Sharing Our Stories: Tales Of Resilience And Renewal

Rick Gilbert is from Let ‘er Rip Productions. He is the Retired Founder of?PowerSpeaking Inc., one of Silicon Valley’s most successful communication and training companies. Prior to founding that in 1985, he was a psychologist and held management positions at Hewlett-Packard and Amdahl. Rick is an author of several books such as?Speaking Up, which is a how-to book on speaking to senior leaders. He performs one-man shows. His latest book is an audiobook,?Sharing Our Stories,?featuring interviews with 65 people, including people like Gloria Steinem and Daniel Ellsberg.

Rick, we’ve got a little inkling of what an impressive background you have. Would you mind taking us back to your own story of origin, childhood, college, wherever you want to start? How did you get involved with teaching people how to be better communicators?

I started out always liking to be on stage. I was always in the school plays. In college, I majored in Psychology. As I got into my first jobs, I began to realize how much trouble people speaking are. It was terrible. I thought, “This is easy for me. Why don’t I go into business and help people learn how to do this?” I was active in?Toastmasters?for a long time and the?National Speakers Association. I saw how many people were calling Toastmasters wanting help with this. I thought, “Why don’t I start a company?” That was many years ago.

The company has grown from me in the bedroom to 35 trainers worldwide and doing hundreds and hundreds of programs every year. The one that might be most interesting for your readers is something called?Speaking Up: Surviving Executive Presentations. We found out that whenever people went up to the C-level in their organizations to make a presentation, whatever they did with their own team did not work. The audience was so different.

What you said is so crucial. I have seen it time and again where somebody is a great salesperson and they get promoted to be a Sales Manager, Director, VP of Sales, not even at the C-level suite. They think, “Everyone has to sell the way I have sold.” Everyone has their own style. That alone is an example of just because you got a promotion does not mean the skills that got you there are not the skills that will keep you there.

Let’s take a composite person. A 45-year-old has 10 or 15 people on his team, making a lot of money and doing well at a certain level, whether VP or Executive Senior Manager. They get a chance to go to the C-level. Maybe they have to do it once a year to give a report. They use the exact same techniques they used with their own team. For some reason, they bomb and do not know why. It is because the audience is so different. It can be a tragedy for their career and team. Most of all, even for a product that needs to be funded, we had some people that we had been working with that did very poorly at the senior level.

I started interviewing CEOs to find out what was wrong with it. How come these guys are bombing? What we learned became that book,?Speaking Up,?and a program that we have been doing now for many years. It is very successful where thousands of people have taken this program. It shows middle managers, even though you are very successful, you are good, and you have an MBA, you’re great. The audience at the top level are different. We thought, “How are they different? What do they want?” We found out things that people can say that will make their career golden.

I will give you an example. The guy I was describing was 45 years old and a head of some big department. He goes into the CEO and the founders of the company. Here is what he or she can do to open up to be successful. The starting line is, “Good morning. I know how valuable your time is. We have 30 minutes on the agenda. I can get through it in 20 minutes.” You are giving me back some time. The second sentence out of that person’s mouth should be, “What I want from you today is a $10 million increase in our budget for marketing in Europe.” They know right up front what we call first line bottom line.

As a Sales Keynote Speaker myself, I know how important that first 90-second opening is. You’ve got to grab people’s attention. What I found works is a story that pulls people in right away, not this, “Thank you for the opportunity. I am excited to be here,” stuff. No one cares that you are excited. We go right into the story. It takes people a while, especially if they are not professional speakers, but just presenting.

I worked with an architecture firm who was presenting against three other firms on who was going to get this billion-dollar project to renovate an airport. I said, “That opening line goes right into your story.” When I was 14 years old, I saw a drawing and I thought, “What is this?” That is what made me become an architecture buff. They are off and running as opposed to all the trite things, people, and the filler words.

This bottom line is a great soundbite. It is to let people know what you are asking for upfront. Otherwise, they are wondering, “What is to ask here? Where are we going?” I learned that when I gave my TEDx Talk,?Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life, the coach I had said, “What do you want the audience to feel, think and do?” Once we had the answers to that, the talk was built from the back end up in order to get those things. I am guessing you have found that similar type of strategy works.

I would make one suggestion to what you said. This is the thing about starting with a story. At the top level, you have the CEO, COO and CFO sitting around the table. They are making $13 million a year and their hourly rate is absolutely huge. This whole thing started when I was coaching this guy to start with a story and he did. They tore him to shreds and said, “Why are you taking up our time? What is your point? Get to the point.” We found that with the very top level, the stories are very difficult. The bottom line is they want data. If you are going to use a story, it should be extremely tightly focused on a customer experience. They are very numeric people.

A lot of the people I work with are in tech and healthcare. When I speak to that audience, they are convinced that people buy logically and back it up with emotion. I say, “Even the most sophisticated person is buying emotionally first and backing it up with logic.” Just pushing out facts and figures will not change anyone’s behavior. They are not going to remember it.

If I am speaking of an audience of CEOs, I always say, “XYZ CEO said to me or found that this was the number one thing that increased his bottom line. Here is the story to back it up.” Hence, if you have a story that can include a little ROI in it about someone that they relate to, they are a little more willing to go into the story.

The guy that got criticized, our client, wandered the story, and took too long. They were so, “Let’s go. I have got another meeting.”

You can’t bore people. That is for sure. You have to be compelling. Stories need to tug at heartstrings to open purse strings. How did you come up with this audio book,?Sharing Our Stories,?about resilience and renewal?

I had retired years ago from the company that I founded, PowerSpeaking. I started a blog right away. Part of my blog was interviewing people. I love to do interviews, plus when I did the?Speaking Up?book, I had interviewed about 50 C-level executives in Silicon Valley. I had all of this choice of video and audio well-done and well-recorded. I thought, “Wouldn’t this be interesting to pull this together somehow?” A friend of mine said, “Why don’t you do an audiobook?” It popped for me.

I thought, “I love audiobooks. I have hundreds of them on my phone. It would be easy to do. I have all this stuff right here.” It was not easy. I worked on it for a year and a half. I am pulling it together and asking the data, “What does this mean? What is the data telling me?” Finally, it all came together and the title,?Sharing Our Stories: Tales of Resilience and Renewal.?I am a “spaghetti against the wall” guy. I said, “What is the pattern here?” That was the pattern that seemed to come out of all these interviews.

I ended up using 65 different people in this book. The purpose of it is to look over our lives from childhood, adulthood and elderhood. As a psychologist, there were 1 million different theories about development. I thought, “They are all too complicated. I like mine about childhood and elderhood. Elderhood is easy.” That was the format for it.

The other thing that was critical about it was I wanted something to be entertaining. I wanted something that would be a page-turner, even though there were no pages. I would hope that people would sit in their cars and listen to this and be late for meetings because they want to find out how the story turned out. That is what I have produced here. It is an amazing contribution.

One of the things I learned from this that I did not know going into it was how powerful stories could be to change lives. It is not just telling our own story. We all like to tell our own stories, but how can I, as a person who cares about somebody else, encourage them to tell me their stories and give them the airtime and space to do it? Magic could happen. Magical things are incredible.

How did you get someone as famous as Gloria Steinem to agree to be interviewed?

I have a friend who runs a writers’ conference in San Miguel, Mexico. Gloria was coming down there to be the big keynote. It is a three-day conference. She was going to be the main event. My friend,?Susan Page, told me about this and said, “You should come down and see if you can interview Gloria.” I wrote up a proposal that went to Gloria’s office. There were a lot of people in Mexico that wanted to interview her. I said, “I am interested, but I am not going to interview you about your career and the politics of what you have done. I want to know more about you as a person, what you have struggled with, and succeeded doing.”

They came back to Susan and said, “We want Gilbert to do this interview.” Nobody else got to talk to her. It was just me. You can see the entire interview on my webpage. Spending an hour with?Gloria Steinem, she is like the Dalai Lama. I was in the same room with this woman. Here is the thing, John, you will love it if you watch the entire thing. I had watched some stuff of hers earlier that she had done. She had been a tap dancer in high school.

Sharing Our Stories: As a person who cares about somebody else, encourage them to tell their stories and give them the time and the space to do it.

At the end of our interview, I said, “We are wrapping up now. I am wondering whether you might be willing to do a little tap dance for us.” I put on my wide angle lens and pulled back. She said, “I do not know. I do not have any music.” I said, “I have music.” I sang, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.” She starts tap dancing in this hotel room. That was the end of my interview. It was more fun. She is a hoot.

There are a lot of takeaways there. One, you figured a unique angle that would appeal to her, so talk about knowing your audience. Two, that personal story of origin and the preparation, having a great closing is also equally important as a great opening and the playfulness of once a tap dancer, always a tap dancer.

I listened to that interview. One of the things that resonated with me was when she gets frustrated, aggravated, or a little down, she is able to remember a story of the impact she has had. She told this wonderful story of a woman who came to her book signing who had been in prison and changed her life. She became a lawyer. That arc of that person’s story energized her. I thought, “How great is that? Stories can energize all of us, even if they are not our story.”

When I asked her about moments that were extraordinary for her, she talked in general terms, like meeting people on the street. I said, “I want something more specific than that.” I burrowed in a little bit and said, “Can you give me a specific example of something that happened?” She told that story about the woman who went from prison to being an attorney and said to her, “I thought you would like to know.” Gloria says, “That keeps you going for months.”

There is a takeaway for the readers. Don’t take the first response someone gives you, whether you are interviewing them or if you are in sales and ask an open-ended question to try and find out what someone needs, and they give you the top line answer. You will understand this as a therapist. It is known when couples come to therapy and say, “Our sex life is in the toilet.”

That is the presenting problem. It is not the real issue. The same thing is true sometimes in sales. When you say to someone, “What is your biggest struggle? What is your biggest challenge?” They will give you a top line answer. You need to dig down a little bit like you did with Gloria. “What specifically does that look like or feel like?”

I learned that from?Terry Gross?on NPR. She is one of my favorite interviewers, and she always digs a little deeper. It has been very valuable for me as an interviewer when I am trying to get people to tell these stories.

Let’s face it. If you are in sales, and we all are selling ourselves all the time, you had to sell yourself to get Gloria to say yes. We need to ask deeper questions and build up some rapport that people are willing to answer those questions.

My background is in Psychology. Being a therapist, one of the takeaways from that part of my life was something called active listening. For an interviewer, that is the gold standard. Instead of trying to tell them your side of the story or direct them in some other way, you listen and say something like, “That must have been a real struggle for you at that point in your life,” and shut up.

Click through to read the rest of the interview.

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