Dan Erwin

How Silence Can Work in Your Favor

Silence works exceptionally well in many interpersonal situations. That’s especially true, for example, in a problem solving or conflict-oriented situation. In such contexts, strategic silence is often one of your best approaches to resolution. It’s an interpersonal behavior used when talk is expected. Someone has a pressing reason to talk, but does not talk and does not explain their silence.

So, when a person violates expectations by silence, the other’s attention is riveted on the silence. It violates expectations and typically leaves the other with “silence nerves.” A tension based on the innate need for social connections and relationships among humans. A tension often so strong that it defines the person—the initiator of the silence.

For example, I was recently involved in a highly frustrating situation with my website provider. Since my blogging and regular interactions were either via email or Typepad, I had decided that my website served no significant purpose and there was no reason to continue the monthly financial payment. Since my email worked out of the website, I contacted my provider and asked to keep the email. That was not possible, but I could purchase a simple stand-alone email site for just a few bucks a month. I also agreed to purchase a transfer process from a provider. But before I had worked thru the password issues for Outlook to transfer those archives and data, the hosting firm closed down my website. The provider sent me to the stand-alone email site, but I needed passwords from my old site to transfer all the data from that site. The agent worked with me for easily half an hour to transfer the material, but we failed. I couldn’t get the new site up and running and the agent couldn’t go online. Frustrated, he asked whether there wasn’t a more experienced person to do the work for me, an obvious snub. I had followed his instructions at least three times, but none of my passwords worked, resulting in a great deal of frustration for him. Clearly, he saw me as inept. I asked whether he could pass me up to his supervisor and his first response was negative. After ten minutes of more screwing around during which I said nothing, I asked again and this time I was passed on to a supervisor. In effect I rejected his definition of me—and he finally accepted my decision.  

The supervisor and I walked through the new email process twice, like the former agent. It failed both times. Then he suggested it might be a cache problem, so I followed his cache deleting instructions. That resolution brought me to the “create a new email” site. But we needed an accurate password to create a new email site and transfer all my materials. I had worked with the hosting firm for more than ten years so I had a number of passwords, but none of them worked, making transfer impossible. I owned the password problem, but here’s where the issue got messy. Because of the firm’s privacy issues, my contact couldn’t retrieve the working password. I was silent while he searched. He slowly went up the ladder, finally telling me that I’d have to handle the issue by paper and that it would probably take a week or two to get the password. I clarified quietly and slowly, “you’re telling me that I won’t be able to use an email for a week?” He didn’t respond. I remained silent. “Let me try something else” he finally said. That failed. I remained silent. So, he said, he might have another option. I remained silent. That failed. I remained silent. Finally, he said he didn’t think there were any other options except the paper route. I remained silent. Then he commented, “you’re not saying anything.” I very slowly and quietly remarked, “I don’t think you need to hear my anger” –and said nothing else. He was silent for a long time, as was I. My silence gave him no clues of how to work with me, so he was obviously playing around with the potential meanings of my silence. My past experience suggested that my silence was controlling the situation and the agent—exactly what I wanted. If I had talked, there was a high probability that I would have lost control of the situation. He would have responded to whatever I said, and taken back control.

Finally, he said that there was a “privacy team up the line, maybe they can help.” Again, I was silent. He said that he’d get back in a couple minutes. I remained silent. About three minutes later, he came back with both password and resolution of the problem. I responded quietly and with simplicity, “thank you.” The first agent was clearly both inept and pissed at me, a relation that brought practically nothing from me except silence, forcing the handover. The second agent revealed no serious frustration like the first. But my silence kept him from gaining control of the situation. “Silence,” however, drove his final search for me and ultimately resolved the problem.

Note well: Silence drives the resolution. Silence is tangible, the hard, strong presence that displays itself openly—so that we can’t escape its presence. The resolution is forced by the silence, not by me and not by the agent. If you can make that drastic mental shift, then tools and competencies assume a level of capacity that offers power that human persona cannot match. Our task as professionals, then, is to set these competencies free to operate in contexts of need.

On some occasions, however, silence does not violate expectations. It may be role silence, that of a subordinate to a superior--a sign of respect. Superiors may be silent toward others as a mark of their status. A senior person may not return a phone call or check in to update a subordinate. Though that kind of silence takes on meaning, it’s not strategic because it follows custom. In such customary settings the onus is inevitably on the subordinate to call the superior back.

It’s important to understand that strategic silence does not stand for, signify or symbolize the person. Instead, the behaviors actually create the person originating the silence. Silence controls the other. So, silence impacts us—and gradually creates us—our persona. It’s not just that the behaviors are different, but that the competency takes on a persona itself. Our task, then is to understand that persona in the contexts where it operates.

Processing strategic silence
Although silence is all around us, it becomes “strategic” only when talk is expected. Someone has a pressing reason to talk, but does not talk and does not explain their silence.

Strategic interpersonal silence is marked by a definite process, often involving a descriptive contextual comment, followed by a brilliant, daring, open question, then silence, then response from the “other,” then still another silence and then a more significant response, usually involving more significant clarity, a slight change of mind, and even material the person did not intend to share. It’s quite probable that the supervisor in the above case did not intend to go to the privacy team and resolve my issue. If I’d given him control, he’d quite happily have resolved the issue with paper and a week-long response. So, two silences or more in the rhetorical process are exceptionally useful. They tend to force a more thorough response. .

Why Is It So Hard to Learn?

There are at least ten or so reasons that tend to make learning difficult for most of us.

Less than 10% of professionals are agile enough learners to quickly process an experience and apply their lessons to new situations. That's a spooky statistic. In today's economy where innovation, skill development  and learning are the only means to circumvent  personal obsolescence, why is the number of agile learners so small? In other words, why is it so hard to learn? Max Bazerman of Harvard  suggests three basic obstacles to learning. In this brief summary I add eight more insights gleaned from both research and face-to-face experience with hundreds of clients. 

The need for balance
If you’ve achieved some level of professional success, the idea that your skills could be lacking won’t compute. In fact, as Bazerman reminds us, balance theory emphasizes that we want consistency when we organize our thoughts and think about our expertise. To maintain our cognitive balance—our need to believe we’re consistent--we are nearly certain to avoid hard or painful truths.

If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
Generally, most of us reach a level of competency between four and six years into our vocation—then we slow down and eventually stop learning. Partly, that’s because we’ve been praised in the past for our work prowess. According to reinforcement theory, we tend to continue behaviors (skills) that brought positive rewards such as raises and promotions. If your professionalism has rewarded you, you’ll tend to resist information suggesting that your judgment and your toolbox could be systematically improved. 

Mistakes were made, but not by me
You’ve probably relied on your way of doing things for years. When you receive negative feedback about your performance, that will mean that you’ve made some costly mistakes in the past—and that will be unsettling. Interpersonal studies suggest that getting negative feedback causes us to avoid the person who gave it, filter information to him in the future, and constrict our  thinking. It’s no surprise that most of us will try to discredit the truth about our deficiencies, and become impervious to self-correction.

Missing the big picture
When learning new competencies, some people are so wrapped up in the detail and concrete specifics of a new skill that they miss the big development picture. Our education, whether business, law, architecture or engineering is highly specialized—making us all "Incrementalists." As a result, we fail to fully integrate the new skill into our toolkit, thinking that learning is merely an item-by-item matter. Without integration, our learning results will be nothing more than mediocre, barely moving the needle.

Why Do Chameleons Get Ahead?

The chameleon's success is built on their ability to self-monitor for the sake of impression management. It’s not that they’re manipulative, but that they’re superb at assessing situations and exceptionally astute at adapting to organizational needs.

Most employees make getting ahead a very high objective. Promotions can drastically change the lives of both those who stay in a company and those who move to another company. Promotions do more than provide different job duties and better rewards. They can also change where you live and who you get to interact with. In today’s high-pressured workplace, gaining new skills and working with different people can help keep you on the learning curve—and provide for job security.

Recently, studies have assessed the power of personality traits to impact promotion and rewards. The studies have ignored the actual performance of individuals and focused, for example, on the Big Five personality traits: conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism. Systematic studies have found that personality can predict job performance fairly well—but only under certain conditions. In fact, you may have lots of job relevant talent and personality traits, like conscientiousness and extraversion, but nevertheless fail to gain power or get promoted. . .

10 Key Behaviors for Learning in Organizations

Learning behaviors are all tied together by just one thread: learning with other people.

Gaining new competencies through “deep learning” is not the same thing as the way you learned in school. Nor is it the same result that you gain from doing a lot of research on a problem and developing an understanding of the problem. Furthermore, there is no real correlation between understanding a problem and being able to resolve it. In contrast, deep learning lasts and is a way of being, a mindset and an orientation. It’s absolutely necessary to put deep learning front and center because the internet has increased close-mindedness and made profound, deep learning very difficult and sometimes impossible. In Chris Argyris’ well known HBR article, “Teaching smart people how to learn,” the author points out that success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning (even more today than when he wrote this), but most people don’t know how to learn.”

What starts you on the way to learn a new competency is the experience of “constructive disorientation.” The strong sense that something’s wrong, not working, could work better—or just very frustrating. And you believe there must be a way to resolve that issue. That “something wrong” has your brain ruminating, focused on the issue and working hard. In short, frustration is the spark for learning, critical reflection it’s engine, and relationships are the fuel.

Of these three issues, the one that’s often ignored is the role of other people in making learning happen. There is a terrific amount of theorizing and research about learning with other people. Jon Wergin of the University of Nebraska has focused on all the major learning issues in his fascinating new book, Deep Learning in a disorienting world. Since this is the kind of book most business people, except for the HR folk, won’t pick up, here are the 10 key behaviors—with my brief notes added...

Should We Regulate Business Coaching?

Can psychological therapy provide the competencies executive coaching actually requires?

It’s not the first time that a psychiatrist has written about credentialing business coaching. Over the past twenty years there have been at least two articles in the Harvard Business Review by other psychiatrists pointing to the need for credentialing in psychology or psychiatry for the business coach. My hackles inevitably go up reading these articles. The current article, which appeared in Psyche Ideas, is a critique of business coaching by a Stanford psychiatrist, Dr. Elias Aboujaoude. His conclusion is that coaching must be “defined and regulated so that mental health interventions can be offered by the experts trained to deliver them.” What adds fuel to the issue is the loosey-goosey goal of the Coaching Federation “to inspire the client to maximize potential.”

The conclusion that managers need a mental health intervention is a serious error—and an obvious power grab. Having worked extensively--one-on-one--with senior managers and executives for nearly 35 years, I’ve found that mental health has almost never been the issue. The psychiatrist and Coaching Federation not only misunderstand the needs of most executives, but they lack any awareness of the personal drives and psychological health of all but a very few managers.

My experience and education
Though neither a psychiatrist nor a registered psychologist, I hold a PhD in communications and modern rhetoric and an MDiv, along with the equivalent in post-doc course hours of a master’s in psychological foundations, including highly relevant subjects such as tests and measures, practice theory, abnormal, clinical, adult learning and informal supervision by a psychological mentor. In addition, my background includes extensive counseling as senior pastor for an eleven-year period in two university related churches, and eleven more years teaching and coaching preaching and communications for both Protestant and Catholic seminary students. Uniquely, I also coached maximum-security prisoners at Oak Park Heights, Minnesota.  An additional 35 years were spent as executive coach of more than 500 senior managers and executives from more than a dozen industries in Fortune 100 and 500 corporations across the country, as well as in Latin America and Europe. Among my clients (with typically a year or more of personal coaching) were MBA grads of Harvard, Chicago, Northwestern, Tuck-Dartmouth, Wharton, and yes, Stanford—as well as others from major public universities.  That also included major experiences coaching clients from the fields of law, medicine and architecture as well as Continental and Brit Europeans, Asians, Middle Easterners, Israelis—and members of the LGBT community. Most importantly, my background in rhetorical criticism, an extensive competency providing exceptional tools for both diagnosis and development of various forms and contexts of personality and relationships, brings profound insight to executive coaching. For example, with rhet crit you become a better “noticer” and can observe and then coach in ways simply not available to psychology—feeling the end of a person’s consonants and getting at meanings and subtexts reverberating in emotions. That competency lies outside the awareness of psychologists and those from other disciplines. The fact that major firms recruited me on a recurring basis over the years, points to their belief in the validity of my various approaches and insights. My point? The proliferation of differing tools in the social sciences and varied approaches for business coaching, the size--and what one executive called the “weird diversity” of my client base--meant that client need determined the necessary tools, a need that was never purely or even largely psychological.

What’s my beef?
Begin here: We now know that in any kind of problem solving the way you define a problem determines the way you resolve the problem. But still more important—and rarely mentioned—is that the tools you bring to the problem determine the way you define the problem. Until physician’s insurance rates skyrocketed as the cost for malpractice, it used to be said that if you take a medical problem to a surgeon, he’s going to recommend “cutting.” That’s why today’s surgeons need a clear rationale for Insurance to be willing to pay. Similarly, if you take an executive’s needs to a psychologist or psychiatrist, you can be damned certain they’re going to recommend a psychological resolution for the issue. And though psychologists regularly reject the notion of “medical model,” they are controlled unconsciously by its power. That’s true whether or not there are better and more efficient non-psychological ways to resolve the issue.

Dr. Aboujaoude is an example of this problem, writing that the common topics for leadership coaches are the “bread and butter of many a therapy session.” That’s simply not true. Obviously, the writer has little experience in business. If, for example, you take DSM-5, the standard set of diagnostic criteria for the American Psychiatric Association, nothing, absolutely nothing in all those psychiatric categories fits typical business requests for help, nor are executive needs satisfied by “bread and butter” therapy. In the psychiatrist’s attempt to create a semantic world bounded on all sides by psychology, he got caught up in his psychological shorts.

Common development issues
The common developmental topics for executive coaches are determined not only by the basic performance needs requested by a client—even when off-base and wrong, but also by the organizational strategy and the cultural emphases of a given time period. For example, the 1980s were strongly oriented to basic management vs. leadership competencies, team skills and, I realized early on, the often, profound needs of significantly introverted IT people with a deficit of interpersonal competencies. The 1990s were oriented to working with flattening hierarchies, more interactional conversation, ordinary exec needs (like time-management or small-talk) and internal client-based, cross-cultural teamwork. The early 2000s, to more cross-disciplinary communication, complex teamwork, more technology management, decision process, business empathy, and—as the research and my experience reveal--ever more profound interpersonal deficits. 

Why I Still Write Blogs

Periodically, I get asked why, at age 86, I’m still writing blogs. Usually the person asking is in their sixties or seventies. It’s a question that just keeps coming up again and again in spite of the fact that 62% of my blog viewers are under age 34, and 55% are using mobile devices—all of which says a lot and is very satisfying for me. But the older age of my questioners makes my answer easy. I just say something along the line of wanting to keep my gray matter working, lest it slow down. Older adults understand that response and seem to be happy with it. There’s truth in that answer. But actually, it’s a brushoff.

To understand why I still write, you’ll first need to understand my life as a child and adolescent. I was the elder of two sons, three years apart, in a profoundly dysfunctional family. My mother was a flaming narcissist and, as my brother said over her grave, “a mean lady.” My father had divorced her two years into my life—a rare act in the 1930s--and then remarried her when he realized my younger brother was on the way. I cannot remember a single week in my entire life before leaving for college when there were not emotional fights and tears. My father actually attempted suicide once. When angry, he broke plates and cups on the floor, then went off hunting with his dogs and a Black buddy, in season and out. Of course, there were significant consequences of all that to my life. To protect myself, I learned to become deceptive, a tool which I have mostly unlearned. My language skills were always the best tools for self-protection. Whenever possible, I retreated to books—books of all kinds—in my search for new language and new ideas. My brother lacked my language competencies. He wasn’t even a good liar—the primary tool for avoiding our mother. Instead, he was the family scapegoat. The two of us had little relationship. Always in trouble, he was sent off to three private schools in his junior high and high school years. Two, out-of-state, before my dad finally shipped him off to the army at age eighteen. The differences between my brother and myself were also instructive. It was one more driver of my language and relational learning. With my background in psychology, I now understand that he was an attachment avoidant and I was a low-level anxious avoidant—a dysfunction that, calculatingly, I worked on changing throughout the first 10 years of my adult life.

What’s obvious, and also profoundly frustrating, is that my mother was my teacher--and an exceptionally capable tutor. Attendance in her school was compulsory and I spent 24 hours a day figuring out how to win the top grades. My best friend recently described that learning as highly reflective. Continually ruminating, I spent all those years attempting to outsmart her. It was language, I kept confirming. It was always the best tool. I worked hard at becoming linguistically effective, eventually escaping, marrying a wonderful woman and moving to another world. It turns out that having someone believe in my failure enabled my success. My friend, also said, laughing, that I would have been a superb Courtier in the Court of Elizabeth the First. I’d be able to manage all the politics and come away rich. My brother, in significant contrast, decided that the best way to manage our mother was to escape. And he spent his years at home attempting to escape her clutches—usually failing. Elizabeth’s henchmen would have tracked him down and murdered him. Essentially that’s what happened. It just took my mother 70 years...

Turning Points and Milestones of Growth-Fostering Relationships

Every person who intends to exert leadership in his personal life, in business or any other vocation—and even in the family--will intentionally focus on personal growth. Research has shown us that effective business leadership growth inevitably requires mentors. Though true, that notion is plainly inadequate. The fact is that all living and all development takes place only with relationships. To put it still more directly, we experience growth because of our connections to other people. I can go through my years since grade school and well into my sixties, and still point to people that changed my life, impacts that would have to be considered as turning points and often milestones. Change that would never have happened without those connections.

 

The underpinnings of growth are inevitably acts of creativity built on relationships. Virginia Woolf puts it this way: Masterpieces (turning points and milestones) are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of thinking in common, of thinking by a body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.  

I still have a lot of memory about my first real growth experience, a phenomenally unique milestone while only in the 7^th grade. I’ll explain later why the experience was so important, why I remember so many details, and what it did for me. To begin, the experience was initiated by a civics teacher, Mr. Fickes, a teacher whom I thought was pretty dumb. I opened my mouth too often and after one episode he chewed me out, telling me I’d be in the “insane asylum by the time I finished high school.” Shortly after that experience, the chair of the social science department, Dr. Arthur, a very impressive intellect, and a delightful woman with sparkling eyes and a Michigan PhD, took seven top students out of the class and created a seminar group on civics for us. Fickes did not return the following year. 

Kevin Costner's "Yellowstone": "Cruel and Uncaring"

Toward the end of episode eight in the third season of Yellowstone, John Dutton (Kevin Costner) says this to his son, Kayce: “In case you haven’t noticed, it (the world) is cruel and uncaring.” And he adds, “you have to be meaner than evil--and still love your family and still enjoy a sunrise.” I could feel my skin crawling, tingling after his words. I understood my rejection immediately, but it took several days to figure out why my emotions were so strong. And why Dutton’s commitment bothered me so much.

It’s not that the words were out of sync with the storyline of the episode or the series. The entire series has been filled with gripping conflicts between good and evil, between protection of the family and property and the attempts to steal the property from the family. Often dripping with brutality. The stories in all three seasons have shown a high degree of consistency and suspense, interlaced with underlying questions about human reality. (Does this actually happen in our world today?) That’s part of the reason the show has kept my interest at very high levels. Obviously, I’m not the only committed viewer. That final episode set a ratings-record with 5.2 million viewers, claiming cable’s #1 spot, in live, same day. If you include the simulcast and encores, the closer drew 7.5M viewers on premiere night.  And it also set up the viewer for season four, next year.

More than a good show?
What bugged me so much about that narrative is that it’s reflective of the distrust of the world and the people in it, the background, for example, for our current conspiracy spasm. Both consciously and unconsciously, my person and my vocations have often circled around our trust and distrust of the community and the world—and how profoundly repetitious stories with similar distrusting values impact our relationships, vocations and communities. I don’t think of Dutton’s two sentences as merely a means for sharing information. It’s an arousing story in which we viewers have been conditioned to participate. And it appeals to our feelings rather than to our thinking. That’s what makes it so powerful and seductive, creating my intense emotional response.  

Dig into any conspiracy theory and you’ll find believers with shattered views of trust in the world, what Richard Hofstadter famously called "an arena for angry minds."

How to Read What's Not Being Said or Written

In today’s complex world, the more analytical and rhetorical tools you have, the better off. That thinking was confirmed uniquely a couple years ago when I put up a a blog on "reading subtexts.. Surprised by the comments and “thank yous,” I’ve decided to go a bit further into what my discipline of rhetoric calls “close reading.” By “close reading,” I’m referring to both print and spoken messages and to more than just the literal words. As in, “If I’m reading the vice-president correctly, he’ll reject that proposal out of hand.”  

So, when I talk about subtexts, I’m referring to covert meanings, hidden commitments, undiscussables,” or what's not said.  The meanings are not immediately clear, but over time and with context, the listener can understand what’s meant.

For example, a student goes to turn in his paper. After looking through two pages, his teacher asks, “Are you sure you want to turn this in?” The literal text is a question that asks for a yes or no. The meaning of the text is suggested by the actual words, message and action discussed. But the student understands her subtext--that his paper may have some typos, misspelling or syntax problems. By her question, she gives the student the latitude to make his own decision about the paper—or receive a lower grade.

A different tool, beyond that notion of subtext, is what does the meaning of a text do to a person’s thoughts, motives, actions or predispositions? This is the kind of analysis that is usually much more complex. It requires a richer, fuller understanding of the context—the teacher’s past comments about his writing ability.

In this larger context, the student remembers many positive comments his teacher has made about his writing. So her question means that there’s nothing wrong with the paper as such. But given the larger context, he recognizes that she’s reminding him that he’s more capable of original, creative writing. Based on the past, her question asks whether he wants to enhance his writing. So what does he think about redoing the paper, giving further thought, insight and color to his article? In sum, it’s a question about his unusual originality and creativity.

This analytical tool can be even more useful for stories, anecdotes and movies.

I watched a couple of absolutely fascinating movies over the past month. The stories and the acting in both were rich and warm. One about a heterosexual relationship and the other about gay relations. The first, the 2005 “Pride and Prejudice” starred Keira Knightly and Matthew Macfadyen. The second was the BBCs “Man in an Orange Shirt,” with Vanessa Redgrave. Curious, because of their power over me, I watched both of them a couple times...

The Most Underrated Skill in Management??

This past Spring’s issue of the MIT Sloan Review (2017) had an intriguing article with the above title, minus the question marks. “This sounds interesting,” I thought. “Wonder what they’ll say?” At the conclusion of the third paragraph the authors wrote, “We’ve come to believe that problem formulation is the single most underrated skill in all of management practice.”

Good shot guys, but not quite. After thoughtfully re-reading the entire ten-page article, I concluded, that the article was exceptionally insightful from a process standpoint. But as far as being the “most underrated” skill, it’s nonsense. Uniquely, it offers me the opportunity to challenge common business priorities that need serious rethinking. But, reflecting for just a few moments more, I was reminded of a brilliant and thought-provoking set of articles edited by the eminent psychologist, Robert Sternberg, entitled “Why smart people can be so stupid.”

The authors of “Smart people. . .” come up with a number of reasons for their conclusion. In spite of the MIT quoted research, one of the most apropos reasons for stupidity is what can be termed the mindless assimilation of social (business) biases. With their impeccable MIT Harvard reputation, these patently smart people demonstrate a bias that is clearly that of the academy. If you read widely and analytically in business, it’s obvious that thinking about people competencies is controlled by organizational behaviorists with a solely psychological background. They look solely at thinking, but not at conversing. It explains too clearly what’s going on in the MIT article. 

It’s an innocent limitation, but limiting conclusions to a single discipline, like psychology or organizational behavior, inevitably limits formulation and potentially creative solutions. Extensive research reveals that...

Can Charisma Be Learned?

There are actually two questions here: can charisma be learned, and will it positively impact business outcomes? Since I’ve worked over the years with clients to develop their charisma, I find the questions, well…amusing. Because the answers to both questions from those in the disciplines of rhetoric and communication is yes. Of course. We’ve known that for years. In fact, for centuries.

But what’s especially interesting about recent research (2011) by the psych and economics faculty at the University of Lausanne is that they look at the question from the perspective of economics in the European context, confirming the power of the discipline of charisma.

But there’s a lot more pragmatic stuff to be added to this research as well as most blogs and studies. The discipline of charisma is inevitably viewed from a public address format: a speaker addressing a group. But for career people, there are far more opportunities to practice and learn in a one-on-one or small group. Furthermore, it’s best to start adding charisma from your tool-kit early on, rather than waiting until you get a managerial promotion. It’s also far less intimidating to learn in a one-on-one or small group, than to wait until you’re a manager and have large group responsibilities.

Given my assumption, let’s ignore the research laundry list of tactics, and the unique opportunities provided by public address settings. Besides, if you gain the competencies in small groups, you can automatically transfer them to the public address context. So, skip those long lists of skills to gain the competency, and focus on just two very significant tactics that will set you on the path to charisma. Furthermore, with just a bit of reflection, these two skills for one-on-ones and small groups will readily open up other strategies..