Speaking for Possibility, Not Probabilty | John Maxwell EP 576

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11When I speak, for example, I sit on a stool like I am right now with you. And I sit down and I look at the audience and I say, my name is John and I'm your friend. On the count of three, give me your name. One, two, three. Good to meet you. Now, what am I doing? I'm visually saying to the whole audience, I want to have a conversation with you. This is not a professional speech. I'm not a professional speaker. I'm just John and your friend. And I'm just like, could we just talk? Could we just talk? What that does is that closes the gap. Because what happens with success, Lewis, is success separates people.

0:47If you're successful, after a while, you're here and they're here. You can't connect being separated. So communicators know, I've got to close that gap. And so the question you've got to ask yourself is, do I want fans or do I want friends? If I want fans, I want to keep the gap. That's how you get a following. You know, I got fans. If I want friends, I got to close that gap because I'm already successful. They're already looking at me saying, my gosh, look what he's done, what he's accomplished. I could never get there. I could never get there. And the worst thing that can happen to a communicator is to communicate and have people say, it's not achievable for me.

1:23It's a terrible thing to speak above the people and have the people feel like you're an amazing speaker. But I could never be there. I could never do that. I was walking around the stage and just talking to the people and teaching. And the stage had stairs on both sides. Not far side, but kind of in the middle. All of a sudden, I decided to go down the stairs. And I went down about three or four steps. And then I just sat down on the floor of the stage. It was magic. I already had the people. But when I sat down on that stage, their leaning in just increased. and all of a sudden I said, look what I just did visually.

2:04This is what you do at a friend's house. You sit down on the footstool, you sit on the floor. I just deepen friendship with these people as I talk visually. I'll say, make a statement and then sometimes I just maybe walk away from the audience and go back and sit down in my chair and the people are going, oh my gosh. I talk about the power of the pause. It's huge. And when I coach people in speaking, I tell them, I say, you speak too fast. Oh my gosh, people can't keep up. They're trying to catch up, but they can't keep up with you. So I tell speakers all the time, you have to pause more. You have to stop because there's nothing like silence to underline the last statement.

2:42You make a powerful statement. Don't keep talking. Good Lord. Let them ponder that statement for a moment. Give them five seconds. Let them in their mind underline that statement. The pause is so powerful in connecting with people, and it allows you to pivot. For a speaker, it's hard to get them to pause. And I kept asking myself, why don't they pause more? Why don't they break their rhythm? You know, some people, they'll just kind of talk you into a kind of a seance after a while. They don't move. I have another law in the book called the law of change-up. The statement there is boredom is the death of communication.

3:18I mean, how many times have you just got bored? The pause allows people to stop and think. It allows them to hear the whisper. Because if you're giving great content, that content has to be applied to that person. And the whisper is when the greater cause than my voice just speaks to a person. They say, oh my gosh, he said that for me. But if I don't pause, I don't get that whisper. The reason speakers don't pause. When you're speaking and you stop, you give up control. and let the audience have it. And speakers don't want to give up control. And so that's why they keep talking and this, and then you do this and this, and I got control.

3:59I've got, I'm leading, I'm going to take up here and then I'm going to take up there. The moment you pause, you basically say, you know what, I'm going to stop. You think about that for a moment. So if you're insecure, it's hard to give up control. What happens when people want control, they talk faster and they talk louder. They just speed up. You got it. This and then this and then this. And the poor person out there. They're dying. They're saying, enough. Please, please, please, give me a moment. My brain needs to absorb what you're already teaching me. Can you remember and share the greatest statement or story that you shared that had the most powerful effect?

4:38What I can do is I can point to places where when I spoke, I felt it had an Yes. Incredible impact. You've got to go back to the 1990s now, when Mikhail Gorbachev lost power and Boris Yeltsin basically stopped the tanks. And all of a sudden, the Soviet Union was not going to be the Soviet Union anymore, parastriking. I was invited by the government to come to Moscow and to speak in the palace there to 5 ,000 communist leaders about leadership and what was about to change in the country. You know, then we'd sit on the ledge of our hotel, on the inside ledge of our hotel room, look at the Kremlin and see that Soviet Union flag.

5:23And I'd point to it and I'd tell my children, you know, that flag's coming down. It was a privilege. It was, I spoke for the opening session for the United Nations. They asked me to speak for two hours on leadership to all the ambassadors, which that was a challenge because you've got kingdoms, you've got socialism, you've got dictatorships, you've got democracies. So you talk about leadership and the king says leadership's easy. I just, you know, I decree. The dictator says, you know, we just kill them if they don't do it. What am I going to speak on? In fact, I worked hard on that. What can I do that will connect with every ambassador?

5:58And so I spoke there on three questions that followers ask about their leaders. And I told them, I said, regardless of what kind of government you have, your people are asking these three questions about you. And the three questions are, do you care for me? Can you help me? And can I trust you? Who wants to be part of something that the person doesn't care for them? Are the people better off because you're leading them than they were before you led them? I mean, that's the acid test of a leader that the people do better.

6:41Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple podcast right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:31Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.