Great Speaking Coach

Kill This Myth-Your Words Are Only 7% of the Message

Will someone please tell me, convincingly, how intelligent, successful business speakers can continue to believe the myth that only 7% of the impact of your presentation comes from your words or content? Can you imagine that body language and vocal quality would overcome the horrible content in a speech that sounds like this:

"Our company provides federal agencies the solutions and expertise to improve customer service and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction throughout the agency. By focusing on standards-based processes and tools, we help federal clients meet their mission objectives, sustain mission-critical functions, and transform mission-sensitive infrastructure. The company's professional services span the IT life cycle, focusing on network engineering, program support, systems management, operations and maintenance, information assurance, help desk administration, and mobile computing implementation and support."

I didn't think so. And that is what presentation "experts" who preach the value of this myth will have you believe and ask you to pay them for.

I agree that most business presenters would benefit from better non-verbal presentation qualities. Those who cling to lecterns/podiums, or who stand facing and speaking towards their slides are obvious examples of people needing to improve the use of their body and voice. If you mumble, follow every other word with 'uh' or 'um', fail to ever make eye contact with anyone in the audience, read word for word from a script or note cards, wring your hands or hold them in the fig leaf position--you need to improve your body language and voice qualities. But to say that these distractions account for 93% of the message is out of proportion to reality.

You don't help your cause by dismissing the heavy importance of content.

• It's content that spells out the direction your company is going.
• It's content that asks people to join you on the journey to the future.
• It's content that tells people what to do next.
• It's content that lets your industry know about your thought leadership.  
• It's content that makes your body language and voice qualities have importance, not the other way around.

In the next post I'll write about content. I'm always interested to hear from speakers who've found that the right content has helped them go where they want to go. Post your thoughts in our comment link.

 

Liven Up Your Speech with Colorful Examples

Colorful examples--not the color palette of your slide deck--add drama, intensity, engagement, and persuasion to your speeches and presentations.

Colorful examples include:

Your original view of a common experience: "our security features are like those new airport scanners--the real analysis work goes on behind the scenes and allows safe passage of non-threats."

Inviting the audience to create a vision of their own future: "We took a close look at the 5 people who were points of contact with our customers. Two of these people always remained calm and friendly; the other three lost their poise five out of ten times. By recording their conversations and working with them one-on-one they gained better conversational skills and we retained experienced staff. How can you thoughtfully and effectively work with your customer service staff to improve your customer's experience with your company?"

Disproving a tired old practice: "Everyone says 'Think outside the box.' That's great when you know the inside of the box. Do you really know your box so well that you can tell what's outside of it? Who defines the box anyway? And how far outside the box should you go? Instead, create specific goals. For example: increase contacts with customers by a factor of 2.Then put in place all the mechanisms needed to do that. You'll end up seeing the parameters of your box clearly and you'll know exactly how to go beyond them."

You can liven up your speeches with colorful examples delivered with wonderful voice qualities and keep your audience paying attention and remembering you and your company. Add one new colorful example to your repetoire each day and pretty soon you'll have a very memorable speech or presentation.

Reporting and Storytelling-Business Audiences Want Both

How often have you stuffed your presentation with facts? Focused on building a logical, airtight argument in order to persuade? Created complex graphics that show the audience everything about your solution, your processes, and the best value?

My guess is that 95% of your presentations are more like reports. They include all these components. Heaven forbid that you should omit anything!

Yet think about your own experiences being in the audience. You crave something more stimulating than the flat fact-based presentation. You think, "I could read this myself. I don't need to be sitting here listening to you read it. How much longer will I be stuck here?"

If the speaker--like you--just added a small amount of storytelling, the whole presentation experience would change. Here's why:

Storytelling by definition is structured to travel a series of arcs. The first arc starts at the base and moves up some, then plateaus. The next arc starts at the plateau and moves up some more until the next plateau. The next arc starts there and moves up yet again. At the end of the third arc the resolution or victory emerges, leaving the audience feeling they have successfully navigated through the journey.

You can turn the facts of your report into a story with some creative work.

For example, what's the journey your company has traveled from its beginning to today? It may be a $100 million company today, but at some point it was a start-up. With just a dozen thoughtfully crafted sentences you can bring the audience on the journey from start up to $100 million and leave them feeling your success and the desire to partner with (buy from) you in order to succeed themselves.

Become a speaking artist by turning some of your facts into stories. Art is transformative and every speaker should be planning to transform their audiences.

Have a question about how to combine reporting and storytelling in one business presentation? Post your question on our comment link.

 

 

 

Speaking Artists Are Made Not Born

You can be a speaking artist because speaking artists are made, not born.

No speaker I’ve ever worked with started by saying “I want my speech or presentation to be a waste of time.” However, rarely has anyone ever said to me “I want my speaking to be a work of art.” Why not become a speaking artist?

Artists use materials that are available to everyone (paint, marble, canvas; the 8 notes of the musical scale, instruments; words on the page or in film) and elevate them from ordinary to extraordinary. Art is memorable, moving and transformative.

You've seen some speakers who are artists. They weave their stories and their 'aha' moments in such a way the audiences are laughing, crying, shocked or surprised. They take the language that is available to everyone and mold it artfully—that is, creating masterpieces out of the letters and words everyone uses all the time.

Why should you strive to be an artistic speaker? You want to inspire people to change their behavior, have aspirations beyond the everyday, spark a flood of insight into their own lives, remember the moment that transformed them.

Engineers want their solutions to have meaning; sales people want their customers to find meaning in the products or services they offer; managers and executives want to generate meaningful and valuable work for their employees.

Yet too many business speakers across the spectrum fall into traps that are not artful. The biggest and most common trap is to focus on delivering information. Company overviews, past performances, features and benefits, missions, vision statements, strategic goals, policies and procedures—none of this is transformative in any way. And the trap is compounded by writing it all on slides and delivering the information in limited, repetitive and colorless business-speak.

You are a transformative business speaker when you artfully weave your best language into an evocative picture of the most important concerns or challenges facing your audience today. What will happen to them if they address or overcome the challenges? What fresh and exciting expectations can they have for the future? Show them a fresh view of their lives and the future and they will transform themselves to meet it.

Other traps business speakers fall into include: reporting rather than storytelling; attempting to be persuasive by using logic; leaving the best content for last; never making a connection from the end back to the beginning; using stale content from company libraries; focusing all their energy on slides and never on their delivery and the live audience they’ll be speaking to; speaking down to their audiences; forgetting that audiences are actual human beings who are controlled by human factors.

Any of these traps prevent you from being an artistic speaker. I’ll have more to say about the connection between these traps and artistic speaking in the future. If you’re interested in learning more sooner, let me know.

Oral Traditions Create Lasting Memories

"Once upon a time... Remember when...? I'll never forget the time that..."

We use these phrases often without realizing that they reflect long-standing oral tradition--passing stories around and down by word of mouth, not in writing. The stories that get repeated are those that are memorable. What makes a story memorable?

Joshua Foer, author of "Moonwalking With Einstein" described his five favorite books about memory in an interview with Eve Gerber for the Browser, and printed in the Washington Post on May 15, 2011. One of the five is Memory in Oral Traditions by David C. Rubin (1995). In this book the author describes ancient understanding about cognition that we moderns should keep in mind.

Among Rubin's points: "rhyme and rhythm are mnemonic as well as euphonic. One of the best ways to make something memorable is by using rhyme and meter and rhythm and song."

Wikipedia provides this definition: "Mnemonics rely on associations between easy-to-remember constructs which can be related back to the data that is to be remembered." I suggest that you create a simple, familiar sounding acronym-type word and tie your content to each letter. That's a mnemonic device. Increase memorability by rhyming the last word of each phrase that begins with each letter. And if each phrase has a repeatable rhythm to it, you strengthen the mnemonic quality even more.

Repeating a phrase is also a rhythmic device that aids memorability. A speaker I heard recently was talking about sources for a particular idea. He described several and then said "I could stop there...but I won't." He went on a bit more and then repeated "I could stop there...but I won't." He continued and when he paused the next time to repeat "I could stop there...but I won't" the audience finished the sentence for him. Twenty minutes later another speaker talked for a few minutes and then mimicked the first speaker by saying "I could stop there..." and the audience laughed in appreciation.

So simple and so memorable. Not a slide or a handout or a note taken--just a phrase that was pleasing to hear (euphonic) and mnemonic (rhythmic/repeatable) and everyone got it.

Your business audiences, in spite of being bored to death by language such as 'business process re-engineering', still hold within them the same human responses to mnemonic and euphonic qualities our ancient ancestors had. Tap into these to create a memorable message and to succeed as a business speaker.

Small is the New Big for Speakers

"Small" is the new big, I think. Setting a small(er) speaking goal and achieving it gives you a satisfying and confidence-building win. That confidence becomes part of you and serves as a foundation for the next step. Here's how this will work for your speaking and presentation track record.

Before you begin, you need these ingredients:

1) A specific audience, so you know what they care about. This affects your topic, your call-to-action and the content of your speech or presentation.

2) Time to practice and rehearse. Prepping for a presentation is not the time to multi-task or take shortcuts. You can't take 3 showers in one day to make up for the three days you didn't shower. Same is true for speaking. You can't cram three days of practice into one day and deliver a great presentation. You need all three (or whatever number) days.

Be clear about the speaking deficiency or fear you want to overcome. Do you struggle in front of clients? Senior managers? External audiences? About one or two particular topics? In certain settings? With slides? Without slides? Pick one of these to start.

Identify the steps it takes to speak well in front of your audience and/or on the topic. How do you decide on your call-to-action? Your key points? Your interesting content? The Attention-getting opening? Which of these components gives you the most difficulty or causes the most anxiety? Which is the easiest?

Focus on the easiest piece. This is where you will create your first small 'win'. Let's say you've got a meaningful call-to-action. Turn that into your attention-getting opening by phrasing it as a question. Or finding an astounding statistic about it. Maybe there's a perfect story that reflects the eventual call-to-action. Work on this until it is out of this world. You could deliver it anywhere, at any time, to any audiences and it will sing. This is going to be your first win.

Prepare the rest of your presentation the way you always do. Remember that your goal is one small and decisive win. Enjoy it, savor it forever, and integrate the confidence you've gained from the one win into your self-image of you as presenter. Piece by piece you'll train yourself to achieve small wins for each element of your speech or presentation.

Over time the accumulation of numerous small wins will transform your own image of you as speaker. Make small the new 'big' for your own speaking and presenting and turn yourself into a great speaker that audiences look forward to being inspired by.

 

 

The Commencement Speaker Didn't Need to Fall Flat

"We can learn a lot from a tale of two cities..."

The Commencement speaker began with these intriguing, attention-getting words. 'Tale of two cities' has a familiar ring, so it attracts our attention, and 'we can learn a lot' focuses on us the audience. This commencement speech will be good and personal, we all thought, and settled back to listen.

The speaker highlighted several nuggets from only one of the cities, and by the time she finished 30 minutes later her ending was weak and flat. Several guests of my graduating friend gathered afterwards and everyone had the same opinion--what started out attracting us turned disappointing pretty quickly.

Why? Because the speaker really only talked about one city; her nuggets were hard to follow or apply to our lives; and there was no call-to-action or memorable challenge at the end.

Business speeches and presentations are subject to the same challenges. I coach my clients to craft and deliver an attention-getting opening because speakers must capture the audience's attention quickly. You must follow through with more compelling content, or they'll drift off.

References to popular culture (Tale of Two Cities), and the word "you" or "we" in the opening are excellent at grabbing attention. Keep the audience listening by continuing to tie your original content to the reference to popular culture. This speaker should have set up her 'two cities' right away, and posed a couple of questions, such as what was the same, what was different. or how could two cities with many similarities take diverging paths over time?

Once she did that, she could bring us into the story by telling about people sharing a common experience (earning a degree from this institution) who have taken different paths. She could have tied the values and mission of the institution to the divergent paths. Her call-to-action should have been a ringing endorsement about maintaining the underlying values of the institution while traveling different paths.

How do you use poplar culture or familiar references to grab your audience's attention? How do you keep that theme going and make it personal to each listener? Share your successes and your questions through our comment link.

Speaking Fear and One Way to Reduce It

"Get back in the saddle" is an old adage people use to admonish anyone who's had a fall--whether from a horse or from any other experience. The thought is that you must immediately confront your fear by doing whatever you were doing again--as if getting back on the horse, or in front of an audience, or your boss or customer will miraculously vanquish your fear.

This approach is referred to as 'implosion' and can sometimes work to de-sensitize you. I have used it over and over again to overpower my anxieties about horse back riding. Yet not too long ago, when I relied on facing my fear and doing it anyway, it failed me. I became numb--couldn't think of or imagine any scenario except disaster. My coping mechanism for 20 years was not working and I didn't know what to do.

Many speakers have expressed terror about speaking. I have always thought that if they focused on speaking about topics they have internal knowledge of and were passionate about, that would go a long way to reducing their fear. Then I helped them practice many times, and then rehearse, until they could deliver their wonderful content with confidence--to me and perhaps a very small, carefully selected audience.

But they'd go in front of their real audience and the fear would come thundering back. While they might get through that one time, they'd promise themselves they'd never again speak in public.

What I have learned is that skill is only one part of the equation. I have plenty of riding skills. My clients have had plenty of speaking skills. What I need and what they need is a de-sensitizing method that will not re-traumatize us. 

The best way to do this is to take small--sometime very small--steps. A fearful speaker would prepare a speech about something he loves and finds it easy to speak about. Maybe it would be five minutes long. She would then ask a trusted friend to be the audience.

Here's what's most important--as the speaker began to walk to be in the front of the audience, he or she will be aware of the physical indications of their fear--shortness of breath, faster heart rate, sweating or chills, dry mouth--and at the moment they feel one of these changes in their body, they would step back. When the physical effect subsided, they would repeat the action-walking to the front of the room. Each time as soon as the physical effect would become evident, they would take a few steps back. The speaker would repeat this as many times as it took until they could walk to the front of the room without feeling the physical effect. That would conclude the exercise for the day.

By eliminating the very first sign of fear, the speaker gains confidence that over time he or she can reduce or eliminate it all. This process requires a lot of patience by the speaker and the friend. You must think of it as taking good care of yourself. You are entitled, in fact I think obligated, to take good care of yourself.

Right now I am working this way to reduce my extreme fear about riding my horse. Although we've shown at big events and I've handled it all in spite of my anxieties, now I am going way back to the first step in riding--getting on my horse. Joey and I are walking towards the mounting block and at the point where I feel my heart rate increase I'm pausing and slowly taking a few steps away. When my heart settles down, we're going a few more steps forward. We will continue this until I can stand on the mounting block. Then I will continue until I can put the reins over his head. And so on,until I can get on him without my heart racing. I will tell you that this is very hard. Yet it is the only way I have a chance of being able to ride again.

When you're desperately afraid of speaking in public, please give this 'advance and retreat' method a try. You will be surprised at how you can make big progress taking one small step at a time.

Let me know how you're doing.

Emotion Has a Place in Business Speeches

Is there room for some emotion in your business speech or presentation? Of course, because it's emotion that sticks with your audience. Generate an emotional response then follow it with some facts, figures,  policies, procedures, strategies and goals and the audience will remember.

Emotions include laughter, joy, surprise, mystery, doubt, amazement, and hope. That is, emotions run the whole spectrum of human feelings and responses and your business speeches should elicit emotions that your audience will enjoy. You don't have to make them cry or feel fear!

Take mystery as an example. You pose a puzzling question. You offer assorted background or information related to the puzzling question, building up the suspense. Make them chuckle with a couple of silly possible answers. After you've got everyone furrowing their brow and looking sideways to see if someone near them has a clue, you gradually reveal the answer. When you generate responses such as "I can't believe I didn't get that!" or "what a clever idea!" or "humph, I'll remember that one for a while" you have succeeded in eliciting emotions and the long-term impact you were after.

So many--too many, in fact--business speakers simply focus on delivering information. They avoid playing into the spectrum of human reactions, thinking that isn't "business-like". Such a mistake and a waste of speaking opportunities! Information is so easily available, free and at a moment's notice, that speakers who only deliver "the facts, nothing but the facts" completely disappoint their audiences.

My experience with executive speakers, who are speaking themselves or who are influencing their direct reports, is that they feel most comfortable with information, and delivering straight information is the easiest way to craft a speech or presentation. Taking the easy way isn't fair to the audience and hurts the speaker. Once they give themselves a chance to be creative and have a little fun with the audience through some kind of emotional response, they see how that makes a difference and want to do it again.

Remember laughter, joy, surprise, mystery, doubt, amazement, and hope when you're writing your own speech or presentation or influencing someone else's. Your audience will pay attention and remember long after they've gone back to their digital devices to search for more information. Emotion definitely has a place--an important place--in business speeches.

 

 

Find the Sweet Spot for Each Business Speaker

A game-changing contract is up for bid and the team is prepping their presentation to the customer. One of the 4 speakers is missing the mark time after time. He's made pages and pages of notes and he's practiced many times in the car, in his office and with the team. Yet he forgets his thoughts, can't generate new ones, and speaks about the least important ideas. This is a man with a successful 20+ year career behind him and the potential to serve this customer extremely well, but everyone is wondering if he needs to be removed from the presentation team.

As we're once again trying to find a place for him, he suddenty asks why he doesn't speak about the actual work he's going to be doing? There are two slides specifically on subtask order management, which will be his major role. We agree--putting aside concerns about "popping up and down"--and give him one day to prepare.

The very next day he bounds up to the front, speaks his part with passion, deeply and without hesitation, making it clear that he knows both the customer's needs and his role to meet them. The rest of the team is stunned. What happened?

What happened was that we found his sweet spot. The topic he knows inside and out and about which he has authentic, internal knowledge. For some people who struggle to present, giving them a topic they already know and care about makes the difference between struggle and success.

This man's new-found confidence and speaking ability also impacted the other speakers. They could relax and focus on the audience and their own content. What had been a halting, nerve-wracking 90 minutes became a smooth powerful presentation from the whole team.

In all my years of speaking coaching I've seen only a few people who really, really can "speak about anything." Many more people have excelled when they've concentrated on what they know and can speak about with passion and authenticity. Find the sweet spot for each of your team's presenters and the whole presentation will be transformed.