Master Communication Expert: Why people stop listening when you speak - Graham Davies

0:00Presentation is a sport with high stress, high intensity, highly adrenalized activity. that you only get really good at if you're given techniques by an expert coach and you practice those techniques under pressure long before the final. There are a lot of things that can help us become better presenters. But if we only should focus on one thing, what would that be? I've worked with presidents. I've worked with prime ministers. I've worked with C-suite executives. Confidence is a skill in itself. What makes a good presentation? Graham Davies is a world-renowned presentation and speaking coach, known for helping senior leaders, politicians, and executives communicate with impact under pressure.

0:46Among his client list are former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, MP Michael Gove, and executives at Vodafone, Sky News, and Adobe. Graham is a trained criminal barrister and was the president of the Cambridge Union and a Cambridge University Law graduate. He regularly appears on TV as a communications expert for discussion and debate analysis, particularly for political speeches. What are the most common mistakes that people do in public speaking? Death by bullet point. Instead of actually communicating on a human being to human being basis, they read out a sequence of bullet points. The speaker is wasting the audience's most valuable asset, which is, of course, their time.

1:24So are you trying to invoke an emotion? I'm trying to engage three things. Their head, their heart, and their guts. so that they feel inside themselves, yeah, that's made me think, that's made me feel, that's challenged something within me. I definitely want to listen to what he's got to say.

1:45Graham, you are one of the UK's leading communication experts. People like the former Prime Minister, Rishi Shunak, say that you've helped him a great deal in improving his communication skills. In a nutshell, can you describe to me your work? I advise people on what to say and how to say it when they're in situations of extreme pressure. And those situations can range from a speech to 5 ,000 people or a one-to-one television interview or a presentation to 20 people in a boardroom or to 100 people in a sales meeting. All of them involve using the spoken word under pressure, and I give them techniques to make sure they can do it as persuasively as possible.

2:37Over the last years, who else have you worked with? Which other individuals, corporations? Well, rather than going through names or brands, I'll give you some categories. I've, over the last few years, I've worked with presidents, I've worked with prime ministers, I've worked with C-suite executives. But remember, I've also been a criminal barrister as well. So I've also advised murderers, armed robbers, burglars, and several perverts. So I've had the chance to advise a very wide range of people, and I learn from all of them. Interesting. Why is this topic so important to you? So when did you start pursuing this career?

3:24Well, I was born and brought up in a place called the Isle of Man. And I attended a boarding school where the main academic subject was rugby. But nevertheless, I still had the chance to take part in competitive Bible speaking and poetry speaking competitions in something called the Manx Music Festival. And they were high stress, high intensity competitions. and having done that it gave me the edge when I started doing public speaking competitions as a natural development of those two categories and that public speaking experience gave me an edge when I started speaking at university at Cambridge the oldest debating society in the world the Cambridge Union and that 10 % edge I got from my experience from the age of 10 onwards gave me a little bit of an advantage, even over people who'd been to the top public schools like Eaton, Harrow and Winchester.

4:33I've never heard of a public speaking Bible competition. What do you do there? Well, for instance, the Bible speaking competition, you are given an extract from a book of the Bible. It might be Old Testament. It might be New Testament. You have to learn it verbatim, absolutely perfectly. But then you have to get across every paragraph, every sentence, every word, every pause in the most persuasive and compelling way in the eyes of the judges. And of course, in the eyes and ears of the two or 300 people who are actually watching the competition as well. It's a very specialized activity. And it's something that I found very difficult to do.

5:26But I got better and better at it by rehearsing harder and harder and working harder and harder. And it allowed me eventually to move away from the Old Testament to the New Testament to words of my own. Interesting. You've used the word rehearsing. Every time I have a public engagement that I need to speak, I always confront the two options. On one hand, should I rehearse or should I practice? Practice is basically, in a way, skimming through the different topics that I will cover because I don't want to sound overly robotic. And rehearsing is literally practicing as if it were the real thing.

6:07What do you think is best? I have known many speakers, many performers, many executives, many entrepreneurs fail to do well in a speaking situation because of under-rehearsal. I have never known anybody fail as a result of over-rehearsal. My motto is this, prepare tight, then you can hang loose. the only way to make sure that you perform as well as you possibly can on the day is to make sure that you've prepared and rehearsed your material as hard as you possibly can in advance and lots of rehearsal means that you can sound spontaneous little rehearsal or no rehearsal means that people can sound robotic because they're trying to desperately remember the next word.

7:10How should we rehearse? You should rehearse as much as possible in battle conditions, in a room that's like the room that you're going to be performing in, perhaps in front of the sort of chairs and the sort of lighting of the room that you're actually going to be performing in. And also, don't just forgive me for saying so, just think through a few headings and sort of mutter the words to yourself. Perform. If you're performing in front of 500 people on the day, you should rehearse as if you're performing in front of 500 people. The very first time that you perform brilliantly won't necessarily be the very first time that you perform.

7:59So make sure you get all your mistakes out of your system in the rehearsal process, and that is much more likely to get you to perform brilliantly on the day itself. What are those mistakes? What are the most common mistakes that people do in public speaking? Well, these days, in corporate public speaking, there is very much still an addiction to PowerPoint Prozac. And that causes in the audience something called death by bullet point. Instead of preparing words that they are going to say to an audience, a lot of corporate executives prepare a sequence of slides. or even worse than that, they power up their laptop and pluck out of the memory of the laptop slides that they've used before.

8:55And instead of actually communicating on a human being to human being basis, they read out a sequence of bullet points. And so instead of it being genuine communication, it actually turns into a public slide reading contest in which they, the presenter, always finish last. So it shouldn't be the presentation. So what makes a good presentation then? In my opinion, the way to ensure a really good presentation is to make sure that you know exactly where you want to take the audience by the time you have finished speaking. You need to define what I call the finishing position. Your finishing position is what you want the audience to know, think or feel by the time you've shut your mouth for the last time.

9:50Is there an ideal time to present? No. Some presentations, of course, can last 30 seconds. Sometimes on television, you're overall doing a presentation, even though you're being asked two or three questions during the course of two or three minutes. Sometimes a political leader has so much material that they need to speak for 45 minutes or an hour. There's a whole raft of different situations which require different lengths of presentation. However, having said all that, I still believe in the power of this old saying. No sinner is ever saved after the first 20 minutes of a sermon. can you simplify that for me i think i understood it but i want to simplify it for me you have to have i think i think we're getting a shorter attention span day by day than we've ever had before yeah i don't think in five years time you and i will be speaking and saying oh people love to have much longer presentations than they did in 2025 and so you have to accept that you need to get to it straight away and you need to stop talking long before the audience have stopped listening and I feel from my experience that you have to have a very good reason before you think of going beyond the 20-minute barrier.

11:25Interesting. I've read that you have a very now famous five-step approach so anyone can become an expert in presenting. Can you walk me through those five steps? Well, I'll just give you a brief overview. Number one, analyze your audience. Know who they are, know why they are there, and know what they need to know. And from that audience analysis, you can work out their starting possession, what they already know, think, or feel about your subject before you start to speak to them. Number two, work out the finishing position to which you would like to take them. Number three, work out the message, which is the engine that drives them towards that destination.

12:18Number four, calculate the evidence you need in order to support that message. And number five, have a striking beginning and a striking finish that will always remain in their memories long after you have left the building. So what makes a striking beginning and a striking finish? Well, I'll tell you what doesn't make a striking beginning to start off with. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. and it's an enormous pleasure to be here. It's the very first time I've been to High Street Kensington and I'm absolutely stunned by the sheer variety of restaurants that we have here. And I'm so grateful to the organisers for putting on the cappuccino and the water here.

13:07And it's such a lovely venue. And I really intend to make the most of the sound of my own voice for the next two and a half. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I believe that those sort of false pleasantries are very 20th century ways of starting a presentation because the speaker is wasting the audience's most valuable asset, which is, of course, their time. So I believe that presentations should start with a spike. A spike is something that's sharp enough to turn the audience on, but not so sharp that it turns the audience off. Can you give me an example of a good start and a good finish? Let me give you this example.

13:53I created this for the chief fundraiser of a particular charity who was speaking to an audience of corporate donors who had given money to this charity before, but he felt they needed a little bit of reminding at the very start of his speech about the good that this charity was doing. So this was the opening spike I prepared. Ladies and gentlemen, 80 % of the world's resources are used by 20 % of the world's population. In fact, there is plenty to go around. The problem is unfair distribution. And that is where we at Oxfam are making a huge difference every single day. Yeah, that was compelling.

14:49I hope so. well let me give you something that's possibly even more striking but can i ask you one question what are you trying to do there so are you trying to invoke an emotion i'm trying to engage three things their head their heart and also something else their their guts so that they feel inside themselves yeah that's that's made me think that's made me feel that's That's challenged something within me. Now, I might not agree with the sentiment that Graham's just expressed. I might not necessarily agree with his statistic, but I definitely want to listen to what he's got to say. What's the other example you were going to share?

15:36I won't even tell you at the moment about who it was for. You'll be able to work it out. And I can't tell you the organisation he was working for either. But again, your viewers will be able to work it out. I was lying face down in a muddy, bloody pool of water. I raised my head slowly so that I could see what was going on. And then I heard a loud crack. And then on the right hand side of my head, I felt the worst pain I had ever experienced in my life. My right ear had just been shot off by a Taliban sniper. And I then had to work out how I was going to survive. Wow. You started with that. Yes.

16:30And so I started deliberately, or the gentleman I wrote it for, or that we cooperated with. I don't sort of impose a script on clients. We work together on scripting. I worked out that he wasn't going to say, Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, I've worked for so-and-so and I've been in such and such a regiment in the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just straight in. And not even the start of the story, just like I believe the best thriller films start about 20 minutes in or 10 minutes in to an action scene these days rather than the slow build up. I wanted them to feel as if the screen had turned on and they were there in this pool of water with this guy from the special forces.

17:18And what's a good example of a great, strong finish? There is a Olympic oarsman called James Cracknell, who's won two Olympic gold medals. and he also is an incredible guy because he came back from spending months in a coma having been knocked over by a lorry while he was doing a long distance charity bike ride in the United States. But he's also a campaigner against obesity and in many ways he'd be an excellent guest for your podcast because he gives people simple techniques to avoid obesity as they get older and he did a speech to an audience of parliamentarians about the strategies and tactics you could use and the main thrust of his speech had been that exercise on its own is not something that will conquer obesity.

18:26You have to have a decent diet as well. And his closing line was this. Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to remember this above all else. You will never, ever be able to run faster than a knife and fork.

18:46And how much talking should you do per slide? So should you have a lot of slides and talk very little in each of them or have few slides and talk loads? Well, forgive me for saying this. Rather than thinking about how much talking you should do per slide, you have to think to yourself, do I need slides at all? Now, the answer might be yes, but I firmly believe this. You should first of all analyse your audience, decide where you're going to take them, and then using my five-step process, work out the words that you want to say to take them on that journey, then hone it and edit it again and then hone it, edit it again, and rehearse it as much as possible.

19:32And then, after you've done all that, then think about what slides you might need to illustrate or to sharpen or to clarify what you've said. And so that inevitably will mean that when you use less slides, you shouldn't think of your slides first. You should think of your slides last during your preparation process. At school many, many years ago, they told me that I should have very little text and loads of images throughout my presentation. I still agree with that. You see, slides, PowerPoint, Prezi, they are great pictorial devices. But when it becomes a sequence of bullet points, what the audience do, and I've seen so many things, people seem to think they should use as smaller font as possible, have as many bullet points as possible, and cram as many onto one slide as possible.

20:32And what it means is that essentially the presenter reads out, is still reading out point number three, when the audience have read point number 10. So there's always a sort of time lag between speaker and audience. And people's attention spans are so short that inevitably you're going to lose them if you do public slide reading like that. And question A is, how do you know when you lost your audience? And then question B is, when you know you've lost them, how can you recover? The best way, of course, of making sure that you don't lose your audience is indeed the preparation process to make sure that you've prepared the most compelling material you possibly can for that audience.

21:19And that minimizes the chances of losing them on the day itself. secondly you do have to make sure just in the same way as you're my audience today that i'm making as much eye contact with as many people as possible so that i know that they are keeping keeping up with me and i am keeping their attention as much as possible and i've always found that i really do need to make sure that there is a light source available to me even in an audience of a thousand people so I can see that that is happening. Thirdly, I make sure that everything that I'm saying is in short, sharp, short sentences. And so I know that I'm not asking them to follow on a meandering wave, but I'm asking them to follow me like a machine gun, bang, bang, bang, bang.

22:16And I essentially, I don't give them the chance to drift away. Now, I'm not saying that every speech I've ever done has been a rip-roaring success. Sometimes I have bad gigs as well. But essentially, although some audiences may not agree with me, may not have been totally compelled by me, no one ever sleeps when Graham's on. I know they'll never actually just drift away. You've just done something that I think is very interesting. so I've asked you my previous question and then you you broke the eye contact immediately looked at the wall like as if you were looking at a ghost and then you came back yes to my question with so much energy what did you do there eye contact is a very powerful thing but if you overdo eye contact there comes a time when instead of it being compelling and say you are one of 10 people in a room and I'm still just staring at you, instead of being a compelling communicator, you start to think, this is very strange.

23:22Graham is being a little creepy. Does Graham find me attractive? Is Graham going to stalk me all the way home? So you do have to be wary of eye contact and overdoing it. But the other thing for me, I find that when you've challenged me, for instance, this morning, as you did two or three minutes ago, and I had to go beyond my comfort zone, just for a moment and to think about stuff that I've got in, dare I say, my back memory, as opposed to in my front memory at the tip of my tongue. It helps me to break eye contact just like that for a moment because it allows me to go in inside myself, inside my databases.

24:04But then it becomes even more powerful when I re-engage with you again, just like I did just then. Interesting. So in simple terms, when somebody's asking me a question and I don't know the answer immediately, I need to break the eye contact, gather my thoughts, look somewhere else, stay quiet, and then re-engage with the person. Well, let's experiment something. Could you ask me a question about some obscure football match that I won't know the result of from five years ago? Oh gosh, I'm very bad at football match. Or something that you know that I don't know the answer to immediately. Do you know what are the benefits in the brain when it comes to intermediate fasting?

24:46I know from personal experience that when I fast for... That's better. But that, it looks as if I've had a stroke. Yeah. What are other things that we should take into consideration so we can answer the questions in a very effective and informative way. One of the core principles that I give to a client when they're about to do an important television interview is this, the best time to share with an audience of 100 ,000 people who might be watching in their living rooms at home, the best time to share a really brilliant new idea that you've had is not two seconds after you first thought of it really that idea is something that they should have thought about honed had some practice sessions with the colleague to see what the weaknesses and strengths of that idea are and how it stands up to pressure and so i do make sure that although they are genuinely engaging with the question they're probably not going to be pushed into being asked about intermittent fasting when they're there to talk about their new piece of software.

26:08So making sure that they go through some sort of process is a way of making sure that they're very likely to be comfortable, first of all, with the overall concepts of the questioning that they're likely to face. And how should we answer a question that is not intended to test our knowledge, but it's almost a show-off affirmative question. So this happened to me in a few cases when I gave lectures or talks at universities. So I'm giving a lecture or I talk to a bunch of students. By the way, one of them was Cambridge University. Typical, yeah, typical Cambridge. And then a teacher would ask a question, but without the teacher wanting the answer, it's almost like they're in a way lecturing me so the rest of the students would also know that the teacher knows their craft.

27:02I've seen that phenomenon a lot in academic audiences, corporate audiences, but also now in TV interviews. It's one of the habits, I find it an annoying habit, irrespective of one's political views, where a TV interviewer sort of says, essentially, my views on this are X, Y, and Z because of such, such, and such, and such, and such. Do you therefore believe that X is correct or Y is correct or Z is correct? And instead of just asking the question in their preamble, they are doing the big mini speech to try and show what their views are and how important they are. So I'm familiar with that phenomenon.

27:44Funnily enough, I also coach people on how to do interviews and how to ask questions. I actually believe the most powerful way is the way that you do it. Just ask the question. And the background will come out. So, yes, that is infuriating. But the way to think of answering any question, in my opinion, is to answer the thrust of the question straight away in the first two sentences that you come out with. And to resist the urge to say, let's say you ask me, so what is the key aspect of your new software? and if I said well first of all in order to understand that you've got to understand the history of computers which started in 1923 with William Watson of IBM and then he did don't go into the background don't do the history of computers go straight away to the key aspect of your new product if there does need to be some background that's explained later on to give your knowledge, a little bit more bottom, a little bit more gravitas, that will come out.

28:50But essentially in the 21st century, I believe that you should answer the question head on straight away. I'll give you another example. Many founders at the end of a presentation, when they are pitching to raise funds, they get questions that perhaps naturally they don't have the answer to. and I've seen in many cases because aside of myself being an entrepreneur, I also am an angel investor. Sometimes those answers are a bit wishy-washy and you can tell that they don't know the answer but they'd rather say something than not say anything. Yes. What would you advise? Yes, indeed. And I know that phenomenon and I think that also people do detect that wishy-washiness more quickly than they've ever done before because we have access to our phones And we've seen wishy-washy answers in TV interviews or in corporate presentations before.

29:44So we've got quite a fine sense of smell for wishy-washiness. I actually believe it is better to do this and say, Antonio, I don't actually know that number. That is much more the area of expertise of my finance guy, John, who's in the audience. John, can you help us with this? Or, so that's one way of doing it. Or I've got to say, I don't know the specific details of that, but I do undertake to get back to you specifically about it and to each member of the audience. It's actually much more attractive and actually enhances your credibility sometimes to actually say, I don't know, rather than to bluff.

30:29Because I don't think wishy-washiness will ever attract an angel investor. Yeah, the first example just brought me memories back to a consulting project that I did many years ago before I become an entrepreneur. And we just needed to do an assessment for a telecom company, I will not name it. And I remember that the chief technology officer back then, we were asking a few questions and we were engaged by the CEO, right? So in a way, we needed to investigate some things that the CTO was doing. And the CTO didn't have the answer for a very specific question. And he sort of passed the hot potato to his direct line.

31:06And then his direct line looked at us and it looked like soap. Like, I don't know, like, oh God, I'd rather be anywhere else but here. And I almost felt like not asking the question because I felt for him. And also his direct line didn't have the answer. So I don't know. Of course, that does play into something that a theme I've been pushing during the course of our conversation. You need to practice situations like that. You need to have colleagues working out with you. What are the toughest questions that any group of investors might like to ask us? And maybe you should deliberately get one of your colleagues to ask the MD, the CEO, something appalling.

31:50something dreadful that they know the direct line manager is better qualified at answering. And the CEO should get practice in saying, actually, that's not my specific area, but my colleague on my right is the man to deal with it. And he's ready for that. He's ready to fly into the rescue rather than it being a source of horror. I guess there are a lot of things that can help us become better presenters. but if we only should focus on one thing if we were to summarize this into just one one area that we should focus on what would that be the thing that people should focus on more than anything else is to have a process to make sure that they are coping with something that is not a natural thing.

32:44You see, presentation is a deeply unnatural human activity. There is almost an unspoken contract when I'm having a conversation with somebody. I'll say a few words, they'll listen to me. They'll say a few words back and I'll listen to them. And we respond to each other's words. It's like a dance. But when, even if it's just a 20-minute presentation, there's a weird contract which breaks the normal contract, which is this. I will now speak for 20 minutes and you will listen and say nothing, but just listen to me. That is unnatural. And so you've got to have a process to get over that feeling of unnaturalness, both the speaker and the audience.

33:34You can't just rock up and expect to be able to do it without having gone through a process. And if you're a complete beginner, how long does it take one more or less to become good at this? The answer to that question lies in one's attitude to the overall subject. Now, some people think that presentation is a science, that it is something that you can calculate precisely. Well, I don't believe that because it's much more human than that. Some people think it's an art. It's an ability that you're just sort of born with and you can either do it or you can't. I don't agree with that either. I think it's somewhere in between those two extremes.

34:25Presentation is a sport. It's a highly adrenalised activity that you only get really good at if you're given some techniques by an expert coach and you practice those techniques under pressure long before you actually play that sport in Wembley Stadium in the final on the day. When you're coaching someone, how can you determine if they have a confidence issue versus a skills issue? To me, confidence is a skill in itself. You have to make sure that they're absorbing the process of content preparation and rehearsing that content in a way that they can feel in themselves that it's getting good and it's getting better.

35:21Sometimes you use a camera and a recording device to play that back to them. Sometimes you don't. But they have to feel it in themselves. If they can be confident in rehearsal, they're very likely to be confident on the day. I feel like sometimes, even confident people, their confidence can be tackled by fear when they speak in public. Yes. In your experience, why do we fear public speaking? Why is it so stressful? There is a lot to be scared of. Imagine this. You've got 500 investors in front of you. They've all got lots of money. They all want to find somewhere to put it. You've got a 15-minute slot on stage.

36:10This is your one chance. You could either get millions of dollars of investment or you could get nothing. You should feel sick with nerves at the prospect of missing that opportunity. So I don't preach this false gospel of, oh, there's nothing to be nervous about. There is. You do have to have specific professional coping mechanisms to make sure that you turn those nerves into positive excitement. So there's merit to feeling fearful. Well, I would suggest that if that situation that I described to you or you're going in to the board meeting and there are 10 fellow directors and you need to propose shutting down a specific part of the company and you know it's crucial to the future of the company.

37:06But you also know that you're going to be battling against certain people in the board who will fight tooth and nail to make sure that proposal is not accepted. you should be nervous again you should be ready almost for some form of combat and if you're not nervous there's something wrong i think that even nova jokovic and carlos alvarez before a big grand slam tennis final there's a certain amount of nervous anxiety which of course they channel beautifully so that it enhances the tennis strokes they're playing. If they're not nervous, they might as well be asleep and still be at home. And what are good techniques to calm us?

37:56There are, in my opinion, there has to be a sequence that you follow. First of all, you need to have made sure that for a big presentational event, you have prepared the right content and that you've done all the research about the audience you have decided exactly where you want to take that audience and you've created and honed and tested recreated re-honed and retested what you want to say to them and so you should look at that process and be proud of it and think, you know, I don't think I could have created better spoken content than I've got. Step two in the nerve control process is this.

38:47You need to rehearse that content as much as possible and indeed rehearse things going badly as well. Some colleagues interrupting you, somebody asking you a really difficult, unfair question. Or responding with one of those mini pompous speeches where somebody in the audience is trying to show how clever they are. So rehearse every possible negative scenario. And once you've done that, be proud of the rehearsal you've done. So you think, no matter what happens, I am going to get this material across in a really persuasive way. I'm prepared for any form of question as well and I can't wait so that's step number two but on the day itself you still might have that horrible queasy feeling in your stomach that urge to be continuously wanting to go to the toilet there are ways of coping with that as well you look back on those first two steps and think really yeah I'm still nervous which is good in the same way as I would be before going out to play the Wimbledon final.

40:00But I'm proud of the preparation I've done. I'm really up for it. I'm ready to nail this. But still, the queasiness is there in the pit of your tummy. And what you need to do in the last 10 minutes, before you go on stage or before you walk into the boardroom, the only thing that you should be thinking about is the first three sentences of your presentation and in your head keep on saying them again and again and again so that you know no matter what even if a bomb goes off outside the window you will get those first three sentences out and absolutely nail them and if in that last 10 minutes you're focusing just on your first three sentences you won't have any room in your mind you won't have any energy to feel nervous you will just feel focused and how should we recover from a mistake while we are presenting sometimes you're presenting and you make a mistake and you feel like oh gosh everyone noticed that well of course often you're wrong when you think that everyone has noticed it and even if they did notice it even though you will be beating yourself up oh i flubber dubbed that word, I mispronounced it, and I slugged it, you'll remember it for five or ten minutes, and it will get in the way of the performance of your next few sentences.

41:33The audience, however, sort of don't really care. They'll have forgotten it probably half a second after you've done the flub-a-dub, and you always have to train yourself to remember that they've got a very short memory. and essentially you've just got to get over it. And do very experienced and good presenters still feel fear before they present or is this something that with time it just goes away? The most nerve-wracking presenting that I do is being interviewed on television because although I might do it, say, once every 10 days, sometimes more frequently than that. I'm not doing it every day.

42:23So every time I'm on TV, I'm still thinking, oh, it's nine days since I've done this. There could be 10 people watching at home. There could be 100 ,000 people watching at home. There could be more watching at home. So I sort of think, oh, there is something to be nervous about here. And it is live. I could make a mess of something and it wouldn't do my reputation any good at all. So there is always an edge. But I first started doing TV work 20 years ago. And so I've gradually got slightly better at it each time. And so although there's enough of an edge to make sure that I prepare properly for the interview, there is now not so much of an edge that it stops me sleeping the night before.

43:12so you gradually learn over the days over the weeks over the years to use that slightly nervous edge to force you to prepare and rehearse but not so much that it actually causes you to lose sleep but you're still a bit nervous before you go on tv just a little bit just you see if i'm too if i was i mean in some ways as i was walking along high street kensington this morning I was just a little bit nervous thinking well he seems like a decent chap and when I've seen him on his podcast before everybody Daniel and your colleague that I spoke to on the phone initially very pleasant people but still this is a podcast that's watched by a lot of people I really mustn't make a mess of it so there was a little bit of an edge and quite right too because if I was just too laid back and relaxed, I really wouldn't be very good.

44:13Whereas if I'm thinking of myself, I must be embracing this with energy and using my nervous energy to embrace it, I will be good. This is very reassuring to listen to because I believe that most of us, when we engage ourselves in any form of public speaking, we feel some sort of fear or anxiety or we feel nervous. But listening from someone like yourself who's been doing this for over 20 years on TV, on several different podcasts, and you're coaching some of the biggest politicians and corporate professionals in the world, that you still feel some sort of nervousness before you go on TV. It's quite reassuring.

45:03Well, the way I think the N word is a negative word in itself, you should probably try rather than thinking of nerves, try and think of excitement. 500 people is an exciting group of people. Sometimes 10 people is an exciting group of people if it's, say, the board of a huge company. One person is exciting if they've got a TV audience of half a million. And think of it as a positive opportunity to use those nerves to energize you into a brilliant performance. That's the way to look at it.

45:51I'd like to talk about storytelling. I was told that storytelling is very powerful in public speaking. What are your thoughts on this? I believe that storytelling has been overdone in the last 10 or 15 years. It's become a cliche so that there are an awful lot of speakers and a lot of companies who like telling stories a bit too much. And people are getting just a little bit tired of them. You see, a story can only be effective if it has a purpose. It can't just live and breathe on its own because, again, it wastes the audience's most valuable, irreplaceable asset, their time. A story, whether it's been used in a TV ad or a one-to-one presentation or a TV interview perhaps, it has to be short, sharp and compelling.

46:56If it's not those three things, it's not going to be effective as a communication device. What makes a good story aside from those three things? Okay. Ideally, it should be something that you've experienced yourself, rather than you talking about something that's happened to someone else. Secondly, it's got to have a level of uniqueness where people think, oh, I've never heard something like that before. and thirdly it really does have to have a specific point that's driven home by the content of the story those three ingredients are quite hard to find does that mean that we should in a way dramatize our story it sounds like lying in a way but is this something you would recommend Rather than lying, I think the term that a professional speaker might use is embellishment.

47:58Embellishment, okay. Because there might be a few details that you'd bring in that perhaps your audience might think, oh, he's gilding the lily a bit there, he's embellishing it slightly. But they know that you're doing it to make the story just that little bit more compelling. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think it's almost compulsory. And do you think anyone can be a storyteller? Because perhaps some people listening to this may think, well, I don't have good stories. Well, you say, your question was, do you think anybody could be a good storyteller? Well, you'd have to ask them, well, why do you want to tell stories?

48:37What are you trying to achieve from stories? And so I'd throw that back at you. What do you mean by that? I mean, do you mean, can they be a good storyteller when they're trying to do a corporate presentation or whether they're trying to get investment or whether they're trying to get an audience to vote for them in a political election? What sort of contents do you think that stories... Captivating your audience. You really need to make sure that they're short, that they get to the point very quickly. If an audience feels that you're veering off the straight line and meandering into something that's just self-indulgent, you will lose them.

49:20So in order to create great stories, you need to make sure that you take a piece of paper and go low tech. Write out the words of the story, word for word, verbatim. look at it and then probably cut about 20 % of the details and then try reading that story out to a colleague literally just reading it out in a flat voice and they will give you some immediate feedback and you're probably going to cut another 20 % of that story it's something a story is something like a piece of clay. You have to cut away 40 % of the clay in order to create a brilliant statue. And would you recommend for us to be more storytellers with a particular type of audience versus another one?

50:13There are some types of audience, especially I found in the sales profession, that love human stories, that love a hint of emotion, something that appeals to their guts rather than necessarily their brains but if you speak to a boardroom don't tell stories at all just stick to the facts just stick to the numbers that makes so much sense you're also you also deliver services a service that i found very interesting which is called after dinner speaking what exactly do you teach your clients here well after dinner speaking is a peculiarly british phenomenon, which, yes, we have exported to the rest of the world to a certain extent, but it's still very, very British.

51:03You know, I told you that one of the key aspects of preparing a speech is to work out where you want to take the audience, what you want them to know, think or feel by the time you've finished speaking. so that, for instance, they might want to buy your product. They might want to invest in you. They might want to see the next stage of details of the proposal that you have in mind. In an after-dinner speech at 10.30 or 11 o 'clock at night, you only have one aim, and that is to make them laugh. Essentially, you're a stand-up comedian in a suit doing a specifically tailored speech. I personally tell a gag literally every 12 seconds when I'm doing an after-dinner speech.

51:55And if the audience aren't laughing a lot, the after-dinner speech is failing. Wow. And why do we need to make them laugh? Well, that's what you've been booked for. You see, let's say there's a company that's had a conference with lots of serious presentations during the day, lots of serious Q &A, Lots of breakouts about specific products. It's very tense. It's very serious. Then they go to their rooms at 5 o 'clock. And then at 6 o 'clock, there's a sort of networking drinks between 6 and 7.30. And the mood is changing because people are having a few drinks by this time. And then they sit down for dinner at 7.30.

52:39But especially at British conferences, this is where the wine comes out. And people are relaxed. By the time it gets to 9.30, hopefully people have had three or four glasses of wine. Now, when it gets to 9.30 at 10 o 'clock, they really don't want to listen to another corporate presentation about our goals for 2026. It's a British tradition to bring on a speaker, a guest speaker, who knows, perhaps a very witty former barrister and former president of the Cambridge Union, who they're thinking, oh, I'm not sure who this guy is. Maybe I've seen him being interviewed on television. but let's see what he's got to say and they are nicely surprised by the fact that i am telling a gag every 12 seconds and maybe i'm making a little bit of fun of the chief executive and the sales director and the finance director and maybe possibly poking a bit of fun at rival organizations and that is a nice surprise it finishes the evening on a high note and it's something that can be very enjoyable for everybody.

53:43So if I'm sitting down in one of those networking tables at a networking event, and I don't know anyone, what's the best way to start a conversation with a stranger? Again, I'm going to do an annoying thing here is to answer the question with a question. Why would you be there at a networking event sitting at a table not knowing anybody? I guess in this case, there may be some business reasons why I need to be there. So perhaps representing my company or selling a product or a service or scouting potential clients. Got it. And so you're sitting at a table and there's two strangers on either side of you and six or seven other strangers around you at the table.

54:26Well, I've got to say, that's just about my worst nightmare. I hate networking events because of that specific scenario. Everybody's thinking, well, we should be talking to each other. And who knows, this might be a useful contact or colleague or client for the future. But nevertheless, there's an awful lot of icebergs between us. Now, I find those sort of events very, very artificial. And actually, I'm amazed that so few people do the really old-fashioned 20th century thing and do this, say, hello, I'm Graham Davis. And then somebody will actually, I hope, stick their hand out and say what their name is.

55:13Things actually flow from that. Do a really proper big hello with your name and then things flow. So to have specific networking ploys, I find slightly weird and obnoxious. And how can we sound more likable to someone? So what should we say or not say? Likability rarely comes from saying something about ourselves immediately. Hello, I'm Graham Davis. I'm a famous barrister. I felt slightly ill even saying that out loud. Um, usually to be likable immediately, try to be saying something that's about them. Hello. Hello, Roger. I see you're from IBM. Is that the IBM in Basingstoke? Because I used to visit that quite a lot or something like that.

56:06Something that's a bit about them immediately rather than immediately about yourself. Can you give me another example? I can't help noticing that you've got a bit of a tan and I'm looking very pale compared to you. Where have you been recently? Yeah, that's a good one. And how can we sound more confident? I don't think people should think through the thought process. Oh, I want to sound confident. Because if you're thinking of sounding confident, you probably won't. I know that whether it's a podcast or whether it's a dinner party conversation, I know that the Graham Davis voice is a bit loud.

56:49It's a bit over loud, frankly. And sometimes I really do need to turn it down and tone it down. If I was thinking to myself, oh, I really need to sound confident, I would sound as if I was doing a keynote speech to three people. So forgive me for saying this. I don't think it's a valid question. I think that you have to feel confident from knowing that you're showing genuine interest to other people. And if you're showing genuine interest without sounding creepy and cross-examining them, they will show genuine interest in you. And how can we sound more interesting? Genuine interest comes from genuine inquiries.

57:32so for instance i think that that inquiry that i gave to you about 30 seconds ago and i said well you seem to have really quite a good tan wish i had one like that where did you get it from was it from let me guess you've been to spain and then it turns out no no no we're further afield than that yeah and that immediately starts a conversation as to whether you get in december a sun tan from flying for two hours or flying for 11 hours to Mauritius or something like that. And that inevitably will lead to at least some sort of dialogue. Because you've noticed something that if someone's got a suntan, I know I'm like this, you sort of want it to be noticed.

58:14And if you're asked about it, that is an automatic door that's opened. But it does alight from interest in the other person rather than thinking, I'll get my agenda across no matter what. And what are other life examples in which good communication skills are useful, like perhaps relationship, dating? Well, I'm probably the last person on your podcast that you should ask about effective dating. I like to think that I had the world record for being the most left swiped face on Tinder. But really, obviously, there's another cliche about dating. Well, if you want to have a successful date, make sure you're making the other person laugh.

59:02Well, again, that's not necessarily the case. I think that the way to use the spoken word when you're in a social, informal context, not necessarily just dating, is to make sure that you're embracing the opportunity to use the spoken word. I've said to you that I find networking events, especially when I'm sat at the table, because you've been allocated to that table at the networking event, I find it really awkward. And it's not because I'm shy. It's perhaps because I'm unfriendly and I just think the artificiality of networking is not something I'm ever going to be comfortable with. but despite that you have to think to yourself I'm going to have positive energy here I'm going to embrace the opportunity to speak to people and if I embrace the opportunity rather than feeling defensive about it I will give myself the chance to use the spoken word as a positive force not just for myself but for the other people in the room as well that is the only way I think of using the spoken word in that sort of situation.

1:00:18And it's advice that I really should try to use myself a bit more. We have spoken about communication through the lens of speaking, but on the other end of the table, there's also listening. What are your thoughts on listening when it comes to effective communication? Yes. You know, I've said to you that part of a really effective speech should be what I call a message. And in fact, actually, I call it a micro message. A micro message is what you'd say to that audience if you only had 10 seconds for the whole speech. It's what you want the audience to remember above all else long after you've left the building.

1:01:04Now, let me test you on something. You've seen many speeches and presentations over the last year, haven't you? how many of them can you remember that key platinum nugget of 10 seconds that they want you to remember above all else how many of them stick in your mind a handful a handful and you're lucky if that's if it's a handful here's a game you can play with yourself when you're sitting let's because you sometimes go to events where let me let me guess there might be 10 speeches during the course of a day, and that can be like the Bataan Death March, can't it? Especially if there's a lot of death by bullet point.

1:01:47So play a game with yourself and almost pretend that the people that are speaking have been coached by somebody like me. Try and work out, what is that guy's 10-second message that I need to remember above all else? Sometimes you won't be able to do that. And that shows what a disaster that particular presentation is. But with a little bit of focused effort, you can usually find a 10-second nugget that captures the best of what they want to get across. And that 10-second nugget is actually worth jotting down on your phone or in a notebook. That is active listening to make the best out of what would normally be perhaps a pretty negative process of listening to bad presentations.

1:02:39So that's one way of using listening positively. But in a one-to-one conversation, there are a lot of coaches I've come across and books that I've read that focus on encouraging people to come out with more and more and more. Now, it's your job to do that with me as a podcast host now. And I get that. And we both understand that. that I'm going to be speaking probably for 70 % or 80 % of the time in this exercise, and you're going to be speaking for 20 % of the time, possibly less in this exercise. But that can't be how a one-to-one conversation is going to be, especially with somebody you've only just met.

1:03:29Because if you're doing this sort of exercise in drawing more and more out of that person, there are types of people around quite a lot who will abuse that encouragement and they will indeed go on and on and on and on and you can't stop them and you're a bit wary of stopping them because you don't want to be seen as being rude yourself and so I advocate a process of active listening rather than just going, which could lead to an endless Tolstoy-like monologue from the person you're speaking to, try and find opportunities to do helpful interrupting. And that is this. When you feel that they've made the point that they want to make, or that they've got to a point in their anecdote where they really don't need to tell you any more about the details of that story, find a way of positively deflecting.

1:04:37And so that might be with just a very small question like, so what did you do then? Or what did you decide that you needed to find at that point? So what was your conclusion from that? And that forces them to come to an end or it takes them off in another less boring direction. If you interrupt like that, they will see it as positive energy from you and it will focus them. If you interrupt in another way by just not looking at them and clearly looking bored, that will actually decrease the effectiveness of the overall communication. but don't just let somebody go on and on and on like i've just done for the last four or five minutes what is a verbal example of a wrong interruption a wrong interruption yeah yeah yeah you've made your point now no need to go on about it that inevitably will cause defensiveness and will make someone think well there's no way i'm going to tell graham another story like that try to make sure it doesn't sound like a block it doesn't sound like something negative trying to make sure that your deflective interruption feels like a positive and is the speed of our delivery important so and also trying to match our speed with our the counterparts the speed a certain amount of voice mirroring is helpful but as long as it doesn't become obvious to the other person because an awful lot of people have read an awful lot of self-development books these days and if it becomes obvious that you're mirroring somebody's either body language or their voice patterns that annoys the other person quite quickly what are other things that annoy the other person too much detail in my opinion you know we talked about the concept of embellishing stories, well, sometimes details, instead of becoming positive icing on the cake, actually cover the cake and make people think, well, I'd really like to hear less from this guy rather than more from this guy.

1:06:52So try and make sure that you're dealing, especially the first time that you meet someone in a semi-social, semi-business context, try dealing with interesting headlines rather than sweating all the details. Graham, is there anything else in relation to communication that we didn't speak about that we should? Artificial intelligence. Okay. You see, artificial intelligence, I believe it's become a very powerful drug. Now, I'm not a user myself, nor am I a dealer, but I am concerned that many of my clients have become addicted to it. You see, artificial intelligence can be a very powerful servant, but it is a very poor master.

1:07:49Now, I'll illustrate this. Now, could you indulge me for a moment by, could you conclude this well-known statement? Garbage in, garbage out. No. With AI, it's actually garbage in, garbage stays. And it only comes out much later in a really harmful, inaccurate way in the form of an AI hallucination. You can't rely at the moment in the current state of technology on the accuracy of what comes out of artificial intelligence. And that's been proven in a couple of recent court cases. AI makes up too much. And any time that somebody is using AI to replace their own thoughts and their own opinions, I think that gets in the way of genuine communication.

1:08:49So we should not ask any AI platform advices when it comes to positive or effective communication? I don't think you should ask an AI, what do you think my opinion should be on this subject? Okay. You can ask an AI, what are the facts on this subject? Or when was the last time this was used? Or when was this created? But of course, even I started to get used to using Google over the last 10 years as my primary research device. And we now live in an era where in-depth research means looking at page two of Google. But of course, even a Google search, the first couple of paragraphs you see at the top of the page, Google gets from an AI.

1:09:38And so I don't believe it's something that you should necessarily go cold turkey from, but you have to be always constantly wary of inaccuracy. You should make sure that you're using your own opinions and don't allow AI to give you your opinions. So you're saying that we should not use AI as a search tool from a content point of view. I'm saying you can use it sometimes for a factual check, but be wary of the results of that factual check. You can use it as something that might give you some ideas, but it must not be seen as the source of the definitive answer that has to come from you. And what about from a framework or methodology point of view?

1:10:29So should someone ask ChatGPT perhaps, how long should my presentation be? What should I include in this slide from a framework or from an aesthetic point of view? Recently, I was coaching a group of people who were just about to get interviewed by Oxford and Cambridge for the purposes of university entrance. And a guy there suddenly accessed ChatGBT. And he told me what he'd done. and he asked them, what questions should I ask an Oxbridge interview coach to get the best out of him? And he did come out with some interesting questions to ask me. But the fact that they came out with challenging questions using ChatGBT was a great thing.

1:11:23But ChatGBT wasn't used by him to come up with definitive answers. Hopefully he was using me as supposedly the expert on the topic to come up with definitive answers. Chat GBT is a great challenger, but it's not necessarily a great creator of definitive solutions. Understood. Graham, my final question to you is the following. If you had to compress all your knowledge into one essential piece of advice that we must implement in our daily lives, what would it be? Embrace the opportunity to use the spoken word with energy. Because the more you embrace it, the more you will enjoy using the spoken word and the more that people will enjoy listening to you and enjoy being with you.

1:12:18Graham, thank you so much for coming. This is one of those episodes, one of those conversations in which I think anyone can learn from. And it's applicable to so many aspects of our lives. As we were discussing before we started recording, they teach us how to talk, but not how to communicate. And I think those two are completely different. So thank you for sharing all your knowledge and all your experience with myself, with my team, with my audience. And I look forward to following your career and perhaps also joining some of your talks. It's been my enormous pleasure. Thank you.