Great Speaking Coach

Money Making Thinking Pays Off Big

Do you think successful money makers protest: "I don't have time to do one more thing" or "I can't put another thing on my plate"? How many times have you turned down an opportunity for these reasons? I'm sure you do feel overbooked. Yet don't you ever wonder what you might have missed?

Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G. Allen collaborated on a process for making large chunks of money quickly, called Cash in a Flash. In the book they tell the story of Michelle and 4 other women who create a money-focused Mastermind Group to generate large sums of money quickly.

Lei Kim protests that she can't take on another thing--and Michelle says: if you think of each activity in your life as one discrete thing, then soon you'll see all these things piling up and you'll get to a point when you don't have room for one more thing.

What if you think of your whole life as one unit that is you? You work, have friends, support the community, care for your family, nurture relationships, exercise, and make money. When a new idea comes to you it's not another thing--it's part of the whole that is you. You will find the time and energy to incorporate this new opportunity to your life because it is part of you, the whole. Best of all, your whole life has an expandable border.

This idea flies in the face of how we typically think about our lives--in chunks of time and the associated activities. Run out of spaces in your calendar and you can't do one more thing.

I like the challenge of this. When I'm tempted to turn down a request because "I can't take on one more thing," I'm going to remind myself that my life is one whole unit, with expandable borders.

How about you? What fixed borders are you going to break out of? Share your commitments through our comment link.

Expert or Just Pretending? Your Audiences Will Know

You can be sure of one trait shared by your audiences, no matter who they are or how many--they have great talent for sniffing out fakes. We learn from birth to read body language and it's nearly impossible to adjust your body language to cover up when you're faking it.

You do not have to fake it ever if you follow these 3 guidelines:

1) Speak only about topics or perspectives you really have expertise and passion about. You will exude confidence and authenticity through your body language which will attract the audience and help your message stick.

2) Practice and rehearse a lot. Professional performers (speakers, musicians, athletes, actors and others) often are guided by this ratio: one hour of practice and rehearsal for each minute of performance. If a business speaker even practices/rehearses half this amount it will make a huge difference in how your audiences perceive you.

3) Know what your audiences care about. This goes way beyond demographics. You must ask questions such as "what do the audience members talk about among themselves?" Or "If you could change one thing about your company, your work, your product/service/industry what would it be?" Or "What have you always wondered about when thinking about (topic)?"

Speak to these questions. Nothing else is more important.

Share how you prove that you're an expert when speaking through our comment link.

CEO Vision Leads to More Business

A CEO said to me recently “We win a lot of contracts but I think we can win more.” That’s a gifted person’s way of thinking. I will be working with over one third of the people in his company to help them go beyond good -- to be awesome -- when they speak to their prospective clients.

What's your thinking about the quality and effectiveness of your speaking? If you cannot imagine one single way in which you or your employees could improve their speaking, you are shortchanging your customers as well as your bottom line.

Audiences have changed over recent years and from what I see most business speakers have not kept up with their audiences. Yes, they may sit there and they may even give you a round of applause--but have you really reached them to the extent that it makes a difference to them and by extension, to your business?

Where would your business be if the technology leaders of the past decade were satisfied with 64K personal computers? Or if the first so-called mobile phones (the size of a large book) were never improved upon?

Speaking is the highest value/lowest cost marketing tool you can use--when you do it well.

How do you use speaking to grow your business? Share your ideas through our comment link.

 

Expert Wows Audience By Revealing Original Thinking

You're a leading authority or recognized expert in your field. Audiences are eager to hear what you think and how you came to your deepest levels of understanding. They also want help or guidance from you in how to develop their own thinking on the subject.

What they do not want as the bulk of your speech or presentation is one citation after another of other experts in the field.

I was in an audience recently when the speaker did just this. For every point he brought up, he cited other writers and thought leaders to prove his point. I learned that he is a good researcher and widely read. But at the end of the hour, I wondered what does he actually know and think about the topic?

True experts apply their own unique perspective and thinking style to their topic. They create something no one else has created before. Think about well-known writers such as Malcolm Gladwell or Dan Heath and Chip Heath. They took popular topics (how to be successful, how to stand out from a crowd) and made them their own. While they cited others, they delivered to you and me something entirely new and fresh. They became quotable themselves.

When you're the expert, demonstrate your thinking and originality, not your ability to do research. What you think is what will catapult you to the top of the field and help you stand out in a crowded marketplace.

My own somewhat contrarian approach to business speaking developed as I studied brain science and other human responses, not past writings on public speaking. Not everyone likes what I say, but they surely remember me.

How do you create unique expertise and stand out from the crowd? Share your ideas through our comment link.

Discriminators Push Company to the Contract Win

How many times have you made a list of win themes and discriminators--or SWOT, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats--only to see that it reads like this: faster, low risk, best value, best of breed, world class, and people, processes, tools and technology?

This list does nothing to help you win government contracts or new commercial business--what bidder is going to brag about the opposite of these things?

Step 1- know the issues that drove the customer to ask for your bid, proposal or sales presentation. These are the things that underlie their requirements. You must know them deeply in oder to win.

Step 2 - Know what their vision for the future is- near, mid and long term. See it clearly, describe it in your own words. You may take a paragraph to say what they've written in a sentence. That's good-it means you are thinking deeply.

Step 3 - identify your discriminators in terms that respond to their issues and their visions. Quantify as much as possible. If they want to be the category-killer in their industry, what does that mean in terms of sales and market share? How will your company help them in terms of magnitude and time? Be specific.

No one who speaks in generalities ever wins. Those who dare to be specific, concrete and credible have a much greater chance of winning. You show that you really understand and have done the hard work to define the problem and come up with a solution.

Give the decisions-makers confidence that you know how to do the work and you have a much greater chance to win.

What technique or strategy have you used to win an important contract? Share your ideas through our comment link.

Leader Overcomes Huge Obstacle

A person who reports to me is not doing his job. He promises and promises and promises, but does not deliver. And yet he insists that I should not be giving direction directly to people on his team. What's a leader to do?

Did you ever sit in traffic? Thousands of cars moving at a snail's pace. You think there must be a huge accident up ahead to cause this much delay. When the traffic finally breaks loose you realize that there was one car sitting on the side of the road with a flat tire. All that waiting because of curiosity about a simple flat tire. Wouldn't you like to shake the first person who slowed down to take a look? If no one had looked, all traffic would have continued to flow freely and you'd be at your destination by now.

One person in a position to move forward or slow down chose to slow down, forcing all the rest of you to slow down too. That's a bottleneck. The best you can do is not to fall into the "look-there" trap and keep moving.

This is a leadership lesson too. If one person on your team is a bottleneck and you've offered help, you've patiently urged them forward, you've been sympathetic to the challenges of the work--in short you've done all you can and yet this person is still not performing (and you cannot terminate them)--what do you do? You go around them. You do not accept that the bottleneck must continue.

Sometimes the best leadership action is to move ahead yourself. Go around or over the blockage. The person lagging will get angry and demand respect. Your answer is to calmly remind them of your patience, your offers of help and your determination to reach the goal with or without them.

Leadership is not harping on people to get their jobs done. It is not deferring to organization charts no matter what. It is also not waiting endlessly for the person to change their ways.

The whole organization is depending on you and you must act. Do not get stuck in traffic for one person who won't keep moving.

How do you handle resistance to your leadership? Share your stories through our comment link.

Re-Built Landmark Helps Business Rebuild Morale

What well-known building or public landmark in your city has been destroyed and then rebuilt? The suddenness of the destruction, the shock, anger, denial, grief, followed by determination, planning, hard work, eventual completion and re-dedication all provide meaningful analogies.

Leaders must rebuild morale and loyalty if their companies are to participate in the coming improved economy. How do you inspire your employees and your customers to stick with you, or to come back to you? Don't rush to make vague promises about how things are getting better or how you're going to be stronger soon. No one will buy those unsubstantiated and generic promises.

Your status as a leader who makes a difference will grow as you confront reality and the difficulties everyone will face as you rebuild.

Craft your analogy on a local landmark. Describe the landmark and how beloved it was for ages. Carefully describe some of its most popular features, and the people who frequented it. When you get to the part about the destruction, use evocative words that will have the audience living through it again. Follow the destruction with the responses of grief, spoken in an understanding and sympathetic tone of voice. Gradually build up the sense of hope and new vision, helping your audience to visualize laying the new corner stone, the crowds gathering around for the dedication and many new people enjoying the rebuilt landmark.

Then ask them to imagine your company as the landmark. Encourage them to imagine the collapse of the company's fortunes like the collapse of the landmark. Acknowledge that they have been through the same grieving process. And show them your new blueprint for rebuilding-- and that just as the new landmark required the work of many hands, so does the future of your company require the contributions of everyone. End with a word picture of a happy gathering of employees and customers, celebrating the re-emergence of your company, just as the citizens celebrated the re-emergence of the landmark.

Using local events increases the reality for the audience (compared to referring to a distant event such as hurricane Katrina.) How do you use local events as analogies for your leadership speeches? Share your ideas through our comment link.

Speaker Learns Business Lessons from Hard Hit Golf Ball

What's your sport, hobby or special interest? You should create analogies from it.

Golf is a game of yards--or is it? You hit buckets of balls, working to send each one as far out as possible. Then one just falls short of that 300 yard marker, or suddenly it veers off to the right. You groan. All the yards, and yet you failed to meet your goal by just inches. Sometimes business problems are like that. You see the huge goal, you work towards it with everything you've got, and then you fall just short.

Does missing your goal by a small amount mean the effort was wasted? Not at all. If  you hadn't hit the golf ball for the distance, you wouldn't even know how hard you could hit and how close you could come. Each time the ball falls short, or veers off a bit, you learn something about your body, your movements and your effort.

The same education occurs when you set a business goal and don't quite make it. Add up everything you did learn and then figure out what else you need to do. A hole-in-one doesn't come on the first, or even the 100th, try. It comes (maybe) after thousands of balls hit. Even Tiger Woods misses and then learns from his mistakes.

Your business goals come after hundreds of tries, and from the analysis and evaluation you do after each one. Next time you set a big business goal remember to swing for the distance and learn from the last few inches.

How do you use sports or your hobby as a source of analogies? Share your examples through our comment link.