Here’s an interesting question:

How do you make people see ONLY the parts of you that you WANT them to see? How do you make them see you as a winner?

The answer given by the social magician is… social misdirection.

Misdirection

Magicians use misdirection.

There’s a classic trick (I’m revealing secrets here!!) where a magician throws a bright red ball into the air and catches it. While doing this, his eyes and your eyes naturally follow the ball all the way up and back down. Then he does it again. Up and down. And again. And again.

Then as he throws it up the next time, his gaze and your gaze move up following the… Hey wait, why isn’t the ball coming down? As you frantically search the air for the bright red ball, you realize it’s gone. You look back down to the magician’s hands, and they’re empty too. What happened?

On that last “throw”, the magician only pretends to throw the ball up while he actually still keeps it in his hand. As we look up (and we’re not looking at his hand), he takes advantage of that moment and hides the ball elsewhere. But if he didn’t throw the ball, why did we look up? Misdirection.

Misdirection is all about expectations. When we have expectations of what we’re going to see, our minds indulge us and let us see only what we want to. When this magic trick was done as a study, scientists found out that the people who watched the trick said that they actually saw the ball leaving the had of the magician! What’s more, they even came forward and pointed how high they saw the ball go before it vanished into thin air. Our minds are easily tricked into focusing on and believing something.

The magician here planted a few expectations into our brain to make sure that most of us are tricked:

1. Throwing the ball up multiple times allows us to expect the path of the ball in the air. We know where it will go so we look there on the last throw.
2. His gaze following the ball means that our eyes look in that direction too. Visual cues are strong ways to tell someone what is important to look at. We always look at what’s important.

With all those expectations running through our minds (subconsciously), we just have to look up.

Here are two  magician’s rules:

1. Never show a trick until you’ve mastered it.
2. Never repeat the same trick.

When you haven’t mastered the trick, you won’t be fluent with it, and your eyes will naturally slide over to where the action is happening. This means that you’ll look to the ball in your hand instead of the imaginary ball that’s supposed to be moving upwards. Guess what happens then? Your audience looks there too.

And kablam! The jig is up. They’ve seen your trick.

So how does this apply to social situations?

Social Misdirection

When people look at your personality, they follow your “visual cues” or in this case, they follow your social cues. What you think is important is what people will focus on. Do you make a big deal about your hair? Then even someone who didn’t even notice anything wrong with it will start to wonder. Do you focus on the pimples on your face every time? Then other people will too.

Ok, let’s bring this to the next level. Do you always focus on the problems in yourself, or the good things? Whichever you focus on, you can bet that the people around you will pick it up from what you do and say. If you focus on problems, they will also focus on the flaws and problems you have. They will always see you for the person you are. A person full of problems.  person who complains day in and day out about how life is not fair. And the most they can do is to pity you.

On the other hand, I’m sure you’ve heard of inspiring stories like Hellen Keller, (who was blind deaf and mute) but still went on to live their lives well. When you see these people who don’t focus on their problems, but rather on how life could be amazing, it naturally shines through from what they do and say.

It’s not like they don’t have problems. They have more than their share. But the fact that they don’t focus on them makes it hard for us to focus on them too. They seem to breeze through life, overcoming one obstacle over another. We don’t pity them, we admire them. There’s a huge difference there.

When you repress yourself and refuse to see how awesome you are, at the same time you’re usually focusing on how un-awesome you are. That is, all the flaws that you have and how they’re “holding you back”. And if you’re focusing there, and putting all your effort into noticing those parts of yourself, how do you think others will notice you? Exactly, they’ll notice you the same way.

When you have a “victim mentality” and always act like a victim, others will treat you like a victim too. A person who complains tirelessly, even when it’s just a tiny problem.

Or to put it another way:

It IS a big deal if you MAKE it a big deal.

They’ll look at you and notice where your “eyes” are looking. Are you always complaining about your looks? Your money? Your laziness? If that’s the only thing you notice about yourself, you can bet that it’s the only thing that others notice about you too.

This is what I call social misdirection. You set up expectations for your audience; expectations for how to feel, how to react, and what to focus on. And your audience follows that expectation. They see what you want them to see.

This means that no matter how many flaws you have, you can always minimize its impact by not focusing on it.

But like in normal magic tricks, social misdirection also needs you to be “fluent” in feeling good about yourself. It’s something that needs to always be “on”. It’s something that you have to believe yourself. But how?!!

The answer lies in magic once again. To perfect a trick, practice it. Practice a hundred times. Practice a thousand times. Practice 3 hours a day for 6 months. Practice looking at yourself and remembering times and ways that you’ve succeeded and done well. Practice it until you do it unconsciously in your sleep.

And then you’ll be ready.

But there’s more that the social magician can do. If he does it right, he won’t just make others see him as a winner, people will also treat him like a winner. I’m going to call this social leading.

Social Leading

We influence how people feel about us and treat us.

Have you ever adjusted yourself to somebody else during a conversation? Of course you have. Sometimes it’s just about adjusting the speed that you talk. They talk slower, you’ll go slower too. They talk faster? You too.

At other times, it’s also about the mood they carry. Meeting up with a person who’s all smiles? You’ll natural make your conversation all happy too. Don’t want to ruin his day, right? And if the person you meet is all sad? The way you speak starts to reflect that too.

Now, if others can affect us in that way, isn’t it only logical to think that we affect others in the same way too?

We DO affect others. So if the people around you aren’t treating you the way you like, check your own attitude first. Are people bossing you around? Maybe you’re letting them. Do they always make jokes at your expense? You probably have strong reactions to the joke. Does no one compliment you? Perhaps you’re bad at accepting compliments.

So this begs the question, what happens when 2 opposites meet who then try to affect each other? Who wins when a sad person and happy person meet?

The simple answer is: the one whose reality is stronger.

When you have the stronger “reality“, you don’t back off. You force people to adapt to your style rather than adapting yourself to them. It can also be considered a form of assertiveness. “This is how I feel and I refuse to change it or feel guilty for it. If others want to feel differently that’s fine and it’s up to them.”

The person with the stronger reality stays in his reality. If he’s optimistic, he doesn’t adapt to the pessimistic person he just met. He’ll go on having that optimistic, winning tone in his voice and in his actions.

Again, you can only have this strong reality when you’re “fluent” with feeling good about yourself. And again, it only comes with practice.

The social magician

So, the social magician is the person who plays with how people see him, changing their perceptions and their realities, casting magic on their senses. He practices being the person that he wants others to see him as, and he practices until he is fluent with the character. Then he uses social misdirection to make people look where he wants them to look, only at the parts of himself that he is proud of. With that, he gets people to follow his lead and treat him how he wants to be treated.

This… is the social magician.

The current work-places and office layouts are laid out to facilitate progressive accomplishment of perceived behavior of employees at various management rungs. The mode of communication-interface is becoming non-verbal among the employees. The assumed and tacit differences are mental battle-fields in the mist. The reactive mentality which is often the bellwether of aggression is overt in the day –to-day business transactions. Despite knowing that such attitude is transitional in tasking; the resulting emotion may cause short-term disgruntlement of all involved. Such situations often challenge assertive attitude because of the merging differences with statements of aggression.

What on EARTH is it saying?!!!!

I’m sorry but I have no idea myself. It took me 10 minutes to read it and I had to read it back 7 times over to make some sense out of it. This is what happens when you try to use heavy jargon, convoluted words, and fancy language to try to impress people. You might impress people with how many words you know, but you destroy the message you want to send across.

Let’s fix it up?

Let’s try to fix it up:

Modern offices are designed to allow employees to communicate face-to-face easily. However this means that body language is becoming much more important in that communication. Differences in aggressiveness and assertiveness can sometimes just be in the mind. Therefore, some people may react badly when they believe that their colleague is being aggressive when he actually isn’t, and this bad reaction will cause further discord inside the workplace. These situations make things worse because they narrow down the difference between assertive and aggressive behaviour for future interaction.

There, isn’t that much more readable? Even then I’m not sure if I’m writing it correctly coz I didn’t fully understand what the original comment meant.

Moral of the story

Please save technical jargon for journal papers. Use proper simple English when you write. The world thanks you.

But it’s something I have surprisingly few regrets about. It’s such an enriching experience to learn, not just how to stand up and speak, but to do it in a focused and structured way.

1. It taught me where Iraq was.

I confess. I was horrible at geography and history before this. I could tell you that I had heard of North Korea but I wouldn’t have been able to accurately point it out on a map.

Because of debating, I can safely say that I can at least point out a few countries.

2. It taught me to never stray from your objective.

You should never ever explain more than important. Because they’ll stop listening to you anyway after they hear what they want. And all you’ll end up doing is wasting everyone’s time including your own.

And the importance of having a clear objective becomes that much clearer. Now, I utterly hate people who do things or say things that don’t help them achieve their objective. Ok well, maybe I don’t hate them. But it’s so frustrating to hear them blabber on and on about irrelevant things, or to see them do so many things that are pointless.

Of course, to only do things relevant to your objective, you have to have an objective in the first place. Over 4 years, debate drummed it into me that you must always have an objective.

3. It honed my skills in explaining complex ideas in an economy of words.

You only have 7 minutes to explain how you want to save the world before bedtime.

Let’s say it takes 5 seconds to say a sentence. That’s only 84 sentences you can say to describe the political situation in some country on the other side of the world and explain why aid is the worst thing you can do to the farmers in the area as well as put forward your own solution for the problem at hand and of course defend it from the arguments of your opponent.

Did I mention you have to find the flaws in what your opponent says and attack those too? 7 minutes is waaaayyyyy too short.

4. It made me meet so many kinds of people.

There are a number of awesome people in this world. It seems that a huge proportion of them are in debate. Not only that, you get to meet so many varieties. I don’t just mean in terms of race or culture. I also mean in terms of people who are just different. Their styles, their personalities, their very outlook on life.

And where else could you find such a diverse group who would be more than willing to talk and talk and talk and…

5. It allowed me to get away from the calculator.

I’m in engineering. The hard sciences don’t give much room to discuss world issues in class. In law or economics or sociology, you discuss world issues all the time. So I stepped out of my classroom and tried to be a little more well-rounded. I didn’t want to just be a guy who knew how numbers worked. I wanted to know what those numbers meant.

Engineering is supposed to use science to solve real world problems. How do I do that unless I know what those “real world problems” are?

So…

If you’ve got the time, join debate. It’s so worth it.

If you haven’t got it, make time.

Of course, having a whirlwind of data isn’t always the best either. There’s always a thing called whitespace.

Whitespace

When you have too much information at a time, your brain won’t be able to process all of it at once. It needs space between information. For example, that pause people make after saying something important. Or the way a webpage looks so so soooo much better when everything useless is taken out and you have the minimum to see.

One reason why people like the facebook layout  is because it doesn’t cram too much on the same page (or at least that’s true if people don’t have a bunch of apps). By spacing the columns of information and limiting the information that gets there in the first place, you can better appreciate and concentrate on what you DO have on the page.

Put large blocks of space in between the blocks of text and things look much better.

Learning whitespace

So I think that we might need learning whitespace too for the same reason. Learn 3 things in half an hour and you’ll walk away with all 3. Learn 48 things in a half an hour seminar and you’ll still only walk away with 3. You might have written all 48 down but in the end you’ll only grasp the overall concept of all 48 and not the individual concepts of each.

So we need learning whitespace. And that’s when I realized what storytelling really does.

I’ve always been a believer that the best way to get information across is to tell a story. Our mind has evolved over thousands of years of oral storytelling to accept stories as the best medium to send information across generations.

A story (a well told story) compresses information into the format that’s best to learn in. Data like dates and names are spaced properly, with the story parts in between to catch your attention again. So you get a bit of info, then while you’re processing it, the author catches your attention with a little story before going on to the next bit.

Books should only have a few major points

I always complained that those hundred ringgit books would only have 3 or 4 main points in a book. Sometimes only 1 point in the whole book! Now I realize maybe it’s better that way.

Of course this only goes for books that aren’t story books  in the first place. Because any book that wants to get a point across should always use stories to do it.

So…

Whenever everything looks too cluttered, just add a little whitespace.

These are real thoughts that go through my head every time before a presentation or a speech. But I can still go up and deliver it. And I’m proud to say that my speeches are not too boring. And it’s because I know that it doesn’t need to be perfect.

People WANT to enjoy your speech

It takes a lot of effort to travel somewhere to sit down and hear you speak. It takes a lot of time out of their busy day to do so. If your audience is there, they want you to succeed. They want you to do well.

Think about it. Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wish this speaker was boring”? Never. It’s always, “I hope this next speaker isn’t too boring”.

Your audience has already made a huge investment.  They’ve come all the way there and they have to spend the next few minutes listening to you anyway, so they might as well try to enjoy it, right? And they’ll try to enjoy it as much as possible.

Your audience want to find any excuse possible to enjoy your speech so if you do even the smallest thing well, or make even one tiny joke, they’ll remember that and conveniently forget the rest.

Nobody remembers the bad parts, they only remember the good parts

I’m sure you’ve heard thousands of speeches before. It could be your teachers at school, speeches on TV, a seminar you’ve been to, toasts at weddings and even the opening speeches at most programs. What do they have in common? 99% of them are quite boring.

What else do they have in common? I don’t remember that 99%. I don’t remember who gave the speeches. I don’t remember what they said in the speeches. Most probably I wasn’t even paying attention.

I do remember all the good speeches I heard though. I still remember the faces of the speakers (sometimes I didn’t get to find out their names), what they talked about, where it was that I heard it and even when I heard it.

So it turns out that even if you perform extremely horribly, guess what? The audience was expecting that anyway. 99% of speeches ARE boring. They won’t bother remembering it and will have forgotten it later. So it’s ok to mess up. No one cares.

3 points is more than enough

Ever thought that you need to make sure that your audience gets all your knowledge? Or maybe you just wanted to impress them with how much you know? It turns out that talking too much bores people!

“Oh my God! Seriously?” *sarcasm*

Seriously though, having too many facts and figures and points that you want to explain will only overwhelm your audience. Stick to 1 or 2 points. Have a maximum of 3 points. Preferably only one. Be clear what they are. Repeat it. Emphasize it.

If you’re telling a long story to explain one of those points, at the end of it tell your audience how that story links to that point. Because they’ll probably forget.

When the speech ends you want them to come away thinking only one thing. That point that you wanted to get across. Just that single one.

So your speech doesn’t need to be perfect

It doesn’t have to be perfect and it probably won’t be perfect. But that’s ok. It will still be better than 90% of speeches if you just keep it short and stick only to the simple message you want to get across.

Once you’re done reading this, I hope you’ll come away with only one point which is, “Speaking in public doesn’t need perfection. It only needs to be just a little bit ok. And short. Keep it short.”

I always heard people speak using big words. No, wait, that’s not true. I always heard about people who speak using big words.

Growing up, I never heard it much myself. Rather, I grew up reading storybooks. Good old fiction. Whether it was mystery or horror, fantasy or comedy, it was all good to me. When I ran out of books, I’d even read magazines (though of course they weren’t as much fun). I opened a few books that were non-fiction as well. Every time, the book pulled me in. I forgot about the words. Want to know why? It’s coz they wrote in Plain English.

Everybody uses Plain English… right?

So I grew up thinking that everybody used Plain English. Explaining things using simple words so that people would already understand the words and could now concentrate on understanding your message instead.

The only ones that didn’t were people who wanted to sound smart. After all, don’t you sound smart when you start saying words that have 10 syllables?

Jargon

Then I found out about Jargon. It turns out that in every field and in every industry, they have things that would be very complicated to explain but happen all the time. So special words were made up to refer to them easily. Instead of calling something “a super tiny sensor that’s made to detect sudden changes in movement up to 5 times of gravity“, an engineer could just call it “a 5G accelerometer“. Shorter. Simpler. Not a bad thing at all. Not until you put 20 words of Jargon one after another. Then it becomes a LOT harder to understand.

Which should we use?

It took me a long time to understand that for some people, it’s not that they don’t want to use Plain English. They can’t. They simply don’t know how to because they haven’t been trained for it and have never had to do it in their lives. Every time they’ve been asked to present any information, nobody has taught them to use Plain English.

When I was taking my degree, I joined my university’s debate club. I had a great chance to hear people present complicated facts and arguments in a way that the audience could understand. I heard people present these things day in and day out for 4 years.

Mistakes

It quickly became clear to me that most people don’t know how to keep it simple. The usual mistakes people make?

1. They assume the people listening know as much as they do.

They immediately start talking and assume that the audience know the same things that they have read and studied about. You’ll start hearing acronyms like UNCHR, FDI, ASEAN+3 and things like junta (pronounced hunta), naming and shaming, floating currencies and locus standi.

What?!

Take a few moments. Say what you mean. Don’t put fancy terms out there if people might not know them. You only use Jargon when people are ALL from the same background.

2. They say everything else about the issue except the issue itself.

You know who they are. The people that ramble on and on and on while you’re wondering what they’re telling you about. You heard them talk about the current global recession and the potential for bio-engineered plants in 3rd world countries, but what does that have to do with hiring nurses from the Philippines?

If you want to say something, say it. You don’t have to explain it.

3. They assume people can read minds and can get what they mean.

Let’s say that I tell you that we should reward green companies to help save the environment. And I stop there. You could understand it in many different ways.

What kind of reward do I mean? Tax subsidies? Exclusive government contracts?

What does green mean? Not burning anything? Filtering their smoke? Donating to organizations that help the environment?

By leaving it at that, it becomes very vague and each person understands it his own way (if he even understands it at all). So say exactly what you mean.

Not too short, not too long

So on the one hand, you have to keep it short. Say exactly what you mean and nothing else. On the other hand, if it’s too short people might not understand what you mean. Right?

Wrong. People only don’t understand when you use Jargon. So make it as short as possible while still using Plain English words. The same words that you grow up with and read in story books. The same words that you use while chatting with someone over drinks.

When you use this same simple language, it makes things easier. It frees his mind from spending time to understand the meaning of the word that you just said. Instead he can use that time to understand the meaning of your sentence and to imagine it in his head. He can see it, hear it, feel it.

When you can make people forget your words, you can make them remember your dreams.