Judson Vaughn

Judson Vaughn Speaking Topics

• The Recipe for Great Presentations

  Great cooks have been writing recipes for thousands of years. So just about everybody who can read, can cook. Vaughn reasoned that so many people have been subjected to so many horribly boring presentations, because no one had ever created a precise, reliable, easy to follow recipe for presentations. So after years of watching great (and not so great) trial lawyers making presentations to judges and jurors, Vaughn created a recipe. There are two decision-making systems within human brains: Our blindingly-fast, illogical, emotional, limbic system – our Fast Brain; and our much slower, logical, cerebral cortex (and associated brain structures) – our thinking, calculating, Slow Brain. Vaughn’s Recipe has two principal components, each containing four elements: 1) The Four Essential Ingredients are Theme, Semaphore, Metaphor, and Emotional Core; and 2) The Four Openings are the Nod, Robot, Action, and Surprise. Each element within the two components directs the Fast Brain or the Slow Brain of those viewing the presentation. Most people aren’t aware that most of our decisions are made by our illogical, emotional Fast Brains, so presenters spend too much time trying to persuade people’s Slow Brains, which makes presentations boring and ineffective. Vaughn’s Recipe teaches people how to efficiently engage both decision-making regions of people’s brains which enables anyone to create and deliver dynamic, persuasive, and memorable presentations in any situation.

• Charisma: The Ultimate Tool of Persuasion

  Politicians, political pundits, motivational speakers, self-help gurus, and social scientists have searched for the source of this seemingly magical personality trait for well over a century, and philosophers for centuries longer. And many of these people have generated theories regarding what makes a charismatic person charismatic. Within this seminar, Vaughn illustrates – beyond a shadow of doubt – why the conventional wisdom and the fanciful suppositions by those listed above – about what makes us perceive people as charismatic – are wrong. Vaughn was able to discover the true essence of charisma, not because he was smarter than others searching for it, but because he had advantages that those cited above didn’t have. Not only was he trained as a sociological researcher – more importantly – he was able to spend two decades working with television and movie stars, often during twelve-hour days, working side-by-side, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sitting around conversing with some of the most charismatic people on the planet. Those long days and nights allowed Vaughn to listen to the vocal patterns and inflections of powerfully charismatic actors, to closely study their facial expressions and body movements – close-up, in person, and to observe and interact with them in infinite variations when he was sharing physical and emotional experiences with stars when the cameras were rolling, and also during the minutes and/or seemingly endless hours following a director saying “cut,” and when lighting, camera and sound technicians were ready for the director to again say, “action.” Those are things none of those listed above have ever been able to do. Vaughn was the right person, with the right skills of observation, in the right places, at the right time, with the right sample population. And he was there long enough to discover something that has eluded mankind for centuries. Since 1993, he has been teaching people exactly what they need to do to become more charismatic.

Writing Body Language

The ability to efficiently direct the emotions of others is the essential ingredient in any presentation or negotiation. It is also the essential ingredient in every business and personal relationship. Most everyone normally does his or her best to positively influence the emotions of those they meet or encounter. But thanks to a host of self-proclaimed, body language experts, many people now believe that in order to maximize their success at positively influencing the emotions of others, he or she needs to become an expert at reading the body language of those they’re communicating with or attempting to persuade during a presentation or negotiation. This seminar will show participants the fatal flaws inherent within that supposition. First of all, with the exception of many people on the autism spectrum, most humans are already pretty good at reading body language. Judson Vaughn doesn’t teach people how to read body language because as it relates to normal communication and particularly to persuasion, reading body language is the act of following others in an effort to guess what they are feeling and thinking. Writing Body Language is the act of leading others, so that you can get them to feel and think what they want them to feel and think. Writing Body Language is the art and neuroscience of doing specific things with your body and face that enable you to direct the emotions of others, and thus, more efficiently, positively affect their emotions, which will enable you to direct their decisions more effectively. In this seminar, people will learn how to Write Body Language to get others to follow them. That is an essential building block of the foundation of leadership.

The Six Elements of Instinctual Trust

There is no more important “soft skill” for a businesswoman or man to learn, than how to secure trust. It seems implausible that TRUST, the foundation of all relationships, can be reduced to a practicable formula, but in fact, it can. In this seminar, participants will see and hear the evidence and conclusions of neuroscientists, that trust is secured or denied – in five-hundreths of a second, and the participants will learn what they are often doing wrong during those fractions of a second that cause people they’re meeting for the first time to distrust them. The Six Elements of Instinctual Trust are precise, objective, primarily physical communication skills that enable those who learn them to secure trust within fractions of a second of meeting strangers. These Six Elements are not some trite listicle created for a magazine article. Judson Vaughn began the creation of these Elements in 1979, and started teaching them to film professionals at his company WHAT Films in 1993. Over the following ten years, the Six Elements continued to be developed, tested and refined by over three thousand participants. In 2003, Vaughn launched his company JurisPerfect to test the Six Elements in one of the most stressful situations any businessperson will ever find themselves – complex, commercial litigation, with millions of dollars, personal reputations and fortunes – in fact, entire companies on the line. Since 2003, in negotiations and litigations, many millions of dollars have been saved or gained by lawyers and clients skillfully applying The Six Elements of Instinctual Trust. These skills have been stress-tested in courtrooms, conference rooms and barrooms, and have emerged with flying colors.