired to point out all the potential problems all the time.” Is there anything someone can do to not completely alter their personality but move up a little bit on the dial where people would like to hang out with them a little more?

You said one of the keys, which is a little bit of self-awareness. If someone’s got some self-awareness and they want to move up that likeability ladder, which is a very good thing both for their own experience of life and for their career, know thyself. One of the things people can do after they know themselves is to put thyself on the loudspeaker a little bit.

Instead of being all covert about it and not saying it, you can own it. You can say, “I’ve been thinking about it and I was thinking about myself and how I am. I realized that maybe I might seem more negative than other people on this team. What I really think is that it’s my commitment to asking all the hard questions and I’m hoping that brings something. If it’s okay with all of you, I’m going to ask some hard questions.”

Speak Like A Leader: One of the keys to move up the likeability ladder is self-awareness.

Rhyming in that the intent, when you describe the intent of why you’re doing something. Does that completely change the framing of it? We also know how important tone of voice is and you’re an expert on this when someone’s presenting, whether on a TED stage or as a leader. Can you speak a little bit about how important the tone of voice is?

There are studies that show that 60% of all your communication is non-verbal and that includes tone of voice, even though that’s technically verbal. It’s not your message. It’s not what you’re saying. I don’t know 75% of your messages, John. It’s silly to argue about what the percentage is because here’s what I’ve decided.

Your non-verbal, your tone of voice, your facial micro-expressions, your body language, and all that stuff, let’s not think of that as a percentage of your communication. It’s much more powerful to say that is 100% of the context within which your communication gets heard. If I’m looking at you and I say, “John, I care about you. I’d like to make a difference for you,” and I’m sketchy, looking away from you and I can’t make eye contact.

“Give me your wallet because I care about you and I want to make a difference for you.” You’re not going to trust me and that’s going to land one way. If I look you in the eye and I say, “John, I care about you. I want to make a difference. Can you give me your wallet for a moment and watch what I do?” You’re going to be much more likely to hand me your wallet and see what I’m going to do because I looked you in the eye. I came across this trust. Where all that non-verbal stuff was aligned with my message, and if your non-verbal is not aligned with your message, does that damage your message.

That tone of voice and being clear, a big thing is being clear where you’re coming from. For that person who maybe has negative stuff to say at the meeting about every idea. If they come at it like, “Everybody in this room is such an idiot. Here, I have to tell you again like this is so dumb.” That’s one place to come from.

You say all the things that are wrong with the plan but if you’re coming from the point of view of, “Everybody in this room is committed to success. We’ve got a lot of great brainstormers and we’ve got a lot of people with great ideas. Let me be the person to bring the pressure and reality test to this. Here’s what I have to say about it.” You could potentially say the exact same thing but coming from those two different places, it will land 180 degrees different.

The takeaways for all the readers are two things. One, make sure you’re giving some context as to where you’re coming from and then be aware of the tone of voice. Are you coming from a scolding parent? I remember years ago, hearing that people either communicate to you as a parent, an adult or a child and that all very much tone of voice usually.

[bctt tweet=”Bring vulnerability to your talk. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

Being aware that nobody wants to be reprimanded, scolded and nobody wants to be treated like a child. You run a bootcamp for leaders on the necessity to speak like one. Just because you’ve been given the corner office, the title and all the perks that go with it, doesn’t mean people will follow you. I love that definition of a leader that people want to follow them. Can you give us a little behind curtains look at? What do you do in this boot camp that you run for these leaders and what kind of leaders are they?

I’m working with leaders that they’re running big pieces of big companies. What I notice is that the best of them is always looking for the next level of great communication and leadership. The ones who have the trouble or the ones who think they’re already good and don’t need to put the time in on it. In this course, I call it the Speak Like a Leader Bootcamp. Even if you are a leader, there’s always a new level of speaking and communicating like a leader.

What we do in that course and it’s very purposeful for leaders. We go through the experience of creating a TED-like Talk and over the decade of doing that with so many different people from so many different walks of life for TEDx events, for the corporate world and everything. I’ve come to believe that is one of the absolute best leadership exercises anyone could ever go through, whether they’re going to give a TED Talk on a stage or never going to do that. All the things that we go through in that course have leaders step into themselves in a whole new way. You got to be clear with yourself because you can’t be clear with anybody else if you’re not clear with yourself and get inspired by yourself.

If you aren’t inspired by yourself, it’s a lot harder to be inspiring and inspire people. We go through all these steps that I’ve distilled over the years, working with these people on these talks, and it ends up being a great leadership exercise. People come out the other side with whole new levels of courage, confidence, leadership presence, being inspired by themselves and by the people around them. Reinspired is a really fabulous experience.

I know for myself that when I get hired to speak in front of a sales organization, that particular talk has a lot of metrics. Are they learning new skills that are going to help them close more sales? When you give a TEDx Talk, it’s a very different mindset and framework.

Absolutely different animal. People get messed up by that a lot. They walk out on stage, having worked so hard on their eighteen-minute TED Talk but they didn’t get the difference in format, and they walk off stage disappointed. It’s not pleasant.

Some of the stories that you might create for a TED Talk would make your existing business conversations so much more compelling, and part of it is going back to the mirror neurons. If you’re opening up and being a little vulnerable or telling a personal story of when you weren’t always perfect, and things weren’t always easy, people can relate to you in another way that allows others to see the cracks sometimes.

I couldn’t say it better. I might add a little bit but that work that people do in a TED-like Talk is one of the things about TED-like Talk is they’ve got to be vulnerable. It’s one of the TED commandments. When people bring their personal self to this talk and they bring some vulnerability and some insight that they got out of the failure they had, and tell us about the hard times that before the good times, people walk away in love with them. Why wouldn’t you bring that to your sales talk? Why wouldn’t you bring that to your all-hands meeting? What we see modeled in the corporate world in terms of communication, connection, how people speak and everything, I’d say 90% of that is not only not what works best.

I’d say about 80% to 90% of that is the opposite of what works best. People get up in a business talk or a first sales meeting, and they think they need to establish their credibility. You don’t need to establish your credibility. They want to let you in the door if you don’t have credibility. Your credibility is already established. What you need to establish, and this is going to be the title of my next book. I’m coining it.

Instead of establishing your credibility in that first conversation, you need to establish your emotional credibility. Why can they trust you? Why can they believe in you? How can they connect to you? Fundamentally, this is another huge piece of neurobiology and I’ll bullet point it, if you’ve ever had this experience, when you go in and you’d get yes, yes, yes, no. “Yes. We like to borrow that guest. It’s first try. Yes. We think it would make a difference. No. We’re not ready. We want to think about it.” That’s never happened.

What that is, is yes, yes, yes, no. That means no. That means you didn’t get the sale but what’s happening there, people say, “Were they lying to me? What were the three yeses and then a no?” Here’s what happened. Yes, yes, yes, no. That’s logic, logic, logic, emotion. We did not make the emotional. Yes, they want it, of course, it’s a great product. You wouldn’t be selling it if it wasn’t a great product. Logically it’s all there but what we didn’t do is make that emotional connection. Give them a way to connect with us, be in the same tribe with us and all that. That’s what gets what I call the fourth and most important yes.

Speak Like A Leader: Be aware of the tone of your voice.

Partly aware that people buy emotionally, and then back it up with logic instead of pushing out all the facts and figures. I remember working for a publisher who had come from another situation that was very complex. I was asking her about it, and she said, “Yes, there were a lot of moving pieces.” I thought, “What a wonderful framework she has as a leader to not get overwhelmed.” I thought, “Certainly if you’re at NASA, that’s a lot of moving pieces.”

That mindset of what you see working at NASA and how that can be applied to the business world, I thought you might have some insights into some of the skills in addition to the likeability being so key that, talk about staying calm under pressure. Many movies are made about this but when you’re working with those leaders, do you think they have had training in this or is it a personality trait that they screened for?

The first thing that comes to mind is, you got great people working at NASA and there are two big things that come to mind for me around that. One is your most important job as a leader. It is to always be creating, speaking, and reminding people of the empowering context for what you’re up to. We’re not here shoving widgets around. We’re not here moving pieces of metal and machining parts. We’re sending people to the moon.

We’re exploring the frontiers of what’s even possible in reality. NASA has a pretty natural building good empowering context. One of the things about many of the leaders that I’ve talked with there is you’re not going to go to NASA, get the job and work that hard if you’re not inspired by it. They’re inspired by the context of what everyone there is doing. One of the key things NASA gets maybe more than most organizations is, how absolutely impossible anything any of them are doing without everybody else.

They’re talking about admissions. They have the missions that they do, and then we have corporate missions. They are a great example, and you’ve certainly had a front-row seat to it, of implementing that mission and the need to collaborate. John, if people want to reach out to you to learn how to be a better speaker or maybe do a TED Talk or hear more about your Speak Like a Leader Bootcamp, where should they go?

There are two places in there, pretty similar. One is ExecutiveSpeakingSuccess.com. I do one-on-one executive coaching. I do large and small group training, virtually, in-person and all that stuff that you could expect from someone like me. You can find out more about it there. If the idea of creating a TED-like Talk as a leadership exercise sounds, maybe it sounds like something that you would, “That sounds terrifying,” you should go check out Ed, which is for education Ed.ExecutiveSpeakingSuccess.com. We run that course about four times a year. It’s an eight-person cohort. It’s a ten-week class. It’s pretty intense and it is absolutely inspiring, beautiful, fun and amazing. It makes an enormous difference. Not if you want to give a TED-like Talk somewhere or speak on a TEDx stage or something but also if you’re selling.

[bctt tweet=”Stories are like songs. People don’t mind hearing them more than once.” username=”John_Livesay”]

What you teach people about so much, John. You can bring that emotional connection of a TED Talk to anything and why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you bring that to your leadership, your sales, your all-hands meeting and to the board meeting? The things that people create in that course stay with them for a lifetime.

It’s a ten-week investment that will pay back over an entire lifetime. The stories that you choose, craft, and tell in that course will become some of your greatest hits. Stories are like songs. People don’t mind hearing them more than once, and when you get a good story and you can tell it well, keep using that thing. If it’s a new audience, don’t tell a new story, tell that story that you’ve been perfecting and that just you know exactly how it lands and keeps making it better.

I love that quote, “Stories are like songs.” We’ll make that one of our tweets as well. John, thanks for sharing your passion, your insights, your great stories about how NASA decides, whether you get to be an astronaut or not. I love that. I’m looking forward to hearing how many people take you up on your offer to get your book, Your Amazing Itty Bitty Guide to Being TED-Worthy or make the jump and are smart enough to get into your Speak Like a Leader Bootcamp. Thanks again.

Thank you, John.

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How To Speak Like A Leader With John Bates

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How To Speak Like A Leader With John Bates

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