Most people have their own ways of getting out of this kind of situation, some better than others. But I’d like to pass on a simple little technique I learned from a senior diplomat. He called it ‘Bridging and Building’, and it’s a very respectful way of neatly sidestepping a topic and leading the conversation back to something you’re safer with – and usually without the other person realising what you’re doing.

It works by creating a conversational ‘bridge’ from the current topic onto one you’d prefer, usually with a ‘that-reminds-me’ remark, then building on the new topic for a couple of sentences to give it a ‘soft landing’, then posing a question to anchor the new subject in the other person’s mind.

Here’s what it might sound like in a simple form:

“It’s interesting you raise the subject of (topic A) because one of our clients was talking about exactly the same thing recently, and he said how important (topic B) was in his dealings with suppliers, especially considering that it fitted in so well with his company’s purchasing strategies. And I’d imagine this would be something that’s important to you?”

Yes, it sounds simple – and perhaps that’s the beauty of the technique. In fact, I’d be surprised if you haven’t used it yourself from time to time. Certainly, you’ll hear politicians using it a lot.

But what seems to make the device particularly effective is that (a) it shifts the ‘responsibility’ for the new topic onto the person you’re speaking with (and which might give him or her a nice little ego boost), and (b) concludes the build with a question which seeks a response from the other person, effectively anchoring the new topic in his or her mind.

Let’s take a look in a little more detail. For simplicity, we’ll start with a non-business example, substituting ‘food’ for topic A, and ‘music’ for topic B – and see how the components work with each other:

First, we create a bridge with a ‘reminds me’ link: “Talking about food (topic A) reminds me of an article I was reading the other day about restaurants (something to do with food), and it mentioned how important music is in creating the right ambience (something to do with music) … “

Then, we build on the new subject for a couple of sentences: “…and the article talked about how different sorts of music create different kinds of feelings in people – and I started thinking about how I really enjoy relaxing to classical music – something like Mozart or Brahms …”

Then, having established the subject in the other person’s mind, we now lead smoothly into a question: “… and I imagine you’d be something of a music connoisseur, right? What sort do you like to listen to?”

Let’s try another example, this time in a presentation context, where the other person might be talking about, say, the possibility of a price discount, and you’d like to shift the subject onto something like customer service:

“Actually, it’s interesting you mention the possibility of a discount because I was talking to another customer recently about exactly the same thing, and we were comparing one product against another – and she told me was very concerned about the level of customer support she would be getting. And I know that’s something we’re quite meticulous about. In fact, it goes right to the very core of our business and is something we’re very proud of. And I would imagine this is something you’d be very concerned about, aren’t you?”

Tailoring the technique for yourself

THE BRIDGE

It’s pretty easy to make the bridge from the current subject onto the new subject. Just about anything will do.
You could switch from the existing subject onto something akin to it – something the other person said earlier, something that you were (supposedly) thinking about recently, read in a book or magazine, something that come up in a discussion with another client, something a colleague was telling you about, something you heard in a lecture. (How far from the actual truth you want to make this is up to you.)

Here are some example bridges to give you an idea:

“It’s quite timely you raise that subject because it leads into something else I think it’s important we cover…”

“When you were talking earlier about (whatever they were talking about), it raised a few thoughts in my mind about…”

“I’m glad you mentioned that, because it’s part of something I was discussing with the PM in a cabinet meeting recently…”

THE BUILD

Now that you’ve ‘attributed’ the new subject to the other person, you’re bound to have invoked their curiosity – wondering what it was they ‘said’ that led your thinking onto new paths. This has the effect of distancing the original subject from their current thinking, even if just a little.

From here, you only need to talk about the new subject for a couple of sentences to allow it to settle in the other person’s mind.

THE QUESTION

You may often find that the question isn’t necessary. However, the important thing about the question, even if it’s a rhetorical one, is that the other person’s unconscious mind will have to answer it internally, whether they actually make a spoken reply or not. And in so doing, the question’s corresponding mental picture will slip into the other person’s on-going mental dynamics, thus further displacing the original subject from their current thoughts.

PROVISOS

Simple though it is, I’ve found this to be a powerful and effective technique, and this has been borne out by the experiences of the people we teach it to in our presentation courses.

But you can’t use it to get away with murder. If someone is determined to pursue a particular subject they will. In that case, it’s best to confess whatever shortfalls there are in your thinking and take the flack.

But for most cases, you’ll find Bridging & Building is a great way of helping you out of that occasional awkward spot.

(I should also add that it’s a life-saving device for dealing with boring people at after-hours business functions, especially those who are determined to prattle on and on about themselves. Just something to keep in mind.)

Perhaps the most commonly used of the tools of rhetoric is known as the ‘triad’ – a device where you repeat a similar sounding thing three times, as Lincoln did in his Gettysburg address when he spoke of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”.

Then, a bit later, Winston Churchill created one of his most memorable phrases when he said, “Never before in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

But what makes this technique so powerful and so capable of moving the hearts and minds of so many people?

The answer is actually quite simple. The unconscious mind is a wonderful pattern-detection mechanism, and will spot patterns long before your conscious mind picks them up. And once it spots a pattern (because it loves playing with things like that), it will home in and give the words extra-big focus. And it’s this that can make the words, and the speeches around them, seem so momentous.

Let’s take Churchill’s sentence as an example:.

“Never before in the field of human conflict was so much owed…” (Yep, I heard that). “… by so many….” (whoa, might be a pattern coming up here, should pay attention to the next sentence). “… to so few.” (Yes, definitely a pattern. Better remember the whole three and plant them into deep and lasting memory.

So, with just a bit of word play, you’ve attracted the full attention of the whole mind, and gotten your key message into the soft underbelly of the unconscious.

Let’s play around with a few examples to see how we could work a triad into a speech or presentation.

“The current economic climate demands that we work harder – and work faster – and work smarter.”

“We were successful the year before last. We were successful last year. And now it’s up to us to make sure we’re successful this year.”

We pay keen attention to tools of rhetoric in our writing courses and our conference speaking courses because they’re such powerful tools for planting messages deep into people’s minds.

We don’t go the whole hog, of course, because there are more than 60 of them. But we pick the best and easiest, and make sure our students go away with a basketful of nice techniques.

And if you want to hear a few of these tools in action, Google JFK’s inaugural address, and notice some of the beauties – like, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country” (phrase reversal).

The fact is, these tools are available. And they’re free. So why not take a moment to thank Aristotle, and make sure you get your audience inspired.

John Cliff. www.johncliff.com

Listeners will often drift away, following their own train of thought, almost as though they’d mentally turned down the volume to pay more attention to their own musings.

But sometimes a word or a gesture will jolt them from their daydreaming and bring their full attention back to what we’re saying.

There are a number of ways we can get this happening with an audience. One of the easiest involves a word that’s such a common part of our language we rarely think about it.

The word is – ‘and’.

“And” is one of the most ambiguous words in the English language. It actually has about 15 different meanings. Think about them:

“Two and two is four – he stood up and fell over – there are jobs and jobs – he’s got dogs and cats – call and see if he’s home yet – tell one more joke and I’ll scream – the sauce is good and thick – he tried and he succeeded – pay the man and go through that door – and then it happened – they came and stayed – try and see it my way”, and so on.

So how can you use this word to really capture an audience’s attention?

If there’s a moment in your speech or presentation (or even just in conversation) where you want to emphasise a point, and make sure you have your listeners’ full attention, here’s what to do.

Introduce your point with the word “and”. Lightly stress the word, and then follow it with a slight pause – as in, “We had a great year last year – and …we have to work even harder this year to make sure we keep up the momentum.”

You can be sure that the phrase which follows the ‘and’ will get their full attention – both consciously and unconsciously. And very often it doesn’t even need a logical connection with the preceding sentence.

How does it work? Simple. Because of the ambiguity of the ‘and’, your listeners can’t be sure of the context in which you’re using it. This puts them in a mild and temporary state of suspense while they wonder what’s going to come next.

And because you’ve now gained their more-or-less undivided attention, what follows is going to get an express ride into the unconscious mind

You can accentuate the ‘and’ even further by slightly shifting your posture, maybe leaning forward a little earnestly, or perhaps lifting your hand, or even just cocking your head forward.

Here are a few more examples:

“Our customers are receiving our new products well – and … there’s a lot more we can be doing to increase our market share.”

“We’re operating in a highly competitive environment – and … we’re going to have to make some cutbacks to ensure the healthy growth of our company.”

“Your sales efforts have been extraordinary this year – and … we know that you can perform even better.”

If you want to see the ‘and’ technique in action, take a look at any of Bill Clinton’s speeches. He’s a master at this.

In our presentation and conference speaker skills training, we usually have a lot of fun with this little device, having people vary the pitch and pacing of the word, as well as the accompanying gestures and posture shifts, and getting group feedback on how effectively it emphasises the sentence that follows.

And it’s so subtle you’ll hardly believe how powerful it can be – until you try it.

John Cliff. www.johncliff.com

It’s to do with audience distance.

You see, in normal face-to-face conversation, the words we use only carry around seven percent of the total meaning of what we’re saying.

An extraordinary 93 percent is conveyed by non-verbal information.

Our words are coloured and nuanced by things like minor shifts in facial expression, subtle variations in voice tonality, slight movements in posture, the depth of our breathing, and so on.

But when we’re presenting from a stage, most of the important non-verbal signals are lost on the audience.

So a little bit of exaggeration is the name of the game.

Good speakers will overstate their non-verbal messages to compensate for the distance.

They’ll increase the variety of their voice tone and tempo, use generous gestures, and accentuate their postural shifts.

In this way, they make up for the small subtleties.

Doing this may seem a little unnatural at first. But a bit of practice and a touch of boldness will add immensely to the effectiveness of your presentation.

Try it out in front of the bathroom mirror. Accentuate things a little more at first, and then allow yourself to gradually become more and more dramatic.

Here’s a simple rule of thumb. When you think you’re going over the top, you’re probably just about right.

In fact, that’s about the level where you’ll be coming across to the audience as a lively and enthusiastic speaker.

GETTING YOUR VOICE WORKING FOR YOU

Probably the best way to add extra punch is by increasing the variation in your voice tonality and pacing.

Good speakers will raise and lower their pitch and change pace and emphasis from word to word, drawing certain words out, and enticing listeners in with pauses.

These are the characteristics that grab people’s curiosity and interest, and compel them listen to what you have to say.

But too many speakers tend to sound the way a closely-typed memo looks. Everything is the same pace, the same volume, the same dull drone. There’s nothing to attract a listener.

So here are two tips to make your voice more interesting

1. Get emphasis by changing pitch, not volume

Don’t try to get emphasis through loud and soft. People just don’t hear it. Try up and down instead.

Take a word like ‘important’. Instead of pushing out the ‘port’, try starting off low with the ‘im’, then let your voice quickly sweep up on the ‘port’, and then down again for the ‘ant’.

2. Get variety by changing pace

Pull out the key words and phrases and s–l–o-w   t–h–e–m   d–o–w–n. You’ll be amazed at how slow you can actually go – and how much more interesting you sound. And for added effect, introduce pauses just before key words. This will draw people’s attention to the words.

Voice tonality is so important that we spend a lot of time on it in our training programmes – with plenty of games and exercises to encourage people to experiment and increase their range.

And most people are surprised at how quickly and how easily they improve.

John Cliff – www.johncliff.com

Make a huge movie screen in your mind and start creating vivid mental imagery of things that have anything at all to do with the topic under discussion.

Let’s say you’re kicking around a few ideas to do with product improvement. Create a mental movie of a suitable situation you’re familiar with.

You might, for example, put yourself in your local supermarket where you’re walking around looking at all those products on the shelves, the point-of-sale material, the overhead posters and displays.

And, specifically, look at close-ups of the products and packaging.

Now, look at the wealth of ideas you can see as you mentally stroll around the aisles – create a six-pack, sell two-for-one, add a free bonus product, change the package shape, put a handle on it, group like products together, add a promotional coupon – and so on.

Then change the movie. Maybe you could put yourself in an art gallery, or a circus, or a toy factory, or your local Kwik-Fit – and notice how different situations can generate even more ideas.

Then try mixing a few movies together – a hospital operating room with an airport check-in queue, a day at the beach with a retail furniture store, a public library with a dog show.

The possibilities are endless. And obviously the more you do this, the better you’ll get.

Why this yields results

We have two main channels for generating ideas – ‘visual’, where we think in pictures, and ‘auditory’, where we think in words.

The visual channel is faster because we can have pictures coming and going in a flash. It’s the mind’s main source of information. The auditory channel, on the other hand, can be useful, but it’s painfully slow. In fact, we can’t ‘think’ language any faster than we can talk it in real life.

And because of the way the mind works, we can’t be in both channels at the same time. So if you’re doing most of your thinking in words, you won’t get nearly as many ideas.

John Cliff. www.johncliff.com

This is because the human mind is a target-driven mechanism. When your target is solidly embedded in your thinking, your unconscious mind will work away in the background to marshal the mental resources you need to bring things to fruition.

But your unconscious mind has to believe in your goals for this to work.

And, surprisingly, we now know that it’s the little details that make our mental imagery believable – not the big picture.

So here’s a nice little trick to help get your goals so real in your mind that they propel you forward with a passion.

Step 1. Start by taking a moment or two to create a great mental picture of the actual point where you’ve achieved your goal – whether it’s the success of having your dream house, or maybe just finishing that important proposal. Put yourself right in that moment when you can throw your hands in the air and say, “Yes, I’ve made it, finished, got there.”

Step 2. Whatever the mental picture that comes to mind, take a moment to let your inner vision scan over the picture. You can close your eyes to make the image clearer if you like.

Step 3. This is the crucial bit. Imagine you’re running a magnifying glass over your mental picture. Let yourself quickly examine bits of detail here and there – the smile on your boss’s face as he congratulates you, the detail of the dashboard in your new Rolls-Royce, the label on the champagne bottle you’re using to celebrate your achievement, the menu in the fancy restaurant where a grateful client is taking you to lunch.

You can spend as much time as you like on this. But even a moment or two is going to add much more credibility and life to the imagery.

So why is this important? It gets down to how the human mind determines what’s real and what isn’t.

There’s plenty of research to show that the more detail you can see, the more vivid you make these ‘future memories’.

Then, the more vivid they are, the more your unconscious mind will accept them as ‘true’ and provide you with the inner compulsion to move towards them.

And if you’ve ever heard the gurus tell you how important it is to ‘believe in yourself’, and wondered how the hell you do it, then this is what it’s all about.

John Cliff. www.johncliff.com

Well, here’s an idea than might help with the answer, and it comes all the way from ancient Greece.

Demosthenes was one of the most famous of the Greek orators. He was also renowned for making very long speeches without notes.

Cunningly, he had worked out a system which he called ‘Temples of the Mind’.

Here’s what he did.

When he had his speech written, he would imagine walking through his local temple and fixing posters of individual parts of his speech onto the various columns. Obviously, he did this quite vividly.

Then, later, when he launched into his speech, he merely imagined walking through the temple, in the same sequence, reading off the posters.

In fact, there was one occasion, it is said, when Demosthenes spoke for seven hours without referring to a single note. So he obviously had his system down pat.

How could you use the same trick?

Instead of a temple, why not think about your own house? You know it off by heart, and there’s bound to be a sequence you follow when you get home at night.

Make up a list of ten or more ‘objects’ within that sequence – your front door, the lamp in the hallway, that picture in the living room, and so on – and then ‘tack’ a visual representation of successive parts of your speech onto each object’

For example, start with your ‘Introduction’ segment and imagine the main points right in the middle of your front door. Create mental pictures and ‘see’ them as vividly as you can. (If your speech doesn’t suggest pictures to you, chances are it’s not going to be a good speech.)

Then simply move from room to room, attaching your key mental pictures to your selected objects – an upward surge of profits tilting the lamp in the hallway, the picture in the living room showing some of the organisational changes you want to make, and so on.

Do this as vividly as you can. It shouldn’t take more than a few seconds for each object or position.
Then, when you’re ready to make your speech, mentally walk through your house in the same sequence. The images will be there to remind you.

This is also much the same party trick that ‘mentalists’ use when they quickly remember a long list of objects, and can then recite them back – both backwards and forwards. They simply create visual representations and attach them to their sequence of remembered things.

In fact during my presentation speaker training, I get our participants to do this as a simple exercise. It only takes a few minutes, but they’re certainly surprised at how easily the vivid images stay in their minds.

Later, when I get them to make an actual presentation, they usually find they can commit the main points to memory in less than a couple of minutes.

I invite you to try it. It could make a huge difference to your next speech or presentation.

John Cliff. www.johncliff.com