1. Seeming Confident When You Haven't Got a Clue
Knowledge is power.
No knowledge? No matter!
Anonymous
We live in a knowledge-based society. Those in the know are rewarded. Those who know nothing are punished - with bad marks at school, or with less chance of a promotion at work.
Of course, knowledge isn't the only factor in success, but it is undoubtedly a crucial one. And your outwardly nice but inwardly resentful colleague is just waiting for the opportunity to gleefully cut you down. Even if it's already obvious how little you know about the issue at hand.
Most people are afraid of being embarrassed and exposed. Human beings are stubborn, and we do our best to avoid awkward scenarios like this. The solution is to seem confident even when you haven't got a clue. It sounds tricky, but it's just another learnable skill. A very specific competency. To be precise, it is an incompetence-compensating competency: an ability to gloss over what you don't know by competently deploying specific techniques. Simply put, it's the ability to hide your lack of knowledge.
As with everything in life, if you know the tricks, you can quickly take control of any situation. Before I present you with my seven most stylish techniques, here's a tip: whatever you have to say, professional body language and tone of voice will instantly make you look far more competent. Amateurs will break eye contact mid-conversation if there's something they don't know. They will hesitate before answering, and then speak too quickly - their flustered appearance revealing at a non-verbal level that have no idea what they're talking about.
Seasoned tricksters do things differently. Even if they don't know the first thing about the matter at hand, they always have their body language under full control. Most importantly, they will:
maintain eye contact with the other person
make active gestures as they speak
stand up straight, directly facing the other person.
But confident body language isn't all. They will also take pains to ensure that their voice sounds convincing. They will always speak:
loudly and clearly
on the slow side if anything - never too quickly
with deliberate pauses
without ever getting mixed up.
Professional body language and tone of voice are the absolute fundamentals of seeming confident when you haven't got a clue. If you don't have these at your command, you should start practicing them at once.
For now, let's take a closer look at my seven favorite tricks.
Trick 1: Abstraction
When you can't come up with an adequate factual answer to a question, one inconspicuous technique to make you sound smarter than you are is abstraction.
Imagine that someone asks you out of the blue, "What are your thoughts on the Bologna reform?" And let's assume that you don't know that they're talking about the 1999 agreement to align courses of study across Europe (with the introduction of the Bachelor's / Master's system and ECTS [European Credit Transfer System] points).
The trick is to answer this concrete question in abstract terms. You can avoid saying anything specific about the Bologna reform, and instead comment on the notion of "reforms" in general. You might say something along the lines of, "On the whole, political reforms can only really be judged by those affected. It's no good asking the politicians - they'll just keep defending their own decisions. And the people affected by this reform are divided on it. But I find top-down reforms in politics generally pretty questionable."
You haven't said anything about the Bologna reform - but it still sounded smart.1
Or perhaps someone asks you, "Do you like Schoenberg's twelve-tone music?" Let's assume that you don't have the foggiest idea about the twelve-tone technique and the Second Viennese School either. What do you do? The solution, once again, is not to offer any concrete response to the question, but to talk more generally about music and our appreciation of it.
So you could reply, "Different people have different tastes. It's just a matter of preference whether you like one type of music or another. Personally, I'm more into jazz fusion."
You've said nothing in response to the actual question, but have come up with universal truths that cannot be attacked. The trick with abstraction is to seize on a familiar term in the question, and elaborate on it by spouting a few generalities.
Trick 2: Digression
A subtle trick that politicians use constantly is gradual digression from the original question towards a subject that they're more comfortable with.
Let's revisit our first example. Someone asks you, "What are your thoughts on the Bologna reform?" - and let's assume that you still don't know a thing about it. How can you skillfully steer the conversation in a different direction? Easy: you parry the question. "I think it's less important right now than." - and then you start talking about something else entirely.
For instance, you could reply, "People get very hung up on reforms, but I think the really important issue right now is how politics constantly favors the rich." Of course, if you don't fancy starting a fiery argument about wealth redistribution, you can pick another more trivial topic, if one comes to mind. Depending on the situation, you could move on to something more personal. It's astonishing how many people seem not to notice this maneuver. Even if they do, they generally choose to let it go.
If you know the other person well enough, you should pick a new subject that they can relate to. Let's say you have a mutual friend called Steffi, who is a great friend of theirs. You could simply say, "What I really wanted to talk about is how Steffi is! I haven't seen her for ages."
This verbal maneuver away from a particular topic is also known as a "red herring" - a term dating back to the 19th century, or possibly earlier. Fugitives supposedly planted the strong-smelling smoked fish to throw tracking dogs off the scent. So if someone tries to take your conversation down a completely new avenue, you can counter, "What sort of red herring is that?" You'll immediately break their stride.
Trick 3: Deflection
A slightly more aggressive version of digression is point-blank deflection. This is a way of fending off uncomfortable questions and statements. If someone asks you a question - "What do you think this department can do better?" - and nothing occurs to you, you can shoot back, "That's not the question we should be asking. This isn't about what our department could do better, but what better decisions management could have made!"
This trick sounds similar to digression. The aim here, though, is not to divert the conversation away from one topic towards another - but to shift the whole discussion from a factual level to an emotional one.
Schoolteachers and professional coaches have always taught us to stick to the facts. But if we want to distract someone from the gaps in our knowledge, invoking strong emotions will usually do the trick. The best bluffers will indignantly clamor, "That's totally the wrong question to be asking!" Suddenly, the other person is on the back foot - and you have the upper hand again.
Trick 4: Agreement and Approval
Another cunning way of hiding your own ignorance is to agree with and approve of whatever the other person says. People are susceptible to flattery: gratification clouds their judgment, and they forget that we haven't actually contributed anything to the conversation.
Phrases like, "That's a really insightful explanation!" and "Interesting argument! I never thought about it like that before," will give the other person wings. Your approval will encourage them to expostulate further on the subject - and they'll keep talking the whole time.
If they eventually do ask our opinion, we can heartily agree with them - and immediately steer the conversation into more familiar territory.
Trick 5: Attribution
One of the easiest tricks in the book is to make any old claim and attribute it to someone else, like so: "I recently read in the New York Times that." This ruse has two immediate advantages for us. First, it implies how well read we are. Second, it takes us out of the firing line - because the argument we are...
