Michael Fabiano, Vice President – Strategic Initiatives, at NBC Universal was kind enough to share this picture with me after a recent public speaking success.   The caption he sent underneath the picture read as follows:  “This picture sums up my feelings about Morgan's book (Give Your Speech, Change the World) and how it helped me!”  Fabiano has transformed his public speaking by working on the principles in the book. 

His body language tells the story – you can’t help responding to the picture because he’s so obviously open and ready to engage with the audience.  When you first start to work on your non-verbal ‘conversation’, you’ll find that it feels risky, exposed, and uncomfortable.  But for the audience, it’s welcoming and engaging.  That’s because being open to strangers does go against our hard-wired instinct to be self-protective in that situation.  This goes back to our cave-dwelling days when the group coming up over the hill at you probably meant you no good.  Nowadays, we have a different problem – how to engage large numbers of people we’ve just met – and our instincts can betray us in that situation.  Michael’s done the hard work of retraining his instincts, and you see the great result.  Kudos to him!