Innovate the way you communicate

you know when I was a boy um I didn’t really know my father I grew up in Sydney and uh I lived there until I was 13 years old and um my dad was one of these men who growing up he had this pretty good job in Sydney and he’d be gone before I got up in the morning when it was still dark he had come home in the afternoon again it probably still dark was around at night and so you know I didn’t really get to know this person at all to me he was just this um cranky man that I got to see on the weekends usually did the lawn and other than that you just did clear of him because you didn’t want to get in his way he might say something to you and um you know I went through this whole life and just wondering actually who is this particular person unbeknownst to me at the time when I was around about 11 years old my father had been going to the doctor and he had high blood pressure and the doctor was been saying to him look it’s getting worse and worse you’ve got to get out of the job you’re in it’s too high stress you’ve got to do something with your life you know make sure you have a change here you’ve got to address it or us you’re going to have a heart attack and you’re going to die so um when I turned 13 mom and dad just said hey we’re moving like I was like oh this is good well we’re in the western suburbs of Sydney near param meta and we end up moving to this beautiful little country gold mining town called gimpy and so just out past the Southside there at lsh right down in the bottom of this Valley mom and dad ended up buying this house with 5 Acres there for me this was absolutely brilliant you this is fantastic this was an Adventure Land I’ve been through this whole process you know growing up and just houses everywhere I always looked at books looked at farms I loved animals I just wanted this life and all of a sudden this life was mine that first Christmas was a real eye opener for me because what I end up discovering is this old man who I thought was a real cranky person wasn’t too bad actually it was actually pretty funny not just that I notic he had the same sense of humor as me you know he was quite a jovial person it’s really interesting you know he’s the sort of person that would laugh like if you you hurt yourself rather than actually asking if you were right he would laugh at it especially if it was something stupid and I did a lot of stupid things when I was a kid I can tell you right now it’s funny cuz now I laugh at my kids for doing stupid things um but he ended up turning out to be what this jovial person he had quite this dry sense of humor and you know I really got to know him I really enjoyed being around him and was a real surprise for me the first day I went to school in gimpy I went to gimpy High I came home on the bus and I’ve looked out the window and his dad standing at the front gate with this white goat on a tether and I’ve looked I’ve got up the bus and I’ve looked and I going what’s going on man he’s like I bought a goat I’m like yeah I can see that I said what’s its name and he goes spotty I’m thinking yeah it’s a white goat so you call it spotty you know great idea that sort of explains the sort of person that my dad was over the next 5 or six years I really got to know my dad well you know we end up becoming these best mates who had these great conversations he was such an intelligent person he was this wise person and um I really appreciated my relationship with him not just that it was really quite bizarre because this goat SP he came to represent his renewed life and Dad spent so many hours walking around the farm just Dragon spotty along behind him that the do goat actually used to start following him around the farm so it was great every weekend we’d be there I’d be offer in ADV ventes I’d come home and here’s dad and spotty just getting around somewhere the farm always having a bit of fun this one particular day I woke up before school and I’ve walked down to the paddock and I’ve gone to move to spotty’s tether and through the night she jumped up into the sapling tree slipped down and a leg had got caught and she’d snapped a leg and when I got down there I lift her out of the tree but I realized straight away that she had died and uh I thought straight away you know alarm Bells R I thought oh gee how’s Dad going to react to this and I ran up to the house I going straight inside and I told joh I said look spot’s dead um and he just went straight to the bedroom and I knew straight away that he was hurt because he didn’t even want to see us about 15 minutes later he came back out and he goes look son can you stay home and bury spotty for me I just can’t do it I’ve got to go to work and I said yeah yeah Dad it’s fine off you go so uh I took the day off school it was a pretty warm day I’ve gone down to the padic of course being the young stupid fellow I was I didn’t take any water or anything I picked the middle of the padic got the shovel out and start digging in the ground and it was like rock and after an hour I was dying of dehydration it was in the middle of the day is just burning I got the whole to about this deep and I just could not go any further so I gra old poor old spotty and I dragged her over and I put her in the hole and just covered it over with dirt I’ve gone up to the house that afternoon dad gets home and goes to you bury and I said yeah and he goes did you put a cross up and I said oh no I forgot I had even thought for a second that he might want to cross that he could actually go down and see the grave I said look I’ll do it Tom goes no no mate it’s all right it’s all right don’t worry about it 2 weeks to the day later I was um at my girlfriend’s Place who happens to be my wife now she’s in the crowd and her mom so I was at their place and um I get this phone call and it was my mother and she said look son your father’s had a heart attack go straight to the hospital and she said don’t get your hopes up mate because it’s pretty bad and you know my world crumbled show I thought gee you know this is it something you know this is what’s what’s going to happen I finally get to know this person I’m going to lose him I went to the hospital I’d already called my sister and she was at the hospital as well she’ talked to the nurses and she came out and she was balling and I knew the second I looked at her that dad was gone and she was shook her head and I just crumbled to the ground you know I finally got to know this person this is five or six years of really becoming best mates with this man and he was gone and I had no idea at any inking at all that there had been something wrong with him well I was distraught and I I was devastated and as anyone who’s lost someone you know you go through this process of just looking for a sign looking for something and even though I told my father that I loved him a lot of times I still felt like I needed something more I needed a sign just from him to let let me know that hey I love you too son it’s all right and about five or six weeks went on and the season started to change the farm you know the grass turned brown and everything started to die it was a bit like my mood it’s like as soon as he died everything started to die as well about 6 weeks later I was up the back of the yard I was feeding the chickens so I’m up there I’m throwing around the chicken food and I just happened to look down at the paddock and here is this bright green patch of grass just perfect round right in the middle of the padic and I just thought this is it it’s the life this is the sign I’ve been waiting for I just dropped that chicken feed and I went running down the Verge Down The Paddock and the grass is there and I came straight up and I just jumped on it and the second my feet went through the ground I realized my mistake there was this big pop and something went all over my face by the time my feet hit the bottom of that hole I was up to about there in spotty’s carcass now you think being waste deep in a goat’s carcass is bad you wait you smell it cuz the next thing that happened is I went and I just started vomiting all over myself now we got to get this picture right here because unfortunately my arms had gone in as well now I’m not going to tell you what color they were and it was one of the nightmares from the movies where you can’t get out of the hole I was sort of like this and I kept spping I having to grab behind me clumps of grass and drag myself back of course I finally get out of this hole and I know where the creek is so I just take a BWI for the creek I couldn’t even breathe because the smell was so horrendous and I’m boiling my eyes out because this is a sign from my father so I did this big bomb drive off the bank into the water and I just the water and I oh I Shing my legs and stuff the funny thing is is that you know when I finally got my head out of the water that day I swear that I could hear someone laughing and to me I received the sign that I was looking for and that was the sign okay uh good morning I am Dr Greg Nash and uh yes uh I’m a Lector in communication but as we’ve said I’m also a baker a pastry cook and a cake decorator and I never forget where I came from now stories make us who we are and we live in a place this rural community is a place of such Rich vibrant stories such a history of stories especially with a history like imp’s got I’m on this Crusade at the moment to get people to embrace public speaking skills and the thing with public speaking is that story plays a big part in it story is so important because story builds trust story is what connects you to the audience um I just want to tell you a couple of a little bit about my history one of the first times I ever did public speaking was in 2006 it was fairly important I was at the bris Writers Festival and the reason that I’m telling you this is because I want you to see that learning how to talk is really important it is a learned SK skill so what actually happened with that particular time I went down there and I was with my uh wife and my daughters I was really nervous about it because there was some really po important people in the crowd and I wanted to impress them i’ had written a bit of stuff so I actually had to talk about it um and it was horrific I was up the front there and I was shaking I was shaking so much that I couldn’t even read what I had written and um of course the voice was a real issue too and I’m going to break this down slowly for you the thing the way that I really knew that I had stuffed it up was because at the end of it my daughter came up to me and said dad you sound like you’re going to cry I was like I was like yeah thanks for that I feel so much better now and uh but it dawned on me that hey what happened to me I know how to communicate I talk to people all the time I know how to do this what happened to me when I actually got the front here so today my challenge to you is I want to innovate the way that you communicate I want you to embrace public speaking skills and as we’ve seen today people like to listen to people and this is really hard because we are all communicators believe it or not we are experts of communication that’s the one profession we all have we all do it every day from as soon as we wake up till the moment we go to bed but there’s a couple of things that we have to think about here first of all in terms of public speaking and we’re talking about um we’re talking about storytelling here this really comes back to Aristotle’s the art of persuasion now he has these three main things here ethos logos and pathos ethos is the appeal to credibility logos is logic now logic always takes the big picture in public speaking you know you want to be logical in what you’re saying cuz you don’t want to come across as being stupid you know you got to know what you’re saying ethos it takes a real back back seat this is credibility so this is about who am I what Authority do I have to speak on this what information am I using and where did I get this information and then finally there’s Pathos and pathos is the big one and that’s the appeal to the emotions of the audience you know the appeal to emotion now in public speaking appeal to emotion is Paramount because trust is the big issue here you want to gain trust with the audience and storytelling is the best way to appeal to emotion as you’re going to see the other thing we have to think about is is the way we communicate and the way we communicate in terms of actual communication 70% of communication is non-verbal so it’s how you actually tell the story so what I’m going to do here is just look at a couple of little things that I’ve just noticed with you guys today and with what happens up here the difference between informal and formal public speaking just today I’ve seen little groups on the brakes outside and you’re all in these groups and you’re speaking some are big groups some are small groups just going to let you know right now that’s public speaking you’re out there you’re telling stories to each other you’re talking about your experiences you are actually doing it you’re doing exactly what I’m doing now but you’re doing it in an informal fashion what we got to do is take the communication that happens in that informal realm and we’ve got to move to this formal realm right here so what might happen out there is you might be talking about the weekend about your fishing trip and you’re saying you should have been there it was Unreal we’re all just sitting there talking we’re on the back of the boat next minute he’s just like he’s holding he’s just like this you know it was Unreal we’re all screaming at him Yahoo and and when he finally got it him man this thing was this big now if I had seen you actually doing that out there and I walked up to you and said hey can I get to you when I’m doing my speech just to come up and tell that story two things probably would have happened first you would have vomited in your mouth because you would have gone oh well I’m not going to get up there and the second thing is is if you were going to do it you would have gone oh yeah I suppose I could do that you would get up here and all of that wonderful communication would abandon you you’d be gone what would end up happening is actually you’d get up the front here now we know how beautiful it was out here but as soon as you stand up here you look at the crowd and you’re sort of like oh je you know you work out pretty quick hey I put my hands in my pockets I can hide them well this isn’t so bad I can hide something it doesn’t take too long when you just start talking that if you put one leg in front of the other one well I can hide one of my legs this isn’t too bad and so all of a sudden we start crumpling up you know I can almost hide my head inside here if I’m and hey they won’t be able to tell how fat I am if I turn sideways and The Voice doesn’t work so it would be yeah we’re in fishing on the weekend with my mate and um we caught a really big fish it was fun so what actually goes on here we got to look at a couple of things let’s let’s break it down a bit The Stance how do you stand when you’re public speaking well the first thing you do is you come out here and you think how am I going to stand I’ve never been in front of an audience before this is really bad so you going sort of you know your arms don’t know what to do with your arms hey the best thing to do is spread your legs stand ight get your hands especially if you’re nervous cuz they’re going to be shaking L clamp them together and pop them in front of you this is important and the reason I’m letting you know this is because voices in the community work you know you want to be a good public speaker so these are easy little skills subtle things that work so you can put put your hands in front of you and this isn’t too bad got to be careful of Mr leg though because if you’re holding all of that nerves in there Mr leg is going to get out the side here and start shaking but there is a good thing with that too because your Stan is going to work with that first of all you’ll find with the hands in the middle here if you do get into a story in man they fantastic because you own these you know them your body knows how to communicate after a little while you’ll start talking and one hand will pop out here and then the other hand all of a sudden you’re conducting the orchestra and you haven’t even realized what happened the fish was this big you know it’s great but the other thing is maybe small movements and you’ll notice if you actually watch this whether it’s online or something of me I’ve I’ve gone all over the place I’ve used this whole Space here it’s great for your nervous energy you know I’m a little bit nervous but these subtle little movements here they actually change your focus of where you are the other thing here is your gestures how do you move your arms your face you got to be careful you don’t get like floppy arms all the way out there so not too pronounced but just nice small ones you know Kevin R he used to have his little pointer the pointer is great you know to actually have the pointer there a bit of this and a bit of that you make a big point you get the one finger in there cuz that’s a big one and this is a big one so they actually you know they work really well as well but it’s also that positive affirmation you want people to agree with you so you look at them and you Nodge your head I can tell you right now if you’re looking at the audience going like this they’re not going to look back at you go they’re going to they’re going to nod with you as well cuz you’re really trying to get them on board with what you’re saying our other big one is what we call par Linguistics all the properties of the voice the tone the pitch the volume even things like a pause in what you’re saying this is so important you know when I talked about my father dying I didn’t say oh yeah my father died that day I was really sad and he just kept going I slowed it right down you could hear it in my voice this is where the emotion comes from and then at the end when I said he died there was this pause there anyone who’s felt that or you know you’re reflecting on it that pause is communicating so much it’s a nice steady pace and it keeps the audience involved with what you’re actually saying as well so this is another really good point my final point for public speaking and again I really hope you think about this because you are expert communicators is eye contact this is what creates trust do you know what this does it lets people know that you want them to hear what you have to say so it actually makes it an intimate process and it creates trust it creates warmth and you know this is the extra actual Rapport that you want to build with the audience because trust is everything you want them to believe what you’re going to say at this particular point I think I should wrap up so I really want to say to you now this is my crusade innovate the way that you communicate you are a public speaker you just don’t realize that you have to move it from the informal through to the formal and have a big voice in a small community thank you very much