Like v. like

There are videos you like, and there are videos you really like. There are very few videos I really like.

An exception is this one from my friend Jill Foster.

For those of you who don’t know Jill, she’s the founder of Live Your Talk, and her business is training and empowering women entrepreneurs to voice their opinions in a public forum.

She’s a speaking coach with a difference.

Now, I haven’t had that many speaking coaches (after all, I went to drama school, so I’ve had lots of training in hamming it up), but I was able to experience Jill’s coaching and style firsthand when I was preparing for Ignite DC last year.

It’s an intimidating forum, even for someone who’s used to being on stage. And Jill really helped me get comfortable with the 5 minutes/20 slides format.

I’ve known for a while that Jill loves the video format

and I’ve been pushing her to do more videos of her own.

I figured, she’s a terrific coach, and she has a great speaking style herself. So by bringing her own presentation skills to the medium of video, what better way to live her own talk and build her business?

Which is one reason I love this video.

Silence that’s commanding

More than that, I was struck by the idea that Benito Juarez used silence so effectively to command his audience… and if you’ve watched the video, you’ve seen how Jill used that technique at the end herself.

Which made me think: if we try to incorporate 10 seconds of silence into our personal relationships, into the practice of public relations, into our relationships with ourselves, what could that do for us?

Ten seconds of silence

gives us the chance to calm our inner voices so that our outer ones can be more coherent;

gives us the chance not just to listen but actually hear what someone else is saying;

gives us the mind space to focus on someone’s body language and all the things they’re not saying verbally;

gives us the time to focus on what that media query really means, and reduces the chances that our pitches will suck;

gives us breathing space to try and understand what measurable outcomes our clients are trying to achieve… or maybe even help them identify those objectives;

gives us a way to focus on what’s important, what’s not, proceed accordingly and be more productive, perhaps heretically so.

Ten seconds of silence

is really a gift… if we treat it as such.

What could 10 seconds of silence do for you?