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Slay your dragons

By Patrick Gant

“We define the entire outer scope of our outer experiences based on our inner problems. If you want to grow…you have to change that.”
—Michael A. Singer

Every day, you face a choice: either you do what you did before or you do something differently. That works fine when faced with a simple matter like: “what shall I make for dinner tonight?” But it can be debilitating if you’re engaged in avoidance behaviour, either in your personal life or your work as a creative pro.

For some, that comes in a low-grade form of procrastination. For others, it’s something more elevated where the behaviour is repeated, chronic and anxiety based.

The effect is the same: the thing that you avoid doing aggravates the pain you’re seeking to avoid. That is unsustainable. Eventually you have to confront what you’re running away from and slay your dragons. To do that, here’s what’s worked for me and maybe it can do the same for you.

Put a name on it
We only understand things we can name, and we only name things that are familiar. Thus, behaviours and thoughts only begin to have a shape once you assign labels to them. Otherwise they are limited to how they make you or others feel. If you consistently avoid taking a call from someone because you’re dreading having a difficult but necessary conversation, you’d likely be feeling a little guilty and the other party will probably be growing increasingly annoyed. Once you name it—“This is avoidance behaviour”—you take ownership of it and stop projecting it onto others as excuses.

Build a better model
If your choices are framed around either I do something or I don’t, you’ll forever be susceptible to the pull of choosing to not do something. Don’t make that an option in your decision-making system. Instead, build a model of thinking that’s built on the premise of having done something. For example: “Once (not if) I get my boring accounting work done, I can reward myself with something nice.” The quality of our assumptions determine the quality of our outcomes.

Schedule tasks and hold yourself accountable
Anxiety is sometimes described as a fear of the future. Avoidance is the manifestation of anxiety but all it can do is offer you delayed suffering. Instead, name the task that needs to get done and put it in your calendar. Next, find a trusted accountability partner who will hold you to your promise of doing what you said you would do. If you’re in a creative line of work, making a pledge and delivering on deadline is very familiar to you. Leverage that skill.

Know the cost
Numbers don’t lie. Create a ledger that keeps track of your most difficult tasks. This will hold yourself to account for each time you engage in avoidance behaviour. Put a sum on the cost of your avoidance behaviour. Measure it in units of time or energy spent or spirit wasted on not doing a job that needs to be done. How has it affected your wellness? How has it affected your relationships? You’ll be shocked by how much gets wasted on avoidance and on the ensuing guilt of not getting things done.

Know what home is to you
We are hardwired to repeat patterns because they are familiar. For many, familiar is safe. Familiar is like home. Even the root of the word “familiar” has its origins in the notion of that which pertains to one’s family. But for some, the figurative act of going home to what is familiar involves feelings that are unpleasant or facts that are painful. In that sense, home isn’t always what and where you think it is. This is why avoidance behaviour is so enticing. It gives the illusion of that painful feelings can be eliminated. In truth: we all go home.

Experiment

“If you really want to see why you do things,” writes Michael A. Singer in his book The Untethered Soul, “then don’t do them and see what happens.” His point works just as well the other way around. If you want to see why you avoid things, do them instead and watch what happens next. Having named your avoidance behaviour and having installed an accountability system, treat what happens next not as a consequence but as an experiment. This is where understanding happens. The pain you’re seeking to avoid with avoidance behaviour isn’t a root cause: it’s a symptom of a deeper unmet need. Your experiment will show you what yours is.

Avoidance behaviour is a tendency to remain stuck in a way of thinking that’s rooted in judgement and consequences. Focus instead on choices that are consistent with what you value. As I’ve talked about before, it’s important to keep seeking that sense of agency we each have within ourselves to build deliberately the life of our own choosing. Do that now.

How to create a presentation that doesn’t suck

By Patrick Gant

Most presentations suck.

They go on too long. The speaker’s compelling idea gets buried in a lot of noise. They make it feel like work for the audience to follow along. And we quickly forget what was said.

And yet some presentations don’t suck. Instead, they persuade. Some do this despite the fact that they’re long and packed with details. We remember what was said.

So why does that happen?

As someone who holds a lot of workshops and teaches what I know, I spend time studying what works well, based on the research and field work of people who are masters at their craft.

There are ten take-aways I’ve learned that you can apply to any presentation to make it connect better wth your audience.

All great stories are about structure

Even when presenting an idea, you are telling a story. Writer Steven Pressfield says it best: “the arc of the hero is a structure that is at the heart of every story.” That means every story we tell needs to define a problem, show a solution and then show what we learn by applying that solution. As a speechwriter, that’s at the core of every keynote I work on. It applies just as much to how you present your work. In your introduction, show your audience what they’re going to see in your talk and refer back to it as you move from point to point. If you don’t have structure, your presentation is going to suck.

Know your goals

The goal is not to make people know things. You can’t make people do anything. All you can do is persuade. Harvard’s Stephen Kosslyn, a well known cognitive neuroscientist, wrote what I consider an essential speaker’s guide on presentation clarity. He points out every presentation has three goals: earn an audience’s attention, keep that attention, and make it easy for people to both understand and remember what you talked about. If you miss any of these goals, your presentation will suck.

Slides don’t tell your story: you do

Your slides are designed to do two things: help your audience situate themselves in your story, and hold their attention. They are not your speaking notes or your TelePrompTer. In fact, they’re not for you at all. They are for your audience. If you find yourself reading from your slides, your presentation will suck.

Busy slides defeat your purpose

Busy slides either get read at the expense of listening or they get ignored. Here’s why. People can read faster than they can listen. So if you cram all your facts on your slides (and if it’s legible), your audience will read them. And they won’t listen to you while they do this, which raises questions why they’re there in the first place. Don’t do that. Treat each slide as the bare minimum of the point you’re driving at in that segment of your talk. Busy slides are the Batman signal of a presentation that’s going to suck.

Bullets kill attention

This point is a matter of opinion, but it’s an informed one based on what I see that works in the marketplace. Don’t use bulleted lists on slides. Bullets are used in long reports and in articles to compress ideas to keep a reader reading. But presentations aren’t documents. They are talks designed to hold your audience’s attention while you communicate persuasively. Even if you do decide to use bullets, heed the advice of Garr Reynolds in Presentation Zen: “people will tire quickly…if several slides of bullets lists are shown, so use them with caution.”

Pictures do more than words

Reynolds’s book on presentation design has a terrific section that illustrates the power of visuals to complement your message. He also shows how easy it is to undermine that power by trying to convey too much information on a slide by adding text and data. He describes it as a Signal to Noise ratio. The harder it is for your audience to understand the difference between one data point and another, the greater the likelihood your presentation is going to suck.

Don’t report numbers: show meaning

Behavioural science tells us there are two kinds of learners: visual-driven and data-driven ones. Even the latter group get frustrated and bored if all you do it use the “spray and pray” approach to reporting on a series of complicated facts. Stop making it feel like work to understand the point you are driving at. If you are showing a bar chart with five data points on it, your focus should not be on reporting each of those five points. That’s self evident. Show the relationship between these numbers. Is there a 38% jump in activity from point#1 to point#5? That’s your story.

Understand cognitive load

It’s not that people have short attention spans. It’s that time is limited and people are busy. Presentations communicate a lot of information in a compressed period. And generations of cognitive research reaffirm that audiences have far less capacity to retain and makes sense of messages than we give them credit for. You’ve had weeks and months and even years to think through what you want to talk about. They have maybe 20 minutes. Even less if they’re tuning you out because your presentation is sucking.

You is a magic word

I talk about this point often in the context of writing for the web and other copywriting. It matters just as much in presentations. If you write a presentation that talks to an audience like they are a mass of people, your presentation will suck. Talk to them as individuals. It is a profound need of all human beings to feel seen and heard. The less likely it is that each audience member feels you are saying “I see you,” the more likely your presentation is going to suck.

Polish your closing

Admit it: most of us who write a presentation devote 98% of our time working on having a strong opening hook and making sense of our most salient points. Your conclusion tends to be an afterthought. Usually because you’ve run out of time. I like how Garr Reynolds explains this. He points out that Japanese culture speaks of “Hara Hachi Bu,” which is to eat until 80% full. I try to adopt that principle when writing a conclusion: polished and filling, but not too much.

Don’t let them call you “a creative”

By Patrick Gant

Why does anyone hire someone for their creativity? Is it just a matter of needing to get a job done and not having the resources to do it themselves?

On balance, I’ve found that there is a deeper reason, but it’s one that’s not very well expressed by either the buyer or seller of creative services.

To explain, let’s get something out of the way first.

Creativity is poorly understood when only thought of as a noun or an adjective.

You’ve heard this kind of conversation before: “Hey, let’s bring in the creatives on this project.” Or “we can leave it to the creatives to fill in the details here.”

On that point, I like what Mike Monteiro, author of Design is a Job, cautions: “Never, ever, ever let them call you a ‘creative.’ It’s a way to be disenfranchised.”

Why? Because that way of thinking is couched in a notion that you are someone–and with membership in a special group of someones–who just show up and make things look nicer or work better with the wave of some magical creative wand.

It assumes your ability to produce great work simply comes from having an inherent knack for it.

Worst of all, it is creative-minded people themselves who help perpetuate this, because they assume that pretty much anybody could do what they do if they had the time or the inclination.

See creativity as a verb.

That’s how designer Milton Glaser–among many others–sees it. And this is the part of creativity that is not very well understood in the deeper motivations I see in the marketplace. As a verb, being creative means there is both a method and discipline to what you do.

You are driven by thought. Not impulse.

Creative mindfulness means you exercise your hard-earned skills in a methodical way that pays respect to the fact that your time and your output have intrinsic value.

It conveys action. If you are doing your job correctly, you impose order on the ideas you generate.

But here’s the really hard part.

If we are being honest, creative mindfulness–the more you practice it–produces more uncertainty than it does complete answers to problems.

The older I get and the longer I do what I do for a living, the more open I am to the truth that I don’t really know anything for certain. That’s a paradox, but it’s one you can learn to live with.

Certainty means having the conviction to know the answer to a problem. Instead, what I find is that while I’m steadily better at finding methods to quickly arrive at solutions, I’m far less willing to trust in the same solution over and over again.

Don’t stay in love with your ideas.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when tackling a new project is to apply old thinking to it.

It’s not so much that old ways aren’t as good as they once were. It’s that you risk skipping over the most important attribute of creative mindfulness: your capacity for curiosity.

Forget what you know. Instead ask questions such as: Why does this thing work the way it does? What assumptions are driving that idea? Is this the right order of things?

Two great insights to help wrap this up. First, physicist Richard Feynman: “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.”

Second, from writer Dani Shapiro: “When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity…they are motivated by their desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn to what they don’t understand.”

That is what is at the heart of creative problem solving.

It’s not about knowing the answer.

It’s about your willingness to look for it.

Even in the dark waters of the unknown.

Especially there.

What Miles Davis teaches you about simplicity

By Patrick Gant

Miles Davis was unhappy.

“The music has gotten thick,” Davis said. “Guys give me tunes and they’re full of chords.”

It was a problem he was ready to solve.

He assembled a group of legendary musicians and over two sessions in March and April of 1959, they performed and recorded Kind of Blue.

The sessions featured almost no rehearsals. There was no sheet music.

Band members were given rough instructions on how each song was meant to be played, instead leaning heavily on melody and improvisation.

The results were stunning.

Kind of Blue remains one of the best selling jazz records and is pointed to by many music critics as one of the most influential recordings of all time.

Simplicity is commonly pointed to among the achievements of this important record.

It’s an accurate choice of words here. But I’m reminded of how often simplicity gets misused to describe the ambitions of a wide range of creative work.

Maybe you’ve heard some of these at a boardroom table before:

“Let’s build with simplicity in mind…”
“We need to simplify the steps required to use this product…”
“Don’t complicate: keep it simple…”

Simplicity is not a process.

It’s tempting to think of simplicity as the act of paring until you’re down to the bare essence of an idea, product or message.

In fact, that’s just good editing.

As Jony Ive, head of design at Apple reminds: “simplicity is not the absence of clutter.”

Sure, as far as writing is concerned, tighter ideas and economy of language are important. But it’s a mistake to assume there’s a process you can adopt to yield simplicity. It’s much more elemental than that.

Turning back to Kind of Blue, it succeeds in its “exquisite simplicity” (as Bill Evans calls it in the album’s liner notes), because Miles Davis started with a clear definition of a problem he wanted to solve.

More than just to music, this applies to all creative work.

And that leads me to my second point.

Simplicity is an outcome of deep understanding.

Early in my career, I padded my writing with lots of literary ornaments: dense paragraphs and plenty of five-dollar words.

Why? Because I lived in constant fear that I’d be found out as a fraud and that I’d have to return my writer’s licence to the Bureau of People Smarter Than Me.

I was half right. Without first having a deep understanding of the problem I’d been tasked with solving, I was regularly putting myself at risk of seeming to dumb things down, rather than finding the heart of an idea.

I still struggle with this, but I do so now at least with the conviction that I’ll study the heck out of my customer’s business problems first before I even attempt to solve them with strategy and prose.

Simplicity is preceded by mastery.

One reviewer in summing up Kind of Blue says how it “sounded different from the jazz that came before it. But what made it so great? The answer here is simple: the musicians.”

Too often, simplicity is thought of as the act of making things look easy. Or that its spareness comes from a kind of idleness.

Simplicity comes only after you’ve begun to exercise mastery of your skills.

Even then, it comes slowly.

Miles Davis explained it best:“You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”

As I see it, writing of all kinds can only start to achieve simplicity—satisfying simplicity—after you’ve dug deeply into your thoughts and have exhausted yourself by writing long form.

I don’t pretend to suggest I’m there yet.

But like you, I get closer, word by word.

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