Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to give a rating and a review and subscribe to this podcast. Today, my guest is someone who is a teacher of clown. Did you know that's existed?
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He's a public speaking coach and a professional speaker. He actually teaches public speaking at Google. He used to be a TV producer for about two decades, but now he's more in engagement with his audiences. And before I go any further, please help me welcome Don Colliver. Hello. Hello, Roberta. Thank you for having me. Hello to Chicago out there from Silicon Valley here, and I'd like to introduce.
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Bucket, if you're watching on video. Oh, it's cute. This is Bucket the cat. Yeah, she is sitting on my lap. So she'll be joining us today. Welcome to the show, Bucket. You are the first cat to be on the show. So this is historic. Yeah, so welcome to the show, Don. Give us a little bit of background about you. Sure. Well, I was in Los Angeles for a very long time producing, writing, and directing television, primarily nonfiction TV.
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I wrote a show called House Hunters for 10 years. I toured with Rachel Ray for her show $40 a day. We went all around and that was the most rock star time I ever had because I ate incredible food all around the world. I can imagine. Yeah, and then that wrapped up. During that time, I was doing improvisation and then I found Clown and I loved.
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It was so fun, it was so incredible because I was always helping, facilitating engagement with an audience or telling stories in television. But here when I was performing, I was doing it myself. I was actually in it. So I just fell in love with that. So when television wrapped up, I just made a decision, you know what, I'm going to make a choice to see what I can do career-wise in this direction. So I started, and things went well. I started working for Blue Man.
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I got a job touring as a clown internationally for a partner of Cirque du Soleil called Spiegel World. And all along during that time, I was like, ah, I think I can also combine all of these storytelling skills and high engagement skills to actually help clients. So then I started speaking for tech clients at trade shows like Adobe, Cisco, Medtronic. I was speaking at trade shows in Vegas and all around the country. After a while, I was like, you know what?
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I think I can help people with this knowledge I have, this really weird background of, A, engaging with thousands in an entertainment way as a clown, and also delivering important data, like marketing data, sales data, with the intent of persuasion. I figured there's a way that I can help people with this knowledge, and that brought me into teaching at Google and coaching and writing my book, which is about exactly that.
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Oh yes, we're going to talk about the book for sure. First of all, anyone who's listening and hears that you were hanging out with Rachel Ray, anytime there's an Oprah put a J on it, did you meet Oprah? No, no. This was pre her syndicated talk show. Ah, okay. But I think she was in the Oprah orbit at the time, but I was just a guy directing television. I was not part of the cool celeb culture at all. Right.
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So when you left producing, you weren't into being a clown. What is it that makes you connect with audiences while doing that kind of work? Sure. Well, Roberta, have you ever done any kind of theater or anything? You seem very poised. Me poised? Thank you, but me personally, no. I have a brother who's in acting school. Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah. Do you know the term the fourth wall? Have you ever heard of that? No, unfortunately not.
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Well, in the theatrical sense, if you're watching a play, right? And you're looking at a kitchen on the stage, there's three walls of that kitchen, the two sides and the back. There's also, you're imagining a fourth wall between you and the actors up there. And the actors are imagining it as well, because that in their mind is an enclosed kitchen, right? Right. So that would be acting. When it comes to clown and the kind of public speaking I'm talking about, we wanna make
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do everything we can do to destroy that fourth wall. So when I'm speaking, I am absolutely aware of you. You are absolutely aware that I'm up here and we're aware of each other that both of us are watching. So that's what got me with Clown. The first time I was really surprised and attracted to it, I was taking an improv comedy class and the teacher was doing a scene on the stage and
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Whenever we in the audience would laugh, he would like look at us and then look back and keep doing it. He would give us a take. He would take the audience. I was like, he's pulling me into the scene. That's amazing. I felt so included when he did that. And after the show, I was like, what was that? He was like, that was clown. I was doing clown in that. Is it more funny? Because you laughed at first, he looks at you.
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So now when he goes back and continues, that's more hilarious? Well, now I'm included in what he's doing because he's kind of invited me in on the journey, as opposed to never looking at us and pretending like everything is fine. I remember once a clown instructor of mine, this is a terrible story, but he was sitting outside of a 7-Eleven and this little boy walked out with a huge, like one of those gallon things of Mountain Dew.
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and he didn't know that the kid, the kid walks through the door and drops the Mountain Dew and the kid just sits and stares at the Mountain Dew and then like looks up at the guy sitting in his car and he just burst out laughing because the kid just shared his experience, shared his feeling in that moment with and that's relatable right? We've had those moments where we always make a mess yes in front of everyone.
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But we usually just jump into, I'm embarrassed, I look bad, what are people gonna say? I just made a mess, why don't we become like the kid and just laugh? Well, that's what I get into about authenticity and vulnerability. If you say, for example, knock over a coffee when you're presenting, if you acknowledge it, own it, and confidently move on.
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You've got that audience more on your side than you did before. But there is one caveat to that. I amazingly found a statistic, a study that was done in 1966. I'm surprised this isn't quoted all the time. It was called the Pratt Fall Effect. A guy did a study of professional speakers, highly competent speakers and not so competent speakers. The highly competent speakers were very polished.
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you know, no filler words, they had great eye contact, the less competent speakers less so, they weren't prepared stumbling around. And in this study, both of these groups of speakers would spill coffee while they were speaking. And then they measured the audience's likability of those speakers at the conclusion of the study. Likability or warmth, how warm, how much did they like the speaker? They found that
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for the highly competent speakers who spilled their coffee, they were much more likable than the highly competent speakers that were perfect. So having one little imperfection, if you are highly competent, makes you more likable. But here's the caveat, the people who were not highly competent, the people who were not prepared and spilled their coffee, audience did not like them, did not like them.
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Yeah, you're here to waste my time. You don't take the assignment seriously. So what are we doing? Yeah, I like the fact that the coffee spilling is what was used as an example, because the one thing I always emphasize when I coach people on public speaking is that making a mistake is going to happen. Make peace with that. The best speakers that you know make mistakes. Don't let
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Let fear of making a mistake be the reason you don't even want to give us a shot. Everybody does. So remove that fear because you'll always make a mistake. People will relate to you and you can use those mistakes to your advantage. Like you said, you can use it to connect to the audience, have a laughing moment, have something that's going to be relatable to them. Yeah, for sure. I like to say ATM, acknowledge it, take responsibility for it. Don't blame somebody else.
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and then move on, just move on. I also like to say if the audience notices it, if it's a small bobble that they don't even know, you don't need to acknowledge it. The example I always use, I don't know if you've ever been in a presentation where there's a car alarm going off. Like I was in a presentation once and the car alarm was going off and that presenter would not acknowledge it. He's just gonna keep going like a steamroller.
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And all I could think of was like, please just acknowledge that there's a crime. Everybody in the room can hear it. Yeah. Yeah. He pretended like nothing is happening right now. Right. Right. I'm like, am I crazy? Am I hearing something? Does this person hear this too? Everyone in the room thought like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But an advanced level, once you get comfortable with making mistakes and continuing on, you can acknowledge the mistake.
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take responsibility, then connect it to your message. If you can spill that coffee up, I spilled coffee, my bad. This spilled coffee is just like our profits spilling out in the second quarter. That's when you're really dealing with a clown level. Like you're able to take everything that's coming, wrap it into your message as you move forward. Which brings in the comedy aspect as well.
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Cause I was saying earlier that a lot of us, we get so consumed by the idea of this is my assignment. I need to take it seriously, which we should. And we forget to actually make people laugh once every other section of the speech, whatever it is. It doesn't have to be a full comedy special, but just to have that relaxed moment once in a while. Yeah, absolutely. Humor's tough. I like to recommend folks to not try and write jokes. That can be dangerous.
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Because I'm sure as you know and your audience knows, never make fun of your audience. No. And never make fun of what they love. And that just circles back to really, really doing your research on the demographics of who you're speaking to. Pretty much the only safe thing to poke fun at is yourself. You will never go wrong making fun of yourself. That's what clown's all about. Having fun with the foibles of the human that's up there and getting the audience to relate to that journey.
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Self-deprecating, but not harmful. Yeah, self-deprecating. This is another thing that I find sometimes. I don't know if you found this, Roberta, when some people are so self-deprecating, they start to seem to leave a little bit needy, like they want you to encourage them. Like, I like to encourage folks. The whole thing for speaking with Klan Presence is first building a foundation of you are enough. If you know you're enough,
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at the beginning that you don't need validation from the audience. You're simply there to be of service to them. You're going to be great and anything that happens, you can move forward. But if you think you need validation from the audience to be okay, that starts a problematic dynamic between you and the audience. And there's a lot of ways to build up that confidence. And I'm sure you have plenty of ways that you work with your clients. Of course. Yes.
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Like I said, needing that validation, because guess what happens? There's a moment when one audience member is gonna need to look at their phone, not because you're boring, but maybe there's an emergency at school and they need to go pick up the kid. If you need external validation, what conclusions are you going to come to if that person has to quickly sneak out of the room? You see what I mean? What did I do wrong? Exactly, you're gonna turn it back to you. Right, right.
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Now let's talk about your Google journey, because this is mainly the very foundation of this podcast, helping mostly tech and engineers who have embraced this social identity we've given them of, oh, you're a nerd, you're quiet, you're gonna program brilliantly and we'll take it from there. Then they promote it to leadership positions and suddenly they need to manage people and give presentations of what they're programming.
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But now this is not something that was a curriculum at university. Talk to us basically about your work at Google. How do you help them? For sure. I teach a six two hour session series on public speaking there. It started as a virtual presence program during pandemic and now it's in person. And I do have a lot of engineers, a lot of non-native speakers in there. And I think.
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What makes it different is, and I was mentioning this with you before, is the focus on positive feedback. I think with perfs and performance reviews, things like that, they're very used to getting constructive feedback and things they need to work on and KPIs and stuff like that that they need to work on. However, I think for presence and confidence, that's less helpful at the outset. It's more important
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in my classes to give them a strong base of positive feedback for a time so they can generate that confidence that they can really hear feedback, positive and constructive feedback. Because I think if you give a bunch of constructive feedback really fast, folks like this who are maybe less comfortable speaking on stage, it just reduces their humanity even more. We see even less of the personality that this person is.
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especially with these folks who are non-native speakers. And I get it. Idioms are crazy. Like I always am catching myself like, oh, you know, two birds with one stone. People are like, what did you just say? Like I have to explain it. And I totally get that. However, just because the grammar isn't perfect doesn't mean these folks aren't some of the most compelling emotional speakers I have ever heard.
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There's a guy I know in Toastmasters here in Silicon Valley, Chinese fella, he has pretty strong accent, but you know what? His presentations are so incredibly compelling. He speaks from the heart, he speaks emotionally, he makes me tear up. Grammar is important, but it's not everything, that's what I'm saying. So I guess to answer your question, the difference is I start with lots of positive feedback before I get into.
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minutia of hand gestures and vocal variety. The nautigrates. I'm so glad you brought that up because I spent the last decade teaching English in South Korea. And with language, you have to speak. I can teach you all the grammar in the world, but you speaking and being in scenarios where you are going to speak English is the best way that you're going to learn the language. And I used to find that the challenge was
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The need to be perfectly speaking and having perfect grammar was the reason they didn't even try it all sometimes. These are brilliant kids, diligent, everything, but the fact that they are so afraid of making a mistake was usually the barrier to them just having a conversation, even though they knew the material. But then you also have the fear of actual English speakers saying, I'm afraid to make a mistake when I'm doing my presentation, so I'm not gonna try it all.
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Sure. I get that. I mean, you're in the heart of improv comedy out there in Chicago. Have you tried any improv out there? I haven't been. I once into about two or three improv sessions back in South Korea. Yeah. I encourage pretty much everyone in my classes to jump into an intro to improv class because here's what it taught me when I first started. I learned that no matter how carefully I prepare a presentation,
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If a curve ball is thrown at me and I need to work on impulse and respond to a question extemporaneously or something like that, oftentimes my extemporaneous improvised response is better than anything I could have ever written beforehand. And you will never learn that unless you're in a safe space where you are encouraged to speak on impulse like in an improv class. I find it's more
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you learn to trust yourself. It's like, oh, I can handle this. I don't need to come up with five funny lines to say on the drive over to the improv class because I can trust myself that what will come out of my mouth will be funny and fine and it won't be inappropriate. It won't get me reported to HR. It will be fine. But you only learn that through low stakes practice in a supportive environment. Mm-hmm.
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building your confidence, which is the one thing we emphasize on. And then what's the other thing as well that people need to be cognizant of when giving speeches and presentations? Let's see, what did we cover? We covered engagement. Yes. I'd love to give a simple tip for adding humor to a presentation, even for non-funny people. A joke is built like this. You set up a pattern and then you disrupt the pattern.
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Classic Groucho Marx one-liner. Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know. We set up an expectation and then we broke that expectation. Oh, I thought the elephant was not in the pajamas. You were wearing the pajamas, that's right, yes. So the quickest way to set up a pattern is have a list of three.
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So an easy way to add a little bit of humor, I was pleased to see in an Amazon review, a guy read my book and then used this at a wedding toast. You give a list of three, like I was really wanted to prepare for my interview with Roberta. So I got a good night's sleep, I exercised, and then I drank three gallons of coffee in the minute before we turned on the Zoom. So you do normal, normal, exaggerated.
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Ah, drop the bomb on the third. Yeah, like, oh, he's just going to say a third thing that's along these lines. But I gave kind of a ridiculous exaggeration on the third one. That's kind of a safe way to add a joke, if you will. The rule of three. And speaking of jokes that are inappropriate, I always say to people, the joke must be relevant to the material you're already delivering. Don't do the...
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A doctor and a lawyer walk into a bar. Those jokes are tired. People have heard them. They're lame. And they're not related to your speech. Right. It's funny. Like I said, in my class, I say, listen, do everybody a favor. Don't even try the jokes. It's going to make it easier for you for a while. Right. But from a clown perspective, the performer is the joke. So if you can tell a bad joke, knowing that.
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The joke is me telling a bad joke, that's what dad jokes are. We're laughing at the joke teller, not the joke. I do that at cybersecurity conferences. I tell cybersecurity dad jokes when I'm speaking to gather a crowd for my pitches. But why did the CISO have to go to the chiropractor? CISO, chiropractor. It's like the person in charge of IT at a company. The answer would be because he had bad security posture.
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Okay. Oh. Which is a terrible joke that only IT people will get and they will all groan and smile and giggle at me, the bad joke teller. Right. So that was the dead joke you told and so they're laughing at you because it's- Exactly. It's not funny. It's a terrible joke. Yeah.
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And it's not even funny for them. It's like, it's a growner. It's what you would call a growner of a joke. So they say lame, but laugh and say, oh, that's a good thing right there. Yeah. And then when it comes to public speaking, you said you're a speaker. The engagement, the jokes, well, if you're good at them, is there anything else that we might have forgotten to mention that you incorporate into your speeches? I think I want to encourage your audience, anything they can do to get the focus.
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off themselves is going to be helpful. I like to focus on being of service to the audience. That's a great way to deal with stage fright is kind of re-focusing. It's not, I gotta be perfect. I gotta get these things right. It's like, I have some knowledge that I really want these people to have. What can I do to make sure there's nothing in the way of them getting this message? That for me works and it relaxes me a little bit.
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being self-conscious and thinking, hey, that's when the fear of making a mistake comes. When you think everything is about you. Yeah, instead of being with the audience and making sure they're engaged and just take them through the journey of wherever you're taking them. Absolutely. Yeah, so tell us a little bit more about your book. Yes, thank you for asking. It is called, Wink, Transforming Public Speaking with Clown Presence.
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And it touches a lot on what we're talking about. I broke it down into the five P's, which would be personal confidence, which we talked a lot about. Partnership, imperfection, and preparation. Yes, it's personal confidence, preparation, which is all the standard best practices for public speaking. Partnership, which starts to get into more of a clown element, like I talked about removing the fourth wall.
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and dealing with the imperfection and the value of humanity. And then finally, kind of the pinnacle of this work is play. How can I start to use pattern and the rule of three and things like that to actually play with my audience? Even in the most serious of topics, there are still ways that I can have joy and they can have joy in the communication regardless of what the topic is.
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All right, so the five P's from the book Wink by Don Coliver. Any last words of wisdom, Don, before we ask for your social media handles? Just like I said, I would love your audience to know that they are enough. You're enough. Find yourself a space for low stakes practice and find that joy in communication and your audiences will be grateful for bringing you the message that only you can bring.
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Words of wisdom from Don Colliver, the clown teacher and public speaking coach for Google and Silicon Valley. Thank you so much for being on our show today. Thank you so much, Roberta. It was a blast. And if we want to continue the conversation, where do we find you on the socials?
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Very good. Well, for your listeners, if they're interested in getting an exercise that they can do to build their audience engagement skills, they can go to doncolliver.com forward slash wink dash exercise. Doncolliver.com forward slash wink dash exercise. They'll get a free exercise they can do with some friends to actually get them more on their toes and aware of their audience and build these skills that we're talking about.
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Otherwise, I'm at LinkedIn, Don Colliver. That's primarily where I communicate with folks is via LinkedIn and my books on Amazon. Excellent. Thank you so much. And don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review. That was Don Colliver. Thank you for listening.