Great Speaking Coach

Basic or Awesome Speaking for Business? There Is No Choice

Anyone can be a basic speaker. Write what appeals to you, practice a few times, stand up and read. That's basic and it will not serve you well. In fact, basic speaking may become a barrier to your advancement.

Awesome is completely different. Awesome speakers are appreciated in the moment and remembered afterwards. Awesome speakers get requests for more speeches and that visibility makes them a person of interest. When someone is seeking a candidate for a high-visibility position, awesome speakers are at the top of the list.

So which do you want to be: basic or awesome? I don't think there is a choice if you want to succeed in your chosen field, no matter what it is.

Here are three steps to be an awesome speaker:

1) Put the Audience First. No matter how much you are admired for your expertise and knowledge, every speech needs to be focused on the specific audience in front of you. Each audience is comprised of individuals with particular needs and interests. They want you to address what's on their minds. Avoid canned speeches or generalities. Take the time to understand what's going on with each audience on that day and in that moment and speak about these issues. That's the first step to being awesome.

2) Have extraordinary presence. Presence is one of those qualities that you know when you see it and it can be developed. Presence takes time to build.

• Your topic should be something you're passionate about (and that the audience needs).
• You must practice dozens of times, until the content is installed and internalized deeply. This allows you to be in the moment in front of the audience and is a big component of presence.
• Once you know your audience and your content, then you develop your delivery style. Start with your natural voice and movement/gestures. Identify places where you can add vocal variety that is memorable but not outlandish. Stories are excellent candidates for vocal variety such as change of pace, high and low volume, varied pitch and strategic pauses. Use gestures to add visual interest. Again, practice dozens of times so that your delivery style is internalized.

3) Expand your thinking about your topic every day. Nothing reduces presence like being in a rut of unoriginal thought. You'll get bored and your audiences will know it. Just becasue you have had a point of view one day doesn't mean  you can't modify or update that point of view the next. Add fresh material--especially your thinking--regularly. This should be coupled with your knowledge of each particular audience. Ask yourself how the audience's needs affect your perpsective on your topic. Look for freshness in world events, as you meet new people, and as your own life changes.

I've updated my speeches frequently over the years and no longer speak about some ideas that I used to think we really important. My experiences, both personally and with clients, have given me new insights and new ideas and that's what I talk about now. I expect that I'll continue to change in the coming years.

How about you? What have you done to put the audience first, develop presence and expand your thinking? Share your experiences and if you need some help, let me know.

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What I Would Say to Graduates

Improve Your Speaking By Changing Your Speaking Culture

Create Culture or the Vacuum Will Create It For You

 

Culture wars. Culture clashes. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Many negative ideas about company culture are floating around and make it easy to ignore culture's importance as a force for success.

Here are my ideas about how to create a culture that serves as a force for success. You'll see that all of these ideas rely on communicating meaningfully and acting in accordance with the culture.

1) Executives must describe the desired culture and then act in ways that make it happen.

Words that describe culture are words that people can easily understand: Integrity. Superior customer service. Respect for all people. High value relative to the cost. Strong desire to retain clients. High employee retention. Innovation.

All additional words, actions and decisions must reflect absolute fidelity to these words. There is a never "We respect all people except..." or "Integrity is for my direct reports (but not for me)." or "We charge the highest price the market will bear."

Policies, speeches, websites and other collateral need to repeat these words and reflect these actions every day, every week, every month, every year.

2) The culture must flow down and flow out. Make it real to everyone, and give recognition at every level for all who epitomize the behavior that reflects the culture. Culture development should be desirable, not a punishment or dull or only for lower level people.

The executive team can talk the culture talk by having frequent retreats themselves where they look for more ways to reflect the culture. Then they have to get out and demonstrate. They bring people along with them and show them what it means to act that way. People will follow the actions of the leaders.

3) Strategic goals have to be attainable by hewing to the stated culture. In other words, you can't have a strategic goal of revenue growth through charging what the market will bear (price gouging) if an element of your culture is to price your goods and services to provide high value relative to the price. If your strategic goal is to reduce personnel costs and your culture is to respect all people, you can't reduce your costs on the backs of the least powerful employees.

When you and your fellow executives, managers and peers do not actively create, speak about and act on a clear and desired culture, you'll be leaving a vacuum that people will fill in their own ways. It's human nature to create rituals and customs so without culture leadership, everyone will invent their own. It's impossible for a ship to sail in one direction when hands are working in many different directions.

Create a positive culture, speak about it regularly, act upon it daily and bring eveyone along. You'll vanquish culture wars and culture clashes and make sure that strategy and culture support each other.

PS-When you speak about your culture, make sure you use mostly examples and stories, stocked with emotions, inspiration and successful outcomes. Culture is not policy, it's lifestyle.

 

 

 

 

What I Would Say to Graduates

Five words: Be Open-minded, Optimistic, Persistent.

Everyone I know who has been working for 30 years or more is not currently in the job or even in the field that they started out with right after graduation. I myself have had 5 different careers over the years.

What does it mean to be open-minded, optimistic and persistent?

Open-minded: There are many paths ahead. Think about each of them in terms of your values, not in  terms of your recent education, degree or career (and money) expectations others have for you. This thinking needs to be deep: How do I want to feel each day when I wake up? What energy will I have for this path? How does that compare to the energy I'll have for another path? What is the best that can happen for me on this path or that path? What will I learn about myself?

One way to approach open-mindedness is to clearly see what what boundaries and parameters are currently surrounding your thinking. You can't think beyond the limits if you don't know what the limits are. Typical limits are: the expectations of others; financial needs; what your friends are doing; where you live or want to live; your own aspirations from a time before you were actually poised to take whatever steps you want. Childhood dreams can be hard to give up.

Optimistic: Headlines, numbers, predictions, analyses, media, peer pressure--these all can conspire to make you view the near future pessimistically. I'm emphatic in reminding you that if you look for them, you'll find many numbers, predictions, analyses, media and peers who think the future is bright and worth going out into with optimisim. You choose your perspective, so choose to be optimistic.

Optimism enables you to see opportunity in the numbers. Instead of being fearful and limited by the one number that says it will be hard for grads to find jobs, look at a broad range of numbers for many different work areas. There are plenty where the opportunities are abundant. Look at trends instead of the current numbers and set your path to coincide with upward trends. Use the thinking and analytical skills you learned for your own benefit.

Most of all, believe that taking one path today is just that--a path for today. You'll be able to veer off or go in various other directions over the years.

Persistent: This may be the hardest behavior to stick to. Social media combined with peer pressure from those physically near you make it hard to stick to a path that is different from the crowd. I assure you that anyone who has been successful has persisted in following their own path, no matter how much external pressure and influence they feel from the crowd.

Persistence also requires resiliency because there are always things that go wrong, obstacles that pop up or changes in the community/industry in which you work and live. Speak to anyone you admire and ask about their failures--there will always be some. You learn from them and keep going.

Success over many years is possible and that's the view you should be taking as you graduate. Nothing you do today has to prevent you from doing something else tomorrow. Define yourself by your values, not by processes, tools, degrees, alma maters or other external factors.

People are always curious about my path to being a successful speaker and solo practioner of speech and presentation consulting and coaching for the past 14 years. The quick summary is this: there was no path. I did many different kinds of work: social worker, adjunct professor of finance, executive director of several non-profits, and owner/operator of a small restaurant before I discovered my love for speaking and my knack for making a difference for my audiences and my clients. I learned a lot from my various other careers that I've brought with me to the work I do now.

Take a deep breath, look inside yourself, and overpower the naysayers with your open-mindedness, your optimisim and your persistence. A few years from now, you'll be telling others how well these three personal qualities worked for you.

 

 

 

 

Improve Your Speaking By Changing Your Speaking Culture

You're very well aware of the culture (the sum of beliefs and behavior) of your company and you do your part to fall within its boundaries. That's largely how people get along and succeed. Company culture unfortunately can be an impediment to better speaking and presentation skillfulness, although that may not be readily apparent.

Over the 14 years that I've worked at hundreds of companies I've seen these three beliefs  and behavior predominate. Your company may only believe one of these but that's enough to cause behaviors that hurt your speaking skillfulness.

1) Belief #1: Our marketing tactics must be reflected in all of our speeches and presentations

Marketing is about establishing your brand identity with a widespread audience. It is general and all about your company. Your brand identity may include specific colors and language or talking points.

Speeches and presentations may be used for marketing in the sense that they cause people to call you. When speaking for marketing, you'll be successful only if the speaker connects with the people right in front of him or her. So forcing broadbased branding tactics on speakers (and slides) is inappropriate for speeches and presentations and is counterproductive.

Real people in audiences respond to lots of variety and surprises. Marketing always limits these.

2) Belief #2: Our company story is extremely compelling and must be told to all audiences

I'm sorry to say that except for a tiny sliver of all the businesses in the world, the company story is not so compelling that it needs to be told all the time. What people really want to hear is what your company will do for them. How will working with you, buying from you or teaming with you help them reach the goals they have for themselves? When you articulate this with passion and deep meaning, you'll be far more compelling than any company story will be.

3) Belief #3: Different speaking rules and standards apply to each level of your organization

When it comes to speaking and presenting, the only way to create a high level of skill in speeches and presentations company-wide is for everyone at every level to have the same speaking precepts for content and style. When CEOs assign their direct reports or subordinates to attend a speaking skills workshop or work with a speaking coach, but then they do not improve their own speaking skillfulness, the others will not change. The investment will be wasted because no one will do what the CEO doesn't do.

Time after time, I've coached a manager or vice president to begin their speech or presentation with an attention-getting opening, only to have the CEO listen and say "We don't do it that way." That's the end of any improvements and a waste of their investment in coaching.

CEOs can work with an executive speech coach privately if they prefer not to join a group. The most important part of the coaching must be teaching the same approach to everyone at every level. And when the CEO implements it, everyone else wiil implement it as well.

Culture brings people together. Use the avenue of company culture to improve speaking effectiveness from the top down and across the whole organization.

 

 

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How to Hold Your Audience in Rapt Attention

There is magic in those moments when everyone in the audience is paying full attention to you. You don't need to be a sleight-of-hand magician to make this happen. You only need to tell a great story.

A powerful example of how a great story is like magic was reported in the news about Bill Clinton speaking at Howard University's 2013 graduation. Clinton described his visit to Indonesia and a tour through the camps sheltering many tens of thousands of those left homeless by the tsunami in 2004.

Clinton praised the handsomeness of a 10 year old boy. The interpreter told Clinton that yes,the boy was handsome and that until the tsunami, he had had 9 siblings. All of them were lost in the tsunami. As the reporter wrote "The crowd fell silent."

It's what Clinton said next that makes this an example of speaking magic. He said to the graduates "This man who had lost nine of his ten children led me through that camp with a smile on his face and never talked about anything but what those other people needed and what he wanted me to do."

"No matter what happens to you, it is highly unlikely that you will ever face anything as awful as what happened to that mother and father."

No facts and statistics, no policy rants, no logic. A compelling story related in simple meaningful words with obvious emotion in his voice. Those graduates will remember their graduation day for a long time. I'm sure that from time to time, when faced with the difficulties of life that everyone faces, they will remember this story.

How well do you create magic with your stories and hold your audience in rapt attention?

 

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Establish Your Unique Identity

Do you compare yourself to someone else? You're "sort of like..." or "in the style of..." or "a knock off of..."  Stop it immediately!

The original person X or person Y is likely online in many media. If you identify yourself in terms of person X or Y, you'll simply send your listeners or readers or followers to that other person and they can do so with a few taps of a finger. Why would they listen to you when they can go directly to the original?

Put your efforts into working diligently and thoughtfully to be the very best YOU. What makes you who you are? Your unique set of circumstances throughout your life can be put to use establishing your unique identity. Every person experiences similar events from their own perspective, lens or point of view. This is how you stand out and establish your unique identity.

Think about yourself in terms of these characteristics:

Values: what are your never-waver-no-matter-what values? Honesty, environment-friendly, helping others, leading, being a geat teammate? There are many others. Know your own.

Perspective: half-full/optimistic; half-empty/pessimistic; insider or outsider; dramatic or steady and even-keeled? Whichever you are, embrace it.

Personality: happy and life-of-the-party; serious and preferring small groups and 1-on-1; introvert; extrovert; deep and analytical; broad and skimming the surface.

I believe that all of these are equally valid-there are no rights or wrongs, best or worst. You are the combination of values, perspective and personality that you are.

What is important is to recognize yourself and claim your unique identity. When you contribute to a project, lead a team, or become a senior executive you must stay true to your unique identity. When you write or speak, let your unqiue identity come through.

What would it mean to you, your career, and your reputation if others started quoting you, referring to themselves as like you, and holding you up as an exemplar? It would mean a lot, even if you can't quite see it now.

Get clear on your unique identity and establish and maintain it.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Now on Kindle: How to Become a Person of Interest by Susan Trivers, America's Great Speaking Coach.

 

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Relevance: Your Speeches Must Keep Pace with Rapid Changes in the World

Your audiences require value, a return on the investment they've made to show up and listen to you. You only give that to them by talking about views and visions that are constantly refreshed. Any speech or segment of a speech that is more than 3 months old does not pass the relevance test. Get rid of it.

Not only has the world changed in the past few months, all the people in it--and in your audiences--have changed too. What was fresh and new a few months ago is either now accepted practice or has gone by the wayside. People today are quick to adopt, adapt or discard.

You will give your audience their desired ROI through wisdom and vision. Wisdom comes from an analysis of your long experience combined with the intellectual work that leads to expectations for the future. We can only act for future results. Anything that simply repeats what is known today falls short of this goal. Real ROI for an audience comes from helping them plan what to do tomorrow and in the coming months.

Forget historical corporate or industry overviews. Forget repeating conventional widsom. Avoid beating the drum for "best practices." If you can't or won't interpret facts and figures, leave them out or don't speak at all.

What should you speak about? First, know what each specific audience cares about now and for the coming months. Topics include growth; changes in the market place; concepts such as adaptability, responsiveness, and service; and values, which are long-lasting and immutable.

Customize your speech content for the specific concerns of each audience. One audience might be worried about how their company, with long lead times, can become more responsive to changes in their market place. Another audience may want to become more responsive to meeting the changing needs of their marketplace but they have the ability for quick turnarounds. These are on the same topic--changing markets--but two different perspectives.

The best business speakers are well-prepared with fresh, up-to-date material relevant to each audience. They don't rely on libraries of slides or files of old speeches where they just change the name of the company or city. Human beings are very quick to assess you and when you speak tired old material, you'll be relegated to the dinosaur heap.

All business growth is future oriented. Your speeches must be the same. Get out a clean sheet of paper or open a fresh screen and put down your thoughts about today and tomorrow. Build your speech from those thoughts. The audience, and you, will enjoy a significant ROI.

 

 

 

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Get the (Imaginary) Rally Towels Waving at Your Next Speech

Excited chatter, waving rally towels, boasting about the team's stats, boldly predicting that your team is going to blow away the other team...

Do you craft and deliver your stories like a football game unfolds?

To me, the qualities that make a sports game exciting and captivating are these:

1) Uncertainty-even an underdog could win!

2) Ups and downs-every team fumbles, makes amazing catches, expresses elation and frustration

3) The possibility for something unexpected to change the trajectory of the game (weather, ref's call, a player coming out of nowhere to make a great play)

Regretfully most business speakers are not like football teams that make the game exciting from
the first moment to the last. Most speakers are like train schedules: they run on time, hit every scheduled milepost along the way and routinely arrive at the destination. That's great if you are a train passenger, but pretty boring if you're an audience member.

Speakers must build excitement and unpredictability into their stories. Write the story from your
perspective of being in it as it unfolds. Express your uncertainty about how it will play out (either good or bad). Make the audience feel they are with you in the moments that the experience took
place.

The opposite of being in it as it unfolds is to view it historically and tell it that way. This is typical and you should try hard to stop doing it.

Big caution here: while a football game seems to be happening "on the fly", it is much more a result of devoted practice and planning. A superbly told story that unfolds with all the excitement of a football game happens because you've crafted it carefully and practiced and rehearsed diligently. Remember that even football games, which take place in the moment, are exciting because the teams have practiced and rehearsed millions of possibilities. They're prepared, so they can go with the flow on game day.

Be prepared so you can go with the flow--be fully present for the audience, adjusting your timing or
gestures or eye contact as the audience responds just as fans respond to the unfolding events at a football game.

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Are You Ready for Bold Self-Promotion?

You'll never get ahead without others knowing about the outcomes that your work generates. Yet we are conflicted about self-promotion. It's bragging, it's unseemly, what will others think? "There's no I in team" has been pounded into us.

Before you turn away from, or jump into, the idea of bold self-promotion, take a few moments to objectively evaluate whether you're ready to self-promote.

The two dimensions are Skills and Outcomes and you evaluate yourself on how high or low you are in each dimension.

If you fall into the High SKills-High Outcomes quadrant, you are ready for bold self-promotion. You have to get over your discomfort about talking about yourself. Create mini-stories such as: "When we had X problem, I realized that the obstacles to overcoming it were A,B,C and I took (or lead) actions Q,R,S to generate Z results." There aren't any grandiose exaggerations here or highly charged adjectives ("I was stupendous in my unrelenting efforts!" or "I worked 24/7 to get the results.") It is absolutely fair for you to connect your work to the outcomes.

If you fall into the High Skills-Low Outcomes quadrant, you're currently non-differentiated from others. You need to develop your ability to turn your skills and work into measureable outcomes. Measures may be quantitative and/or qualitative. Hard work that doesn't contribute to the goals of the organization is like a hamster running on a wheel. You don't want to do that. The first step to improvement is to establish a measureable outcome or goal. Define what it will look/feel/sound like when you achieve it. Then focus your high skills on reaching that goal. High skills are the foundation for the readiness to self-promote.

If you fall into the Low Skills-High Outcomes quadrant you're in a tenuous position: "a one-hit wonder." The high outcomes may have been the result of others' work, a fortuitous change in circumstances, or something outside your control. If you boldy self-promote on the basis of great outcomes not backed up by your own high skill level, you've built a house of cards that can come tumbling down at any time. The biggest risk is that you are asked to repeat the success and you won't be able to. Enjoy the space that high outcomes gives you to build your skills. Until you have the skills as well, you should resist bold self-promotion.

If you fall into the Low Skills-Low Outcomes quadrant, you know you are far from ready for self-promotion. The first step is to set a measureable goal you can attain in the short term (6 months). Then list the skills you'll need to achieve that goal and acquire them, either by taking classes, self-study or mentoring or a combination of these. While you are working on your skills, keep a notebook of your progress. It's much easier to recognize small steps at the time you take them. After 6 months, compare where you are with where you started. It may not be time for bold self-promotion but I'm pretty sure you'll see that you're moving into the High Skills-Low Outcomes quadrant. From there it is possible to generate more outcomes.

Share examples from your own life about how you got ready for bold self-promotion. Post them in our comment box.

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Similes Add Vivid LIfe to Your Speeches

"A great speaker lifts the audience up like a quarterback running for a touchdown excites the fans."

This is an example of a simile, which is a comparison between two unlike objects or behaviors that specifically uses the word "like" or "as."

To state this comparison as a question: "Do you lift the audience up like a quarterback running for a touchdown?"

Business speakers load up their speeches with facts like a freight train loaded with heavy cargo.

Instead, business speakers must present like a thriller that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats.

Now that you've got the idea about similes, what concepts or objects will you compare to events, actions and objects from the non-business world? Your ability to use similes could well make you a person of interest, and sought after over the many others who are competing in your space.

A person of interest is like the grand canyon: beyond measuring, memorable, and one of a kind.

Share your favorite similes in our comment box.

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