How to Communicate Effectively With Anyone, Anywhere

Your Passport to Connecting Globally

Dan Bullock, Raul Sanchez, Rod Sánchez

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781632651792
• eBook ISBN: 9781632657565
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Doing business nowadays often means globally, whether with clients, customers, or business partners. Communicating your message effectively—online or in person—has become a must. If you want the best outcome, you must serve the growing need for cultural training that links awareness to action.

“A masterclass in authentic global communication. Full of specific frameworks and actionable tips, it is a must-read for anyone looking to bolster or refine their professional communication toolkit.”—Elizabeth Owens Skidmore, Sponsorship Specialist, Bell Canada

In our increasingly interconnected world, effective communication is the formula for success in any industry. Whether you’re speaking in public, writing an email, or navigating an important negotiation, how you present yourself through language is all-important in today's global business world. In How to Communicate Effectively with Anyone, Anywhere, two New York University professors reveal a new approach to global communication across key performance areas, including effective emailing, public speaking, and negotiation.

How to Communicate Effectively with Anyone, Anywhere, with key illustrations, is part instructional text, part empowering workbook, containing practical and proven strategies that can be put to immediate use, along with exercises designed to impart valuable self-discovery and position you as an effective global communicator. You will gain not only the practical skills essential for operating across cultural settings but also a firm foundation for managing global transactions, international relationships, and worldwide innovation.

We all know how to email, right? But contacting counterparts in China, Brazil, or Germany with success requires us to upgrade our skills with key strategies for an expanded and productive network of global interaction. Each chapter contains a practical, easy-to-implement framework that functions as a “blueprint” for global communication and how each skill can best be used virtually in remote work scenarios.

For professionals looking to take their skill set to the next level, this book’s approach is the key to connecting professional skills to a larger practice of global understanding, ultimately leading to you communicating effectively and impactfully with anyone, anytime, and anywhere.
 

The only reason to give a speech is to change the world. —John F. Kennedy

Every speaking situation is an opportunity for change. Whether facing a crowd of five or five hundred, we feel an earthquake rising inside. A fire awakening. A spark ready to ignite the hearts and minds of the world. This fire in our minds is an idea and it is a tool, coursing through our every word—ready to transform us and our audiences anew.

Whether we are presenting to a small group of stakeholders, a conference room of board members, or a larger audience, the universal goal of any presentation is to create a connection between presenter and audience that brings about lasting change. So how do we expand this impact when we’re delivering presentations to global audiences?

In the globalized era, presentation skills are more important than ever. Today successful speakers must not only know their subject, but their audiences. As businesses and organizations become more global, the international presentation space has seen a shift in focus from information to communication. We now have multicultural teams to motivate, international clients to engage, or global partners to collaborate with, all with diverse needs and communication styles.

On the global stage, we discover that fire breathing within us, igniting our inner self to hold the space and focus on one goal—communicating an idea powerfully. Expression is transformative, and we each have a spark inside that can illuminate the world. So how do we create a bridge with our audience that ignites rippling change?

To ensure that our messages will resonate with diverse audiences with a rich mix of communication styles, we must develop an international presentation style. The potential of a presentation style that works for everyone around the world goes vastly beyond career opportunities, managerial interpersonal skills, and organizational productivity. We live in an ever-evolving era of global innovation. Sharing ideas has always been our key to human progress.

Experience has shown us that the communication of ideas has produced such innovations as space flight, the personal computer revolution, the transistor radio, quantum physics, antibiotics, the steam engine, the sundial, and the wheel—we can envision these ideas all lit up, like sparks of light uniting us through the ages, crisscrossing the earth in a glowing latticework of inspiration like part of Earth’s electric field.

No matter how giant the leap, looking backward, we can see that every idea in the flow of human progress was advanced by the spreading communication of ideas that came before, like sparklines connecting all around the globe, propelling human history into a fascinating voyage through time to the present moment.

Overall, if you have a big idea, you’re already capable of a powerful speech. It doesn’t have to be a Nobel Prize–winning invention—it could be a vision of the future or a reminder of what’s important. What matters most is the way we share that idea. All we have to do is make specific and dynamic combinations of two key presentation components: delivery and content. When connecting—how we say things is just as important as what we say.

Indeed, research has revealed that when we share a powerful presentation or story, we actually share the same brain activity as our audiences. That is to say, the importance of a good presentation is not just delivering the information, but connecting with the audience so that they can integrate the information and act upon it in collaborative ways. When presenting on the world stage, we must not be distracted by notions of personal success, but instead focus on what the former United Nations high commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay calls starting “millions of conversations among people around the world.” Our goal is service—namely, serving as a catalyst for thought, emotion, and action.

We are already a part of this sparkline process of service—of business entrepreneurs creating new innovations, of scientists finding new facts, of artists inspiring new worldviews—and of breakthrough discoveries such as how blood circulates through the human body or how gravity works to propel the International Space Station in orbit around the earth. We are as much a part of the innovative process as we are a part of Earth’s magnetic field, the electricity charging the atmosphere, and the electromagnetic impulses firing from one synapse to another inside us, carrying our ideas between our minds to become blazing realities.

All we have to do is shift our focus from presenting to our audience to connecting with our audience. Then, on the world stage, these ideas of today and tomorrow—ideas inherited from the past and inspired by dreams of the future, a better human future—converge and burn inside of us.

In this chapter, we’ll explore how to develop an international presentation style that applies cognitive strategies for using visual aids, navigates multiple communication styles, and uses specific transcultural storytelling patterns that tailor our messages to diverse audiences—all while revealing the glow of that universal connection. Ultimately, an international presentation style allows us to fully enter communication patterns across the world, while also influencing global business, cross-border transformation, international workforce development, effectiveness of global teams and organizational missions, and world change.

Globalization is the defining characteristic of our age, and in globalized business markets, we now present to a mix of cultures in one presentation space. Therefore, as global communicators, when we layer our presentation skills with patterns of cognitive strategy and storytelling, we not only create more engagement and impact among multicultural audiences, we also participate in the global innovation process.

1.1 Presentation Fire: Powering the Mind-to-Mind Connection

We seek the fire of the spark that is already within us. –Kamand Kojouri

What is the power of a speech? Think of the flames reaching from within us, sparks leaping from nerve cell to nerve cell, carrying our hopes and dreams through our bodies. Leaping across synapses as they travel through us like gathering electrical firestorms. One tiny electrochemical spark is monumentally influential in our lives.

This spark has been the centerpiece of all cultural innovations, from those of our ancestors to the many inventors through the last decade. A fiery force that has become a newfound treasure for us to share, cultivated from our passions, consciousness, and ongoing purposefulness in our careers. The power of a speech resides in more than the courageous act of sharing an idea, but sharing that idea in service to others. And like electrons leaping from atom to atom, we can transmit this energy to others. An idea can become supercharged.

Researchers at Princeton University took a closer look at this energy, discovering that when we deliver a powerful story, we share nearly identical brain waves with our audience, similar to the way “mirror neurons” work. This research affirms that one of the most powerful presentation vehicles between us as human beings is storytelling. Dr. Uri Hasson, one of the pioneers behind this research, arrived at the findings for this shared human experience when analyzing the brain scans of both storytellers and audiences who were hooked up to MRI machines. His team determined that our brains essentially get in “sync” with one another during storytelling in an amazing event termed neural coupling. Sparklines.

In other words, during the live act of storytelling, firing neural patterns in listeners “mirror” those in speakers. No wonder storytelling remains an age-old and fundamental process that we humans instinctively and passionately use to communicate ideas, emotions, and motivations—storytelling transcends culture. The boardroom, virtual room, and conference room environments have become our new metaphorical campfires. However, when we tap into storytelling, we also tap into our ancient roots and a universal process that makes our ideas part of world collaboration, catharsis, and collective memory across cultures.

Forge the mind-to-mind connection from the global stage by telling stories that:

• bond with our audience over a professional, social, or personal cause

• illustrate a skill, method, or process important for personal growth or global progress

• highlight how to overcome a shared challenge or achieve a common goal

• make a presentation “bigger” in meaning than its data

• convey our passion for a topic, and ignite audience interest in the process

Yet, an idea doesn’t simply get its power from storytelling, nor courage in the act of expression—an idea gets its power from service, the most important concept of presentations in the global context. The most powerful narratives are those that inspire, nurture, and heal others. As Japanese Buddhist priest Nichiren Daishonin writes, “If one lights a fire for others, one will brighten one’s own way.” Service is the act of giving back the gift of ideas that have been given to you. As we do this, not only do our own lives change for the better, but also the lives of all those around us.

Global Presentation Tip

Sharing an idea in service to others is our greatest expression as a global presenter-

1.1a The Fire Within and Between: Global Courage and Global Sensitivity

When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don’t touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people? –Tori Amos

The principle of service as a global presenter is paramount. On the global stage, we do not present for ourselves. The concept of service is founded on the idea that we are all joined at a certain level. Indeed, human rights keynote public speaker and South African social rights activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”

The key to embodying service as a global presenter is with the right combination of courage and intercultural sensitivity—which, in turn, cultivates our larger skillset as a global communicator. According to notable keynote speaker Stephen R. Covey, all our human interactions are touched by two essences: the amount of courage we have to display our emotions and convictions, coupled with the amount of consideration we have for the emotions and convictions of others. In his landmark work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he presents a matrix with these two variables that delineates the o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Connecting Globally
• 1 Connecting with the Audience: Public Speaking from the World Stage
• 2 Connecting with People: The Power of Meaningful Networking and Relationship-Building
• 3 Connecting in the Digital Sea: Effective Emailing and Behavioral Psychology
• 4 Connecting with Body and Voice: The Power of Nonverbal Communication
• 5 Connecting with the World: Negotiation in the Age of Collaboration
• 6 Connecting with the Mind: Strategic Writing in the Global Space
• Conclusion: Our Global Mantle
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Global English and Brevity
• Bibliography
• Back Cover