Introduction: The #1 Fear Is the #1 Skill
p. 1 “Invest in yourself”: Catherine Clifford, “Billionaire Warren Buffett: This Is the ‘One Easy Way’ to Increase Your Worth by ‘At Least’ 50 Percent,” CNBC.com, December 5, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/05/warren-buffett-how-to-increase-your-worth-by-50-percent.html.
p. 3 “Bureaucracy defends the status quo”: Laurence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (New York: Collins Reference, 1977), 83. See also Rodd Wagner, “New Evidence the Peter Principle Is Real — And What to Do about It,” Forbes, April 10, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/roddwagner/2018/04/10/new-evidence-the-peter-principle-is-real-and-what-to-do-about-it/#52658d281809.
p. 4 “My devotion to continuous improvement of my communication”: personal communication with the author, circa 1988.
p. 5 “If you have ever thought that you would rather die”: Kaya Burgess, “Speaking in Public Is Worse Than Death for Most,” Times of London, science section, October 30, 2013, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/speaking-in-public-is-worse-than-death-for-most-5l2bvqlmbnt.
p. 5 Many surveys rank public speaking: Christopher Ingraham, “America’s Top Fears: Public Speaking, Heights, and Bugs,” The Washington Post, October 30, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/30/clowns-are-twice-as-scary-to-democrats-as-they-are-to-republicans. See also Karen Kangas Dwyer and Marlina M. Davidson, “Is Public Speaking Really More Feared Than Death?,” Communication Research Reports 29, no. 2 (2012): 99–107, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08824096.2012.667772?scroll=top&needAccess=true.
p. 6 “When faced with standing up in front of a group”: Glenn Croston, “The Thing We Fear More Than Death,” Psychology Today, November 29, 2012, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-real-story-risk/201211/the-thing-we-fear-more-death.
p. 7 Gordon Goodman, a successful actor and singer: Andrew Salomon, “Study Shows Stage Fright Is Common Among Working Actors,” Backstage, September 21, 2011, https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/study-shows-stage-fright-common-among-working-actors-60640.
p. 9 “What Gandhi thinks, what he feels”: Desai, quoted in Eknath Easwaran, Gandhi the Man: How One Man Changed Himself to Change the World, 4th ed. (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 2011), 114.
p. 10 We don’t develop or increase our authenticity: Jennifer Beer, “The Inconvenient Truth about Your ‘Authentic’ Self,” Scientific American (blog), March 5, 2020, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-inconvenient-truth-about-your-authentic-self.
p. 10 “These are my new shoes”: Charles Barkley, television commercial for Nike, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev2kYHXma5I.
p. 11 In his classic On Becoming a Leader: Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader, 4th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
Chapter 1: In Order to Flow, Think Like a Pro
p. 13 what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes as flow: Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).
p. 19 “The brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things”: John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Seattle: Pear Press, 2009), 93.
p. 20 “learning to write is like negotiating an obstacle course in boot camp”: Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin, 2015), 12.
Chapter 2: Empathize with Your Audience
p. 26 for most people that’s the limit: George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” Psychological Review 101, no. 2 (1956): 343–52.
p. 29 Shor liked to conduct informal market research by pretending: Harvey Mackay’s webpage, accessed April 23, 2020, https://harveymackay.com.
p. 30 “Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people”: W. B. Yeats, quote on the cover of W. B. Yeats, The Short Stories (Miniature Masterpieces, 2013).
p. 31 “the curse of knowledge”: Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin, 2015), 63.
p. 35 “It’s no secret that the founders of start-ups”: Keith McFarland, “The Psychology of Success,” Inc., November 1, 2005, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20051101/spotlight-psychology.html.
p. 37 like writing a love letter and addressing it to Occupant: Based on a witticism widely attributed to AT&T presentation research manager Ken Haemer, who used the punch line “To whom it may concern.”
Chapter 3: Use Mind Maps to Generate, Organize, and Remember Your Message
p. 51 “I was exposed to various alternative note-taking modalities”: Jim D’Agostino, personal communication with the author, February 14, 2020.
Chapter 4: PROPAR
p. 60 Psychologists call this the primacy effect: APA Dictionary of Psychology, s.v. “primacy effect,” accessed April 23, 2020, https://dictionary.apa.org/primacy-effects.
p. 66 “I knew the truth — perhaps I alone”: Neil LaBute, “Rabbit Candle,” Significant Objects, December 1, 2009, http://significantobjects.com/2009/12/01/rabbit-candle.
p. 69 “My experiments show that character-driven stories”: Paul J. Zak, “Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling,” Harvard Business Review, October 28, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/10/why-your-brain-loves-good-storytelling.
p. 71 The Recency Effect: APA Dictionary of Psychology, s.v. “recency effect,” accessed April 23, 2020, https://dictionary.apa.org/recency-effect. See also Peter Russell, The Brain Book: Know Your Own Mind and How to Use It (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2010).
p. 72 “Great is the art of beginning”: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Elegiac Verse,” from In the Harbor (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1882); available at https://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=310.
p. 72 “The biggest laugh has to be at the end”: Jonah Weiner, “Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up,” New York Times Magazine (video), December 20, 2012.
Chapter 5: All Business Is Show Business
p. 79 “The medium is the message”: Marshall McLuhan introduced this iconic phrase in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; repr., MIT Press, 1994), 8.
p. 79 “The room is doing 80 percent of the job”: Jerry Seinfeld, “Jerry Seinfeld, NBA,” ESPN Radio (podcast), http://www.espn.com/espnradio/play/_/id/13010973.
p. 84 Master of Mind Mapping: Brian Weller, personal communication with the author, April 20, 2020.
p. 89 what psychologists call the “reminiscence effect”: Peter Russell, The Brain Book: Know Your Own Mind and How to Use It (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 1986), 85–86.
Chapter 6: Words Matter
p. 95 “I am about to — or I am going to — die”: “Last Words of Real People,” Bailly to Burbank section, website, http://www.sanftleben.com/Last%20Words/lastwords-r-b.html.
p. 97 “The first man who compared a woman to a rose”: Though widely attributed to Gérard de Nerval, this quote has also been attributed to Voltaire and Salvador Dalí.
p. 97 “All writing is a campaign”: Martin Amis, “Battling Banality,” The Guardian, March 24, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/24/artsandhumanities.highereducation.
p. 98 “I don’t know and I don’t care”: William Safire, On Language (New York: Times Books, 1980), 151.
p. 98 “So what? Why should I care about what you’re saying?”: Tammy Gales, personal communication with the author, February 14, 2020.
p. 102 “What we need now is some new, fresh clichés”: Samuel Goldwyn, as quoted in George Tiffin, All the Best Lines: An Informal History of the Movies in Quotes, Notes, and Anecdotes (London: Head of Zeus, 2014). See also “At the End of the Day, Clichés Can Be as Good as Gold,” Talk of the Nation, NPR, podcast audio, December 27, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/12/27/168149099/at-the-end-of-the-day-cliches-can-be-as-good-as-gold.
p. 104 “If you do it thoughtfully”: Tammy Gales, personal communication with the author, February 14, 2020.
p. 105 “There is no mode of action, no form of emotion”: Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in Oscar Wilde: The Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 256.
p. 106 “We can shape events in each other’s brains”: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (William Morrow, 1994; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 1.
p. 106 “A man with a scant vocabulary”: Henry Hazlitt, The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt, ed. Hans F. Sennholz (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1993), 51.
p. 108 “In 523 words”: Greg Hall, “Elizabeth II’s Finest Hour,” The Article, April 6, 2020, https://www.thearticle.com/elizabeth-iis-finest-hour.
p. 109 “The most important thing is to read”: J. K. Rowling, online interview, Scholastic, February 3, 2000, https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/jk-rowling-interview.
p. 109 A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books”: The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter, (Boston: Mariner Books, 2000), xvi.
Chapter 7: Cultivate Your Body Language
p. 114 “Humans and other animals express power”: Dana R. Carney, Amy J. C. Cuddy, and Andy J. Yap, “Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance,” Psychological Science 21, no. 10 (2010): 1363–68, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20855902. Watch Cuddy’s TED Talk, which has received more than 57 million views, here: https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_may_shape_who_you_are. This talk sparked significant criticism. You can read her response at David Biello, “Inside the Debate about Power Posing: A Q & A with Amy Cuddy,” Ideas.TED.com, February 22, 2017, https://ideas.ted.com/inside-the-debate-about-power-posing-a-q-a-with-amy-cuddy.
p. 116 In a study entitled “Attracting Assault”: Betty Grayson and Morris I. Stein, “Attracting Assault: Victims’ Nonverbal Cues,” Journal of Communication 31, no. 1 (1981): 68–75, https://academic.oup.com/joc/article-abstract/31/1/68/4371921?redirectedFrom=fulltext. See also Carol Krucoff, “YOU: Sending Out Messages of Muggability?,” The Washington Post, December 9, 1980, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1980/12/09/you-sending-out-messages-of-muggability/c4ad2149–474e-446a-bf3b-3d90fb18b89e.
p. 128 “We join spokes together in a wheel”: Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper & Row, 1998), 11.
p. 129 “That impressive silence, that eloquent silence”: Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 3 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 170.
p. 130 “a means for changing stereotyped response patterns”: Frank Jones, “Method for Changing Stereotyped Response Patterns by the Inhibition of Certain Postural Sets,” Psychological Review 72, no. 3 (May 1965): 196–214.
p. 130 “a method for expanding consciousness”: Frank Pierce Jones, Body Awareness in Action: A Study of the Alexander Technique (New York: Schocken, 1976), 2.
p. 131 “the method for keeping your eye on the ball applied to life”: Leo Stein in Jones, Body Awareness in Action, 48.
p. 134 “My daily practice of the Balanced Resting State”: Deborah Domanski, personal communication with the author, April 11, 2020. Note: Domanski is my wife. I listen to her exquisite singing every day. I also get to hear the improvement in her students’ voices.
p. 136 laughter is one of the best ways: “Social Laughter Releases Endorphins in the Brain,” ScienceDaily, June 1, 2007, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170601124121.htm.
p. 137 listening to the music you lLove: Laura Ferreri et al., “Dopamine Modulates the Reward Experiences Elicited by Music,” PNAS 116, no. 9 (2019): 3793–98, https://www.pnas.org/content/116/9/3793.
p. 137 The scents of lavender and vanilla: “10 Natural Ways to Release Endorphins Instantly,” Reader’s Digest, https://www.rd.com/health/wellness/natural-endorphin-boosters.
p. 137 Anticipating celebration raises dopamine levels: Thai Nguyen, “Hacking into Your Happy Chemicals: Dopamine, Serotonin, Endorphins and Oxytocin,” HuffPost, October 20, 2014, updated December 6, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hacking-into-your-happy-c_b_6007660.
p. 138 “These simple practices can help you gain control”: Eva Selhub, personal communication with the author, March 13, 2020.
p. 138 Karsenty explains that our bones release the hormone osteocalcin: Gerard Karsenty et al., “Mediation of the Acute Stress Response by the Skeleton,” Cell Metabolism 30, no. 5 (2019), https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)30441-3.
Chapter 8: If the Buddha Gave Sales Presentations
p. 142 “Sales scams are as old as humanity”: Better Business Bureau, “Sales Scams,” https://www.bbb.org/pacific-southwest/get-consumer-help/top-scams/sales-scams.
p. 143 “I was lucky enough to find someone who believed in me”: Jeff Kriendler, “Frank W. Abagnale: Pan Am’s Great Impostor,” in Pan Am: Personal Tributes to a Global Aviation Pioneer, ed. Jeff Kriendler and James Patrick Baldwin (San Francisco: Pan Am Historical Foundation, 2017), 78; available at https://www.abagnale.com/pdf/KriendlerAbagnale.pdf.
p. 144 “Be sure...you can answer the two questions”: Daniel H. Pink, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others (New York: Riverhead, 2012), 228.
p. 144 “Sales must be the ultimate ethical”: Steve Lishansky, personal communication with the author, March 13, 2020.
p. 146 “Maybe you don’t hold the title of salesperson”: Zig Ziglar, “Everyone Sells,” Success, May 12, 2009, https://www.success.com/everyone-sells.
p. 146 “Physicians sell patients on a remedy”: Pink, To Sell Is Human, 19.
p. 147 “the use of one person’s communication skills”: Duane Sparks, personal communication with the author, March 13, 2020.
p. 148 “For years, our most successful partners”: Chris Hillmann, personal communication with the author, April 2, 2020.
p. 148 “Most people, even many within the world of formal sales”: Sparks, personal communication, March 13, 2020.
p. 149 He’s discovered that although most people believe: Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984; repr., New York: Harper Business, 2006).
p. 151 “It is the spread of the good things”: Nicholas A. Christakis, TED Talk, “The Hidden Influence of Social Networks,” May 10, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U-tOghblfE.
p. 154 “On the one hand, seeming too eager might be taken”: Jeremy Nicholson, personal communication with the author, February 14, 2020.
p. 157 “evolutionary adaptation, the need to figure out”: Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 3 (1993): 431–41.
p. 158 “Individuals tend to look at what other people are doing”: Nicholson, personal communication, February 14, 2020.
p. 160 “You can do much on behalf of your own healing”. A Course in Miracles, ed. Helen Schucman, Bill Thetford, and Kenneth Wapnick (New York: Foundation for Inner Peace, 1976), 28.
Conclusion: The Master’s Secret Mirror
p. 163 “In the master’s secret mirror”: George Leonard, Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (New York: Plume, 1992), 176.
p. 163 “I think I’m beginning to understand something about painting”: “Renoir Art Lesson — Biography and Activities,” Liberty Hill House (blog), October 9, 2015, http://www.libertyhillhouse.com/2015/10/09/renoir-art-lesson-biography-activities.
p. 168 “You can learn from an ordinary bamboo leaf”: Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, trans. R. F. C. Hull (1953; repr., Vigeo Press, 2018), 48.
p. 168 “must fall from the archer”: Ibid.
p. 168 “The best moments in our lives are not the passive”: Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 3.
Questions and Answers
p. 174 “Very early on in my career, I hit upon this idea”: Sean Davis, “Jerry Seinfeld Explains the Perfect Way to Handle Donald Trump,” The Federalist, September 10, 2015, https://thefederalist.com/2015/09/10/jerry-seinfeld-explains-the-perfect-way-to-handle-donald-trump.