The Pin Drop Principle
Written By: David Lewis & G. Riley Mills
The “Pin Drop Principle” is a book filled with the tools for good communication. The goal of the book is to teach readers how to communicate and engage their audience, so deeply to the point that if a pin were to drop in the presenter’s audience it could be heard. The authors take a unique approach to the book focusing on what actors learn to captivate their audiences. Both authors have been involved in acting and the corporate world and joined together to found a company that gives workshops on how to communicate well. The company has grown respectably and has been awarded many times for its innovation in learning and training.
Some main themes that are pushed throughout the book are: great orators achieve great success only with lots of practice, it is entirely the presenter’s fault if the audience loses interest, and a presenter needs to speak with intention and objective.
You might be thinking what I thought at first, that intention and objective are pretty much the same thing. The way that Lewis and Mills depict these words though is that “objective” means your end goal, or what you want to be the result of your presentation to be, and the “intention” is how you intend on reaching that objective, or eliciting certain feelings from the audience. So a simple objective might be a sales associate with a desire to sell a box of LED light bulbs, and his intention might be to excite, build trust, and reassure his audience in order to reach his objective. If the associate were to only focus on selling the box of LED bulbs, he will most likely come off as that stereotype of a pushy and dishonest salesman who is not that concerned with the wellbeing of the customer.
So how do we convey elicit emotions from our audience? Well, the book goes into great detail of effective methods to do so, but what I have grasped in the big picture is that the audience wants to feel cared for to the point where a relationship is developed with the presenter and to know that the presenter is credible. This must be accomplished with both verbal and nonverbal cues. Nonverbal factors include posture, direction of the torso, eye contact, facial expressions, and gestures. Verbal factors include physical aspects of speech such as pitch, volume, intonation, and then there is the substance that includes ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos would include speaking with honesty, proving to be reasonable, genuine, and reliable. Pathos embodies an appeal to the audience's emotion such as igniting feelings or being empathetic with the audience. Logos is appeal to logic. This is how the presenter shows support with facts, evidence, and claims that are reasonable and accurate. Now, like I said, the book goes into great detail with all of these factors, but with a focus and troubleshooting of these things, one should be able to develop effective communication.
One really cool practice that was presented within the book is what the authors called a “murder board.” A murder board is a mock presentation in which the audience provides feedback and asks questions that could potentially be presented in a real situation. The audience helps the presenter to refine answers and to become comfortable with their presentation. An important point that was stated within this book that Peter Drucker also focuses on in his book “Managing Oneself” is that feedback analysis should be unbiased. Friends are not your friends with feedback analysis. A friend does not want to hurt your feelings. Practice is essential to becoming an effective and confident communicator, and I don’t believe there is a better way to do so than with a murder board.
This book was very well organized and achieved the author’s objective of supplying me with the tools to practice in order to become an effective communicator. The book contains exercises to practice the lessons and is organized in a way that got me engaged more than a majority of the books I have read. Lewis and Mills were great teachers. I learned a lot from this book and would highly recommend it to absolutely anyone.