In this engaging episode, hosts Daniel, Adam and guest Graham Norris explore their personal journeys within the Toastmasters program, highlighting its significant impact on their public speaking skills and confidence. They share stories about overcoming initial fears and discuss how repeated practice at Toastmasters helped them become better communicators. Graham describes how his experience with Toastmasters led him into a career as a professional speaker and organisational psychologist. The conversation also delves into broader themes of navigating change and uncertainty, making informed decisions, and the importance of experimentation. Both host and guest underscore the invaluable benefits of Toastmasters in various facets of life and business, making a strong case for participation in such programs.
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:23 Personal Toastmasters Journeys
01:31 Overcoming Public Speaking Fears
04:45 Practical Benefits of Toastmasters
07:43 Transition to Professional Speaking
10:14 Navigating Future Uncertainties
23:26 The Value of Experimentation and Decision Making
26:09 Conclusion and Contact Information
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Connect with Graham Norris LinkedIn by clicking here –https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamnorris/
Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here –https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielwelling/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris/
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here –https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
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We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript
Hello everyone and welcome back to It’s A Numbers Game. I’m Adam Morris, and as always, I’m joined by my co-host Daniel Welling. In this episode, we are chatting with organizational psychologist and futurist Graham Norris. Someone Daniel knows from Toastmaster days about confidence, communication and making better decisions about the future.
So stick with us because in the next half an hour you’ll hear how Toastmasters can take you from terrified of speaking to actually enjoying being on stage. And this is something that matters to m Ms. Ponas, running webinars, team meetings, and sales presentations. a practical way to think about the future without getting paralyzed by uncertainty. This will help you make clearer, bolder decisions in your MSP instead of kicking them down the road , and how to turn worry and overthinking into a useful tool,
right. That’s enough from me. Let’s jump into the conversation with Graham.
Daniel: Graham, welcome to the program.
Graham: Thank you very much, Daniel. Great to be here.
Daniel: We, as we often do, had a little chat in the green room just before pressing the record button. And what we thought we’d do, first of all, is, well, there’s kind of two topics we want to cover today. leaning into your fascinating, and multi-pronged, career. but the first thing we wanted to talk about was reflect on our own individual journeys within the Toastmasters program, which for those of you that don’t know, Toastmasters is, an international, an international group, a format with lots of local. local events. the one we go to is bi biweekly and, enables us to practice both our public speaking but also our evaluation of others speaking. And in doing so, develop, develop our ability to communicate and. Interestingly, we have all been, Adam was in Toastmasters, for a number of years. Graham, you and I met through our local Toastmasters, group, and I’ve been talking to people generally about my experience with Toastmasters and how. Most people are surprised when I say I’m not very confident, public speaking, and I often get the, well, Daniel, you are a sales person, surely you are happy to, to speak and Generally I am, but just not when there’s a number of people in the audience.
how did, how did you first get involved with Toastmasters? Graham?
Graham: I first joined Toastmasters in 2010 when I was living in Beijing, and it was one of the first things I did when I got there. I think actually the first day I arrived in Beijing. I joined Toastmasters. I joined a Toastmasters club there, and I remember the first experience I had was. Doing the, they have an impromptu session, in the Toastmasters meetings. And I just remember standing up in front of this group of people and I almost couldn’t see anything. It was like looking into a black hole. I just felt like the whole world was looking at me. and it was almost like the, you know, the pressure of getting sucked into a black hole or something, and how stressful that was.
And yet, over the years of. Repeatedly putting myself through that experience that I would got to the stage where I could tolerate that. And then it was kind of neutral for me. And then eventually I started enjoying it and I started really appreciating that you can share ideas and connect with groups of people at the same time and really find that a very fulfilling experience.
And so that’s how I ended up, you know, going into, professional speaking. More full time. And you know, and when you look back 15 years, it’s, it is almost quite incredible the transition. But I’ve seen it in so many people who go to Toastmasters and build that confidence standing in front of a group of people and sharing their experiences.
Daniel: And Adam, your entry to the
Adam: Well, as a professional public speaker, no. So, but it’s interesting ’cause Miro, a lot of what you’ve just said there actually, Graham, and the fear, I mean, what drove me to it was that I just, I found myself. Health in the position of running a small business or owning a small business and realizing that it would involve talking to people.
And and I had a fear, a phobia almost, around it. and so I had to confront it head on. the opportunity arose and I decided. Yeah, I had to decide what I was gonna do about this, and I joined, and the first meeting was, you know, really hard and frightening. And the second was a little bit easier, and the third was a little bit easier again.
and so it goes on, and then suddenly you find yourself, as you said, suddenly enjoying it. and then you, there’s like a kind of pivot where you go, oh my God, how did that happen? And of course, it only happens through practice. Perseverance, consistency, all of these things. and I think I was a member for about six years.
I think, you know, it’d sort of run its course as things tend to do. I felt it was the right time for me to drop it. but I, I think, my speaking stagnated probably because of that, I think I would benefit from, you know, having some refresher sessions. it’s a bit like, it’s a bit like anything, isn’t it?
It’s a muscle really. you’ve gotta keep training it. You’ve gotta keep practicing it. or else it’ll atrophy. So, yeah, for me, it was, massive in terms of building that confidence. there are still butterflies, but I think they’re positive butterflies now. and I would, as I’ve always said, to anyone recommend you do something like Toastmasters.
It doesn’t have to be Toastmasters. I believe there are others out there, although that’s probably the most well known. yeah. if this is something you think you can improve on, or you think holds you back, then just go for it.
Daniel: And prac practical implementation of this for most of our listeners in the MSP community will be hosting webinars or in-person seminars and having to, if you’ve been successful in building an audience, you have to then stand at the front of the room with the microphone and. Hand a microphone shaking, ideally, getting that under control, first of all, and then becoming confident and comfortable and thus putting the audience in a, in a happier place.
also, and, Graham, you, you’ve been there and done that over the 15 years, I’m guessing.
Graham: That’s right. And I’d also like to say, and this is maybe relevant to your listeners here, is the fact that in some ways the biggest benefit I got out of Toastmasters was not just being able to speak to audiences, but actually being able to speak more confidently and clearly on in one-on-one situations. That was probably the most noticeable thing because I was speaking a one-on-one with people much more frequently than I was speaking to large groups of people. And I’d noticed that I could articulate myself more clearly. I was reducing all those filler words that we tend to punctuate our speaking with, and really just think more clearly about what I wanted to communicate, and how to conduct that relationship.
So I’d say honestly, the skills that you learn in Toastmasters are applicable in many different
Adam: and again, just to extend it, it, it’s applicable to talking to your own team, right? Could be three people, it could be 30 people. Again, articulating your message. having that confidence. in a sales situation, you might have 3, 4, 5, 6 people in a room and you’ve gotta manage the eye contact, you’ve gotta manage the communication, the body language.
You’ve got to understand the interactions. There’s so much sort of going on, isn’t there? So the more experience and, confidence you have in those situations, it’s gonna, it’s gonna, I think it, it, cross crosses over to lots of different things essentially.
Daniel: really great points. and I guess my final point on, on. provision of feedback, in evaluating other speaking and the, the sort, the standard, tech technique of, sandwiching a recommendation with two compliments. E even just having that in your ram memory as you go about day-to-day trying to, to convey. concepts and information to others. it’s, it’s very useful. So, and I joined predominantly because of my extreme nerves in speaking to, to, to groups, but, happily surfaced my. Perhaps overuse of filler words, which I continue to work on day to day. thank, thankfully most of the content that’s produced actually is edited.
So a lot of my filler words I can edit out, but that’s not always possible. So I am definitely, still working on that in my Toastmasters journey. And, so, so Graham, you’ve gone on to not just. Improve your speaking, but to actually make it a profession. you, you now are a public speaker paid. Tell us about how you found your way into that.
Graham: That’s right. Well, I was, you know, working as an organizational psychologist and also, finishing up my doctorate and I realized there really was a space there for, sharing the, those learnings because there’s a lot of people they spend most of their days. Stuck in the day-to-day, dealing with emails and calls and meetings and so forth becoming a little bit detached from the future.
And as the future seems to be speeding up and becoming more confusing, I saw there’s a lot of space to help people lean into those uncertainties. So, you know, I describe myself now as a, as an organizational psychologist and futurist, and what I really do is help companies going through change, think more clearly about the future so that they can realize their ambitions. And the bottom line for that. It’s really about that decision making. All decisions are about the future, and we’re increasingly asked to make decisions that have longer term impacts, and yet we are most practiced at making decisions just for the immediate term. We spend most of our lives thinking about the next few seconds. If we ask people, you know, what’s on your calendar for tomorrow? They probably won’t know. We are, we’re mostly stuck in the here and now and the today, and yet we’re making decisions that will have impacts months, even years in the future. And people don’t feel so confident about that. They hesitate, they be procrastinate.
They second guess themselves, put their heads in the sand and that’s. Hap tends to happen when the future gets more confusing, more uncertain, and that’s exactly the kind of time when we need to be leading more into it and really trying to see through the fog and un understand what we want to try to achieve from it.
Daniel: really e even today, some of the examples you gave, I’ve lived those to today in con conversations and, and situations. I think this is a really interesting thread for us to pull on actually, because it does, does go alongside the, the work that, that Adam and I do as part of MSP finance team in helping MSP owners. Establish what their current reality is from, certainly from a business, but you know, with a financial focus. and then. Setting that future vision and then the resulting plan that, that goes from that. So, so I’m pretty sure there’s, there’s some interesting, tactics and techniques that perhaps we can borrow from you, to today, Graham, to aid that process.
ca can you give us an example perhaps of, of a typical engagement and how you might break that down?
Graham: Well, what I really talk about is when we’re looking at the future, there are really elements of the future outside of our control. So those are the uncertainties. The drivers have changed the things that will shape the future that we have to live with. So it, it could be, geopolitical, you know, disruption.
It could be technological evolutions, it could be societal changes. And then there are the elements of the future that we have some influence over. We never have full control, but we have some influence over these things. and that’s really the space where we make our decisions. Because by making those decisions in, within that space, we’re maximizing our control over what happens. And so I help people realize that, you know, I often talk about people being DIY futurists. We all have this capacity to look deeply into the future and try to figure out what the possibilities are. We won’t know exactly what’s gonna happen. we like to make predictions, and predictions are usually wrong, but if we can let go of that tendency to make predictions. Employ what I call full spectrum thinking to look at all the possibilities, then we can move ahead much more confidently because we’ve thought through what might happen, even if it could be the bad things, not as well as the good things. So that’s what I really encourage people to do. and I’m curious to hear for MSPs what kind of challenges or what kind of uncertainties. Do, do people face that they, you know, causes them to hesitate and maybe kick things down the road? delay the delay, those decisions.
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Daniel: E everything you’ve actually just mentioned. societal change, working from home, pandemics, technological, moving to the clouds, security. Ai, all of, I mean, MSPs I think are probably your archetypal futurist, and I’m pretty sure there’ll be some interested, interested listeners to this episode for that.
ai I think everybody is grappling with that at the moment in terms of, am I gonna make billions or lose billions? will I have a job? Will I not? and and for the MSP, they’re like, you know, should I even. Be doing this at all because, my, my general, you know, 90% of my business is infrastructure, not applications.
And, maybe office productivity is where the AI overlap is. But, yeah, so, it’s a really interesting time for the MSP.
Adam: Graham, can I just circle back to what you were saying around that, component of control and looking at, the different things that could pan out, I think is what you said. what kind of resonated a little bit there with me. was a tendency for my own brain to, to, if you are taking a negative stance on this.
2, 2, 2 kind of terms to describe some of my behaviors. One overthinking. Two worrying Now, I would say the worrying whilst a negative behavior had a positive outcome. Certainly in terms of building my MSP business, the worrying drove action. It drove, improvement in performance. It drove, the focus on detail, what could go wrong.
and, those behaviors ultimately resulted in a successful business. at the time they, all of those emotions weren’t necessarily positive because of it’s, it’s a type of worry. and maybe overthinking is the brother of worry. you know, some somewhere. So I’m interested to know. If I’m completely off track here with that sort of view or whether there’s some kind of connection between, how you mentally process this, but in a positive way,
Graham: Sure. I, when I’m looking at teams in particular, any kind of organization where there’s a group of people, normally I try to, I help them identify
what is their perspective on change and uncertainty and the future. Because everybody will look at change and uncertainty in the future in different ways. So some people will be quite visionary. They will be wanting to, you know, turn everything over and start again and create a completely new situation. So we can think about someone like Elon Musk. Some people will be very conservative and want to maintain the status quo. They quite like the way things or that the way they are. They feel quite comfortable with that and they’re trying to just optimize what’s going on at the moment.
And there’ll be people in between who wanna make change, maybe practical change that, doesn’t necessarily completely overhaul the system. It’s nevertheless something substantially better than we have today. And the point I always try to make
is that all of those views are valuable. So we need the visionary to give us hope that we can have a better future.
And we need the managerial type who’s gonna help us give that sense of tradition and connection with the path. ’cause we need to have hope about progress. It’s a very natural thing to wanna progress. We don’t want necessarily wanna be going backwards or just the same as today. We need to feel that sense of progress. But we also need to feel that sense of connection with the past because, you know, just ourselves, we wake up in the morning believing that we are still the same person as we were yesterday. We didn’t wake up sort of fresh thinking, okay, what are my values gonna be today? What are my beliefs today?
What’s my worldview today? No, we’re the same person as yesterday. So we need to have that sense of connectivity. And indeed, many companies, are very proud of their histories. And we are normally very proud of our histories as well. And then of course, we need that practical. Sense of entrepreneurship in between, which says, okay, without sort of changing everything, what can we actually achieve?
What can we really do today that’s gonna make a, an incremental or a substantial difference to how things are? And so, as you said that worrying ca doesn’t have to be bad, right? It may be unpleasant or uncomfortable, and yet it also has a role to play and it can be, very useful as you try to make decisions and move forward into the future.
Adam: but is, in terms of the, in terms of those, trying to predict outcomes or possible outcomes, how does, how do you twist? or maybe you don’t, I’m interested to know what your thoughts are on that. challenge around overthinking something, trying to be trying to be too smart and too predict to trying to predict too much what may happen versus actually an appropriate level of, of thinking around all the different things that could happen, could go well, could not go well.
I’m just trying to sort of make sense of that.
Graham: Sure. I’d say when people look at the future, they often get overwhelmed with it. Sometimes, particularly it used to be, I used to talk to people about the future and their eyes were quickly glaze over ’cause it just seemed too overwhelming. There were just too many things to think about, and I’ll just go back to my emails.
that’s why I’m safe. And so I al I always try to encourage people to say, do you know what most of it is just noise. The bits of the future that are relevant to you. Are actually quite narrow and you can just find very fine slices of the future to look at. So the, probably for MSPs for example, there’s probably, you know, only certain number of things or a certain range of trends and technological advances that are likely to be relevant in the, let’s say the medium term. And so if we can focus just on those things. Understand the possibilities of those elements, then we can feel, more comfortable that we’ve got a handle on what could happen. the problem is that we’re so overwhelmed. I mean, I tell people not to read the news because if you read the news, you’ll see views that will tell you that AI is going to save us from cancer and all humanities problems, and it’s gonna kill us all.
It’s gonna end humanity. It’s not healthy. it’s not useful to be taking such extreme. views and to let your mood and your, decision making be influenced by those things in the short and medium term. I, you know, I often think about the, the sort of challenge we face. We’ve had the luck to live through the information revolution, right?
So, you know, when I was a kid, if you wanted to find something out, you had to go to the library, right? Whereas now we have infinite amounts of information available to us, and we feel that we just. Can solve all our problems by getting more information. But the uncertainties of the future can’t be solved by information.
It’s not an information problem, it’s an imagination problem. We need to apply our imaginations to really thinking through what could happen. And that’s not something we naturally really do that much. and so, you know, a lot of the techniques that futurists use is to really stimulate the imagination so that you can understand the possibilities and then you won’t be just, or like turning the wheels trying to get more information.
Do I have. Right, the right answer here, you’ll feel better to say, okay, I know enough now, I can pull the trigger on this decision and accept the outcomes.
Adam: that all makes sense. and just one last thought without trying to dominate this, it, to what extent should we rely on previous experience as a guide for. What may happen in the future? So if we look at what’s happened in the it, you know, IT industry over the last 30 years, we went from mainframes and mid-range to, to micros.
You know, desktops. And then we went, then we networked these things and had, Nobel Networks and then we had Microsoft, and and then we had this cloud thing and, oh, what’s all this? and then we had this security thing and what’s all this? And now we’ve got the AI thing. and you know, what seemed, what seems to be clear.
is that every five, 10 years there is significant change and everyone just gets on with it and it works out. so do we just go, well, that was the same as it’s always been, so therefore let’s just take ai It’s gonna be the same. Yeah, there’s some stuff we’re gonna have to learn, but it’ll work out.
or should we not rely on those previous sort of, beliefs? what’s your thoughts on that?
Graham: The framework that I use to help people think about this is to engage in mental time travel. So, and absolutely you’re right that the past has a lot of value to us. And so the first stop in this mental trip is to go to the past because there’s a phrase amongst futurists that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And by looking at these past technological evolutions and revolutions, we can understand a lot and get great perspective on what’s happening right now because it’s very easy to overestimate or underestimate what we’re experiencing right now, which is why you get these very extreme. Views about the possibilities of the future.
And then after extracting the value from our experiences, then we can use that to fuel our imaginations, to help us understand what could happen in the future. Because the future is really a continuation of the past. And so the more that we can understand kind of how we arrived, where we are now, the better we’ll be able to understand where we’re gonna be heading into the future. Indeed you, we, it’s very easy to say that AI is just another technology, and at the moment that’s kind of seems how it is, right? That’s how we’re using it. But when we look at the past and then apply that to imagining the future, then we can come back to the present and see much more clearly, oh, okay.
You know, somebody’s extreme things that maybe not, something I should be thinking too much about. I can actually, think clearly about the kinds of decisions that are gonna make a difference.
Daniel: really interesting and a couple of thoughts just, popped into my mind as you were talking there, the first, the societal. a change looking back, was, you know, every, everyone used to work from home, thus the term cottage industry. And then everyone started going to the, to mill and and then work there.
And so now we’re back at home, but that was what, a couple of hundred years the, the cycle there. So, so yeah, maybe we’ve got a little bit of time before the robots take over and do everything for us. And, the other thing that really, sprung to my mind was, this morning I saw an advert for, an IMAX version of Back to the Future to celebrate its 40th anniversary.
So that, that’s right. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, back to the future is 40 years old. So how does that make you feel?
Graham: Yep. Still, well, it, you know, it, and it’s, it was a good movie and I’m sure, on the bigger screen it’ll be even better.
Daniel: absolutely. But think thinking back to my childhood, that was a film that really sparked my imagination. And as you were talking earlier, that, you can’t base everything on facts and figures of past. you gotta think about these things and become infused and excited and, and, and that, that film, I think that’s one of the things that makes it such a, aside from it being a really well. Well, well written film, and a great story. it does, it’s got a magic about it. And so, so, yeah, if we can take a, an ounce of that magic and apply it into our business planning as MSPs and imagine a positive, value, filled future, then I think that’s, That’s something to, to certainly rely on. And, and yeah. the final thing I was thinking around this was actually, you talked about all of this really coming down to making decisions and what you can control and you can’t control. so, applying some discipline to. What we allow ourselves to think and make decisions. So like, yes, we might be right or wrong, but actually the most important thing is that we do make a decision and we’re not just a stuck in indecision limbo as it were.
Graham: Absolutely. You know, I encourage people to take an experiment. You know, embrace the spirit of experimentation because, society really emphasizes the need to be right and punishes people who are, seen to be wrong. And this is not a healthy way to, to look at things because you can’t really learn very well like that because you’ll naturally take a very conservative approach to things. Whereas if you can take a more scientific approach and say, well, I’m gonna make a decision and we’re gonna see what happens. Yes, maybe you have a more desirable outcome and a less desirable outcome, but the only failure could be if you don’t learn anything from that experience. So, if you can, and I acknowledge that you can’t do this with every decision.
There are some decisions which have to work out, and so you’re gonna spend more time on those. But for many decisions, you can take a more incremental approach and say, do you know what? let’s see what the outcome’s gonna be. And, that will feed your understanding of the future because by taking these experiments, you will understand more about what might happen going forward.
Daniel: Fa fascinating stuff and, a really interesting conversation, which I didn’t imagine we would have. I thought we were gonna talk most, mostly about Toastmasters, but it’s been really, really interesting. any final thoughts from you, Adam? Have you decided how good an episode this
Adam: Well, no, it’s massive, isn’t it? It’s huge. I’d love to talk about this for hours and, the thing about making a decision, if you don’t make a decision, that’s still a decision, isn’t it? It’s a decision not to make a decision and stay where you are, so you’re still actually making that decision.
I think a lot of people forget that. So, there is still a decision to, to not change. and the other thing associated with this is, I’m not sure how to articulate it, but there’s a cost to not changing, isn’t there? How do you or making a decision or doing something different, what, you know, what could happen?
or rather, what are you missing out on by not making that change? you know, whether it’s fear, uncertainty. you know, there’s a cost sometimes to not making that, that decision or that move. So yes, you may decide to do something. Do you know what? It might not work out that well. Okay. Had you not tried it, you would never know.
and if you just go through life not trying things, think what you’re missing out on. Because some of those are gonna land, aren’t they? Some of those are gonna be successful, but you don’t know unless you try. So I completely, agree with you, Graham, around there is something societal about making poor decisions and being wrong, rather than just looking at and saying, oh, I tried something, it didn’t work out.
That’s okay. We’ll move on. We’ll do something else.
Graham: Absolutely couldn’t agree more.
Daniel: Wow. So on that con controversial bombshell. There, there is no contra controversy. we’ve decided this though. That’s the important thing. Greg, it’s been fascinating talking to you and, yeah, really appreciate your time. And, this is the time in the episode when we offer our guests a, a shameless plug. so, if, if anybody would like to carry on the conversation with you, how best to get in touch.
Graham: Sure you can find me on LinkedIn, or on my website, which is Graham Norris me. And, just get in touch and I’d love to, continue the conversation.
Daniel: and of course available for all manner of, events and speaking gigs.
Graham: Absolutely.
Daniel: Brilliant. Thank you very much indeed.
Graham: Thanks a lot. Thank you very much.