We humans are simple in some big, basic neuroscientific ways.  Two of them are that we are far more tribal than we are aware of, and that we spend far more of our brain keeping track of where we are in space than we know.  Put those two ideas together, and you have an interesting strategy – or set of strategies – to improve your public speaking and leadership.

OK, so how do we put these ideas together for leaders and speakers?  We begin with anger.  We used to believe the Freudian idea that venting was a good, healthy, smart way to release anger – the pressure cooker theory of the mind.  In other words, if you are angered by something, it’s like pressure that builds up in your brain and it needs to be released.  Freud called this catharsis.

But research since Freud has shown over and over again that venting doesn’t release the pressure of anger – and it might even make you angrier. Unfortunately, the pressure-cooker metaphor, or the tea-kettle metaphor, while appealing, simply isn’t accurate. Venting doesn’t let off steam; rather it creates a memory of our anger that extends it and makes it seem more significant and important than it otherwise might be.

So why do we vent?  It actually strengthens our relationships with the friends we vent to, according to a recent study.  Venting makes us more popular and makes it more likely the people that hear our vents will do nice things for us.

So venting is a tribal connection move, at the expense of someone else in the tribe.  It’s a power move to elevate us in the tribe.  It all comes back to our tribal needs rather than individual ones.

The second idea, that much of our brain is taken up keeping track of where we are in space, is something that speakers and leaders can make use of immediately in their communications.  You can make your ideas come across much more clearly to your audience if you locate them in space.  You might propose one idea while standing stage left, and then move to stage right to put forward a second idea.  Think of this as the “on the one hand, on the other hand” rule of good communications.

But it goes further, because (as I’ve reported before) we also map our social relations in space in metaphorical terms.  This is so important to us that we use our daily dreaming to put people in our social hierarchies into spatial slots, even though we may have interacted with them in completely different spaces, times, and ways.

So how do you put all this neuroscience together?  Create a section of your talk for venting about some group or other, someone not in your audience, and give the vent on a particular spot on stage.  Locate the vent — and the people you are venting about — in space on stage.

Your popularity will rise, your speaker ratings will rise, and you will be more memorable as a speaker, maybe not in that order.  Of course, speakers and leaders have been creating scapegoats for millennia, probably back to when there were first actual goats sent into the wilderness to expiate  the community’s sins, but I hope you will use these insights for good and virtuous reasons, not just for putting some other group down or for group catharsis.  Venting about a social group more powerful than you, for example, shows courage as well as connecting nicely with your brain and the audience’s brains in the ways described.

In short:  be brave, be tribal, and be grounded.