Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 140. Rethinks: How to Handle a Skeptical Audience

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Preparing to speak in front of a skeptical audience is more than thinking about objections beforehand – there are specific techniques you can use to respond to these challenging situations without sounding defensive, evasive, or dismissive. Here, we offer a few key tips for how to handle skepticism with aplomb.In this episode, host Matt Abrahams and Stanford GSB lecturer Burt Alper share how to prepare for these challenges from your audience and discuss the importance of tactics like acknowledging audience input, reframing responses, and how to remain cool, collected, and credible.Episode Reference Links:Burt AlperEp.102 Create a Presence: How to Communicate in a Way Others Can FeelEp.70 Keep ’Em Coming: Why Your First Ideas Aren’t Always the BestOriginal Episode: Ep.5 From Monologue to Dialogue: How to Handle a Skeptical AudienceConnect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> [e-mail] Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn,  Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedIn ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smartJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

Hi, Matt here. We have two days left before we close our listener viewer survey. A big thank you to all of you who have already provided feedback. Please take a few minutes to share your input on the show. We still have a few prizes left to give to lucky respondents. Go to FasterSmarter.com.com. To give us your input. That's FasterSmarter.com.io slash survey. And now a word from one of our sponsors.

Their support allows us to bring you quality content free of charge. If you've ever thought, I know I can do more, but something's holding me back. You're not alone. Whether you're navigating career growth, seeking better balance, or wanting to communicate with more confidence, coaching can help you bridge the gap between intention and action. At strawberry.comme, you'll get matched with a professional coach who's trained to help you clarify your goals, build lasting confidence, and make intentional choices professionally and personally. This is not therapy, it's not consulting. It's a thought partnership designed to help you take action with more clarity and purpose. I strongly believe in the value of coaching. All of us can benefit from the help of a coach. Visit strawberry.combe slash smart

to get matched up with your coach today. That's strawberry.comme slash smart and get 50% off your first coaching session. It's the most affordable time ever to see if coaching is right for you. Hi, Matt here. Welcome to this best of episode where friend and fellow strategic communication lecturer Bert Alper and I discuss how to deal with challenging objections and hot and spicy conversations. Enjoy as we discuss ways to help you handle these situations. One of the communication situations that makes people most uncomfortable and nervous is when challenged with objections and concerns. Clearly, deep thought and active debate over ideas often helps improve decision-making, but the experience of defending your ideas and proposals is hard and fraught with potential pitfalls.

In this podcast, we'll explore ways of handling objections while remaining cool, collected, and credible. I am so looking forward to diving into this topic with my friend and fellow lecturer at the GSP, Bert Alper. Welcome, Bert. Thank you. If you don't mind or have any objections, I'd like to start by asking you to talk about a time you were confronted directly with an objection from an audience member. How did you handle it? Well, I'll give you a very specific example, and it comes up all the time. when you're offering best practices to executive clients or even here at the GSB, someone always raises

their hand and says, well, I like what you're saying, but that would never work in my company, or that would never work in my weekly meeting. And as a first step, when I get that pushback, while I want to get defensive, I'm trying to train myself to be more open to that criticism. So the very first thing that I'll do is I'll acknowledge that that concern is legitimate. You're right. There are some situations for which this rule or this guide or this piece of information may not be appropriate. And I find that's a quick way of diffusing the situation.

People want to be acknowledged. They want to be validated. And if you can build a bridge right out of the gate, you're starting off on the right foot. Second thing I'll do, I'll offer them the freedom to adjust as they seem necessary. So if it might not work in your particular environment, is there something you could do that would work in that? that environment. And the third thing I'll do is I'll push back a little bit. Maybe you haven't tried this in your weekly meeting and you think it won't work, but until you actually give it a shot, see what happens, and then adjust as necessary going forward. You don't really know. And I might

invite them to try one particular aspect of the best practices that I've given them and see if that one fits. And if not, okay, then we know it doesn't work in that situation. You're talking about the approach you take and really thinking about being open to somebody else's opinion rather than immediately getting defensive. Right. And I think so many people get defensive right away, even before they get into the situation, they're prepared for battle. And I know that that can restrict the interaction and what's possible.

So let's talk a little bit more about preparation. What do you advise people to do in advance of situations where objections might be raised? What are some best practices there? I think there's certainly the opportunity to anticipate where the pushback's going to come. So if you're dealing with any kind of information that has a contentious element or maybe even an unfamiliar element, thinking ahead of time about how that's going to land with your audience, where you might receive the pushback, and making a strategy ahead of time. So if you're upending the way the expense reports are done and you know that the people in your firm are creatures of habit

and they want to keep doing things the same old way. How do you anticipate the pushback you're going to receive? And before you get into that moment of contention, you've already got a strategy for how you might make that a little easier for them to swallow. Certainly having those contingency plans, I think, can really help so that when you hear it come in, you've got some ideas about how to manage it. And that's absolutely good advice to think about what can I do if this comes up. And perhaps are there ways to circumvent or address it in advance?

So it helps you prepare for that. Now, I know when you and I teach about objection handling, we talk about how objections can be divided into two categories. We talk about emotional objections and logical objections. Can you define what distinctions are between those two types and perhaps give some examples? As long as you and I have been talking about this, we've gone back and forth on that. And I think it is a fascinating way of breaking down skepticism or, objections in conversations. The age-old cliche of the forest and the trees I find is really valuable here. Often the more logical concerns or objections are getting down to that individual

tree level, the specific point about the quarterly budget not accommodating any new expenses, something very particular that's rubbing them the wrong way, and they've got to get that issue out there. On the flip side, the emotional objections tend to be of the forest view, and they might not be able to see or even put a label on the concern they're having. It's just not sitting well with them. And you'll often hear people say, I can't put a finger on it. I don't know what it is that's not working for me, but something in here isn't working for me. So thinking about individual trees versus the entire forest, for me, breaks down the logical versus the emotional reactions. It strikes me that in preparing for these kind of interactions, having a stockpile of specific

statistics or specific approaches to expand and extend a point would be really helpful to be ready with this different information so you're not caught off guard right away. And that's where your preparation is so valuable. You start to anticipate where the skepticism might come and how you're going to. to handle it. And there might be three or four different approaches that you've mapped out to each of those specific objections, but time and circumstance, time in audience will determine which response you might apply to that particular pushback. Absolutely. So yet another thing to put into the preparation category. You know, one of the things that we teach and we talk a lot about,

is this notion of how to handle objections through reframing. How does reframing work when it comes to handling skepticism and objections. I think of reframing as a way of giving yourself the speaker or the information deliverer room to maneuver. And in the simplest terms, you're giving yourself a chance to respond to the objection without admitting defeat. And sometimes you have to change the way we're talking about something in order to be able to address the issue without saying, yeah, you're right, this is a terrible idea.

Yeah, I see this all the time in the, and the work I do with clients as well as with the students. So, for example, if somebody is being pressed why a certain feature isn't in a product, and you know that that feature is not coming now or maybe ever, it's possible to reframe that to be a broader discussion about how do we prioritize feature set? And as a result of that discussion, you can then come back and address the key issue. I think what's so critical here, and I know you and I agree on this, is whenever you reframe a discussion, you're not becoming a politician and just talking about what you

wanted to talk about. You're addressing the issue in a different way at a different level, and you always have to come back to what the challenge or question or skepticism is about. And that is such a crucial point. You have to put yourself in the other person's shoes. If you were the one who had the objection and someone took a reframe too far and started answering a different question, how would that make you feel? You would feel either unappreciated or unheard or it might even make you think less of the person who was trying to communicate in the first place because they didn't seem like they were able to manage your question.

So your point about coming back to the core issue is critical. If you don't answer the question at some level, you're missing the whole point. And your audience is going to see that as a weakness or as a missed opportunity. Certainly. And I think part again going back to preparation. is you can begin to think about these reframes in advance. So I know that questions about feature set can be talked about in terms of priority. I know if somebody brings up a question about pricing, I can reframe that as a question about value.

So having these ideas in mind in advance, again, can help you if and when that arises. Now, I want to talk a bit about paraphrasing because as powerful as reframing is, I think paraphrasing is really critical for handling objections and skepticism in the moment. Well, I think the first thing that paraphrasing does is it establishes what are we really talking about. So if someone raises an issue and you may or may not know exactly what they're concerned about by putting the paraphrase into the conversation, either overtly saying, I just want to make sure I'm clear on this, or tacitly saying, I just want to make sure I'm clear on this. You're establishing that we're talking about the same issue. And audiences, particularly skeptical audiences, enjoy the or appreciate the effort to make sure that you're on the same topic.

So you've established a bit of an empathetic connection with them just by trying to clear the air. Paraphrasing also allows you to reframe. So you can put your words on top of their words. And if you do it skillfully enough, if you've had enough time to prepare, they might allow you the freedom to change it from a question about pricing to a question about value. And that's a subtle reframe in the form of a paraphrase. I think where people tend to get a little into the danger zone here is if you push the paraphrase too far and now it's no longer the same topic, then you'll get the objector digging in his or her heels even further. because they feel like you're trying to skirt the issue. So the paraphrase needs to be as accurate as you can make it, but you can adjust the frame of reference a little bit in that paraphrase.

Yeah, and I think paraphrasing is something that people have to understand is not this big thing that you always have to say. So what I hear you saying is, and then there's a repetition. You can extract just some key ideas or phrases and go from there. So it allows you a way to take the floor to do some reframing, to do the validation you're talking about, as well as to really help yourself formulate your thoughts along the way. I do want to bring up this notion of emotion, since emotion is around, I believe, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, that acknowledging the emotion without naming it is critical to do early in the paraphrase. So if somebody comes at you with a lot of heat, you know, maybe they're angry, maybe they're passionate,

to rather than to say, oh, I hear your anger, and then the person, well, really I'm frustrated. Now we're arguing over their emotional state. I think just to say, hey, I hear there's a lot of passion here and then move forward, acknowledges that emotion, puts it out there because everybody hears it. And for you to ignore it, I think puts you at a disadvantage. I'm curious your thoughts. I really like that. As soon as you started talking about the, I hear that you're angry example, I'm, you know,

I buy products. I'm a consumer in addition to. being a coach, when I get a bad experience in the outside world and I talk to the customer service rep and they say, oh, I feel your anger or I'm sorry that you feel so angry, that does not make me feel any better. The acknowledgement of my anger doesn't make me feel any better. If they were to say, this is really important to you and therefore it's really important to me, wow, it's a powerful shift. Now I feel like you as the customer service person are really taking how significant this is in my life. Right. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word

from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. If you've ever felt like you're trying to do everything yourself, especially when the stakes are high, you're not alone. One of the biggest shifts I see in effective leaders growing their organizations comes from focusing on the right things. But that's hard to do when you're stretched thin. You need to be able to delegate some tasks to competent professionals. That's where Upwork can really help. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across areas like marketing, development, data and analytics, and more. It gives you fast access to specialized talent, so you can move quickly, fill key gaps, and scale your work without taking on full-time overhead. You can

browse profiles, review past work, and get support scoping your project so you can hire with confidence. It's a simple way to focus your time where it matters most. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-rk.com. And now back to our conversation. As we end, I like to ask people the same three questions to get their ideas, reflections, thoughts on communication in general. So if you're ready, are you ready, Burr?

I hope so. Okay, there we go. I'd like to ask you the same three questions. If you were to capture the best communication advice you've ever received as a five to seven word presentation slide title, what would that advice be? I can only choose one phrase. Yeah, you've only got five to seven words. It's not what you want to say. It's what they need to hear. I didn't count the number of words, but I think you're close, but so important. And it really gets back to that notion of framing that we talked about, doesn't it, and really understanding what's needed in the moment. Who's a communicator that you admire and why? I've been referencing Oprah Winfrey a lot these days.

I watched her acceptance of the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes a few years ago, and I am blown away by her ability to sound authentic and sincere. She's wonderful at that. but to vary the tone and the intention that she's able to achieve in an authentic way. So she can be endearing and sweet and very lovable, and she can be very strong and powerful and authoritative, authentically, in the same speech. And that is an incredible range of emotion,

an incredible range of vocal quality. and she backs it all up with very powerful content that has specific examples that are relatable, that are familiar, and that really do drive her point home. Well said, for sure. So last and certainly not least, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? That's a great question. I'm going to go alliterative on you.

Ah, I like alliteration. I'm going to say passion. preparation and personality. I want you to bring all the enthusiasm that you have for the topic. I want you to prepare in advance so that you know what your audience needs and wants. And I want you to bring your own personal style and flare to whatever conversation you're having. Let me try a little alliteration with you. Great gift you've given all of us as we go about our communication. Thank you so much for sharing your insights. not just about communication, but how to handle challenges, objections, and skepticism.

You know, Bert, this topic is so critical to success. We all need to be able to share our opinions and our ideas, but also handle those ideas when they get challenged, when people bring up alternative points of view. We see this happening not just in our work lives and our personal lives, but we see it happening in society in general. the ability to approach objection in an open way to foster dialogue rather than to foster dissent is so critical. I really appreciate the insights you shared, and I hope all of us can take

advantage of some of these tools. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast from Stanford GSB. To learn more about how to create a strong leadership presence, listen to Episode 102 with Muriel Wilkins. Listen to episode 70 with Jeremy Utley to learn more about how creative ideas fuel innovation. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Ibrahims. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us.

Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out Faster Smarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe, and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast Talk Smart.