I’m going to start a series of blogs on people that have added something important to the world of communications.  The series will be personal and partial, but I welcome nominations for those you think I’ve missed.  I’m grateful to these people because understanding how we communicate is desperately important to bettering our humanity in both business and life.  Miscommunications are sometimes merely irritating, but sometimes fatal.  Business communications are usually banal and boring and only occasionally riveting.  Leadership is tougher than ever – and more than ever about communicating well.  The great business communicators –  Steve Jobs, for example – can turn little companies into dominant ones and truly change the world. 

So I’m going to start with someone you’ve never heard of, unless you’ve read the footnotes to my second book, Trust Me.  I’m not vain enough to think that you have, so let me introduce Susan Goldin-Meadow.  Susan has been studying how children learn for some time now, with an eye to making that learning better, especially for autistic children.  She’s doing God’s work.  But it was her book, Hearing Gesture:  How our hands help us think, that provided me a big ‘aha’ that led to writing Trust Me. 

This is why I’m grateful to her.  The insight in her book is that people gesture what they’re thinking but can’t necessarily articulate.  In other words, we can gesture more than we say, because gesture comes from our unconscious minds and is often way ahead of our conscious thought. 

For example, you can say ‘staircase’, and at the same time gesture in a corkscrew fashion, and your listener (if she can see you) will infer that you mean a spiral staircase.  That kind of unconscious communication via gesture happens all the time, but people tend to discount gesture because they think of it as mere hand-waiving that accompanies (conscious) speech. 

Or a child can gesture a relationship between two items in a math problem before that child can articulate that relationship in words.  In short, we learn first through gesture.  Gesture is primary.  We think our brains give us conscious intent – say, for example, we become aware that we’re thirsty, and then we direct our hands to reach toward a glass.  But in fact, the brain research shows that we get unconscious intents first, the gesture starts next, and only after that (up to 9 seconds later) do we become consciously aware of what we’re doing. 

The implications of all this are vast for communications.  If gesture comes first, then we need to pay as much attention getting that right as we do our speech (and our slides, for God’s sake).  There’s a lot more that flows from it, and I talk about it all in Trust Me, but that’s where it starts, and Susan Goldin-Meadow provided the spark for me. 

You can see her discussing her insights in a great TED talk here.  She’s not the world’s best presenter, but she’s good enough, and her thinking is absolutely brilliant.  Watch the talk, read the book, and gesture a quiet ‘thanks’ to Susan Goldin-Meadow for her insights.

 

 

 

 

People send me their books regularly for comment, and the last half-dozen I’ve received all are aimed at the level of basic information for beginning speakers.  If you’ve resolved to kick-start your career in 2012, then one or more of these books may save you from making the usual beginners’ mistakes – and may even give you an idea or two for accelerating your career. 

10 Steps to Writing a Vital Speech
Fletcher Dean

Dean aims his basic manual at speechwriters, but there’s good, beginning advice in here for all speakers.  He covers a variety of ways to think about preparing a speech, storytelling, structure, Power Point, and other aspects of getting started, as well as a little on delivery and the stage managing of a speech. 

Quick Takeaway:  Dean believes that a speech can do one (or more) of 5 things:  inform, create understanding, reinforce shared values, change attitudes, or elicit action.  He says these get harder in that order and the last two are the hardest of all.

Secrets from the Greenroom
David Michael

This slender volume talks about entertaining audiences from the comic’s perspective.  Michael, who has worked the comedy circuit as well as corporate public speaking, offers brief takes and stories on issues such as: 

•    Don’t be afraid of being afraid
•    Nervous?  Pretend you’re someone else – adopt a persona
•    Why it’s important to check out the room beforehand
•    How to know when to quit – when the audience is still with you
•    Why you need to work the room
•    The importance of props
•    How to make the audience your friend – identify with them

Who Needs Words?
A Christian Communications Handbook
Richard Littledale

This is my favorite of the book on review here, even though it’s aimed at pastors and Christian communications.  Littledale has thought deeply about the means and the ethics of communications, and he shares his insights in this warm and engaging book.   There’s something for every communicator to learn here, especially as you’re beginning your forays into public communication of any kind.  

Quick Takeaways:

•    You must “land in the world” of your listener
•    Don’t be afraid of silence
•    All speakers – and pastors – need ‘confident humility’
•    Ask yourself, what is your communications culture?
•    Use mirroring and meta-mirroring (role playing the positions of the other people you’re communicating with)
•    Embrace your vulnerability
•    Enjoy your humanity

Obama’s Secrets:  How to Speak and Communicate with Power and a Little Magic
Gil and Nili Peretz

The premise of this book by an Israeli communications team might strike Americans as a bit odd:  we can learn valuable insights from studying President Obama’s communications and communications style.  We here in the US think of Obama as a great campaigner, but many Americans have soured on his communications now that he’s in office.  Of course, as Winston Churchill famously said, you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. 

Nonetheless, the Peretz team have lots of useful, if rather basic, insights gleaned from studying the 44th President.  They use the NLP filter as a way of understanding Obama’s strengths, and that limits their work a little.  NLP – neurolinguistic programming – is based on old science that hasn’t been significantly updated since the 1970s.  As a result, it’s right some of the time, and way behind the research some of the time. 

With that caveat, here’s a sampling of their takeaways and insights: 

•    Use your own real life experience
•    Listen to your audience
•    Put yourself in someone else’s shoes
•    Use “Us” and “We” not “Me”
•    You are what you say
•    You can shape your own destiny
•    Self-confidence is the secret for success
•    It’s better to be strong as a communicator (and a person)
•    Ask what motivates your audience
•    Keep it simple
•    Build rapport with key words, messages, body language
•    Pace and then lead your audience 
•    Tell stories
•    Use metaphors
•    Ask questions
•    Use the rule of threes
•    Use repetition, contrast
•    First look at your audience, then pause, then speak

Speaking Professionally
Alan Jay Zaremba

This is a beginning textbook covering all aspects of communications for the student.  Zaremba has chapters on ethics, speech anxiety, audience analysis, style, structure, visual support, group presentations, persuasion, body language, and Q and A.  Recommended if you’re looking for a simple, clear introduction to the research and scope of modern communications. 

Paid To Speak
The National Speakers Association 

This is a useful book for people looking to start a professional speaking career.  Written by a series of successful professionals in the NSA family, Paid To Speak covers a number of issues that speakers starting out always have questions about.  The advice in this book could save you a year’s worth of flailing around. 

Topics covered include:

•    Eloquence – making yourself and audience comfortable
•    Storytelling and speaking
•    How to facilitate
•    The power of the pause
•    Using improv
•    Working with humor
•    Basic body language
•    How to dress – what to wear
•    Building your confidence
•    Creating your brand

One of the most remarkable books in recent years for students of public speaking is Clarence Jones’ Behind the Dream:  The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation.  The book puts us in the moment when King raised his hand high in the air, stood on tiptoe, and said, “Free at last, free at last!  Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”  The crowd erupted in a roar that has reverberated down the years and generations to the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president, but also to countless individual dreams realized in the slow march to racial equality. 

Jones was Martin Luther King’s lawyer, and one of his inner circle of advisors.  That put Jones in a very good position to witness the development of the idea for the march on Washington, the planning for it, and the event itself.  He recaptures very convincingly the state of mind of King’s circle beforehand, not knowing whether or not the speech would be a success, worrying about harassment from the FBI, and struggling with the demands of all the groups that wanted to be involved and have their say in how the day worked. 

In the end, of course, it worked very, very well.  Jones moves on to talk about the development of the speech – he was also King’s speechwriter – and takes credit, essentially, for the first half of the speech.  This section talks (in somewhat legalistic terms) about the promissory note still due American blacks because of the injustice meted out to them over the previous several hundred years. 

Of course the magic happened in the second half of the speech, where King left his script and ad-libbed the incredible “I have a dream” sequence, as I’ve blogged about before.  What Jones adds is that the impetus to ad-lib came from Mahalia Jackson, the great singer, who had treated the audience to a heartfelt rendition of a gospel number, “I’ve been ‘buked and I’ve been scorned,” just before King began to speak.  She shouted to King, according to Jones, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin, tell ‘em about the dream!” about midway through the speech. 

Jones’ theory is that King heard those words, and in nanoseconds decided to throw away his script and begin ad-libbing. 

It makes a great story, and of course it’s possible.  But my hunch is that King must have been realizing that he wasn’t connecting with the audience several minutes before that.  A decision like that comes from a growing sense that you need to shift gears because of the unconscious messages the audience sends you.  Jackson’s urging might well have tipped the balance, but unless it was reinforced with King’s own feeling about the audience, I doubt one shouted comment alone would have had the effect Jones attributes to it.  King’s speaking style, from his Baptist minister days, incorporated a good deal of ‘call and response’, so there was lots of shouting going on.  

If you watch the filmed record of the event, all you see is the shift itself, with King mostly reading the script in the first half of the speech, to him directly addressing the crowd in the second half.  Make a decision to go off script he clearly did, but what prompted the decision?  We will never know for sure. 

Nonetheless, Jones was there and I wasn’t, and his tale adds to the lore of what is one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century.  The book is wonderful, and rewarding for students of public speaking as well as of the civil rights era.  History is all too often written backward, with the certainty of future knowledge lending inevitability to the author’s insights.  Jones is particularly skilled at giving us the contingent nature of events as the happen, and that is a great gift to anyone who wants to understand where we’ve really come from.  Highly recommended. 

For more detailed analysis of King’s speech, especially of the ad lib section, see my earlier blog, “What you don’t know about King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

A friend sent me a book – Team Talk, by Anne Donnellon – that inspired me to create a diagnostic tool based on Donnellon’s research for cross-functional teams to rate themselves on their collaborative strengths based on their communication styles. 

Donnellon’s basic insight is that you can predict how teams will succeed or fail by how they talk about themselves.   Teams that argue more, and work to true collaboration, rather than shutting up to get along, or pulling rank, are more likely to accomplish great things.  

The higher you rate on this simple diagnostic, the more likely your team is to succeed – and the reverse is also true. 

It’s a quick, easy test to take -- just 6 questions.  Take it today to see where your team’s strengths and weaknesses lie.

1. Identification.  Do your teammates identify themselves more with the functional area they came from, or the team itself?  Rate your team on a scale of 5, with 5 meaning ‘identifies with the team’ and 1 means ‘identifies with the functional area they came from’.

2. Interdependence.  Do your teammates take unilateral action, or do they work with the team to get things done?  Rate your team, with 5 meaning ‘works with the team to get things done’, and 1 means ‘takes unilateral action’.

3. Power.   Do your teammates pull rank, or argue based on merit?  Rate your team, with 5 meaning ‘argues positions based on merit’, and 1 means ‘pulls rank’. 

4. Social distance.   Here’s where the chit-chat and small talk is important.  Rate your team, with 5 meaning ‘lots of social connections among teammates’, to 1 meaning ‘no social interaction’. 

5. Conflict management tactics.  Do your teammates force some issues, and avoid others, or do they confront and collaborate?  If your team mostly confronts and collaborate, rate yourself a 5.  If the team mostly forces and avoids, rate yourself a 1. 

6. Negotiation.  Rate the negotiations that go on within the team.  If they’re mostly win-win, rate yourself a 5.  If they’re mostly win-lose, a 1. 

The score. 

24 – 30: You’ve got a highly collaborative team, and you’re likely to pull off win after win.

23 – 18: Your team is moderately collaborative, and is likely to be distinctly average. 

18 or less:  Your team is likely to underachieve. 

I’m fascinated by the connection between how a team talks – its communication style – and how well it succeeds.  Let me know how you get on, and what your results are.  Is the diagnostic helpful?
 

Peter Guber has written a masterful additional to the storytelling library shelf with his book, Tell To Win.  In the course of showing you how to research, use, prepare, share, borrow, set, mine, and kill with a story, Guber tells a hundred wonderful stories himself, about his career in the movie business, and about many other celebrities along the way.  My only complaint is that he doesn’t tell you how to craft a story beyond the familiar three-part opening challenge – struggle – resolution that is the stuff of hundreds of similar books on the scene.  Maybe he’s saving that for his next book.  But there’s so much good stuff in this volume that you should pick up Tell To Win without delay and devour it because great stories make great speeches and this book will be enormously useful for anyone interested in communicating better as a speaker, writer, or business person. 

Beyond beginning, middle, and end, what are Guber’s insights?  Here are some of his takeaways:

1.  Beware the power of the backstory.  Guber relates a number of stories where paying attention to the client’s or customer’s backstory won the deal – and ignoring backstory lost it.  Guber himself tried and failed to steal Larry King away from CNN a number of years ago.  Ted Turner kept Larry at CNN with 5 words, “Just tell me, ‘Good bye’.”  That worked because of Larry’s issues about loyalty over his struggles with his father.  Turner knew what button to push – the power of the backstory.

2.  Who’s your audience?  With Guber’s stories, it becomes clear that he does his homework.  You’re never ready to tell a story until you know your audience better than it knows itself.  What does that audience fear?  Long for?  Dream about?  Loathe?  You’ve got to do the research.  You’re simply not ready for prime time otherwise. 

3.  Who’s the hero of your story?  Who are you going to put in the role of hero?  A good storyteller knows that you have several options.  You can put yourself in the role of hero, and rely on the empathy of the audience to make the transference.  Or you can cast a figure from history, or a fictional character as hero.  Most powerful, often, is to put the audience in the role.  That way, you make it easy for your listeners to take over the story and make it their own. 

4.  Mine everywhere for sources of story.   As someone with a long history in the movie business, Guber knows that stories come from just about everywhere – personal experience, history, myth, the classics, the news – wherever human intent and effort are involved.  Don’t limit yourself.  Be prepared to find stories everywhere.

5.  When you’re telling the story, get into the right frame of mind.  Storytellers have to be fully present, feeling the emotions of their stories, so that the magical transference of emotion to the audience will happen when it’s supposed to – and not when it isn’t.  You don’t want unintended humor – you want the audience to respond on cue.  To get that response, you have to earn it by being completely in the moment with the story. 

6.  Props can help tell a powerful story; they can also kill one.  Guber tells the story of presenting former President Reagan and former President Mikhail Gorbachev with Tiffany-designed jackknives and reminding them of playing mumblety-peg as boys.  The prop, and the story worked.  But when candidate Michael Dukakis rode in a tank to show he was tough on defense, the prop shot down his campaign, because it didn’t feel real for the peace-loving Dukakis. 

7.  In the end, you have to surrender control.  Good storytelling means giving the story to the audience.  The audience has to own it or you haven’t succeeded.  That’s brilliant advice, and a nice cap to a valuable book.

As I said, Guber leaves the structure of a story at the simple level that most other writers do.  For a more nuanced, thorough explanation of what makes a good story, see my (free) article, "How to tell powerful stories in your speeches."
 

Some of the best communications advice I’ve read recently is to be found in Connie Dieken’s Talk Less, Say More.  Connie’s thesis is that world’s attention span is getting shorter, and she offers a 3-point plan for cutting through the clutter and capturing your audience’s attention quickly and efficiently.

Her main point is incontrovertible.  Attention spans are getting shorter, we are all trying to absorb more information faster than ever before, and there are more new ideas out there demanding our attention.  It’s a triple whammy, and Connie’s response is similarly three-fold:  connect, convey, convince. 

First, connect.  To connect with an audience, you have to be tough on yourself.  No wandering preambles, no endless qualifications, no screwing around before you get started.  Respect the audience’s time, and information overload.  Give it to them straight and as simple as possible. 

Most important, you have to know the audience – what it wants and needs, and what its preferred communication styles are. 

Second, convey.  Keep it simple, use clear visuals when possible, tell stories, and give your points in groups of three.  That’s about as simple as I can make it.  It’s all good advice and it all works. 

Third, convince.  The idea is to lead people to action, and you do that by sounding confident, cutting out the shilly-shallying, bringing others along with you by bringing them in and allowing them to own the solution too, and by adjusting your energy to the appropriate level for the audience and the room.  There, I summed that section up in one sentence.  Connie would be proud. 

This is a great book for the long-winded, the detail-oriented, and the footnoters of this world.  Life is picking up speed at an ever-faster rate, and we all have to learn how to keep up by cutting to the chase. 

For more on how to persuade others, see my article on How to Write a Great Speech. 

Guy Kawasaki enchants with Enchantment.  It’s a lovely word, but of course Guy wants it to mean more than just charming the socks off someone.  He is talking about how you delight people with a purpose:  to buy your product, help you achieve something, or just be your friend. 

Can you use Kawasaki’s insights to give better speeches?  Guy offers some specific advice on giving presentations:

Customize the introduction.  Guy’s idea here is that you give better speeches when you give the same one over and over again.  Presentation practice makes perfect.  But you enchant people by tailoring the beginning to them – showing that you know or are connected with them in some way.  Guy often takes pictures of the audience or the city and puts them in the introduction. 

This is good advice, but not enough.  You really need to tailor a speech to an audience throughout.  Of course, there may be big chunks of your usual speech that fit with a particular audience, but you should never assume that’s the case.  Good speaking starts with good research, and that research may affect not only the beginning but the middle and the end of your speech.

Sell your dream.  Guy means that you need to sell the sizzle with the steak, the big idea with the product, the differentiator with the beta release.  It’s a good point, but the real way you enchant an audience is to solve the audience’s problem.  To do that, you need to know what that problem is. 

Think screenplay, not speech.  Great movies follow a 3-act structure, and so should your speech, says Guy.  This is good advice, and widely proffered, but all too often watered down to saying that a good speech has a beginning, middle, and end.  A great screenplay is much more than that.  A great screenplay takes viewers on a journey, seen through the eyes of the hero.  A great screenplay begins with a situation, then a complication that forces the hero out of her comfort zone, her daily life, her stuck situation.  It may be an event, a new person, a decision.  Then the complications begin.  A great screenplay throws obstacles in the way of the hero so that it will take 2 convincing hours for her to reach her goal.  When these complications reach their zenith, the hero faces a test that reveals her true character.  If she passes the test, the story resolves more or less happily.  If she fails the test, the story resolves more or less tragically. 

There’s a lot to a screenplay, and Guy only touches on what’s really involved.  By all means use the idea of a screenplay to jazz up your presentation, but realize that a screenplay is a complicated, subtle beast and needs to be treated with respect.  If you have a beginning, middle, and end to your presentation, you don't have a screenplay.   

Dramatize, shorten, and practice.  I’m combining three of Guy’s points here because they all have to do with upping the ante and avoiding dullness.  Dramatize your talk with great slides that convey emotion.  Shorten your speech – no one ever complained when a talk finished early. And practice, because it makes perfect.  Guy also says “speak a lot,” which is the same point. 

Warm up your audience.  I like this point, because it’s not as obvious – or as frequently given -- as the others.  Guy means going out into the audience before your talk begins to get to know them.  This is a very good idea, and not practiced enough by speakers everywhere.  ‘Visiting’ with your audience beforehand will warm them to you, help with your nerves, and potentially give you stuff to say to customize the talk.  All good, and very worthwhile. 

What about the rest of the book?  I think the real value of Enchantment for public speakers comes in Guy’s wise, funny, and spot on advice about how to catch people’s attention, hold that attention, and keep enchanting them for a long time.  It’s not that the advice is so surprising for a regular reader of advice books, but Guy puts it together in a delightful way, and his warm, down-to-earth personality shines throughout.  Highly recommended airplane read. 

For a discussion of an equally revolutionary set of principles along similar lines, read my review of Sally Hogshead’s Fascinate. 

Publication of a new book by Public Words’ good friend Tim Sanders is an event to celebrate, and in this case, Today We Are Rich:  Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence, is a special cause for celebration.  The book is packed with great stories, jammed with wonderful tips on how to improve your own confidence and performance, and overflowing with the character of Tim’s grandmother, Billye, who took him in and raised him up to be the dynamo that he is. 

The book is Tim’s most heartfelt and revealing to date.  This one is personal.  We get the story of Tim’s tough childhood and his ‘sideways’ years after his father was murdered and Tim simmered with anger and rejection. 

The stories are memorable, and the advice is spot on: 

Feed your mind good stuff.  (Turn off the junk TV and bad news.)

Move the conversation forward.  (Keep it positive but don’t ignore the realities.)

Exercise your gratitude muscle.  (Remember everyday what is good about your life.)

Give to be rich.  (Take what you need and share the rest.)

Prepare yourself.  (Do your homework.)

Balance your confidence. (Keep it real and have a purpose.)

Promise made, promise kept.  (Follow through on your commitments.)

If you work with Tim, you’ll find that these are indeed the principles he lives by, so the guy is for real.  And if you take these principles on, you’ll find that you are indeed rich – from today forward. 

If you get a chance to see Tim speak, seize it.  He’s one of the best public speakers on the planet.   Today We Are Rich is a top-notch self-help book from a charismatic speaker who’s lived a real life and knows what he’s talking about.  Highly recommended.  

In his NY Times Bestseller, Delivering Happiness, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh advises public speakers to “wing it.”  I am driven to take up the cudgels and protect people from that spectacularly bad advice. 

What’s Hsieh’s story?  As CEO of the phenomenally successful Internet-based shoe company, Hseih received more and more invitations to speak as the company became better and better known. 

Apparently, it was not a task that he looked forward to with much enthusiasm.  He says he had done little of it, and got quite nervous beforehand.   But he agreed to the speaking because each speech represented an opportunity to tell the Zappos story to a new audience and spread the good word about the company’s success.  In that way, Hseih figured, he’d sell more shoes, get more recruits, and continue to grow the business.  Very smart. 

Unfortunately, as smart as he was in realizing a good marketing opportunity, he turned out to be sadly dumb in his approach to public speaking.  Here’s what he did.  He wrote the speech out beforehand, and “spent a month memorizing it and rehearsing it.”  As a result, when the day came, he was nervous, short on sleep, and glad when the speech was over. 

He reports that he did an “OK” job, but the whole experience was not a pleasant one, even though it was good for Zappos business. 

Part of his dislike of the whole experience came from when he inevitably forgot one of those memorized lines, and went into a tizzy trying to recall it so that he would give the audience the entire speech as written. 

Then, in the midst of all this misery, Tony had an “ah ha” moment.  He realized that the audience didn’t know when he dropped a line, because it didn’t know the speech beforehand.  That was liberating, but there was more to come. 

Tony started getting feedback from his audiences that they really enjoyed his personal stories about the business, because he was passionate about those stories and Zappos, and that made for a more entertaining speech.

So for his next speech, he abandoned the script and the rote memorization and just told stories selected on the fly from the stock that he had developed during his Year of Living Miserably giving memorized speeches. 

The result?  He got into the “flow” and had a ball telling the stories.  The audience responded better, and the whole thing just clicked.  So, Tony concludes, when you’re going to give a speech, “just wing it.”

But hang on a minute.  Tony’s not winging it.  Winging it is making it up as you go along.  But Tony already has a pretty good idea of what he’s going to say.  He’s going to choose from a finite list of stories he’s told many times, and about which he’s passionate. 

That’s not winging it, that’s giving a modular speech, a speech constructed out of familiar chunks that you’ve done many times before. 

Tony’s advice is quite good, when you ignore the headline and concentrate on what he’s really saying.  Don’t wing it, because you’ll always look like you’re doing it for the first time.  The result is that your body language will telegraph “first time!” and your audience will get an impression of you (inexperienced, nervous, inauthentic) that is most likely very different from the one that you want to convey:  confident, cool, in charge, competent – you pick the adjectives. 

Instead, tell stories that you’ve rehearsed many times and that you know really, really well.  Stories that you’re passionate about.  Put those stories into a simple structure (like the problem-solution format that I've blogged on before) that makes the point that you’re trying to make with those stories, and you’re all set. 

Oh, yes:  and keep it real.  Then you’ll rock the house just like Tony. 

I was very excited to see the work of a good friend, Josh Linkner, debut at number 1 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble today:  Disciplined Dreaming:  A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity. 

Josh’s argument is that the only sustainable business differentiator left is creativity, when anyone with a computer and a credit card can steal your existing business away by copying it in a matter of weeks.  Business cycles have shrunk to no time at all.  Creativity throughout your organization is what will keep your business on top, constantly reinventing products, ways to market, services, and so on.  How do you delight your customers when the competition can do exactly what you can?  Creativity. 

If innovation is important to you, you need to read this book.  But Josh’s twist on the usual insight into creativity and innovation is that creativity is something that needs to happen at all levels of the organization.  Creativity and innovation are not just about the big blockbuster ideas – the iPhones and iPads – but also about everyday thinking:  how to improve a process, how to save time and money in shipping, how to streamline a budgetary cycle.  The difference between front-rank organizations and all the others is how well they keep innovating at all levels – and that takes creativity and Disciplined Dreaming. 

We’ve worked with Josh on his ideas and his speaking, and his presentation is one not to be missed.  You can check him out here.  He’s also a professional jazz guitarist of 25 years’ standing, and the head of a new venture capital fund.  Josh makes creativity seems effortless; read his book to find out how. 

Of course, I’m envious.  I wish I’d thought of the title, The Naked Presenter.   It’s attention getting.  It got your attention, or you wouldn’t be reading this.  My only consolation is that Garr Reynolds and I agree on most issues around creating and delivering effective presentations.   Where I give science-based reasons for my recommendations, Garr Reynolds gives reasons based mostly in Japanese culture.  Very cool.  Along with his earlier books, Presentation Zen, and Presentation Zen Design, The Naked Presenter is a beautifully designed book with a series of elegant insights into how to present effectively.   Following are 5 of the best lessons from the new book. 

1.   Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.  Garr recommends rehearsing at least 4 or 5 times.  He talks about lessons from the bamboo trees in the Japanese forest.  Bamboo bends, it doesn’t break.  It’s “always ready.”  It grows continually.  These are the qualities that people who are adequately rehearsed can emulate, because they don’t have to focus exclusively on what comes next, trying to remember the content of the speech.  Rather, they can focus on the moment, and respond according to what happens, flexible and easy with their content.  Your body language always signals the state of your psyche to the audience (here’s where the science comes in).  If you’re doing something for the first time, your body will inevitably telegraph that to the audience.  If you’re practiced, you can achieve a level of comfort that will allow you to bond more easily with the audience. 

2.  The audience is on your side; it’s yourself that you have to conquer.   Garr’s insight from Budo, or the general term for martial arts in Japan, is that one’s greatest enemy is oneself.  Public speakers also face that irony every time they get up to speak.  If you realize that a speech is not about you, the speaker, but about the audience, you will be energized by the exchange with that audience.  If you think the speech is about you, it will always feel like hard work.  In terms of the science, if you open yourself to the mirror neurons of the audience, you will feed off their (positive) emotions, and connect with them.  If you focus on your own nervousness, you’ll have a miserable time. 

3.  Never, ever run long.   Garr invokes the Japanese idea of Hara Hachi Bu, which means “eat only until 80 percent full.”  Come to think of it, my grandmother used to tell me that, but she also used to tell me, on other days, “eat what’s on your plate – there are children starving in Africa.”  Anyway, it’s a universal truth that no one ever protested that a speech ended early, but just about everyone is offended when a speech goes long.  I once had the enormous privilege of attending a private seminar with Ted Sorenson, President Kennedy’s speechwriter, about the writing of his inaugural address, the Cuban missile crisis, and other matters.  Sorenson warmed to his theme and ran 90 minutes over, and some members of the audience were growing restive, despite the historic topics that were being discussed by one who had witnessed them.  I would have stayed until dawn, but the point is that even Ted Sorenson talking about Kennedy shouldn’t go on forever. 

4.  Don’t be defensive.  Here, it’s Akido, the gentle Japanese martial art of leveraging your opponent, that comes into play.  Stay interested in the truth, Garr advises, rather than winning or losing.   If you face aggressive or hostile questioning, don’t become hostile back; you’ll only increase the aggressiveness in the room.  Instead, breathe deeply and stay cool.  What the questioner usually wants is to be acknowledged, and I’ve found myself and working with clients, that if you can simply reflect and acknowledge the passion in the question, the hostility goes away.  Instinct pushes one to back up and become defensive, but the better response is to move toward the hostile question and embrace the feeling. 

5.  Keep it simple by presenting naked.  Garr means a number of things with his deliberately provocative title.  He means be simple, be honest and direct, and keep it real.  He means keep your visual aids to a minimum, and when you do use visuals, keep them stripped down, unadorned, and elegant in the Japanese style.  This is great advice, and I would only add that honesty begins with getting clear about how you feel emotionally about your material.  It’s essential to have a strong emotional connection to your presentation, otherwise you can’t begin to be successful with it.  So find the emotional core of your talk, the part that is important to you, and work out from there. 

I recommend all of Garr’s books highly.  They’re elegant, spare, and useful texts on presenting and slide design that should be in every public speaker’s library. 

Nancy Duarte’s new book resonate arrived in my mail box a few days ago, and I’ve been racing through it ever since.  It should immediately join the shelf of great books for serious students of public speaking; it’s destined to become another classic like her earlier book, slide:ology. 

What’s innovative about resonate is that it incorporates insights from storytelling experts like Joseph Campbell, Robert McKee, and Syd Field from the mythological and movie worlds into a straightforward presentation development system (including lots of yellow sticky notes) to enable you to design a presentation as compelling as any Hollywood movie – or almost.   Duarte is one who gets the idea that speeches need the same techniques and structural devices that make movies interesting.  Situation, complication, resolution.  Tension and release.  The audience’s journey.  Good speechwriters need to know and use these concepts – and Nancy makes them clear and usable for you. 

This book is as beautiful, of course, as slide:ology.  Nancy derives inspiration from a number of great speakers from Martin Luther King, Jr to Benjamin Zander.  Her discussions of these speakers and their speeches are useful and to the point.  And she keeps clearly in view the goal of all this effort:  to change the world with compelling presentations.  For the serious student of public speaking, resonate is a must-have.  I’ll have more blogs on some of the subjects raised in resonate,  but I wanted to get out early notice that this book, just released, is a winner. 

A little book arrived in the mail recently:  15 minutes including Q & A:  A Plan to Save the World from Lousy Presentations, by Joey Asher, president of Speechworks, a communications coaching firm in Atlanta.  Let me say from the outset that I love just about everything about this book.  It’s a polemic against long, boring, over-PowerPointed business speeches, and that’s a subject I’ve been blogging about for 4 years now.  So what’s not to love?  More, within the polemic is some crisp, good advice for organizing brief speeches and delivering them. 

There are only a couple of points about those brief speech tips that I’d argue over with Joey, and I’ll cover those below, but overall he’s just about right on the money.  This is a great book for mid-level executives, speakers preparing to lead breakout sessions, speakers in internal meetings – the great silent majority of speeches given in a thousand companies around the world every day. 

Here’s my one main problem with the book:  because (as I’ve said many times) the only reason to give a speech is to change the world, our business as speakers is changing the minds of our audience.  Now, changing people’s minds is both an intellectual and an emotional exercise.  And to make a real, lasting emotional decision to change our minds takes more than 15 minutes including Q & A.  As I’ve seen in thousands of speeches over the years, changing people’s minds requires time because you have to take them down into the problem and wallow there for a while, before you can lead them back up into the solution.  Otherwise, we listen, and we even engage intellectually, but we don’t change our minds fundamentally.  If I’m going to come over to your point of view, then you’re going to have to stay with me a spell and show me you really get my problem, and that you’ve got a solution that’s worthy of my consideration.   

So if you have to change the minds of the audience about something important, something that matters, something that people care about deeply, you need more than 15 minutes including Q & A.  That’s a fact of psychology.  But if your speech is, say, a breakout session on “Maximizing the Online Marketing Impact of X,” or “Improving SEO Rankings for Local Real Estate Offers,” then this book provides an excellent template for your speech. 

And further, Joey raises a good point:  what justification do we have to take more than 15 minutes of people’s time these days?  I love – love – the implicit courtesy to the rest of us time-deprived people.  The only justification for taking more time is to have an issue that’s important to the audience, a point of view that’s sincere, and genuine respect for the audience’s need to make a decision for itself. 

The few minor points that I disagree with Joey about in his excellent little book follow.  First, his recommendations for organizing the 7-minute speech are fine, but they contain more recapping than I think is really necessary.  In that short a speech, you simply don’t need as many signposts as he suggests.  Second, his ideas for transitions are too simplistic; it gets a little tedious to say, “That’s point one.  Point two is next.  It is…..”  Good storytelling takes more than mere enumeration.  And finally, in the delivery section, he makes good (if rather basic) points about eye contact, but strays into dangerous territory when he tells people to “exaggerate” as a way of making your presentation more interesting.  That does work for some people, but for others it creates hilarious results.   Of course, it’s difficult to provide one-size-fits-all advice in a book, especially one this short, but nonetheless, I think the idea of exaggeration as the only fundamental approach to mention is wrong.  There are other approaches to bringing out your personal style that work better.   Imagining yourself talking to a close friend or family member, for example. 

Overall, I recommend the book highly as an intelligent, bracing polemic with a great deal of useful advice packed into a very brief space.  Nice job.  If everyone took Joey’s advice, the business speaking world would be a much better place.  And we could perhaps save the longer speeches for the ones that really matter. 

A reader of this blog, Rich Litvin (check him out at: http://thatconfidenceguy.com) sent me a link to a fascinating YouTube performance – part of a speech by Richard Machowicz, former Navy SEAL, Bukido trainer, and author of Unleash The Warrior Within. 

If you can get past the macho SEAL stuff, the book has a very good set of tips and techniques for taking control of situations, conquering your fear, and realizing your goals.  I took lots of notes.  Machowicz tends to overdo the acronyms and lists, but it all boils down to some very useful insights into how to succeed, especially in tough situations.  And there are some great Navy SEAL stories to illustrate his points. 

Two lists in particular seem helpful.  First, the 3 steps in thinking about achieving something (like killing a terrorist or reaching your life goal): 

One, figure out the target. 

Two, the target determines the weapons you need. 

Three, the weapons determine the movement (aka tactics to achieve your goal). 

 

Then, there’s Machowicz’ acronym for analyzing how important something is to you:  CARVER, or criticality, accessibility, recognizability, vulnerability, effect on overall mission, and return on effort.  If you rank your various goals on a 1 -5 scale using these criteria, you’ll quickly find out which one you should attack next. 

How good a speaker is Machowicz?  Check out the YouTube video:  http://bit.ly/dp675B.  (WARNING – SALTY LANGUAGE.)  It’s not the whole speech, but enough so that you get the idea.  What’s fascinating is that even though Machowicz has done SEAL stuff like parachuting into ice cold water under the cover of darkness in order to take out terrorists, he’s just like the rest of us when it comes to public speaking:  he’s nervous. 

That alone makes the video worth watching.  It should help everyone to know that we’re all in this together when it comes to performance anxiety.  Even former Navy SEALS.

Machowicz is a strong, charismatic speaker with some rough edges that prevent him from being at the very top.  He uses verbal ticks that give away his nervousness, like saying “OK?” at the end of a phrase, undercutting the strength of the phrase itself.  He’s also got a bad case of happy feet – he’s wandering around too much, which weakens the effect of the strong things he’s saying. 

He needs to learn Rule Number One of Public Speaking Triage:  when you get to the place where you’re going to speak, no matter how much time you have, your first job (after shaking your host’s hand and thanking that individual) is to check out the lay of the land and mentally choreograph where you’re going to move.  For simplicity’s sake, pick a home base, a place where you’ll start and finish, and then mentally mark where you can comfortably move to toward the audience in order to engage it at various points during your presentation.  If you don’t do that, you’ll end up rootless and wandering, like Machowicz. 

Nonetheless, on the plus side, Machowicz has a great presence and authority that his nervous behavior doesn’t completely undermine.  I enjoyed the speech to a bunch of rather weary-looking NFL trainees.  The book is worthwhile; thanks to Rich for the tip. 

Ever since I heard Dr. A. K. Pradeep, neuromarketing researcher extraordinaire, speak at SXSW this past March, I have been eagerly awaiting his book, The Buying Brain:  Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind.  It’s out now, and I’m not disappointed.  Pradeep applies the new brain science to buying, advertising, and marketing, and the results are extraordinary.  And yes, there are some fascinating implications for public speaking. 

Pradeep’s fundamental insight is that our brains are overwhelmingly unconscious.  We process 11 million bits of information a second – that’s the good news.  The bad news, perhaps, is that only 40 bits per second are conscious.  The rest – 99.99 percent of our mental activity – is unconscious. 

And, of course, as readers of this blog know, most of that mental activity is taken up with keeping us alive, keeping us safe, finding food, attracting mates – just the basics of species continuation. 

Public speakers, like marketers, can either ignore that knowledge and continue to (1) data dump, to (2) present complicated word slides, and to (3) damp down their emotions – and alienate and bore their audiences silly.  Or, they can use the insights of modern brain science to make more compelling speeches:

1.  Keep your presentations simple, very simple. 

2.  Make your presentations about basic issues that matter to our unconscious brains. 

3.  Make your presentations emotional. 

Then we’ll remember what you say.  And we’ll love you, the speaker, for it.

There's lots more to it, of course, but I'm making it simple for you.  Anyone interested in effective public speaking should grab a copy of this book, devour it, and get to work revamping their presentations and their approach to public speaking.  Your audiences will reward you a thousand-fold.  Actually, something like 10 million-fold. 

If you’re a reader of this blog, you’ll know that the care and feeding of a speaker’s voice is essential for long-term career health.  Your voice is your single most important asset by a number of measures, so it’s important to treat it well.  Obviously, you shouldn't smoke or drink alcohol, especially before speaking.  Obviously, you need to learn how to breath properly, with support, and using the diaphragm.  And obviously, you need to re-position your voice if it's nasal and audiences don't find it attractive.     

Good books on the voice are hard to find, and thus it is with real pleasure that I came across this gem in a theatre bookstore in Toronto: Finding Your Voice, by Barbara Houseman.  Barbara has trained many English actors, including greats like Kenneth Branagh, who provides the forward. 

If you’re looking to increase your vocal presence and strengthen the power of your speaking voice, this book is a great place to start.  All the physical exercises you need are explained clearly here, and Houseman gets the importance of the mind-body connection for the voice.  She explains how to release the voice, both physically and mentally, in addition to talking about the long-term care of the voice – and the body that produces it. 

Here’s a quick tip from Houseman’s book on how to ground and center yourself before you start to speak.  Start by standing with your feet shoulder-width apart, and your knees slightly bent.

(Move) your hands away from your body at hip level, as if reaching out underneath (a) beach ball, then bring your arms up round the front of the ball to shoulder level and, then, bring your hands in towards your body and take them down to your hips.  Repeat this backward circle about ten times and then stop and see how that feels.

Apparently, this motion is based on a Tai Chi move, and Houseman recommends it highly for grounding and focusing your energy before speaking. 

The book is filled with exercises and tips for the speaking voice – how to bring it out, how to realize its maximum effectiveness, and how to ensure that it stays strong.  Public speakers should put the wisdom contained in this book in practice today. 

Kristin Arnold is a professional facilitator, the author of a new book, Boring to Bravo:  Proven Presentation Techniques to Engage, Involve, and Inspire your Audience to Action, and the current President of the National Speakers Association (NSA).  I’ve taken a few shots at the NSA over the years, so I was particularly appreciative of Kristin’s willingness to chat with me about speaking, the NSA, and what’s in her new book. 

Reading Boring to Bravo, I found myself agreeing with something on just about every page.  The book is packed with tips for making speeches more interactive and memorable.  I recommend it highly if you want to improve your speaking game.  Kristin and I talk about very similar ways to approach an audience in our books and blogs. 

Nick:  I’m going to ask you all the questions that people usually ask me.  So, what inspired you to write Boring to Bravo? 

Kristin:  I’ve been a professional meeting facilitator for 2 decades, and I’ve often been a fly on the wall, hearing other speakers.  I was never happy with people just doing their shtick.  What worked for me was an approach that got the audience involved.  I started noting what worked and what didn’t, and this book is the result. 

Nick:  What’s changed in the years you’ve been in the business? 

Kristin:   I think the current generation wants a more engaging, conversational approach.  People today expect to be talked with, not at – and they expect interaction.  Of course, every speaker has to balance the need to be conversational on the one hand with the need to hold forth on your subject of expertise on the other.  After all, you’ve been brought in to speak because of your expertise.  It’s always a balance, and it depends on the audience and on your style. 

Nick:  For the professional speakers reading this blog, how do you create and build your business?

Kristin:   I do all the things that professionals have to do; I have the web site, the marketing materials, the DVD.  But most of my business comes from word of mouth.  It’s someone in the audience saying to a friend, “you really should get that speaker I just heard.”

Nick:  We always say that an audience is hundreds – or thousands – of potential references, so you’d better pay attention to them.  Tell me about the NSA.  Why should I join it if I’m a professional speaker?

Kristin:  Belonging to the NSA means you can shorten your learning curve.  It’s all about community and education – as well as helping speakers deal with the entrepreneurial side of the business. 

Nick:  What is your year as President going to be about? 

Kristin:  We’ve done some strategic planning, and I’m looking forward to implementing that.  How is the NSA best situated to be supportive to its members as the professional society for speakers?  That’s what we’re focused on. 

Nick:  What are your top 3 to-dos and don’t-dos for successful speaking?

Kristin:  Don’t make it about you instead of the audience.  Don’t abuse Power Point.  And don’t hide behind the lectern.  Do engage the audience early.  Do use inclusive language with the audience.  And do be deliberate – know your objective.  Then relax and enjoy yourself!

Nick:  Kristin, thank you very much. 

Humor is disarming and it is its own reason for being.  That means that if you can make the audience laugh as a public speaker you’re a success on that score alone.  Occasionally, an audience will complain that a speaker wasn’t serious enough, or that there wasn’t enough meat on the bones of a speech, but those complaints are rare.  We live in tough economic times and most business meetings are boring.  Make me laugh and I’ll thank you.

Accordingly, all public speakers need to read one of the classics on humor in the theatre, Why is That So Funny, by John Wright.   Wright begins by analyzing four kinds of laughter: 

•    the recognized laugh,
•    the visceral laugh,
•    the bizarre laugh, and
•    the surprise laugh. 

The recognized laugh is, simply enough, laughter of recognition.  When someone mimics a high status member of the audience, for example, we laugh if the mimicry is close enough that we pick it up right away. 

The visceral laugh is the laugh of slapstick, of extremes, of physical humor.  When a speaker interacts with an audience member and there’s a pay off in a funny physical effect – like hypnotists making their victims do inappropriate things – you get a visceral laugh.

The bizarre laugh is the Monty Python school of humor – non sequitors, random comments, the yoking of 2 unrelated things together – and it’s the easiest kind of humor to create in speeches and presentations.  Use it with care, though; not everyone gets it and it may leave some audience members puzzled and irritated.

Finally the surprise laugh is the laugh of a child at something unexpected.  When someone jumps out from behind a curtain, people laugh to express the incongruity of the action.  This sort of humor is simple and keeps everyone ‘present’ in the moment.  It’s a good way to wake an audience up that has gone to sleep. 

Wright’s book is full of games to play and insights into humor of all kinds.  The games themselves are excellent ways of upping your public speaking game; like Improv, they will help you develop quick reflexes and confidence to act in the moment with an audience. 

A very simple example:  Wright describes the “Yes Game.”  This game involves talking to yourself as you’re walking across the stage, saying, “Yes, I am comfortable and happy doing this action.”  Wright points out that when you engage in that kind of self-talk, your body language follows along, and you become physically more comfortable and happy in the space.  That’s a great trick for nervous public speakers to try, and worth the price of the book in itself. 

Why Is That So Funny deserves to be read by all public speakers who want to improve their delivery, stage presence, and maybe even be funnier. 

What is a book about negotiation doing in a blog about public speaking?  Simple, really.  Every time you get up in front of an audience, it’s a negotiation.  I’m reminded of the first time I sold a car, to a Greek-American used car lot owner.  The car was ancient, and I didn’t expect to get much for it.  But I managed to negotiate my way to about half of what I should have received for it, thanks to my inexperience and his slick expertise.  After the humiliation was done, I asked him, ruefully, where he had learned his negotiation skills.  And he replied, “Nick, life is a negotiation.”  And grinned.  I felt like Alan Bates in Zorba the Greek. 

For those of you who fear your audiences or experience performance anxiety of any degree, thinking about your audience as someone to be negotiated with rather than a great beast to be feared, will help.  An audience wants a certain experience – a successful experience.  You hope to provide it.  A certain amount of negotiation is in order.  I always check, in the moment, for example, with my audience to determine if the plan for the hour or hours that we have together is OK with that audience.  I make it a real question. 

Asking that question near the top of the speech, for real, is a great way to find out if any audience member has a question or issue that she wants to talk about – and that she is afraid you’re not going to cover.  You might table the topic for later, or address it in the moment, but you win points for flexibility and connection. 

Successes and failures in public speaking turn on small moments like that.  If your negotiation with the audience is real, then it will respond with enthusiasm.  If it is fake or pro forma, the audience will rebel.  But thinking about the audience as a group of humans to be negotiated with will help make them real to you, as people, and therefore less frightening. 

If you’re only going to read one book on negotiation, Negotiation Genius is a good one.  It updates the Fisher classic, Getting to Yes, and provides step-by-step negotiations and stories about negotiations that bring the ideas to life. 

When I first read Getting to Yes, I was so inspired that I talked my way into the local post office -- after it was closed for the day.  Having that confident negotiation mindset will help your public speaking, too. 

The central insight of Negotiation Genius is that you will be more successful in negotiations if you spend a good deal of time beforehand understanding the needs of the opposite party.  And this insight holds true for public speaking.  In fact, it’s probably the single most important insight for successful public speaking.  Your first job as a public speaker is to understand your audience – better than it does.  Everything you do, big and small, with your audience, should flow from that. 

If you understand your audience, you will know when to negotiate and when not to.  Just as a teacher might negotiate the terms of a final exam, but not the fact of one, so too a public speaker should be prepared to negotiate some things with an audience, but not the basic issues of topic and authority.  It’s your job to take the audience on a decision-making journey about the topic at hand, helping them to understand better – and to act on – the subject under discussion.  Everything else, like life, is a negotiation.  Public speakers need to be expert negotiators. 

At Public Words we’re keen followers of David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, World Wide Rave, and Real-Time Marketing and PR, due out in November.  David has released a surprise summer book, just in time for marketers who want to combine a little fun with their work:  Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead:  What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History.  It’s co-written with Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot, and another Deadhead.  Full disclosure:  we’ve helped David with his speeches.  Fuller disclosure:  I vaguely remember attending a Grateful Dead concert in the late seventies.  Maybe the early eighties. 

The book is a delightful combination of serious marketing insights and trivia about the band, including some great photos from the Dead’s archive.  It doesn’t take long to read, and you can justify the time spent as work-related. 

Here are just a few of the marketing lessons:

1.    Create a unique business model
2.    Build a diverse team
3.    Embrace technology
4.    Establish a new category
5.    Bring people on an odyssey

I highly recommend the book for some very useful marketing insights presented in a user-friendly way.   David and Brian’s text is thoughtful and teases the lessons out of the Dead’s history in a way that is relevant, topical, and never feels forced.  The lessons are buttressed with current examples from companies that have tried similar things.  A great beach read for Type-A marketers who have trouble leaving their work behind. 

The new science of neuromarketing has a good deal to offer public speakers who want to succeed with their audiences by delivering memorable speeches.  In their book Neuromarketing:  Understanding the “Buy Buttons” in your Customer’s Brain, marketers Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin give a simple, lucid account of the basics of brain science as applied to marketing.  Public speakers can use a great deal of it to enhance both their talks and their delivery of them.

The basic shape of our new picture of the human brain should be familiar by now to readers of this blog.  The unconscious mind is far larger, faster, and more powerful than the conscious mind.  Most of our decision-making is controlled by the unconscious mind.  Our conscious minds are easily overwhelmed by everyday experience, and we rely much more than we realize on our unconscious minds to handle most of our important thinking chores.  The basic role of the unconscious mind is to keep us alive and safe.  As such, it constantly scans the immediate neighborhood for threats to our safety and opportunities to eat and mate.   We signal what we find to the other humans in our area and they pick up on our emotional attitudes through mirror neurons that cause them to experience the same feelings we do. 

All of this basic wiring causes problems for us when we stand up to give a speech.  Our natural nervousness -- because we find a large crowd in front of us -- causes our unconscious minds to signal danger.  The audience picks up on that danger and goes into similar paroxysms of fight or flight thinking.  The only way to fight this is with a positive ‘script’ that causes you to send out happy messages to your new friends in the audience instead of messages of terror. 

Renvoise and Morin get most of this right, though they don’t go into as much detail as necessary to truly understand why we behave the way we typically do in front of a crowd.  Instead they focus on how to construct messages that will engage your audience and keep them interested – as befits their roles as marketers. 

For example, they offer the six triggers that what they call the “old brain” (the unconscious mind) responds to:

1.    Me (the brain is most interested in itself)
2.    Contrast (we respond quickly to clear contrasts – new vs old)
3.    Tangible Input (keep it concrete; avoid abstract words)
4.    The beginning and the end (that’s what we remember)
5.    Visual stimuli (we respond to pictures)
6.    Emotion (emotion is memorable)

Fill your speeches with these triggers and your audience will be hanging on your every word.  The book is positioned on the simple end of the complexity spectrum, but it’s a useful read for all public speakers nonetheless. 

In many ways, the single most important thing a public speaker can do to improve her performance is to stand properly.  How we stand signals to the audience – unconsciously – whether or not we perceive threats in the room, and the audience picks up those signals – still unconsciously –and goes into flight or fight mode accordingly.  The result is that a nervous speaker makes the audience nervous and it all goes downhill from there.   And of course it all happens before the speaker even opens her mouth to begin to speak! 

Standing with confidence and authority, then, is key to beginning a speech successfully.  If you stand with a confident, open posture, you'll send unconscious 'trust' messages to the audience and begin much stronger than the frightened speaker.  And you'll create a happier bond with the audience. 

The Alexander technique is one of several methods designed by charismatic founders that will help you in precisely this important way.   Alexander was an actor in Australia who found that his posture was injuring his voice, and he developed his technique to heal himself. 

The founder and director of the Alexander Technique School New England, Missy Vineyard, has written a book on the technique, and it is mostly about standing and sitting properly.  How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live, is an extraordinary exploration of how posture and motion influence our lives.  I recommend it highly for anyone who wonders if his posture is helping or hurting his public speaking performance. 

In the meanwhile, here’s a quick way to test your posture.  Stand, feet shoulder width apart, looking forward, arms at sides.  Now raise your arms as high over your head as you can, touching them together, and let them fall naturally back to your sides.  That quickly aligns spine, neck and shoulders – though you should be warned that your natural slump, if you have one, will quickly take over again.  Gravity is never defeated for long.  

Readers of this blog will know that I’m a big proponent of Improv as a practice that is of enormous benefit to public speakers.  I believe that every serious public speaker should take a year-long course in Improv and learn essential lessons like, there are no mistakes, and yes, and. . . . 

If you’re already an Improv adept, here’s another practice to add to your set of skills:  martial arts.  It has been a number of years since I worked my way up to a brown belt in Taekwondo, and I would hate to be put to the test now, but the experience was invaluable.  From a martial art, you learn presence and awareness, as well as fast reflexes. 

For those who find the thought of a violent martial art too, well, violent for your tastes, consider Aikido.  It’s all about using your opponent’s energy.  It’s perhaps the most non-violent of the martial arts.  Begin by reading Wendy Palmer’s The Intuitive Body, because her gentle insights into human nature and performance under stress will have immediately applicable lessons for all public speakers. 

Palmer focuses on awareness, on what actors call being present.  It is, of course, a goal (if that’s the right word) of meditation.  She asks three questions which are powerful for public speakers seeking to increase their presence – and thus charisma. 

1.    Am I paying attention to my breathing?
2.    Is the front of my field equal with the back?
3.    Can I feel the weight of my body?

The first question should be a familiar one for public speakers:  through breathing we stay calm, present, and focused.  The second requires a little more explanation.   By ‘field’, Palmer means your energy, or perhaps aura.  And by ‘equal’ she’s pointing to the fact that, especially in Western cultures, we’re all about our front half.  That means we ignore our backs, broadly speaking.  And yet the back can be the most expressive part of a person.  If you look attentively at someone’s back, you will know instantly how she’s feeling.  You can mask the emotions in your face, but not your back. 

So the next time you’re preparing to give a speech, think about being present in your whole body, not just your front and face.  Mentally explore how that back is doing.  You’ll be surprised at how much the exercise improves your presence. 

Finally, the third question has to do similarly with presence.  Feeling your own weight means experiencing your body completely in space, feeling the pull of gravity on your legs, your back, your lower spine, and all the rest.  It’s a very powerful exercise, again, for a nervous speaker to try before speaking.

You don’t have to become a black belt to benefit from a study of a martial art as a public speaker.  You just have to be present. 

The great French acting teacher and theorist Jacques Lecoq has spent a lifetime investigating the dramatic possibilities of human motion and the body.  He sums up his work in the book The Moving Body, which I recommend highly for any serious student of body language and public speaking. 

Lecoq began as a physical education instructor, and he made a study of virtually every form of dramatic theatre that involves the body – from mime to commedia del arte to Greek tragedy.  For Lecoq, movement must always have meaning; gesture must always be justified. 

His central insight is that meaningful movement can have 3 ways of justifying itself:  indication, actions, or states.  Indications are gestures like pointing out a moving object, or a sign.  An action is just like it sounds, doing something to carry out some purpose:  find an object, catch a train, stop someone from leaving.  States are the physical manifestations of attitudes, such as emotions or feelings. 

If you’re a public speaker, these categories are very useful ways of thinking about your movement.  If you’re not doing one of these three, then your movement will be purely mechanical – it won’t be justified.  From Lecoq’s point of view, that means it won’t be interesting.  Public speakers who keep these categories in mind, and analyze their own movements from this point of view, will eliminate a good deal of unnecessary gesture and greatly increase the interest, and therefore the charisma, of their body language. 

Lecoq's insights are not based on science, but rather on deep observation of human movement from the point of view of finding the drama in it.  As such, Lecoq has much to teach the public speaker. 

Indicate, act, or state.  Do one of the three.  Eliminate everything else.

Moshe Feldenkrais was one of the more original thinkers of the 20th century.  An engineer, he studied physics, judo, and improved sonar for the British during WW II.  Injuries sustained first playing soccer and then on a submarine led him to develop the Feldenkrais method of exercise and self-awareness.  His exercises have helped many people recover more fully from injuries and handicaps than traditional medical practices allow. 

His book, Awareness Through Movement:  Easy-to-do health exercises to improve your posture, vision, imagination, and personal awareness, is a must-read for public speakers.  Practicing the Feldenkrais exercises in the book will heighten your awareness of yourself, your poise, and your general alertness – all useful for optimal public speaking. 

Feldenkrais is a keen observer of the way human bodies move, and he understands what is effective and what is not.  Performing the Feldenkrais exercises will help you undo a lifetime of bad habits and develop good ones.  A great summer project for speakers who want to increase their confidence and charisma. 
 

Readers of this blog will know that I’m passionate about good communications, public speaking, and body language.  The revolution in brain research over the past couple of decades, and especially the last ten years, has provided those of us in communications with a whole new way to think about “the two conversations” – content and body language – and how they work together to create great – and awful – communication. 

But there are other, older traditions that have concerned themselves with encoding ancient wisdom about communications and body language, and those traditions can enrich our understanding enormously.  Recently, I received a copy of a book entitled Winning Body Language, by Mark Bowden.  Mark’s a successful communications coach of politicians and executives in Canada and the UK.  He draws on a number of these traditions in his work, including mime, theatre, and other sources, to create a fascinating take on how to use non-verbal communications to persuade, charm, and even control your audiences.  Mark and I have chatted over the last several years about our practices and approaches, and so I was eager to read his book. 

Most books on body language fail miserably because they adopt the 20th-century approach to understanding non-verbal communications.  That approach came out of the study of “emblems,” or gestures that have specific meaning, like the peace sign or the “single-finger salute.”  The result was a century-long attempt to decode hand gestures, for example, in terms of single, specific meanings.  The hand waving that accompanies speech got largely ignored, because it resisted this kind of decoding.

But it turns out that the hand waving is where the action is, and it is the most important for communications.  The recent brain research shows us that most of our thinking is unconscious.  We get an intent or an emotion deep within the unconscious part of our minds.  That motivates gesture – that’s the hand-waving – and only after the gestures have begun do we get conscious thought.  It’s literally true that our conscious minds spend a good deal of time explaining to ourselves why we have just done something.  Decisions are taken by the unconscious mind and only later justified by the conscious mind.  Those hand-waving gestures cue us – and those around us – to what we’re thinking before we’re aware that we’re thinking it. 

So the old approach to understanding body language isn’t either accurate or helpful, because it teaches people to try to think consciously about their specific gestures, which means by definition that it happens too late in the intent-gesture-thought sequence.  The result is something watchers of politicians have often seen:  the perpetrator looks awkward and fake.  What then is the right approach? 

People wishing to master their body language and thus the impression they make on others need a more holistic system, one that utilizes the power of the unconscious mind.  I’ve put forward such a system in my book Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.  So naturally I was inclined to dismiss Mark’s system in his book at first as completely wrong.  Call it a natural competitive reaction.  Primitive, wasn’t it?

But I’ve pondered the differences and similarities between the two systems a little longer, and I’ve realized that I’ve done Mark an injustice.  There is actually quite a lot of common ground between the two of us, and in any case Mark deserves respect for having worked out an holistic approach to the mastery of body language.  In spite of the advances of brain research, this is still largely new territory, and those of us who are passionate about pushing knowledge forward should be grateful for the good work of others in the same field. 

I’m going to use the rest of this blog, therefore, to give Mark a platform to discuss the tenets of his system, with my thanks for his generous participation and willingness to debate something we are both passionate about. 

Nick:  Mark, thanks for joining us!  You mention a number of sources for your work, including ancient practices like mime and acting gurus like Jacques Lecoq, as well as Moshe Feldenkrais.  Can you tell us how these gurus and traditions have shaped your thinking?

Mark:  Thanks, Nick. It is always good to discuss this area with someone prepared to dig deep into the existing knowledge on nonverbal communication and open to new theories, science and practices.

So to start with: Lecoq was a gymnast, physiotherapist, theatre practitioner and Frenchman who reinducted the western world into its hidden legacy of physical performance styles and élan. In doing so, he fundamentally revolutionized world performance culture including innovators such as Cirque de Soleil, Julie Taymor and Oscar winning actors such as Geoffrey Rush.

Lecoq taught out of his school in Paris and internationally for over four decades until 1999 under his tenant “tout bouge”—everything moves. His belief and practice as I studied and understood it was that movement is the universe’s common currency and to understand its vocabulary is to be available to express more about ourselves. Lecoq created a mime pedagogy within which his students could be provoked by physical impulses into authentic feelings. As artists they could then utilize these emotional reactions in their performances.

Some of my techniques are an extension or distillation of Lecoq’s work and so draw a line back through history to the anarchic, irreverent satire of the Italian Commedia dell ‘Arte, into the ecstatic, cathartic and politically influential ancient Greek Tragedy, and way back to the first performers telling the story of the hunt and acting out its animal behaviors to bond their tribe in a relationship with a bigger, perhaps spiritual universe.

As you rightly say, Nick, “give your speech and change the world,” and mime (from the Greek memos—to imitate or copy) has provoked and influenced human perceptions and actions for thousands of years. So much so that under Pope Benedict XIV, the Commedia were forbidden to speak and so the silent style that so many now believe all mime to be, or to ever have been was enforced. The philosophies, skills and practices that had stood the test of thousands of years were driven underground as performers were outlawed as thieves, vagabonds, rogues and gypsies for close to two centuries, only to start a reemergence in Europe in the early 1900’s.

Now Moshé Feldenkrais on the other hand was an Israeli nuclear physicist, spy and martial arts expert partly responsible for Judo’s journey from East to West. After suffering a debilitating injury he set about creating a movement system designed to improve both physical and self awareness. He studied how the physical twists and turns in a person’s muscular-skeletal frame could congruently cause twists and turns in their psychological outlook. Feldenkrais died in 1984 leaving a legacy of students well trained in the effects, application and teaching of Awareness Through Movement, and his techniques, taught through renowned theatrical movement practitioners such as Monica Pagneux, have had a profound effect on the artistry of Oscar winning establishment actors such as Emma Thompson, and mavericks like Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Both Lecoq and Feldenkrais were pioneers in exploring and codifying the way specific movements could predictably supply an impulse to a specific intention or feelings in both the performer and the observer. It is this practice of “working from a physical impulse” to produce feelings totally authentic to each moment of a performance that I have brought to the training of leaders when communicating.

Nick:  Mark, what are the key tenets of your system?  Can you explain to us what you mean by the grotesque and truth planes, for example? 

Mark:  The key tenet of the GesturePlane system is that the feeling evoked by a verbal message can be radically and predictably changed in the performer and the perceiver simply by (amongst other things) the horizontal height at which the performer holds their hands.

For example when the hands are held in the TruthPlane (navel height) the message is perceived by both performer and audience as more sincere, honest and factual; when in the GrotesquePlane (below the waist line) the message is perceived by both performer and audience as disinteresting, depressing and quite often over before it has begun.

I clarify this further in the book (it makes up a good quarter!), and the full model of the whole gesture plane system and how to use it to your advantage is also comprehensively explained in Winning Body Language.
Simply put, these techniques use specific, consciously produced physical movements to “kick-start” a wave of feeling totally authentic to that moment of performance. This “from the outside in” approach to performance forms the basis of the traditional European school of acting and the more modern American school attached to the Meisner Technique; both distancing themselves from the much publicized and historically isolated “Method” approach of Lee Strasberg, which capitalized on the 1950’s popularization of Freudian theory and evolved a teaching style akin to psychotherapy where the analysis of human thought was deemed the perfected route to authentic actions.

Physically stimulating the unconscious mind to produce sustained emotion has proven throughout the history of art and culture a rich avenue to truthful expression. With any technique, there are those who do it well and those who do badly either through ignorance, laziness or poor training. The good examples… well, you just can’t see the technique!

Nick:  What’s next for Mark Bowden? 

Mark:  I’m writing the preface for the Chinese translation of my book (now in five languages), and I’m collaborating with the award winning British TV writer Shaun Prendergast on a new book for our publisher McGraw-Hill Business and Academic which looks at how story functions in confronting audiences with a finite number of human dilemmas that are universally engaging. This is a unique insight into the purpose,  power and underlying mechanics of story beyond the common—“there are only (pick a number) stories” and the “three act narrative” structural analyses most readily available today from McKee, Field et al.

The book will be for anyone who needs to engage an audience with story and wants to understand and utilize the deeper mechanics behind the human compulsion for a narrative journey. Our goal is to produce a work that most helpfully maps out some defined routes to moving your audience emotionally.

Nick:  Mark, Thank you very much. 

Readers, there you have it.  I encourage you to read both books, Trust Me, and Winning Body Language, and decide for yourself. 

And finally, please weigh in with your experiences.  What is your experience of working with your own body language?  What have you tried?  How well has it worked?  Let us hear from you!

It’s all about connection.  If you’re already a John C. Maxwell fan, his advice on successful communication – and public speaking – won’t surprise you.  His new book is Everyone Communicates, Few Connect.  The book is a great introductory primer for speakers early in their careers, and a nice reminder for more advanced professionals. 

Maxwell is a preacher, and he knows deep in his DNA that the way to a successful public speaking career is to connect with the audience.  That means making your speech more about the audience than about yourself. 

The book breaks no new ground in terms of communication research; indeed, it gets the infamous Mehrabian study slightly wrong (see pp. 48-49 – the study wasn’t about decoding communications, but about decoding attitudes behind communications).  I’ve blogged about that study before.  But what it does do is give you a wealth of stories, many of them memorable, about people who communicate well and people who don’t.  By the time you’ve read it through, you will be reformed and ready to start communicating through authentic connection, which is the only way to communicate.  You will think more about your audience than you do yourself.  And you will prepare – as Maxwell does – with a thoroughness that would embarrass a military campaign. 

Maxwell is focused and he takes communication very seriously.  The result is a book that has good, if familiar, advice of the hortatory sort on virtually every page.  Each chapter ends with a section on “connecting one-on-one”; “connecting in a group”; and, “connecting with an audience.”  Beginning speakers especially will find these tips and takeaways helpful.  Indeed, I wish every businessperson who gives presentations and speeches occasionally would read this book and take its prescriptions to heart.  If that were to happen, the business world would be a far, far better place for its hapless audiences. 

What I particularly like about Maxwell’s take on communications is his unwavering focus on the audience, his insistence on the speaker being fully present with the audience when giving a speech, and his enthusiasm for good communication itself.  There’s not much about body language in the book, but if you take Maxwell’s advice to heart, you will speak with such an enthusiasm for the task and a concern for the audience that I won’t have to worry too much about your non-verbal communication. 

This is an exciting time to be interested in public speaking.  Brain research has accelerated and is providing us with many insights into the nature of perception and communication, both of which are key to understanding why a public speaker succeeds or fails.  Indeed, many of the commonsense understandings we have of the way our minds work turn out not to be true.  In particular, two of our everyday operating theories of the mind are wrong, and have interesting implications for public speaking:  the Little Director Theory, and the Mr. Spock Theory. 

Both of these theories are exploded in Joseph LeDoux’s fascinating work, Synaptic Self.  Like his earlier work, The Emotional Brain, LeDoux discusses both his own work and the research of many other scientists in putting together a best-guess theory of the brain as we know it now. 

The Little Director Theory

Most of us imagine that we have a little person (who looks remarkably like us) sitting in our heads directing our actions.  This little director notices that we’re thirsty, say, and then directs us to reach for a glass of water and drink.  The appeal of this theory is that it puts us in conscious charge of our brain and our actions.  Of course, we realize that we don’t have to consciously will our hearts to beat, but all the other important stuff is something that we consciously control. 

As LeDoux and others have discovered, our minds actually work quite differently than that.  We get an impulse, an emotion, or an intent deep in our unconscious brains.  That intent motivates a gesture – still unconsciously.  After those two events have happened, we get a conscious thought about them, explaining our actions and intents.  What we have is a Little Explainer, not a Little Director.  It’s literally true that we make our decisions unconsciously, before we’re even aware of them.  This finding has important  implications for public speaking, as we’ll see. 

The Mr. Spock Theory

The Mr. Spock Theory works like this:  we have a conscious, logical mind that represents our best self.  Emotions are messy, stupid, and, well, emotional.  It’s better to make decisions by ignoring emotions as much as possible and hewing to logic. 

LeDoux’s work on the brain shows that it is in fact impossible to make decisions without emotion.  Emotions get attached to memories in our minds so that we can distinguish what’s important from what’s unimportant.  Far from squelching them, we need to understand that emotions are essential to the efficient workings of our minds.  Without emotions, we would approach every decision, indeed every act, with paralyzing indifference.  Should I turn left or right?  Who cares?  Should I go or stay?  Doesn’t matter.  Without emotions, you hover in indecision, unable to move forward. 

OK, so what are the implications for public speaking?  There are many, but let’s focus on two.  First, every speech – every communication – needs to have both emotional and intellectual elements if it’s going to be remembered.  Don’t avoid the emotional and appeal only to logic, because you will be instantly forgotten. 

Second, in delivering a speech, don’t try to control your gestures with your conscious mind.  The result will be that the gestures will come too late, and you’ll look stiff, awkward, or unintentionally funny. 

LeDoux’s book will give you a clear understanding of how the brain works – as far as we know now.  It’s great summer reading for those who are passionate about communications and public speaking. 

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of breathing.  Not only does it keep you alive, but for public speakers, proper breathing calms you and gives your voice the right kind of quality so that people will want to listen to you speak, the quality known as resonance.  Resonance is impossible without good “belly” breathing; that is, breathing that involves expanding the stomach using the diaphragmatic muscles on the in-breath, and then once again using the diaphragmatic muscles on the out-breath to squeeze the air out through the mouth. 

So I’m going to inaugurate this series on summer reading – books that are interesting and useful for public speakers – with the classic book on breathing, Science of Breath, by Yogi Ramacharaka. 

The book seems to have been written early in the last century to judge by the language it employs.  Words like “Oriental” and “Occidental” are used instead of the more modern “Eastern” and “Western.”  Yogi Ramacharaka may be a real person, or he may be the pen name of William Walker Atkinson, an American lawyer who embraced Eastern thought, and who claimed to be a student of Ramacharaka's. 

But don’t let the flowery, old-fashioned prose and the mystery of the book's composition put you off.  Everything you need to know about breathing is contained in this 70-page book.  If you practice the techniques described in this book, you will increase your resonance and lung capacity.  Those are both good for your public speaking and your overall health.  Indeed, while you may not decide to practice distance healing or auras – two of the more advanced activities described quite simply in this remarkable volume – you should at least learn to breathe deeply and profoundly before you stand up to speak. 

Good public speaking begins with good breathing, and this book tells you how.  It belongs on every public speaker’s bookshelf. 

IN THIS SERIES

• 1. David Meerman-Scott
• 2. Sally Hogshead
• 3. Seth Godin
• 4. Daniel Pink
• 5. Chip and Dan Heath
• 6. Michael Mauboussin
• 7. Keith Ferrazzi
• 8. Greg Mortenson
• 9. Chris Brogan
• 10. Bishop T.D. Jakes

I’m closing out my series on current speakers and their books with another counter-intuitive choice:  Bishop T. D. Jakes.  Counter-intuitive because Jakes is a preacher – but not such an unusual choice when you consider that Jakes is the CEO of a modest-sized not-for-profit corporation, with 300 employees, at least $50 million in physical plant, television and radio production companies, roughly 30 books and a Grammy award to his credit.  He has prayed with and counseled the last 3 presidents from his megachurch in Dallas, which has over 28,000 members.  

The guy is a player, with followers, influence, political power, and financial clout.  One of his recent books is pretty typical:  Reposition Yourself:  Living Life without Limits, which is all about growing through faith, achieving through works, and both giving and receiving blessings: http://bit.ly/cJcxXg. 

Jakes has many YouTube videos; here’s a recent one that gives you a good idea of his style: http://bit.ly/nYL65.  What can business speakers learn from this powerful preacher?  Two things.  First, when you’re talking to 30,000 people there’s only one way to reach them:  with passion.  If you don’t have the passion, don’t bother to try.  It’s a lesson that many a business speaker needs to learn.  So take a look at this 8-minute video, watch Jakes keep his passion strong throughout, and take the hint. 

Second, as much as Jakes is a preacher, he’s not just shouting at his audience.  He’s having a conversation with them.  Watch him change it up, involve his audience, pause for them to respond, and generally ensure that his audience is with him every step of the way. 

Two great lessons from the Bishop that all business speakers would do well to remember – and make their own. 

IN THIS SERIES

• 1. David Meerman-Scott
• 2. Sally Hogshead
• 3. Seth Godin
• 4. Daniel Pink
• 5. Chip and Dan Heath
• 6. Michael Mauboussin
• 7. Keith Ferrazzi
• 8. Greg Mortenson
• 9. Chris Brogan
• 10. Bishop T.D. Jakes

Chris Brogan is a giant in the field of social media.  He’s a blogger extraordinaire (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/), an author, a speaker, and he runs a company called New Marketing Labs, a “new media marketing agency.”  His big book, written with Julien Smith, is Trust Agents:  Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust (http://bit.ly/ayzRkR) and it’s a New York Times bestseller.  His latest is called Social Media 101:  Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online, a collection of the best bits from his blog (http://bit.ly/c0bUd7) with a little more besides. 

You can see him speaking here: http://bit.ly/29ldmv.  What sets Chris apart as a speaker is that he makes the room feel small and cozy by having a conversation with the audience.  And he’s truly passionate about the subject.  Check out his blog, or one of his YouTube videos to see what I mean.  I talk about four steps to authenticity (and charisma) in my book Trust Me, and the first thing that occurred to me when I saw Chris speaking is that he has all four steps down, making him a truly authentic speaker, and one that people all over the world want to see.  He’s open to the audience, he’s connected with them, he’s passionate, and he listens.  That’s what it takes to be authentic, and that’s what Chris manages.  It’s not easy to do, and I recommend heartily checking out Chris in all his media to see how it’s done. 
 

IN THIS SERIES

• 1. David Meerman-Scott
• 2. Sally Hogshead
• 3. Seth Godin
• 4. Daniel Pink
• 5. Chip and Dan Heath
• 6. Michael Mauboussin
• 7. Keith Ferrazzi
• 8. Greg Mortenson
• 9. Chris Brogan
• 10. Bishop T.D. Jakes

I’m going to take a bit of a departure for today’s blog and talk about a different kind of speaker and author:  Greg Mortenson.  If you haven’t heard of Greg, or the work he is doing in Pakistan and Afghanistan, then click on over immediately to Amazon.com and find his first bestseller, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time, or his second book, Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

Greg’s story is extraordinary, and part of what is so extraordinary about it is that he would be the first to tell you that he is an ordinary man with average abilities.  Greg was a mountain climber, trained as a medic, and he agreed to climb K-2 in the 90s with a team of climbers partly in order to honor his younger sister, who had recently died of the effects of severe epilepsy. 

He didn’t make it to the top, and on the way down, he was sick and emaciated and ended up in a small Pakistani town where he depended on the kindness of the villagers to nurse him back to health.  In order to repay the kindness of those people, he vowed to them that he would build them a school.  The story of how he did that after several years of struggle is amazing, inspiring, and unique. 

Now, two decades later, Greg travels the world speaking about his experiences and the importance of bringing education to Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to promote peace there and indeed around the world.  He continues to work with his Central Asia Institute to build hundreds of schools in the region, in this way helping to educate tens of thousands of young Pakistanis and Afghans. 

Three Cups of Tea became a phenomenal bestseller, with more than 3.4 million copies in print around the world, I think in part because Greg shows us that another way of interacting with the world besides declaring war on it is possible – and indeed far preferable.  His message of hope and education deserves to be heard, and to be spread, as widely as possible. 

Greg maintains a punishing speaking schedule, and continues his work for part of the year in Asia.  You can see him on Bill Moyers Journal here: http://to.pbs.org/6Ai6ZG.  I recommend both books -- and catching Greg at one of his speeches -- in the highest possible terms.  He’s a quiet man with a powerful presence and message that the world urgently needs to hear. 

IN THIS SERIES

• 1. David Meerman-Scott
• 2. Sally Hogshead
• 3. Seth Godin
• 4. Daniel Pink
• 5. Chip and Dan Heath
• 6. Michael Mauboussin
• 7. Keith Ferrazzi
• 8. Greg Mortenson
• 9. Chris Brogan
• 10. Bishop T.D. Jakes

Keith Ferrazzi is the author of Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, and – more recently – Who’s Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success--and Won't Let You Fail.  Clearly, he’s not afraid of long book titles.  Keith is also the CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a sales and marketing consulting company, and a professional speaker. 

He’s also one of the most networked people on the planet.  He will tell you it’s all about forging deep, real connection with people – and helping each other – but his address book must be one of the most envied in the world.  Both books give very thorough instructions in how to build your own network and make meaningful use of them. 

Keith’s central 2 messages are:  (1) don’t make small talk, make deep connections and (2) create a network of a small number of people who ‘have your back’ – who will tell you the truth and expect the truth in return.  In an era where Americans – and indeed the Western world – are increasingly isolated, it’s timely advice.  Keith is a good speaker, and one who involves the audience in his talks.  You can see him here, being vulnerable on Larry King: http://bit.ly/b4ZoCQ and here: http://bit.ly/90kQsb, launching Who’s Got Your Back around Arianna Huffington’s pool.  Now there’s a connection. 

IN THIS SERIES

• 1. David Meerman-Scott
• 2. Sally Hogshead
• 3. Seth Godin
• 4. Daniel Pink
• 5. Chip and Dan Heath
• 6. Michael Mauboussin
• 7. Keith Ferrazzi
• 8. Greg Mortenson
• 9. Chris Brogan
• 10. Bishop T.D. Jakes

I had to dig a little to find any video of Michael J. Mauboussin speaking, and that’s a shame, because he does a good job of explaining some very complicated business subjects.  Mauboussin is Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management and adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School.  I finally tracked him down talking in a spin-off interview at an Economist conference:  http://bit.ly/27fiVJ. 

Mauboussin’s latest book is Think Twice:  Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition (Harvard Business Press, 2009) and it’s all about the ways in which we fall into irrational mental traps as we try to think rationally about investing.  The book is brilliant, clear, and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why most of us do our research, ponder the salient news and trends, and then end up buying high and selling low despite our best efforts.  His earlier book, More Than You Know:  Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places, took 50 insights from a variety of fields of interest and applied them to investing. 

If you want to understand better why your mental models are woefully inadequate to modern investing (or just about any other aspect of modern life) than read Think Twice or catch Mauboussin at one of those Economist conferences.  Your bank balance will thank you. 
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IN THIS SERIES

• 1. David Meerman-Scott
• 2. Sally Hogshead
• 3. Seth Godin
• 4. Daniel Pink
• 5. Chip and Dan Heath
• 6. Michael Mauboussin
• 7. Keith Ferrazzi
• 8. Greg Mortenson
• 9. Chris Brogan
• 10. Bishop T.D. Jakes

Chip and Dan Heath have written two highly successful books:  Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Thrive and Others Die, and Switch:  How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.  The first, Made to Stick, took Robert Cialdini’s ideas from his classic book Influence and made them more accessible.  The second, Switch, creates a very simple framework for accomplishing change:

• Direct the Rider (provide clear directions for our rational sides),
• Motivate the Elephant (engage our emotions), and
• Shape the Path (make change easier by changing the situation in key ways).

I worked at a couple of management consulting firms that focused on change in the mid-90s, and I can tell you that these ideas were old hat then – but not usually so clearly or simply expressed.

Plainly, the Heath brothers are gifted packagers and storytellers.  You can see them both speaking here: http://bit.ly/Uh2A0 and Dan speaking in a longer excerpt here: http://bit.ly/qlYLl.

What you’ll see in Dan (at least) is a very engaging, relaxed speaker who’s quite good at holding an audience – even after lunch.  He’s a natural teacher, at ease with asking his audience to take a short test and throwing his listeners lots of questions to keep them engaged.

While I have some reservations about the originality of their thinking, I have no reservations in recommending both the books and the speakers for entertaining, concise, and practical summations of some very important ideas.

For my blog today, I'm pointing to Chris Brogan's site:  http://www.chrisbrogan.com/.  He just posted a wonderful video blog on Give Your Speech, Change the World.  Enjoy, and thanks, Chris!

IN THIS SERIES

• 1. David Meerman-Scott
• 2. Sally Hogshead
• 3. Seth Godin
• 4. Daniel Pink
• 5. Chip and Dan Heath
• 6. Michael Mauboussin
• 7. Keith Ferrazzi
• 8. Greg Mortenson
• 9. Chris Brogan
• 10. Bishop T.D. Jakes

Dan Pink doesn’t think much of the traditional workplace, and he’s written several books to prove it.  In Free Agent Nation, A Whole New Mind, and now Drive, not to mention The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, Pink argues for new ways of working, ways that are creative, unstructured, and that offer non-traditional rewards.  Drive in particular argues that for all sorts of jobs – except the most mundane – autonomy, mastery, and purpose are more important motivators that the usual carrots and sticks. 

Pink was Al Gore’s speechwriter before he became a free-agent, right-brained, intrinsically motivated writer and advice dispenser.  Oddly, his speaking style is reminiscent of Gore’s – but in a good way.  You can see him giving a TED.com talk here on motivation:  http://bit.ly/nzmRH. 

He holds himself a little too stiffly and rigidly, like Gore, and some of his mannerisms are Gore’s.  But he’s got tons of energy, making big gestures and getting worked up on a regular basis throughout the talk, so you’re never in danger of nodding off.  If I were coaching him, I’d get him to think about having more of a conversation with the audience, rather than feeling like he’s a preacher holding forth on a Sunday.  Again, that attitude is a bit like Gore’s.

Pink has a real gift for explaining scientific research with clarity and verve; his books read quickly and are very good at making their cases.  (Pink trained as a lawyer.)  It’s only afterward that you ask yourself, hang on a minute, it’s not quite as clear-cut as that – but by then the talk, and the author, have moved on.

I recommend Pink highly as a very thought-provoking author and speaker.  You won’t be bored, and you will think about his topic in a new way.

IN THIS SERIES

• 1. David Meerman-Scott
• 2. Sally Hogshead
• 3. Seth Godin
• 4. Daniel Pink
• 5. Chip and Dan Heath
• 6. Michael Mauboussin
• 7. Keith Ferrazzi
• 8. Greg Mortenson
• 9. Chris Brogan
• 10. Bishop T.D. Jakes

Anyone with any interest in business books is already aware of Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin.  That’s because Seth is a phenomenal marketer, and he has a gift for putting one vital idea at a time simply and provocatively.  His earlier books include Purple Cow and Tribes, and they are similar in the sense that each contains one idea, phrased forcefully and memorably. 

In Linchpin, Seth argues that we’re all artists, or at least those of us who want to be indispensable and not just average workers in average factories.  And by the way, those average jobs in average factories are going away and never coming back, so you’d better think about becoming an artist.  Seth indicts the whole ‘scam’ as he calls it of factory worker jobs, whether those are white or blue collar, so I don’t think he’s particular sorry that they’re going away. 

In Seth’s view, an artist is someone who is passionate about creating something.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be a traditional work art – it could be a customer experience, a way of looking at rental cars, a bagel. 

You can see Seth talking about tribes and other things here: http://bit.ly/XJVL0.

As a speaker, Seth is funny and insightful.  I recommend both the new book and the speaker highly.   

IN THIS SERIES

• 1. David Meerman-Scott
• 2. Sally Hogshead
• 3. Seth Godin
• 4. Daniel Pink
• 5. Chip and Dan Heath
• 6. Michael Mauboussin
• 7. Keith Ferrazzi
• 8. Greg Mortenson
• 9. Chris Brogan
• 10. Bishop T.D. Jakes

It’s an ADD world, information-saturated, and 24/7 – this everyone knows.  Sally Hogshead has figured out what anyone wanting some attention can do about the short attention span of our fellow humans.  In a word, what you have to do is fascinate your species.  Sally’s new book is called Fascinate:  Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, and it’s the user manual for our era.  Anyone wishing to be more than ignored by friends, family, potential mates, and of course the business world should read this book. 

Sally identifies the 7 triggers that capture our attention.  They’re not surprising, but they certainly feel like the right ones:  lust, mystique, vice, trust, alarm, prestige, and power.  She takes us through a travelogue of modern society, pointing out the brands, the things, the people, and the events that trigger these triggers in us, and relates them back to our evolution as a species needing to eat, be safe, and procreate.

Her speech on this subject is fascinating in itself.  Here's a snippet:  http://tinyurl.com/y9hatpa But it would have to be, wouldn’t it?  Still, any speech that involves a Jagermeister tasting qualifies as interesting in my book.  More than that, you learn why we smile, why the DARE program encourages drug use in teens rather than discourages it, and what Sally was doing trying on some of the world’s most expensive jewelry at Harry Winston’s in New York city. 

It’s all fascinating, and both the book and the speech are worth catching.  Sally’s perspective comes originally from the advertising and branding world, not surprisingly, but her insights are relevant to a far wider world.  

IN THIS SERIES

• 1. David Meerman-Scott
• 2. Sally Hogshead
• 3. Seth Godin
• 4. Daniel Pink
• 5. Chip and Dan Heath
• 6. Michael Mauboussin
• 7. Keith Ferrazzi
• 8. Greg Mortenson
• 9. Chris Brogan
• 10. Bishop T.D. Jakes

For my next blog series, I’m celebrating some top speakers who have recent books.  I’m beginning with David Meerman Scott, who has just updated his 2007 bestseller, The New Rules of Marketing and PR (http://tinyurl.com/yjpkd3k).  A lot has happened in the last 2 and a half years in social media – Facebook, Twitter and Ashton Kutcher, to name a few – and the good news is that David gets virtually all of the new developments in this second edition. 

What I like about David’s book is that he manages to address the novice and the knowledgeable alike without talking down to anyone.  If you’re a social media maven, but you have a dark secret, like, you really don’t understand Digg, then this book will allow you to catch up without feeling stupid.  And if you’re a novice to Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin, David explains the basics without condescending to you. 

It’s his infectious passion for what you can do online that makes the book fun to read, and David a great speaker to watch.  Catch him here talking about speaking:  http://tinyurl.com/yd2unbl.

The good news is that he packs a lot of learning into his speech while entertaining at the same time.  His speech, like his book, is full of stories, and they stick in your mind.  Want to understand how you could talk up your conference without spending millions on advertising – which might not be seen by the right people?  Check out the way the First Annual Singapore Tattoo Show got the word out.  It’s memorable, and it’s typical of the stories in the book and speech. 

If you’re wondering what social media is all about, or you’ve been thinking about starting a blog and you wonder how you can justify it to your company, or you’ve got an ad budget and you’re wondering if TV is still the way to go – then read the book or hire David to speak.  You’ll be glad you did.