I grabbed my Blackberry when I woke up this morning and saw that Bnet was promoting a webinar called How to Change Hearts, Minds, and Actions: Guy Kawasaki Speaks on Enchantment.

Guy Kawasaki, for those of you who don’t know, is a venture capitalist and an original thinker.  For instance, when people came to him with an idea for a business, he enforced the 10, 20, 30 rule:  No more than ten slides; no longer than twenty minutes; and no font smaller than 30.

Now he’s into enchantment, which is a game-changer.  Most of us are talking about persuasion, story, brain science, stickiness, and presence.  Suddenly we’re into the realm of the magical, the mystical, the enchanting!

It is a great word, one that has freshness and bite, so let’s run with it.  But it speaks of the oldest art of the public speaker, the rhetorician, the spellbinder, and rainmaker.  The ability to get an audience to believe, to see a new reality in the theater of their own minds, and to carry it with them into action.

You may be familiar with Bruno Bettelheim’s seminal work, The Uses of Enchantment, in which he writes about the power of folk and fairy tales.

Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms.  If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose.  Bettelheim thought that by engaging with these socially-evolved stories, children would ge through emotional growth that would better prepare them for their own futures.

- Wikipedia, The Uses of Enchantment

We are enchanted by stories and by performances; by the artificial world of opera, sports, and theater.  Any story that doesn’t suspend our disbelief is a failure.  Good novels and movies are more vivid than real life.  They lodge in our minds forever.  And because they last, they have a chance to teach us how to behave, how to act.  The drama is so captivating, so enchanting, that we are penetrated by it – and instructed by it.

Combined with the wisdom of rhetoric, cognitive and social science, and the art of the theater, the spoken word can also be enchanting.  When we learn how to shape our arguments, structure language patterns to captivate the mind, be both conceptual and concrete, and perform like an actor, we can alter reality for our listeners.

Percy Bysshe Shelley said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  I think what he meant to say is that great speakers and storytellers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

They are, in fact, the acknowledged leaders of countries, companies, and institutions, because they are the people who are able to tell the stories that shape their followers vision of the future, and their interpretation of the past.

And maybe even more importantly, the personal story of the leader – his or her biography – very often embodies the values held up by the institution he or she leads.  Think, “Obama,” a new kind of President.  Think: “Lincoln,” “Mandela,” “Thatcher,” “Reagan.”  Their personal stories represented the aspirations of their cultures.  They enchanted the electorate, not only by what they said, but also by what their lives said.

The bar has been raised.  Kawasaki has done it again – jumped out ahead of the conversation and elevated the discourse to urge us to a higher level.

It’s no longer persuasion and influence.  It is no longer presence or power.  And it certainly is no longer “presentation skills,” that mechanical, pedestrian phrase that fails to lend any magic to the art of speech – that is so 1980s.  No, the new word is enchantment.  Can we enchant our audiences?

Can you see it now?  A whole generation of MBA’s studying the art of suspending disbelief.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.

Robert Selander, the former CEO of MasterCard, had a thing for “presence.”

When asked what he looked for in those he hired, he said, “Leadership, results, and presence.”

About presence he said, “At varying levels of the company you deal with different stakeholders.  Having somebody spend time with a member of Congress is very different than having somebody go downstairs and see that they were appropriately replacing a torn carpet.

As I’ve gone through my career, I’ve been challenged to deal with different stakeholders.  Internally when I was younger and more junior, I probably did pretty well with peers.  But how do you credibly communicate with more senior people, who are not as concerned about details, but want a bigger picture?

So it’s a combination of how you convey things and what you convey to various stakeholders.  Presence is learning to deal with different audiences in a way that allows them to get what they need out of interactions and ensures that the well-being of the company is looked after.

I think you can be a good communicator and you still may not have presence.  There may be someone who is very articulate on a subject and they know levels of detail.  When you get with a particular audience it may not be appropriate to go into those levels of detail, or you may create doubt by even going into the subject matter.

Some people are not very good communicators, but boy, when you get them into their subject matter, they know exactly where and how far to go.

Others are brilliant communicators, but because of the connection between their thoughts and the synapses firing and the words coming out, there isn’t enough time and introspection.  Therefore, they brilliantly communicate something that they shouldn’t be talking about.

Presence is knowing what to communicate, and how.”

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

This from Body Odd:

Before now, those with performance jitters have had to contend with the nausea and the nerves on their own, or take beta blockers to battle the symptoms.  New research has come up with another way to fight stage fright:  biofeedback.

“Our research looks at both the psychological and physiological effect of stage fright,”  says Dr. Myron Thurber, a counselor, physical therapist and biofeedback expert from Spokane, Wash.  “It raises our conscious awareness of our heart rhythms by allowing us to see them on a screen.”

In the study, anxiety-ridden musicians were trained in the use of a small biofeedback machine to “train” their body’s emotional response to stress.  After being hooked to the device with an ear clip or finger monitor, the musicians could see their heart’s responses to both anxiety or stress (typified by a jerky, edgy pattern) as well as feelings of joy or appreciation (a smooth, coherent pattern).  After four sessions, the subjects were able to shift their emotional response – holding onto the feelings of joy even while performing – successfully keeping the stage fright out of the limelight.

“After we trained them, people reported on average about a 70 percent improvement in playing ability as well as the same decrease in their sense of stress or performance anxiety,” says Thurber.

In other words, no more flubbed notes, flushed faces or tossed cookies in the recital hall restroom.

Even better, Thurber says the biofeedback machine is both versatile – it can be used for other types of anxiety such as test taking or public speaking – and unobtrusive (about the size of an iPod).

“Some people would practice using it in the recital hall before a performance,” he says.  “People are used to seeing little handheld devices so we hardly notice them any more.”

Have you ever gotten nervous before performing or speaking in public?  What happened?

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.