Mastering the A-Ha! Moment and Conquering Distracted Audiences with Gabe Zichermann

Most of us have been faced with the challenge of addressing an audience at least once in our lives, and depending on our professions, public speaking may come with the job. Some of us seem to do it effortlessly, inspiring the audience, while others find their speeches or presentations falling on distracted ears.

Author, entrepreneur, leader, and investor Gabe Zichermann is an expert on public speaking, and his approach has been adapted by mega firms from Apple to Amazon. In his new book, The A-ha! Method: Communicating Powerfully in a Time of Distraction, he breaks down the theories and practices that make communication work, how behavioral science can give us a greater understanding of the power of communication, and how to best harness it.

We asked Zichermann about his latest book and for tips on cutting through the noise of today’s distracted audiences and making an impact that matters.

Grit Daily: Your new book, The A-Ha! Method, has an irresistible subtitle: Communicating Powerfully in a Time of Distraction. What’s your message, who is your audience, and to get to that subtitle, why now?

Gabe Zichermann: People are incredibly distracted, and our previous assumptions about communication no longer hold true. Even when you’re pitching a VC, making a sales presentation, or working to motivate your team, the folks in the room are being bombarded by notifications and other interruptions. The A-Ha! Method uses proven techniques from behavioral science to help leaders cut through the noise and keep the audience’s focused attention.   

Grit Daily: In your career, you’ve coached a whole host of people on public speaking, including top executives who are known for being able to tackle complex challenges. What do you find makes communication in public so hard for them?

Gabe Zichermann: Even super smart leaders and subject matter experts are afraid of public speaking. And for good reason: It’s one of the hardest skills to master, but also one of the most lucrative for your career/startup. Generally leaders fear public speaking because they don’t want to be embarrassed making a mistake that goes on their “permanent” (e.g. YouTube) record.

What most people don’t realize is that audiences are very forgiving of speaking mistakes like saying “umm” or having to restart a line. What they don’t forgive are speakers that waste their time and don’t deliver the authentic goods they are looking for. One of my central pushes is to think holistically about speaking as a form of content and a performing art, not one or the other separately. 

Grit Daily: You talk about that moment of arousal early on in the book — a “peak of intellectual or emotional arousal” — and even provide a fascinating graph on how that might look in a talk, which you call “A-ha!s per Talk (AHPT).” What exactly does that mean?

Gabe Zichermann: When someone says something to you that really lands, you might experience a tingling sensation in the back of your neck or elsewhere on your body. This kind of “peak arousal” opens the receiver up to deep memory and connection with the material and speaker. I call these “A-Ha! Moments”— a special state that speakers should deliberately cultivate in their talks, with an eye on using it just enough, but not too much. You want to deliver a reasonable number of A-Ha!’s in your talk with plenty of time for audiences to absorb and process what you’ve said. 

Grit Daily: You assert that while your practices — as presented in your book — could be done piecemeal and at leisure, they really should be approached systematically and in order. Can you talk about why it’s so important to follow an order when it comes to this method of building effective communication skills? 

Gabe Zichermann: Most of the time when people come to me for help with a presentation or pitch, they’re looking for polish on a deck or talk they’ve already partially put together. Invariably, they view the content, the deck, and the delivery of the two as separate tasks. But this simply doesn’t produce the right results.

The content, visuals and delivery cannot be separated from each other, and shouldn’t be. The process of building and practicing can be done in an agile fashion that is efficient, but the speaker needs to be intimately connected to the content. It should always be developed in the voice of the leader, and delivered authentically and creatively. This requires collaboration and practice. 

The first thing I do when someone approaches me for help is to tell them the truth — that if they want to deliver a great talk, it’s going to require at least 15-20 complete run-throughs of a speech from start to finish. This usually causes 90% of leaders to drop out of the process and choose the “other” way — the one that results in unmemorable drivel. Of course, there are plenty of other priorities in an executive or founder’s life, but if you’re not willing to put in the work, you’ll struggle to reap the benefits. 

Grit Daily: You talk about the role of cognitive bias as a hurdle in just about every aspect of life and how the speaker has to not only learn to recognize their own cognitive bias but also those of the audience. Can you give some examples and advice on how to overcome these?

Gabe Zichermann: I wrote a whole chapter on cognitive bias because I think it’s important for speakers to be really aware of these hidden “errors” that people make in their thinking. This is both to avoid mistakes and also to leverage them to better connect with audiences and improve persuasion.

For example, recency bias is a cognitive bias that says that we tend to overestimate the future likelihood of events that happened recently. When delivering a talk using the A-Ha! Method, you can use recency bias to your advantage by reinforcing ideas towards the end of the talk that you want the audience to think of first when they come to you afterwards and offer investment or partnership in your company. 

Grit Daily: No question, we all need to be able to speak in public, but the arena is more complicated and potentially more terrifying than ever. What are the most important strategies and skills leaders and executives should master to overcome not only their fears but also the inevitable technical as well as audience challenges they may face?   

Gabe Zichermann: I think there are more opportunities than ever for founders and leaders to make their mark in the world using public speaking and communication skills. On a fundamental level, the desire for audiences to be persuaded hasn’t changed since the dawn of time – people want to learn and know new things, and they have a strong desire to believe in the expertise of others. And even though the content landscape has become more fractured, and attention feels “shorter, the truth is that people always got bored quickly. It just wasn’t as easy for them to “change the channel” in the past. 

This means that if you can successfully channel the lessons in The A-Ha! Method, you can still reap the benefits of breakthrough public speaking in today’s world. And because audiences value authenticity even more today, you can be sure that if you’ve done the work and built your talk in a true and meaningful voice, and focus on delivering great value to the audience, you can accomplish anything from the stage.