How To Be A Good Communicator?
How to be a good communicator:
What makes you good on stage, also makes you a good communicator all across the board.
We met Peter in one of our coworking events in Budapest. He impressed us with his personal communication skills as of the moment we met him. It’s not so common that you meet such good communicator everyday! So an interview to dive deep into how he has developed them was a must.
Peter Mezey, for us, stood up with 5 essential communication skills:
- active listening: Peter has been actively listening everyone at the event when we met him. It was obvious.
- eye-contact: Peter had eye-contact with everyone.
- tone of voice: this was a uniqe skill that his tone of voice just adjusted to the audience and the message he wanted to convey. Just so natural.
- facial expressions: you could see it in his face what he wanted to say
- non-verbal communications: Words are everything, or are they? There is many other ways we express ourselves and Peter had a knack doing so.
So, all these skills, just confirmed us that it was a must that out Cowork7/24 Founder Serkan Kurtulus personally had to interview Peter Mezey at Kubik Coworking Space: so he did:
What’s your story Peter?
Peter: I run a communication training center in Budapest. It originated as an improvisation theatre and it’s still the core of what we do, where we take amateurs and we teach them how to perform on stage completely spontaneously. I’ve been doing this for three years. It evolved into a communication studio because we learn that what makes you good on stage, also makes you a good communicator all across the board.
So, now a big money maker of mine is public speaking training in particular companies. I train a lot of students at universities who need training in job interviews and presentations and stuff like that. The reason I got into this was, I was working on Wall Street as a programmer and I grew up my entire life I was a math prodigy. I was in national competitions and I was rich and I was smart and I had no idea how to talk to people and everyone around me. I simply had no idea how to talk to people. So I realized it wasn’t like shyness, but rather being inauthentic to your true self. So I started improvisation theatre as a hobby in order to be more in-touch with my true self. More in-touch with my creative expression. So my passion is always, like the moment that makes everything worth it for me regardless of money is when I see someone on the stage for the very first time being their core self. They surprise themselves and there’s this joy, the spontaneous giggle that comes out when they realize that only if they do this more often people are going to love them. And it’s easy, there’s no stress, it’s just being you.
“On a human level we all have the same wants”
Serkan: As you’re working with very diverse people, people from all kinds of backgrounds, How do you connect with them? In your courses, in your sessions, in your daily life?
Peter: On a human level we all have the same wants and needs and I’m working with emotions. I find it easy to build the connection because I’m grounded on my shadow side like I know my dark sides so well that it makes me comfortable sharing embarrassing things about me and even if people don’t share it back it quickly builds a rapport, builds a trust because if I’m willing to share the worst parts about me. People feel more relaxed to share more about themselves. Our students are everything from art hippies to digital nomads, to business people. It’s a place where everyone can just be human together.
“I almost got jealous of my own grandchild…”
Serkan: Is there an embarrassing story that you want to tell?
Peter: Where to begin!
I’ve blown up my business twice in last three years, where I’ve this tendency to, when I get scared, I close up myself. I’m normally a very open person but when I hit something that triggers me it’s like a clam shell. It’s like bam, and what happens is like when I feel myself too close to a group that happens and I lost two groups and had to start over twice. It doesn’t bother me though, because I’m so passionate about this. I’ll start over as many times as needed to get it right, but specifically, this one time, there was this group that started like a spin off group. So there’s my comedy theatre and there was a spin off comedy group that happened because of it. I almost got jealous of my own grandchild in a way because of my baby is the theatre. My baby’s baby was this other event and I became very jealous of it.
“Meditation helps me cope with negative feelings…”
Serkan: How did you cope with negative feelings?
Peter: Meditation.
I do a bunch of meditations. Traditional like transcendental meditation. But also I get a lot of social meditations which are relatively new phenomenon originated in the UK where you practise being emotional around other people.
And now use those techniques as part of improvisation.
“You need to keep creating even when you feel you are getting stuck..”
Serkan: You’re offering several services to digital nomads, to coworking spaces, to corporations. How did you decide that these are the right services around improving communication skills that you want to offer?
Peter: It came to me so! Right now, I’m sort of solidifying that digital marketing strategy and it’s evolving based on who has come to me in the past. There were four groups of people that formed my core groups the last three years, nomads were one of them. Thus, as I’m developing the strategy, it’s solidifying around what I have to offer which is; communication number one.
Number two is boundaries. who am I and how do I be myself when someone is being aggressive towards me.
Number three is how do I remain creative even when I’m creating all the time and I’m getting stuck. This is a core one for digital comrades and coworking spaces is.
You need to keep creating. For instance, you probably know 10 to 15 is the magic number for blog posts you have to do in a month to make it worth it. Until that, your reach is growing 30% to 50%.
10 to 15 that’s the sweet spot of blogging. In this range, you’re going to see your traffic getting double, even triple.
(n.b. Cowork7/24’s note: These numbers are from a study of Hubspot)
Serkan: How do you approach coworking spaces? How do you do your own sales?
Peter: It starts of as a community event so I offer this win win where I’m going to give a free event that’s going to bring the community together. I start with giving a valuable service like how do you create when you get stuck
It’s free for me, free for you. But it’s a way to get in the door and get eyes of people for people to know what I’m all about. From there we have two funnels. There’s the individual and the group funnel. The individual is “I could really fix your body language if you give me an hour”. I can make people look like they know what they’re talking about, forever.
Serkan: I said “30 seconds” because of you know the elevator pitch that we talked. How can you explain that that to the people you met in the elevator?
Peter: Alright! stand in front of the mirror. Just stand! Most people would stand like this actually. I’m off-balanced, my shoulder leveled a little bit. I ask people to put their hands up and then drop. This will automatically moves your shoulders back. Then I’ll take a picture of them so take a picture before and a picture after.
One looks like I’ve no idea what I’m doing and the other looks like taking seriously and you can see that visually. You can just flip back and forth in the camera, before and after. That sells people, but to make it a permanent change in you I need an hour so from there I would do life coaching.
Serkan: What can you do in 30 seconds?
Peter: In 30 seconds….
I can fix people’s posture in 30 seconds. To make it really permanent though, I need an hour
“Coworking Spaces should bring in more local leaders, and do it more actively…”
Serkan: As coworking spaces are a great place for you to meet with people whom you can do business with, what would be like one thing that you would wish coworking spaces do more for you, or for people like you?
Peter: I wish there was a more active effort to bring in local leaders. My experience is mostly about Hungary right now. The events are mostly organised by the event organiser, not by the coworking space itself so I wish the coworking spaces here in Hungary were more proactive about bringing in guests to build the community.
Would you like to improve your communication skills?
Here’s how you can reach out to Peter’s improvisation theater or visit his Facebook page to stay current on his events at coworking spaces in Budapest.
Peter has used the same speech structure for seven years to transform his life and build his lifestyle business. Get the speech structure here for free!
Do you operate a coworking space ? Sign your space up here
Are you looking for a coworking space to work from ? Download our app here for iOS and here for Android.
Do you need more resources for inspiration or building your skills to manage your coworking space, here’s some more reading for you:
Why attend a Coworking Unconference in Bansko
We had also a little video of Peter Mezey talking about How Success Looks Like for Him:
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