I grabbed my Blackberry when I woke up this morning and saw that Bnet was promoting a webinar called How to Change Hearts, Minds, and Actions: Guy Kawasaki Speaks on Enchantment.
Guy Kawasaki, for those of you who don’t know, is a venture capitalist and an original thinker. For instance, when people came to him with an idea for a business, he enforced the 10, 20, 30 rule: No more than ten slides; no longer than twenty minutes; and no font smaller than 30.
Now he’s into enchantment, which is a game-changer. Most of us are talking about persuasion, story, brain science, stickiness, and presence. Suddenly we’re into the realm of the magical, the mystical, the enchanting!
It is a great word, one that has freshness and bite, so let’s run with it. But it speaks of the oldest art of the public speaker, the rhetorician, the spellbinder, and rainmaker. The ability to get an audience to believe, to see a new reality in the theater of their own minds, and to carry it with them into action.
You may be familiar with Bruno Bettelheim’s seminal work, The Uses of Enchantment, in which he writes about the power of folk and fairy tales.
Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Bettelheim thought that by engaging with these socially-evolved stories, children would ge through emotional growth that would better prepare them for their own futures.
– Wikipedia, The Uses of Enchantment
We are enchanted by stories and by performances; by the artificial world of opera, sports, and theater. Any story that doesn’t suspend our disbelief is a failure. Good novels and movies are more vivid than real life. They lodge in our minds forever. And because they last, they have a chance to teach us how to behave, how to act. The drama is so captivating, so enchanting, that we are penetrated by it – and instructed by it.
Combined with the wisdom of rhetoric, cognitive and social science, and the art of the theater, the spoken word can also be enchanting. When we learn how to shape our arguments, structure language patterns to captivate the mind, be both conceptual and concrete, and perform like an actor, we can alter reality for our listeners.
Percy Bysshe Shelley said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. I think what he meant to say is that great speakers and storytellers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
They are, in fact, the acknowledged leaders of countries, companies, and institutions, because they are the people who are able to tell the stories that shape their followers vision of the future, and their interpretation of the past.
And maybe even more importantly, the personal story of the leader – his or her biography – very often embodies the values held up by the institution he or she leads. Think, “Obama,” a new kind of President. Think: “Lincoln,” “Mandela,” “Thatcher,” “Reagan.” Their personal stories represented the aspirations of their cultures. They enchanted the electorate, not only by what they said, but also by what their lives said.
The bar has been raised. Kawasaki has done it again – jumped out ahead of the conversation and elevated the discourse to urge us to a higher level.
It’s no longer persuasion and influence. It is no longer presence or power. And it certainly is no longer “presentation skills,” that mechanical, pedestrian phrase that fails to lend any magic to the art of speech – that is so 1980s. No, the new word is enchantment. Can we enchant our audiences?
Can you see it now? A whole generation of MBA’s studying the art of suspending disbelief.
Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.