I interview Seamus Byrne and he shares some helpful steps to help you rock your virtual engagements. Seamus could be described as a citizen of the world, having been born in the U.S and holding both a U.S and Irish passport. He’s attended school in Dublin, London, and Limerick and has lived in Paris for 7 years after college. His wife is French/Spanish and together, they have two kids and immediate family in 5 countries.
A background that’s helped to shape his passion for human behavior and his fascination with how humans think, interact and make decisions. Seamus has 20 years of experience in HR and Recruitment, having worked for big tech firms. He is also a Director of www.sapient.ie and is affiliated to SNP Communications.
His biggest influences are the works of Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris as well as Steven Pinker. All of whom have influenced his 5 steps that’ll help you rock your virtual engagements.
- The elephant and the rider
- How do webcams and virtual technology affect the recruitment process?
- Brad Pitt’s charm
- How do you fully engage your audience in a virtual meeting or conference?
- How can you improve interaction with your audience?
As virtual meetings and engagements are still relatively new to us, a lot can be done to improve the experience for your audience, leaving you with so much room to try new things and make your virtual meetings as fun and engaging as possible.
Seamus Byrne shares with us his 5 steps that’ll help you rock your virtual engagements:
The elephant and the rider
Johnathon Height, a social psychologist covered this concept in his book, “The happiness hypothesis”. The elephant and the rider analogy is a way to describe how our minds work. The elephant represents the unconscious mind, and the rider as the conscious and aware side of the mind. The rider thinks he’s in control, but he isn’t, the elephant is.
The elephant is deliberate, big, strong, stubborn, intelligent and uncommunicative, it’s hard to know what the elephant wants directly, but it learns by observing while the rider, or the rational mind, thinks he knows where he’s going, but in actuality, the elephant brings us into another direction. The rider is simply left to explain the course of decision in a post hoc fashion.
How does the unconscious affect the way we communicate?
Albert Mehrabian experiments in the 60’s, investigated inter-personal latent emotional communication. He found that people derived meaning in communication in the following ways:
- 7% was the words we used
- 38% was the tone of voice
- 55% came from non-verbal cues
Your body can convey a message you’re often unaware of. Remember, the body doesn’t lie!
How do webcams and virtual technology affect the recruitment process?
You’re interacting with a 2D shape, so a lot of information that you’d use to make up your mind is now lost. Our intuitive gut feeling is impaired and we have to refer to data, which leaves you feeling like you’ve had an unsatisfying experience. This forces us to challenge our assumptions of what we think it’s going to be like, so how do we adapt to this new normal?
- Be more alert, engage them in a way so that you “pull” them into the same room you’re in.
- Don’t rely on your normal patterns of communication.
- Keep it relevant, get clued up on what is happening with the person you’re communicating with.
- Be more interesting and engaging than normal because it’s easier to lose your audience’s attention.
Brad Pitt’s charm
Brad Pitt has a natural onscreen charm when the camera focuses on him, but if he were to walk into a room full of people, that would be lost and he’d have to work a lot harder. In a similar way, we need to engage and bridge the gap in virtual meetings. In the absence of physical presence, you need to draw your audience in even more. You have to try to be extra charming and really get them involved.
How do you fully engage your audience in a virtual meeting or conference?
- Dial up your curiosity.
- Dial down your own ego.
- Increase your interest in them.
- Spend more time finding out what they need to know.
- How can you improve interaction with your audience?
- Be customer-centric and not seller-centric. Seek to understand with your audience, don’t try to manipulate your audience or customer to meet your objective or agenda. It’s important to focus on the other person so you can build a rapport and influence them, this way everybody wins.
In conclusion, remember to focus more on your audience and what they need to know, than focusing on what you want to say. Never take your audience for granted, simply getting to know them a little can make your virtual engagements more meaningful and make you far more likely to succeed.
