S7E5: Public Speaking with Neurolinguistics

Hello, hello my favorite people on the internet! Dr. K here, and I am pumped to be back with another episode of the Experience University Podcast! Today’s episode is about the neurolinguistics of public speaking. This episode discusses the important concepts of stage presence and body language when speaking. Be sure to follow along for more episodes in the coming weeks!

Today we are discussing:
Neurolinguistics in Speaking (1:42)
Incorporating Stories (2:51)
Stage Presence and Stage Placement (3:36)
Anchoring and Setting the Stage (7:48)
5 Hand Styles/Satir Groups (10:45)

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Transcript

Dr. K
You are listening to the Experience University Podcast with Dr. K. Season 7, Episode 5.

Speaker 2
Welcome to Experience University where we aim to educate, inspire, and empower individuals who wish to design transformational experiences. Now, your host, Dr. Kristin Malek.

Dr. K
Hello. Hello, my beautiful family, my podcast family, my friends. I am logging in with you from Austin, Texas today. Still on the road. I’ve got some allergies going on, but the content today is absolutely incredible. I have been asked a lot for help with developing speeches lately. And because of that, I have been on all these calls and trying to give input not just on storyline arcs or hero's journeys or your signature story or training content, but really trying to also provide some things from a neurolinguistics standpoint that you can do with your hands and your feet.

I was talking to quite an experienced speaker who had been referred to me and they said, “How do you know all these things? Is there a training for this? Can I sign up for a training?” And I said, “It's just all these things that I've picked up through my unique and interesting background and all my different certifications.”

So, I thought I would spend today, by ask of this particular user, focusing on the neurolinguistics in your speeches. And if you're someone that's interested in public speaking, speaking from stage, or selling from stage, this is all really great information. If you are someone who's planning, hosting, or designing events, these are great things that could be built into speaker training. I've been hired to do speaker training for a variety of organizations, and depending on how long your speaker training is and what you're looking for, we would incorporate some of these different components. It also depends on if you're on Zoom or if you're in person because there's a lot more that we do with eyes on Zoom. But here I really want to talk about your stage presence.

So obviously, you have a story, a storyline. I really want to emphasize that there are so many different types of speeches. So we're not going to really dive into the content of your speeches right now in terms of if you're a keynote and you want to have some more personal or motivational stories. If you're at a breakout where you have a lot more content, the important part of this is you need to be incorporating stories. You want to have very clear, defined bullet points and incorporate stories, personal stories, client stories, whatever types of stories to support and kind of install some of these learnings. That way, it's not just a bullet point on a screen or a bullet point that someone writes down. It's actually applied and learned from the story because that hits your unconscious mind in a totally different way.

So outside of the content of the stories, which is a whole separate piece and hard to do a collective podcast training for because it's so individualized, I want to talk about some some things that can be generalized.

So one of those would definitely be the stage presence, or stage placement. If you think about the stage, and I'm going to assume that if you're listening to this and you are interested in a public speaking, you are confident enough to get out from behind the podium. If you are an event planner designer listening to this, then that would be like the first step that I would take is getting your speakers out from behind a podium. Give them that confidence monitor in front of the stage or in the back of the room, let them read it that way. Get them out from behind the podium. It's just an additional barrier between your speaker and your audience. You need to get your speakers comfortable on the stage because that's really, really important.

So I would say, ok, think about the stage as a timeline and if you're familiar with theater, you already know what I'm going to say, but if you think about your own timeline like I am, and I'm standing here, you are you, you're standing there. If you think about your past, then typically you think the left side of your body and if you're thinking about your future, you're thinking of the right side of your body. So moving from left to right, kind of like a number timeline in math from 0 to 100. Your zero is on your left and your hundred is on your right. This is a basic concept for everyone to know and understand. But when you're speaking on a stage, you have to remember that it's opposite.

So if you're giving a story that's chronological or you're trying to future pace your audience or get them thinking into their future, you want to be delivering that type of content on the right side of the stage, which would be the opposite for you as the speaker. So if I'm in the audience and I'm looking at the stage, my future is on my right-hand side, which is on the speaker's left-hand side, and it's totally the opposite from what the speaker perceives personally. So you have to kind of reorient yourself. And this is something from a conscious and unconscious, subconscious perspective that can really make an immediate impact with your audience.

So even if you have three bullet points and you stand up there… I mean, this is one that could really benefit from a video, right? Rather than an audio podcast. (I'm doing all the motions, you just can't see them.) But if you're holding up three fingers and you're saying, I have three points that I'm going to cover today. The first point and then you would switch to holding up one, your first point. And then, you go stand in a spot that is in your past where that zero would be from that audience's perspective. And then you tell your story, your first point, and you talk about it. Then you say, and the second point and you hold up two fingers, and then you go stand in the center of the stage, right? Stand where your 50 would be from the audience's perspective. You say your second point and you're talking about it in that perspective, and then the same with the third point except you'd move it into the future because that's how our brain works. It works chronologically, it works in time. It works from past to future, from first to third.

We call this anchoring. This is the anchoring in the stage. You're like, “Oh Kristin, I've never heard of this. Where, where is this from?” Well, there's a lot that comes from neurolinguistics. Some of the tips that I give in my speaker training are from hypnosis. I'm a certified hypnosis practitioner. And then there's some that come from theater. So it's really from a wide background that's kind of all blended together. There are a lot of things in neuroscience and how your brain recognizes things from birth to now that we can play into. From hand movements, you know, when your hands are pointing up, like palms up and open that it kind of goes into this placater. It's kind of like an archetype, this placater mentality of like I'm in service to you. If your hands are pointed or you know, you're pointing or you're being very firm with them, or the karate chop type hands, that's more dominant or masculine. It’s an “I'm in charge” kind of movement. And so there're so many different things that go into this, but we're talking about anchoring, anchoring on the stage.

So you can anchor stories, you can anchor bullet points, you can anchor anything that you want on the stage. You want to make sure that when you anchor something that you keep going back to that point when you're talking about it. You can even point to that point. So if you're done with three points and you stand behind the three points, and you're saying like in summary, and you're saying point one, you can just point to that spot that you anchor that story. Then, you could say in my second point, and you can point to that spot. So, you're referencing spots and that's anchoring it in our brains. So I would say definitely use that tip in terms of stage presence and stage location.

In improv and in stand-up comedy, which I have also done a lot of improv and stand-up comedy courses, we also can set the stage, which is another form of anchoring. So if we're trying to tell a story of when I was in my office or I was sitting on a couch or in a chair, you would actually, similar to what a mime would do, you would kind of hold up your hands and say, “Here's my desk.” And you would indicate where the desk is and then you could pretend to sit at it and type in the keyboard, and that's how we set the stage.

The number one issue that speakers have, if you're setting a formal stage and setting things on the stage, is that they forget they set it there, and then they walk through it later. And that really messes with our unconscious mind because you're essentially walking through walls and walking through furniture. So if you're setting anything on stage, you want to make sure it's a little bit out of the way. You want to incorporate it throughout.

Just last week, I was helping a speaker who was developing a story and he had, you know, his valley story and his really feel-good, like emotional impact story. And then he has three bullet points with his three mini-stories, and then his offer and his close, and I was talking to him and I said, “There's this one scene in your story that you keep referencing throughout your entire talk, right? It's part of your Valley story. But then in all three of your bullet points, you're referencing it. So let's just set the scene towards the back of the stage and you know, hold up your hands.” It was a room from his past. And I said, ok, let's set the scene like make the corner of this room towards the back side of the stage and then set up your furniture and then just keep referencing it every time you want to talk about it, just step into it, right? You don't have to keep referencing this room from my childhood in the basement. Just step into it because from a neurological perspective, you're taking us back into it. But don't walk into it unless you're in that scene. Don't walk through it. Those are physical walls. There are a lot of different things that we can do there in terms of our brain, imagination, visualization, and all of these different things.

There are also these different types of satir groups, the five different types of hand styles that you can have at different points in your speech. Now, of course, every single thing is within us, and we can use it naturally. I'm literally talking with my hand as I'm doing this podcast right now. If you're a hand talker, just be more intentional about it. I use these styles when I'm trying to bring a certain point home. So you might be a hand talker, but you don't want to be a distractor where you're overusing your hands. You want to use your hand movements very intentionally to get your point across.

So we talked about the playcater with their hands up and then we talked about that more forceful style, one that politicians use a lot. They will use the leveler, which is kind of like you holding your hands up and moving them side to side. It’s kind of in a horizontal line or if you want more of an impact, you would hold both of your hands up and then bring them down as if they’re in L shapes. So they'd be at the top kind of at your chin, and then they would come down in a straight line and then out opposite from each other. I like to use points when this leveler point to really emphasize. I would say like get clear anything that's like two, four, or six words, you can really use this. It's called the leveler.  These come from all different trainings. So if you take keywords and you go to Google, I'm sure you can find like if you're Googling like this to your groups, right?

We also have the distractor, which can be really, really useful in certain points of your speech. If you are the distractor, technically, I think by definition is asymmetrical hand movements, so it kind of messes with your mind. It's not like your whole body flopping all over the stage. But if you're overusing your hands over and over again, then that would also be considered a distractor because it's taking away from your speech. So you want to make sure you're using the distractor very intentionally within your speech to really bring home a point. Make sure that it's in your signature story in that way.

Lastly, I would say the computer or the thinker. That's where you're holding your one hand kind of up to the side of your face, like you're kind of tapping on your brain or any move. That's kind of similar to that where you're like, “Hm. That's a good question. Hm. Let me think about that.
That's really interesting.”

So these are the five kind of hand styles that you can use to kind of talk directly into the unconscious mind, or the subconscious mind. When used together, the anchoring and the satire styles are super, super powerful.

If this is the type of content that interests you, definitely reach out. Let me know and I can do more content like this. We can talk about some hypnosis. I'm happy to come to talk to your group or do trainings. If you want to work with me individually, I absolutely love working with authors and speakers, and I do books as well to kind of firm up your message and market yourself to get those contracts.

As always, I never take your time for granted. Thank you for listening to this week's podcast episode. Make sure to subscribe, follow, and give us five stars. I'll see you in the next episode.

Speaker 2
Thanks for listening to the Experience University Podcast. Stay tuned for our next episode.