Hi.

It's Rob.

Welcome back to the Fundraising Bright Spots podcast.

Now we've found there are plenty of really good books with the word fundraising in the title, but we found there are also many other brilliant reads that can help you as a fundraiser that are not solely or even primarily about fundraising.

So this time, my colleague Ben and I thought we'd share some of our all time favorites that you may not have come across, with examples of how we found them especially valuable.

What are the skills that are most vital in an area of fundraising to get great results?

And then ask yourself, how do you improve a skill?

And probably the most interesting answer to that question I've ever come across is in this book by Daniel Coyle.

It helped me to see the difference between writing, presenting, and storytelling or conversations that made the donor more likely to want to care to give versus the stuff, to be honest, that I was probably doing before I read the book.

All of us have some big occasions sometimes, be it an interview, a pitch, or a crunch meeting with your colleagues or your trustees or whatever it might be.

And this book is jam packed full of various things that you can ongoingly think about and potentially do that increase the chances that those important occasions go your way.

In this episode, we've got time to share the first half of our chat in which we cover the first three book recommendations.

And if you wanna get access to a special bonus episode, including our chat about the other three on our list of super six, as well as some helpful notes we've put together about all of them, just look for the link in the podcast description on your phone or wherever you're using to listen to this podcast.

Hi, Ben.

How are you?

I'm very good.

Thanks, Rob.

And today, we wanted to talk about some books that we've really enjoyed and that have helped us in our fundraising careers with the idea of, a, sharing some thoughts and concepts and skills, and also potentially piquing the interest of some of our listeners who might like to go out and buy a book right now to help them further develop their fundraising or leadership skills.

Absolutely, Rob.

Listener, if you're interested Rob, how many books do you read a week?

I feel like it's an extraordinary amount.

Honestly, I've slowed down quite a lot recently.

But certainly for a key part of my career, I always had a book on the go that was potentially helping me with my fundraising.

And at that stage for several years, I was probably getting through at least one of those a month or so.

It's slowed down a little bit now.

Thanks, Rob.

The reason I ask is because I have to say in the prep for this, the list of outstanding books that could help you in what you do when chatting it through with Rob, So many.

I love that this episode, Rob, you've really shrunk and thought and deliberately said, if I'm a fundraiser who's got time sitting on the beach or just choosing to pick up a book that can really help me with my confidence, my results at work and outside sometimes.

What might those books be?

I'm excited because I think the listener will enjoy this episode.

Rob, have you got a sense of where you would start if you were picking their their reads?

What would be the one you'd start with?

Yeah.

It's one of my favorites, actually.

It's a book that I never would have come across ordinarily if I'd only been on the lookout for, quote, fundraising books.

But it's called The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.

Subheader, greatness isn't born, it's grown.

Slightly intriguing strapline there.

And what is it about?

Well, my starting premise is that various things are often in place if you're raising more money or you're growing your results.

But one of them, I think, is if you work out what are the skills that are most vital in an area of fundraising to get great results, know which two, three, four, five are really vital for that type of fundraising.

And then ask yourself, how skillful am I at those things?

And what could I potentially do to get better at them?

A key thing that becomes interesting is how do you improve a skill?

And probably the most interesting answer to that question I've ever come across is in this book by Daniel Coyle called The Talent Code.

So a lot of the book is him traveling the world trying to answer that question, and a lot of how he does it is by visiting what he calls talent hotbeds.

So one of them is a very Spartan tennis academy in Moscow that's produced more top 50 tennis players in the world than pretty much anywhere else.

Another of them is a music school, a pop music academy in Texas.

Another of them is an academy for classical music.

I think it's in Switzerland.

All these different places.

And he visits these places where so called prodigies or very talented people, often young people, develop their skill.

And he's really interested in how they practice and how this existing skill gets multiplied many fold.

So far so obvious in a way, the thing I find really interesting about the book is I come away with a much more clear, precise understanding of what skill is and therefore, what kind of practice or preparation it takes to build skill than I had before I read the book.

It's not just about studying how certain people train and certain people coach and the best students practice.

The really interesting bit for me is the biology or the neurophysiology of it.

And if before you'd asked me what is a skill, I'd have given you an airy fairy answer.

The book gives a really precise answer, which is skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals.

Now what on earth does that mean?

It means, any skill, be it peeling an apple or doing a tennis serve or playing a scale on the piano, when you do a quote skill of any kind, what's going on in your brain is an electrical impulse, a signal is being fired along nerve fibers in your brain.

That's what is happening in your brain when you do one of those things.

Now, the very interesting thing is if you're an amateur at one of these skills, lots of the signal sort of gets dissipated in all directions in the brain.

And partly because of that, the signal travels relatively slowly.

Whereas if you are Serena Williams or a chess grandmaster who appears to have this seemingly effortless, graceful skill, then what's happening in their brain is that signal is moving incredibly quickly from a to b.

Hardly any of the electrical impulse is being lost, and almost all of it is going directly from a to b incredibly quickly, almost instantaneously.

It seems that quick.

Now the interesting bit in terms of the biology to me is, what's the difference between Serena Williams or Federer's brain and my brain if I try and do a tennis backhand?

In our brains, if you looked at them, the nerve fibers in my brain for doing a tennis backhand have hardly any insulation wrapped around the nerve fiber, so the signals go all over the place.

But if we looked at Serena's brain, we would see through a microscope this fatty tissue wrapped all around like insulation around an electrical wire.

This stuff called myelin is the thing that stops the signal being wasted and therefore speeds it up.

And to give a kind of an old school analogy, the speed with which that signal fires in your brain and then all the other things in your muscles happen to enable that to happen, it's like, for me, being an amateur, like old school dial up Internet versus the experts is like broadband.

Superfast broadband.

Why?

Because hardly any of the signal is lost.

The million dollar question to me is, how do you get more myelin?

And then the rest of the book becomes interesting.

There are certain types of preparation for an important skill or indeed practice, which massively increases the amount of myelin that gets wrapped round the relevant circuits in your brain, for instance, for giving a speech at a fundraising event or for analyzing fundraising data to a high degree or whatever the fundraising skill is or tennis skill is.

There's a certain kind of way of practicing that that makes you more skillful more quickly.

And therefore, that's why in these talent hotbeds whose reputations are built on the ability to produce and develop talent, that's why they tend to be set up in certain ways and quite deliberately help people get better at skill in certain ways.

I'm certainly intrigued.

What is the thing they're doing differently to to create that way?

So it's all about creating more high quality signals per practice than other people practicing do.

And the way you get more signals is also by not just going through easy scales that are effortless.

It's by doing hard practice, effortful practice, practice which to some extent requires willpower to hang in there in what some would call the ugly zone and often slowing down and going deeper.

There's really interesting stuff about these outstanding musicians on the violin or piano.

To get better, they slow the piece right down to an extraordinary degree that amateurs practicing can't believe.

So it's going deeper, going slower, and repeating, but crucially also doing it where it's hard.

And the thing I find interesting about that is ever since I was studying for exams, I was advised not just to read the textbook, Rob, but do the practice questions.

And I would nod and smile and intend to do it, but very often, more often than not, I would end up doing what I thought was revision.

I read the book.

When I got better at revising, my better performances at exams were when I quite deliberately tested myself on the edge of what I did and didn't know.

It's in that act of testing yourself and getting it wrong and then finding out and then in that effortful practice, all of those ideas stick so much better.

My ability to find the ideas and put the ideas together under exam pressure got dramatically better because I'd practiced on, quote, the edge of the comfort zone.

I guess this bit isn't that surprising to some of our listeners because you know that there's a certain way of preparing for a difficult thing which does give you better results.

The reason I love this book, though, is it's got the biology and the science to help me understand why it's worth my while to be braver.

It's because I'm only ever, if I possibly can summon the willpower, I'm only ever gonna prepare a skill that matters to me in a way that maximises the amount of myelination, the amount of insulation that gets wrapped around the nerve fibres that, for instance, will help me do public speaking well or do a pitch well or whatever the skill might be.

Gosh.

I want to read the book just for the studies and the science behind how seeing it in action, seeing how it's being created.

Everything you've said reminds me of a conversation we had a few podcasts ago about some of the habits that great relationship builders have.

And one person in particular, Martha, when she appeared to go in the space of six weeks, almost overnight, Rob, from someone who was not using the phone much to someone who now uses it and gets extraordinary results.

But when I chatted to Martha, one of the things she did was you're absolutely right.

To begin with, it really was uncomfortable.

To begin with it, it felt like it was difficult.

But the act of trying to do as many, in in all honesty, uncomfortable calls, uncomfortable calls as possible, one after another after another, in hindsight, she realized she was picking up on things.

Sometimes, consciously, oh, the speed of my voice at the beginning of a call.

If I'm fast, it's harder for the listener to understand what I'm saying or the order of what I say.

Like, sometimes she could figure it out there and then.

But in other cases, I think her body was catching up and myelin was being created.

And now she talks about this particular habit, this skill in a totally different way.

Yes.

And interestingly, if it's too uncomfortable, if it's too stressful, too difficult, then not many of us hang in there.

It's just too much.

So one of the things that great coaches do is they help you focus on the right level of difficulty.

It's manageable.

It's not totally comfortable, but it's not impossible either.

And it's also a thing we pride ourselves on on our courses, the ones that you and Linda do in house for charities and my high value courses in corporate partnerships and major gifts.

A key thing we do is identify the relatively few skills that will make the biggest difference in those types of fundraising, and then we go deep and slow at thinking through and practising the kinds of things that will help you get better at it.

And people tend to do more of them.

I think Daniel Coyle and the neuroscientists would say when people come back on day two or day three more confident in an area, I think another way of saying that is there's now more myelin wrapped around the nerve fibres linked to these important valuable skills.

Brilliant.

A surprising, interesting book that really helped me be more likely to practice skills in a particular way that gets me better results is called The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.

So if we were coming up with a list of some good books that have helped us over the years with our fundraising skills, Ben, what's one you would put on that list?

Do you know, Rob?

Without a doubt, it would be Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath.

Two brothers that have inspired us a lot in the work that we do at Bright Spot, but especially they inspired me fifteen years ago when you first introduced me to this book, because it helped me to see the difference between writing, presenting, and storytelling or conversations that made the donor more likely to want to care to give versus the stuff, to be honest, that I was probably doing before I read the book and that I noticed most communication is doing.

And in hindsight, Rob, when I speak to people who say to me, I first met Rob eighteen years ago when he trained me in this topic or that topic, and then they tell me, Rob, word for word chunks of the training.

And I think one of the reasons is because the lessons in this book have helped inform our training, have helped inspire us, and crucially have helped an awful lot of fundraisers and ourselves to make choices in how we frame our work for the audiences that we're talking about.

Have a think about times when donors have been most moved, when law change has happened, when teachers have taught you best, when there's advertising campaigns that are still going on again and again and again, when people have been moved to act, and unlike the thousands and thousands and thousands of other communications that happen every day, they say that they have some things in common.

And at the heart of them, it very it talks very early on about a particular study that we have talked about in our training, Rob.

And and I know you did just a few weeks ago on one of our master classes.

A study that helps us understand why it is harder than we think to communicate complex information to others.

Anyway, Made to Stick, Rob.

It it's an excellent book to help you make choices when deciding which bits to talk about your cause or your information when trying to help and persuade others.

Thanks, Ben.

Yes.

I've always loved this book, not least because it gives practical ways we can quite deliberately overcome the so called curse of knowledge.

And there's not time to talk about all of these ideas, but if you had time to just mention one or two of the tips, that might help our listener now.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

And talking of overcoming the curse of knowledge, for listeners, what that means is the more of an expert we becoming something, even if I've just joined my charity or for a week, I've suddenly consumed more information on perhaps my problem or my charity than most other people.

The more of an expert I become in my organization, the harder it is to remember what it's like not to know any of that information.

And so the book has these six principles, almost antidotes to the curse of knowledge.

And one of them is, as you may have gathered from bright spots obsession, is stories.

Like, one of the best ways to get across information, you know, statistics and evidence and numbers have their place, and there's a whole other book that they do on that.

But one of the most important principles they talk about is stories.

I e, can I find more real examples, big or small, that bring to life the problem that we're here to solve, or our solution and how I know it works?

But the book has a wonderful set of examples on both how to find them, how to use them.

It has loads of different ways that you can think about finding stories, keeping them, and using them with your cause.

And then the other principle, Rob, that I'd look at is when it says unexpected.

Finding unexpected things about your cause or your charity.

It talks about some of the most successful adverts.

And if you buy the book, you'll notice some themes in those adverts that leave the listener or even the films that really grab you.

It's not always linear.

It's not obvious.

You can't always guess what's going to happen.

The things that we remember most are when almost that script is broken, when things are unexpected.

And in our world, Rob, I think of the magic formula that you created.

And just in case our listeners don't don't know that bit of Rob jargon, but the magic formula is system.

It's a a recipe we teach on our courses to help you work out the most persuasive things you could say or write about your cause to bring it to life to your audiences.

And I think you're about to to go on to say, Ben, that one of the key elements of that system that we find so helpful is to search for the thing that's not obvious or somewhat unexpected about the problem that your charity is there to solve.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

And the book shows you the power of what happens when you do find those things, but we've seen it in action in every single cause that I've worked with, including people who've come on the podcast, Rob, when we've traced back to times when the donor, the company, the trust finally got it.

Someone saw why the need was so important.

It's because we've worked a little bit harder to understand what is the unexpected bit of the problem.

So I can think through of one of your episodes, where somebody was talking about how hard it is for women when they're leaving a domestic violence situation.

And we know that that is a part of the problem that I think most people are aware of, how hard it can be to leave a situation, but then also how does finding a shelter to help them.

Some unexpected bits of that problem that we were told was the number of women that it's not just they themselves leaving.

They might be leaving with their children, and one of them might be 12, 13, 14 year old boy.

They might be leaving with a dog, pet, an animal.

They might be leaving or themselves have have disabilities.

And one of the not obvious things about the problem was just how hard it is to find a shelter, to find a place of safety that accepts animals, a place of safety that's equipped in the long term to help someone if they have a disability, and then a place of safety that would allow a woman to go there if they have an older son because that they could appear like a man and they don't want a a man in a domestic violence shelter.

And it's just these unexpected bits of the problem that, for instance, made their very clever solution of building their own shelters that are more inclusive, that can do these things, like why they were so important.

But it was interesting for me the the extra step of finding the unexpected bits of the problem are so often matched by clever bits of our solution.

And for me, read the book Made to Stick.

And one of my favorite things about this book is every page you read, every idea they talk about, clearly they're very story like and sticky and good at rewriting.

Every time you read the book, your brain fires off with ideas of, oh, well, that's that's what I could say about my project.

Or or in in my case, when I first read it, Rob, well, no wonder that donor didn't want to give.

I was just repeatedly telling them, what one in four people will one day suffer from my cause.

We've helped 643,000 children like, actually, the book helped me think about communication in a different way, and what I've noticed a more powerful way and a more successful way.

Thanks, Ben.

So so far, we've got The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.

We've got Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath.

And for now, my third book that's really helped me in my fundraising, which I would recommend you check out if you've not read it before, is called Presence by Amy Cuddy.

The strapline on the front of the book is bringing your boldest self to your biggest challenges.

I love it, not least because of Amy Cuddy's background.

For years, she was a professor and a teacher and researcher at Harvard Business School.

She features on a hugely successful and much viewed TED talk all about how to embody confidence and presence at a different level on the big occasion.

But for now, the book is about far more than the subject of that TED talk, excellent though it is.

So what's the book about?

It's about all of us have some big occasions sometimes, be it an interview, a pitch, or a crunch meeting with your colleagues or your trustees or whatever it might be.

And Amy Cuddy's book is jam packed full of various things that you can ongoingly think about and potentially do that increase the chances that those important occasions go your way.

It's both body language to quite deliberately be aware of and even practice, not effortfully, but just being conscious of certain ways your posture, for instance, affects your confidence, and also behaviors and also mindset that can help you succeed on those big occasions.

I do love the book too, Rob, and it's got so many great ideas.

But which is one or two that might help our listener right now?

Can you think of any of them?

Yeah.

So in my book, The Fundraiser Who Wanted More, I describe a particular technique to do with changing your body language even for just two minutes before going into a big meeting, and the science that Amy Cuddy shares about how that quite literally increases your confidence as measured by the hormones in your saliva in these various studies.

If you do certain things just for a couple of minutes before going into an important meeting, you perform better and they can even see why you perform better because you just are doing more confidence in terms of your hormones in your bloodstream.

They can measure it.

But there's another one which I really like because many people are aware of that, especially people who've done my courses or seen the TED talk or read my book.

But there's another one I haven't talked about much.

One of the many techniques is not so much about what you're doing with your body, but about what you focus your attention on.

And the idea is very often when we're not at our best, we're at some level focusing too much on what people think of us.

We're trying to force and worry about making a good impression.

And at some level, the more we do that paradoxically, the less real and authentic and at our best we become because at some level, people can tell we're trying too hard.

It's as if we're not comfortable in our own skin.

It's kind of obvious when we see this happening.

So an antidote to this is to pick a value which you hold dear.

You know, it could be freedom.

It could be justice.

A couple of my favorites are kindness and learning.

And what you do is maybe for five, ten minutes on the same day of doing your important event with a notebook, just journal two or three paragraphs, however many sentences you like, about how you feel about that value, why it's important to you.

Yes.

By all means, times in your life when you yourself have expressed that value and you're proud of those occasions when you were kind or whatever it might be.

But also, if you're feeling stressed and you can't think of many, just talking about which of your friends you admire this quality in.

Or if there's a film or a book or a, you know, a pop star or a role model of yours who embodies this.

Even just the act of writing about this value action, which you admire and hold to be an important one, the act of focusing your energy on creatively describing that in action, I have found in a very gentle way just causes myself to get this kind of glow, this extra level of poise that then later in the day, in the next hour, or a little bit later when I have to go into that interview or that difficult meeting, at some level, I do appear and feel more confident.

And the best way I can describe it is I am more comfortable in my own skin because I'm more clear on who I am and what I stand for.

Because these are values which are really important to me, even if sometimes I feel short on them, but I know who I am and what's important in life.

And the act of in that gentle way just focusing your attention on it causes you to show up in the meeting more likely to know who you are and what you stand for.

And without needing to seek disagreement or conflict, you're more likely to confidently give answers to questions or talk in a way that really is clear of what kind of person you are and what is important.

Interestingly, when I first read the book, I thought that the values you needed to pick had to be values that would suit that occasion of the pitch or the interview, like courage or being articulate or funny or whatever it might be.

Actually, they don't even need to be.

I mean, it probably would do no harm if they were.

But I've found even if I focus on values, which actually don't appear to be perfect for that scenario, it still works because it helps me tune in to who I really am and what I stand for.

Thanks, Rob.

And it has made me think of lots of conversations I've had with fundraisers, fundraising leaders, especially in coaching chats, where they have felt like they are a bit of an impostor, whether that is turning up to present, whether that's a meeting, whether that's a new job, whether that's an interview, times when they have not felt their most powerful, calm, confident present self.

And as well as the TED Talk, which has some wonderfully tangible advice, this book is such a good way to help you go deeper.

Even if for nothing else, that excellent chapter you're talking about, you're right.

This will help you.

So I have a feeling, maybe it's not the listener, maybe it's someone in the listener's team, I think they could really benefit from from getting this book.

Thank you for listening to our book ideas.

We ended up talking for a full hour about six of our favorite books that fit into this category, and we only have time on the Fundraising Brightspots show to share the first half of our chat.

But if you want to get access to the rest of our discussion, including the other three books in our super six, there is a way you can do that.

It includes more ideas and insights, including, for instance, ideas to help any of us handle and even embrace those very common feelings of vulnerability that show up during fundraising.

And we also share the most effective way I found to build habits that increase your confidence and your creativity at work.

To listen to the full discussion and to get some support notes I drafted about the super six valuable books for fundraisers, just look for and follow the link in the description where you click to listen to this podcast.

As always, we'll put a summary in the episode notes on the podcast section of our Brightspot website.

And if you've not already subscribed to our show, please do click the button now.

Clearly, our ideas are not an exhaustive list, so Ben and I would love to know what you think.

We're both on LinkedIn.

Thank you as always for the part you play in our show just by listening and by sharing it on with your team or on LinkedIn.

We always appreciate your help.

Good luck with your fundraising today and with any of these books you decide to check out, and I can't wait to share more Bright Spot stories and ideas with you very soon.