How To Have Confidence And Power In Dealing With People
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How To Have Confidence And Power In Dealing With People
Confidence and the sense that you're in command of the situation is a necessary public speaking skill. In this tutorial, an instructor and seasoned professional in that field, tells you how best to come across as an important person.
Hello. My name is Michael Ronayne. I'm a director of the College of Public Speaking, and I'm going to be talking about different aspects of public speaking.
Now, there is of course a book called 'How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing With People.' It's by a man called Les Giblin. It's very short and very simple, only about thirty pages, very easily written as well.
So that's probably a good place to start. But if you said to me, "What is the key? What is the one thing? What's the one characteristic of somebody who is confident, has power, and is able to deal well with people?" It's probably not the characteristic you'd imagine. It's listening, the ability to listen to people.
Because if you think about it, often people who are busily asserting their importance are busily trying to tell everybody, "Don't you realize how important I am? Don't you realize who I am? I've done this, this, and this." And your response to that sort of person is they're trying too hard. They're pushing too hard.
They're obviously not as important as they think they are, because they wouldn't need to tell me. And I remember many years ago, I'd lived in Germany for a couple of years, and I was at a friend's birthday party, and one of the parents there was a highly respected civil servant. He'd travelled around the world.
And he came up to me and said, "Michael, I hear you've been in Germany. Tell me about it." And for the next twenty minutes, he said nearly nothing.
He made no - he could have told me all sorts of "Oh, I've done that," "Oh, I remember that, and I could do that better." He could have told me all that stuff. He just listened to me.
He listened to me, so that at the end, I thought, "This man is so significant, he's so important, he doesn't need to tell me how important he is. He just is." And by listening to me, he made me feel important, and because he made me feel important, I began to regard him as a very significant important person as well.
So if you want to have power and confidence in dealing with people, don't tell them. Shut up. Listen to people.
If you listen to people, they'll think you've got a lot more to you than sometimes maybe the eye. And I remember a saying once which said that you should maybe keep quiet and people will wonder whether you're stupid or not, rather than open your mouth and remove all doubt. .