A Bike Ride Into Leadership...Across Chicago
hi there
and welcome to my work from home space
and my living space
uh tonight i want to talk to you about
effective communication
in short i’m going to give you three
principles of effective communication
and tell you a story from my own life
that illustrates this
before that i’m going to try to reach
through the virtual environment
and make this a little bit more engaging
so i want you to think of an instance
where you were a ineffective
communicator
where you didn’t get your message across
it wasn’t effective your end goal wasn’t
reached there was some sort of
miscommunication
something along those lines
now if you’re anything one like me you
probably want to think of yourself
and have in your mind that you’re a
great communicator
and so your confirmation bias is
probably going to
filter out any stories that run contrary
to that
but try to grab one where you were a
poor communicator
and now choose the opposite of that so
remember a time where you were a great
communicator
where people came up to you afterwards
and said you know what
you you communicated so effectively you
got the message across that’s exactly
what you need to hear
i want you to hold those two as we walk
through
these three three principles here
so you know your abcs i’m gonna give you
your cdas
so the three elements of communication
we’re going to talk about tonight are
audience content and delivery
so as you think about that time where
you’re a great communicator think about
who your audience was
who were you talking to what were their
motivations and look beyond just
the number of uh of head count
or um or what their backgrounds were
and really get a sense for the flavor of
who that person is
were they were they working in a
corporate environment
where your communication needed to be
buttoned up was it on the back of
a tailgate where you could let loose a
little bit
and try to bond over common vernacular
what kind of language were they speaking
do they operate
at a fifth grade reading level an eighth
grade
a high school a college advanced degree
first grade
who are they and what do they want most
importantly
then think about the content what did
you actually communicate
what meat was there was it complex was
it a graph was an analysis
or was it a simple urgent message that
you had to get across
as quickly as possible and lastly the
delivery
this is kind of the the cart that
carries the content
um was it via email was it via zoom
was it in person was it over the phone
and what so beyond just
medium of delivery um how did the had
the delivery
method play into how the content was
received
and how that audience reacted so
uh if you’re unlimited time
now’s a great time to stop the video but
if you have time
i’d love to tell you a story from my own
life that that illustrates these three
so i moved to chicago in 2019
uh sorry 2018 june 2018.
i had never been here before i knew zero
people
and from the first day i showed up i
tried to bust open
chicago’s social communities and tried
to engage with as many folks as i could
and one day i met the fundraiser
person that organized fundraisings for a
large non-profit well maybe a medium
non-profit about 10 million dollars
revenue
um here in the city she came to me and
said
she said james uh here’s our mission
we’d love for you to be on board
um and i was like great how can i help i
just moved to the city
i know a few people this seems like a
great exchange here you introduce me to
some people
uh i get some community um and in return
i’d love to help you fundraise because i
really identify with your cause
and she came to me and said that sounds
great you should do a peer-to-peer
fundraiser
but before i agreed to sign on to that
um
i knew i i needed a reason why i had
done
a lot of fundraising before in the
nonprofit world
but i found myself getting burnt out
unless i had engaged with the nonprofit
in a very real way and had my own
personal story of why i was engaging
so i said hold on uh i want a volunteer
first so i volunteered a little bit
and as i saw the inner workings of the
organization i was blown away
i wanted to get my name behind
this organization and take them to the
next level so
uh i went back to her and said great
let’s do this
and her idea was well you have a
birthday coming up
instead of getting birthday gifts go
ahead and just say
make a donation to us
i want to go bigger i’ve always loved
organizing events and i’ve always hated
asking people for money
so perhaps fundraising isn’t in my
future but
i i was good at asking people for things
or their time because i knew i could
control
how good of a time that they had an
event but i didn’t know
how to ask people for money so instead
of fundraising on my own i instead
decided to host a bike ride across
chicago
we called it bike across chicago it’s
going to be 50 miles it’s going to start
north of the city in evanston and end in
the southernmost neighborhood
with points all along the way so we’re
going to start in evanston
cross over howard which is kind of the
chicago northern
border go downtown go out west to the
northernmost neighborhood
and then south to gail gardens the
southernmost neighborhood
and through this we would see 35
neighborhoods of chicago
and really get on the ground feedback on
how
how the city was doing um this was
particularly meaningful for me who had
never been to the south side or the west
side at that time
um so the logistics just seem to
be very attractive here um but
i had this problem now instead of me
simply going on this bike ride and
raising some money
i had to i had to rally a crowd i had to
communicate to that crowd
and get them to buy into my mission i
had to get them to put on helmets
rent borrow or buy their own bikes
and then bike 50 miles of me which is
kind of a large ask
for some people so uh
i targeted in on my audience my audience
were people that
i already knew through some other means
um whether that’s through work
uh most of my most of my audience were
at work so i’ll describe that flavor a
little bit
more depth but there were other people
that
i related to as well
this is a highly educated crowd it’s a
crowd that highly values their time
and is also not scared of an athletic
challenge
so i knew i could rope them in with
the the challenge of 50 miles right that
that would be um
that that wouldn’t be uh it was a
barrier for some but it wasn’t
insurmountable right um this was also a
crowd that
was highly incentive by bragging rights
um
so the fact that i’m convincing them to
buy 50 miles and i guarantee that
they’ll make it
um and that they could brag for the next
year that they biked 50 miles in a
single go that year
um that was another element that i
thought i could hook them with
um and lastly they’re highly educated
and they
uh they had they were from an upper
income
so um i knew that this would be a right
target for
my end result which is raising money for
this nonprofit um
now let’s talk about about the content
um
so for this section
i’m going to deviate a little bit from
that first year of the bike ride and
talk about
the actual content of the ride so it was
a great day uh
it was a little chilly um but as you get
biking and start warming up it
became just perfect um i want to
describe a scene to you
because uh this became the content of my
pitch
in years for the future we’ve done this
right now
three times so it’s a little bit chilly
we’ve been biking all day we’re
approaching austin
which is the western neighborhood in
chicago westernmost
and i don’t know if you’re familiar with
all of chicago but the green line runs
over i believe it’s i believe it’s lake
street
and there’s tons of glass on both sides
we’ve gotten a few flat tires
i’ve held back fixed them and then we’ve
caught up
and there’s a staff member from this
non-profit that’s that’s leaving us at
the time
and all of a sudden he pulls in the
middle of the intersection underneath
the green line and he goes james
leave your team and of course
i i don’t know the route uh i don’t know
what’s going on but he signals me to the
right so i take a right-hand turn
and all of a sudden the skies open up
and it’s sunny and it’s
warm and there’s hundreds of kids lining
the streets
on both sides waving signs and cheering
us on there’s my name on there
there’s the girl that signed up last
minute her name is on there
there’s all seven of us all seven of us
riders
are represented on signs there’s people
with balloons there’s kids shouting
it was just this amazing sight to behold
so we paused we stopped we recruit and
this girl ran up to me
and she slapped me across the face and
she goes james
i was just on the phone with my mom i’m
crying
my mom’s crying you gotta warn me
before you ambush me with 300 kids like
that
and throughout the rest of the day we
made two or three more stops that were
just as impactful
so pause that’s that’s the content
that i use in my pitch to get people to
participate in the bike ride going
forward
that’s the message that i want to send
across i want to communicate
the emotion of appearing from underneath
the l it’s dark
it’s gloomy there’s glass you can see it
right
and then the skies open up and it’s just
pure
joy i understand that this medium
uh isn’t the best so perhaps that
emotion wasn’t communicated
uh but that ties in my third point which
is delivery um
it’s best to communicate this in person
the urban studies done that majority of
communication is non-verbal
um and even though you can see me right
now it’s difficult for me to communicate
my energy it’s difficult for me to
communicate um
whether i’ve had a rough day any
anxieties that i have
and and most importantly uh this
delivery lacks feedback
i don’t know if you’ve turned off by now
i don’t know if you’re checking out
i don’t know if you’re listening to
anything i’m saying i don’t know if
my voice is too low or if it’s too high
if i was in person i could get
real-time feedback on how you’re
reacting to my message
and that i think is is one of the key
parts whatever delivery technique that
you choose
try to ensure that you get shorter
feedback cycles depending on what the
content is
and this content i’m looking for uh
i’m looking for a reaction right i’m
looking for someone to agree to go in
the bike ride with me
to agree to support my fundraising
effort
so it’s very important to me to know
what you’re thinking
and how you’re reacting to this for
instance if i was pitching in a very
formal environment if you if you were
the type of person
that i i was that it was very uh
very close to emotion that was very by
the book analytical
want to know the roi i probably wouldn’t
have told that story
i would have told the story about how uh
the
the fundraiser has grown by thirty
percent over three years
or every year for three years we’ve i
would have told you about the roi
of seeing these kids faces and uh
i actually i take that back i have told
you about their faces i told you about
their grades it’s an after-school
program so i would have told you that
for every dollar
um this is how many kids you impact and
this is
the grade point average improvement that
they would have seen
so delivery is very important and the
method that you deliver
the medium so those are my three points
audience content and delivery um thank
you so much for listening
um i hope that you’re doing well and
staying safe
bye now