I accidentally carried out a fascinating experiment this week.
One of the last challenges of my Compelling Communication Skills course is called Your Thoughts.
In it, we ask learners to tell us the single most important insight they've gained from our time together.
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They have plenty to choose from:
Clarity, brevity, simplicity, the golden thread, the pillars of persuasion, storytelling, advanced public speaking techniques, the inverted pyramid trick for ordering content, the George Orwell rules of writing…
And much more besides.
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I never meant this task to be particularly insightful, just a sense of what the learners found most helpful.
But of everything they could have chosen, one clear winner emerged.
- Authenticity, as you can see from the big reveal in our final lecture together:
I'm pleased to say the group told us the course offered many essential techniques for compelling communication.
But the one which really made all content shine, which forged a connection with an audience, and which made for truly memorable messaging…
- Was authenticity.
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For what it’s worth, I agree.
And here’s a brief story about why:
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When I taught my first lecture here at the University of Cambridge, I was, frankly, pretty much terrified.
This place is daunting, to put it mildly.
800 years of history, so many remarkable people, so many extraordinary achievements.
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Me, teaching here? What on earth could I add?!
I was sufficiently intimidated to be tempted to play it straight and safe:
A template lecture: a delivery of information without any of my usual quirks.
No interactions, no entertainments, and certainly NO JOKES.
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But then I thought:
If I was ever going to succeed in this historic university, surely I should be myself?
If I didn’t, I would come across as hollow, forced, and fake.
And that was a sure-fire route to failure.
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So I gathered my courage, I was myself, the lecture went down well…
I was asked to do more…
More and more, then lead a course for Cambridge, and then write a book for Cambridge…
All of which made for this wonderful new career that I've found so very joyful and fulfilling.
And at the heart of so much of it - well, you guessed it:
- Authenticity.
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So, the lesson is:
Let your character come out in all your communication.
Not just public speaking and presentations, but storytelling, writing, blogs, videos, social media, the lot.
You won’t regret it. Because, as I've found, and so many others I've had the pleasure of teaching have also now discovered…
Authenticity is the stardust which adds the sparkle to the substance.
