Nick Morgan - Public Speaking Advice and Commentary

TED.com -- 5 -- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Continuing my tour of TED.com, the amazing resource for those who want to study ideas and the public expression of them, I’m taking on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html)

Mihaly is the expert on ‘Flow’, that state of happy absorption into any creative process that he has documented as part of a life-long research project on happiness.

What's Mihaly's insight?  It turns out, alas, that money doesn’t buy you happiness.  In fact, beyond a certain minimal level, happiness does not increase with increased material wealth. 

Happiness does come with flow, at least for creative people involved in doing things they like to do.  The composer creating music, the poet writing a lyric poem – or the CEO running a business.  Each of these can experience flow on the job. 

I’m a big fan of Mihaly’s work, and highly recommend his books, including Flow:  The Psychology of Optimal Experience, which describes the state in question in greater detail.

Unfortunately, I can’t be a fan of Mihaly’s presentation style.  He begins with a moderately interesting story, only somewhat relevant, of hearing Carl Jung speak about how Europeans coped with the tragedy of WWII.  But it’s not until 2:41 minutes into the talk that he uncrosses his arms and looks up for the first time.  After that, he’s still got his head down, looking at the floor, pacing randomly, connecting with the audience only occasionally.  My guess is that he’s modeling his behavior on professors he’s watched over the years, and that’s a mistake.

He seems to be carrying an enormous psychological weight around, a little odd for someone who studies happiness.  A little more bounce in the step would seem more consistent with his message.  But maybe he studies happiness because it eludes him personally. 

As the talk goes on, he does open up his gestures, but he then turns to the screen and talks to the slides, constantly backing up away from the audience until the end of his talk, where he disappears into the darkness at the corner of the stage, asking ‘OK?’ of no one in particular.  Clearly, public speaking is not where Mihaly experiences his flow.  Buy his book; skip the lecture. 

TED.com -- 4 -- Benjamin Zander

Once in a while, I get to see a real pro at work, and it helps makes up for all the painful speeches I’ve had to sit through.  Benjamin Zander’s 20 minutes on TED.com demonstrates how good a public speech can be when you do everything right. ( http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html)

Or almost everything.  He does start off with a lame joke, and I got out the red pen to start making critical notes – but he quickly moved on from that slightly inauspicious beginning.  And to his credit, he did weave the point of the joke in the speech later on so that he avoided the worst sin a public speaker can commit in the first 3 minutes: telling an irrelevant lame joke.  This one Zander made relevant. 

Everything that happened after that was so good that I put down the red pen and just enjoyed the ride. 

Zander first demonstrated something profound about music in a very simple way.  What makes (classical) music powerful is that there is a long-term journey the composer takes you on during the course of the piece.  In formal terms, you start on the root or tonic chord, and move to the dominant.  By the end, you come back to the tonic.  It’s a simple journey, but a powerful one.  And, as Zander demonstrated with a Chopin prelude, a great composer makes you wait for that return as long as possible so that, when you get there, it’s like opening the door to your own home after a long, emotional journey.  There’s that relief and upswelling of emotion you feel to be back on home ground. 

To make this point, Zander weaves in stories of children, audiences worldwide, and Holocaust survivors, so that by the end his audience has laughed, cried, and finally smiled through the tears.  As he says, he knows he’s doing well when he sees ‘shining eyes’ in his audience, and we forgive him for going to the audience in the room and pointing out some eyes that are shining.  He’s earned it.

To be sure, Zander could control his ‘happy feet’ – random, adrenaline-induced movement – a bit more, but on the whole he works the audience well, so the movement is for the most part purposeful.  After watching so many speakers stay within their own self-absorbed bubble, moving aimlessly around the stage, wandering toward the slides and back again, it was wonderful to see someone make the speech about the audience. 

Finally, he does one thing that only really great speakers do.  He risks making himself the joke on occasion.  By allowing the audience to laugh at him, just occasionally, just a little, he opens himself up, which is why the audience opens up to him and sheds real tears.  Only the best speakers ever seem to understand this secret. 

For a great performance by a real showman, check out Ben Zander on TED.com. 

TED.com -- 3 -- Nicholas Negroponte

My tour of TED.com continues with Nicholas Negroponte’s talk on his One Laptop Per Child program. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/nicholas_negroponte_on_one_laptop_per_child_two_years_on.html)

It’s a great program and one that deserves wholehearted support from people in developed countries.  My comments focus on the talk and Negroponte’s delivery of it, not on the worth of the program.  In fact, to demonstrate that sentiment tangibly, I’ve just gone to the OLPC website and made a donation to give a laptop.  I figure that entitles me to speak freely. 

Negroponte’s talk represents a huge opportunity lost.  Were he to structure the talk properly, and deliver it with some panache, I guarantee that he would greatly increase donations and participation in the program.  As the talk stands, it’s badly structured and badly delivered.

First, the content.  Nicholas begins with two minutes of rambling nonsense about himself and his education.  It’s self-absorbed and disengaging.  At nearly three minutes in, he finally finds his way out of his solipsistic bubble and gets to the rest of the world.  But from there we get a series of random thoughts, prompted by a random assortment of slides, on this very important topic.  To say that it doesn’t do OLPC justice is an understatement.

We learn a little about the Ethiopian keyboard – remarkably, the first in that language.  We learn that when you offer a salary of $0.00, you get the best people applying.  We see a few pictures of kids and laptops.  We learn about the 4 design innovations that the laptop presents – sunlightmeshnetworklowpower – in such a slapdash way that if you didn’t know what they were beforehand you wouldn’t by the time Nicholas was done. 

We learn all this, but not in a way that allows us to decide that OLPC is a great idea or that we should contribute.  Negroponte does make several calls to action – including that we spread the world, that we contribute for one laptop, and that we contribute for many – but the 'asks' are made in passing, almost apologetically. 

The opportunity lost is to present a thoughtfully structured talk that leads the audience on a proper decision-making journey.  Negroponte should begin by engaging the audience, then describe the need, then the laptop and the program, then how the program would benefit the world.  Finally, he should close with one clear call to action. 

Nicholas’ mishmash of a talk is delivered in classic bad form.  He wanders around the room aimlessly just as his talk wanders around the point.  The only time he stops and delivers is when he utters the line “You get the best people.”  He’s completely withdrawn into his own head; his head posture is combined with self-protective arm and hand gestures that keep the audience away.  He talks to the screen, not the audience, and uses the slides to help him remember where he is.  His head posture is also coupled with an occasional pelvic move that is very disconcerting and distracting.  All in all, a performance that will lose as many donations as it gets.  A shame, because the cause is so good. 

TED.com -- 2 -- Jared Diamond

My second pick from the extensive TED.com archives is a talk by the noted scholar Jared Diamond on “Why Societies Collapse.”  It’s a classic instance of brilliant content married to a faulty delivery. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse.html)

Diamond describes five reasons why societies fail.  He uses as an example the European settlement on Greenland, that began in the 900s or so and died out roughly 500 years later.  First, Jared says, societies can have a destructive effect on their environment.  In this case, the Norse immigrants contributed to soil erosion through their destructive farming techniques, among other problems. 

Second, climates can change.  Unfortunately for the Norse, the world turned cold in the 1300 and 1400s.  Third, relations with friendly neighbors can weaken.  The ties to Europe faltered during the cold spells because of difficulty in traveling back east.  Fourth, relations with hostile neighbors can affect survival.  Here, the Inuits knew a good deal about survival during the colder era, but the Norse were unable to learn from them because of the two societies mutual incomprehension.  And finally, political, cultural and economic factors can prevent a society from seeing and responding to the impending collapse.  The Norse were heavily invested in their Christianity and in particular building cathedrals, and that effort was misguided to say the least in a land that was barely suited for hard-scrabble subsistence farming and raising sheep.

It’s quite cozy, in a slightly perverse way, to contemplate the unwise actions of a long-dead civilization.  But Jared smoothly makes the transition to our era, and we soon realize that we’re failing, too, on all five factors.  Just to make sure we don’t miss the point, Diamond lets us know that societies don’t decline gradually; rather, they collapse rapidly, within a few decades.  He notes that those in his audience who are under 50 will be witness to our collapse unless we manage to rise above history and change the ways things are going.  It's a scary message. 

And what about the scholar’s delivery?  Diamond has a commanding presence that he throws away because of his natural introversion.  He swallows his voice, bringing it out reluctantly from the back of his throat half-strangled.  He does move from his notes at the podium out to the audience, but he doesn’t clearly define that end point well enough, and he tends to wander in between the two points like a lost sheep. 

His gestures are defensive; he constantly crosses his arms and brings his hand to his face.  But the worst aspect of his body language in terms of connecting with people is his head posture.  Naturally enough, as a scholar with a lot on his mind, he leads with his head, looking down and rarely connecting with the audience.  As he warms up, he begins to direct fleeting glances at his audience as if he’s surprised that anyone is still there, but they don’t last long enough to help. 

All in all, an arresting and thought-provoking message marred by a hopelessly introverted delivery.  The classic absent-minded professor restricts the reach of his message because he doesn't know how to deliver it effectively. 

You should know TED.com

If you don’t know TED, you should get to know it.  TED.com is a repository of hundreds of fascinating short speeches, on every subject under the sun.  It’s a tremendous opportunity for speakers and students of public speaking to study the great and near-great on line in tidy little packages. 

What’s fascinating to me is how mediocre, on the whole, these brilliant people with wonderful ideas are.  They’re nervous, they pace randomly, they talk to mediocre slides, they are defensive – they are a catalogue of how not to do it.  That’s partly why they’re so inspiring – even the best have feet of clay.  their humanity makes them feel more approachable. 

And yet, the quality of the ideas does shine through, usually.  These people are opinionated, often a tad condescending, convinced of their righteousness, academic in the bad sense of the word – and yet fascinating. 

I’m going to spend the week talking about a few speakers from this treasure trove, but don’t take my word for it.  Go deep into TED.com and check them out for yourself. 

My first pick, because I’ve been a fan of space flight ever since Star Trek, is Carolyn Porco, a NASA person, and head of the unmanned flight to the moons of Saturn.  I’ve picked her talk to illustrate the right use of visual aids. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/carolyn_porco_flies_us_to_saturn.html)

Carolyn’s slides are, quite literally, out of this world, being pictures of Saturn and its moons.  She does manage to convey something of the magic of space flight that NASA’s spokespeople usually manage to kill.  And her story of what the team found on a moon of Saturn – the first time humans had landed anything on a planet in the outer solar system – is arresting.

That said, she commits the classic mistake of an inexperienced speaker.  In her nervousness, she starts out with her hands close to her side, nervously pacing hither and yon, and her gestures are circular, and repetitive, rising from the waist and spreading out, as if she’s trying to unload something, because she is:  her adrenaline.

Speakers instead should find ways of channeling their adrenaline that connect with the audience and build trust and credibility.

Once Porco gets into her topic, she settles down, and becomes quite effective.  It’s a good speech, and one to be studied for an effective use of visual aids.

Debate and its discontents

I was recently interviewed by a public speaking magazine on the subject of various kinds of debates – their uses and abuses.  The underlying question was, is debate training a good thing for public speakers or not?

The first distinction you have to make is between debating as people practice it in high school and college, and the thing that the presidential candidates do.  As any debate aficionado will tell you, what the candidates do is not a debate in the traditional sense. 

That doesn’t mean that it is somehow less, or wrong, or impure.  It’s just different.  It doesn’t follow the rules of debate.  Nonetheless, it is a fascinating way to see how the various candidates behave live and less scripted.  Of course, they memorize answers and use pieces of their stump speeches, and so on, but relatively speaking we’re seeing them in as impromptu a setting as we’re likely to see them.  That makes the presidential debates inherently fascinating, and revealing.  And of course, the stakes are very high.

Traditional debate, on the other hand, is many things.  Some debate styles involve speaking as fast as possible – up to 300 words per minute, or twice the rate of an average speaker – in order to lodge as many facts as possible in the judges’ ears.  Some debate styles are obscene, deliberately filled with as many double entendres as possible. 

None of this is terribly useful for persuasive speaking in the grown up business world.  Persuasion is at once intellectual and emotional, and many debate styles promote the intellectual over the emotional.  As a result, debaters can become all head and no heart.  That makes them largely useless in the rough and tumble of real life persuasion, where trust and credibility are the relevant currencies. 

Nonetheless, the research skills, the ability to think and respond on your feet, the ability to marshal complex arguments, the poise under attack – all of the general skills you develop from practicing debate – certainly will stand you in good stead. 

In the end, the best way to become a better, more persuasive speaker is to practice.  In debate as in life, there are no shortcuts. 

Power Point, Visual Aids, and Cirque de Soleil

The controversy on Power Point and visual aids will rage as long, I suspect, as we have bad presentations in the business world.  Which is to say, forever. 

The fundamental question is what else beside yourself do you need as a presenter?  What add-ons will enhance the experience of the audience rather than detract from it?

Here, it’s helpful to think about what the range of options are, and what the competition is like.  Of course, the bar is set very low in the business world.  Most people don’t expect riveting presentations, and they are not disappointed.  But lurking at the back of even these Stoic minds is the competition.  ‘I could be playing a video game….Or at the opera….Or watching a football game…Or attending a performance of Cirque de Soleil….’  That’s because even the worst business speech competes for our brain space with all the other things we have to pay attention to – from our BlackBerrys to the financial meltdown to our entertainment choices. 

If we take the most extravagant of these entertainment options – say, Cirque de Soleil – we have performers enhanced with movement, costume, music, lighting – in short, spectacle.  When you add a Power Point slide deck to your own presentation, you are taking one tiny little baby step toward that. 

But does it enhance the experience, like Cirque de Soleil’s costumes and music, or is it merely a distraction?  Ask yourself if the PP deck supports your talk or competes with it.  Is it a speaker outline, a series of slides filled with words which you either read or not, or is it a visual accompaniment to your talk?  Cirque de Soleil integrates all the aspects of the performance to give you one amazing visual spectacle.  When you put up a speaker outline, you’re in essence giving the audience 2 speeches, not one. 

In short, you’re distracting the audience, not enhancing its experience. 

Real visual aids, on the other hand, can enhance the presentation.  Think again about the range of options open to you.  Props, pictures, video, even the humble white board or flip chart – not to mention music and lighting – all can support and enhance your talk rather than rivaling it. 

If you are ever tempted to put a PP slide up for an audience that contains more than 10 words, lie down until the temptation goes away.  Instead, look for a real, high-quality photograph that tells the story.  Find the single number that makes the point.  Put a picture behind it.  If you must present numbers, find the one line graph or pie chart that gets the point across.  Visual aids are good.  Slides full of words are bad.  The next time you open PP and start typing a long heading, stop and remember Cirque de Soleil. 

The final presidential debate

Once again, I’m going to dip my communications toe into dangerous waters and discuss the final presidential debate.  Just to get the inevitable out of the way from the start (and no doubt infuriate McCain supporters), I’m going to declare a winner along with most of the rest of the viewers:  Obama. 

Here’s why.   As a communications coach, I was looking for alignment between the content and non-verbal ‘conversations’, as I call them.  Senator Obama presented a calm, thoughtful approach to his various subjects.  There were lots of conversational markers indicating organization and precision – lots of ‘there are 3 reasons for that’ and ‘here’s why that won’t work’, and so on. 

He also answered questions in the way that I coach people to when faced with an impromptu speaking situation:  give the headline, give several supporting reasons, repeat the headline.  (Although he didn’t always get to the last step because of time.)  That approach to content makes audiences think you're in control and you're smart. 

His accompanying non-verbal conversation was polite, attentive, and deliberate.  Some said “defensive and dull,” but I would not agree, at least with the first adjective of that pair.  My hunch is that two things are going on.  First, Obama is a thoughtful, cool, low-key guy – a consensus-builder, not a firebrand.  Second, he was coached to stay calm, cool, and low-key, given that the world is in financial meltdown and most of us probably want a steady hand at the presidential tiller.

Obama looked at McCain when he was speaking.  He rarely interrupted him.  He kept his facial reactions limited to occasional wry smiles.  He was playing poker, and he had his game face on.  His was a controlled performance. 

By contrast, McCain was in constant motion.  When Obama was talking, McCain rarely looked at him.  He rolled his eyes, he smirked, he smiled false smiles, he scribbled notes, he sighed like Al Gore back in 2000 – in sum, he looked cranky and untrustworthy, and even rude at times. 

That’s because his content and his non-verbal conversations were not in alignment much of the 90 minutes.  He frequently attacked Obama, but, because he’s apparently anxious not to appear too angry, he swallowed his evident fury and gave us the false smiles.  The result was unnerving.  We deeply distrust people who smile to hide anger underneath.  It’s an unconscious response, for the most part, that we have to all mixed messages like that.  McCain would be much better served by just getting angry, and showing it.   

McCain’s content was disorganized, rambling, and repetitive.  He must have mentioned Joe the Plumber 15 times.  He frequently would start a thought, interrupt himself, and start another line of thought.  This speech pattern is typical of someone who is attempting to conceal a strong emotion. 

McCain was at his best when he turned to Obama and sent him a zinger, like the comment that if he wanted to run against George Bush he should have run in 2004.  There, the non-verbal anger and the anger in the content aligned, and he was effective.  I thought that was the best line of the debate, and I'm a Democrat. 

TV is a cool medium.  It craves emotion; emotion fascinates viewers.  When you dial it back, like Obama did, we watch you more closely to find out what you’re thinking.  When you’re conflicted, as McCain was, you’re also fascinating, but for the wrong reasons.  It’s like a train wreck.  You can’t take your eyes off it, but you know something is going wrong. 

In the end, alignment between your verbal and non-verbal messages is key, because that demonstrates authenticity.  On that level, regardless of politics, Obama succeeded and McCain fell short. 

Storytelling and archetypes -- 4

And what of archetypes?  How can you use them to help create powerful speeches?

Let’s first figure out what archetypes are.  Basically, an archetype is a model of a character, or part of a character.  The word and concept have been around for a long time, but they was made famous, so to speak, by the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. 

When Jung talked about archetypes, he meant primarily aspects of a person – the Self, the Shadow (your Dark Side) and the Persona (the face you put toward the world).  But he also talked about a host of other kinds of people, and aspects of people and the natural world, that could be archetypes, from the child, hero, mother and wise old man to the fish. 

The idea is that your particular mother resonates for you with the archetypal mother in some ways, and not in other ways.  You may develop a mother complex as a result.  We live at our best and most fully when we’re in harmony with all the archetypes we summon up. 

Jung believed that archetypes were real – a kind of bridge between our inner psychological world and the real world out there.  More than that, we all have access to universal wisdom and understanding through and with these archetypes. 

OK, so what does that mean for speakers? 

I think we can invoke the power of the basic archetypes by naming them at appropriate moments in our stories and by using them as ways to connect with the audience.  Words like ‘child’, ‘mother’, ‘father’ and so on have enormous resonance for just about everyone in your audience.  The trick is to let your audience do the work, creating the associations, by giving them enough detail to get their minds working, but not so much that you stop them from using their imaginations. 

Archetypes work best in simple stories that allow audiences to fill in the blanks.  You need to craft these stories – really parables – with great care so that they are not hackneyed or silly.  If you do it right, you can create powerful, memorable stories that call us all to our best, archetypal selves. 

Storytelling and archetypes -- 3

I’ve blogged before on the fundamental stories of Western culture, so I’ll just mention them briefly here.  They’re important to invoke in your presentations because we all respond to them – that’s why they’re fundamental. 

If you ask your employees to embark with you on a long and arduous journey to develop a new product, they’ll complain about the obstacles along the way, unless you invoke a Quest story.  Then, the obstacles are to be expected because that’s what happens on a quest.  The heroes (your audience) meets obstacles and suffers reversals – but eventually overcomes them all to reach the goal.  Don't make the mistake of casting yourself as the lone hero -- always bring the audience along with you.  

The Quest story is the basic one, and audiences get the idea very quickly because the story is so deeply ingrained in our psyches.  Quest stories have heroes, journeys, obstacles, mentors, and most importantly a goal at the end.  For more information on the subject, read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the definitive book on the subject.   There are many others that take the idea and apply it to writing, scriptwriting, and so on.  Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey, is a good example.  For more detail on how to apply these ideas to speeches, see my book, Working the Room, reprinted in paper as Give Your Speech, Change the World. 

After the Quest, the other stories are:  Stranger in a Strange Land, Love Story, Rags to Riches, and Revenge.  There are other theories that offer more stories, but I’ve always found the other ones to be kinds of Quests, and so I stick to these five.  Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots is an example of one of the other theories, but his book seems to me to make the whole business more complicated than it needs to be.  He says he spent 30 years writing the book, and maybe that’s the problem. 

The way to think about these stories is as thematic ideas that you invoke as you go through your speech.  You might do it with a specific reference to a particular, well-known Quest story, like the Holy Grail, the Wizard of Oz, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or you might use the elements and the language of a Stranger in a Strange Land story in order to bring the audience into that magical space without actually telling them bluntly that ‘you’re on a quest’.  It’s better in this case not to be blunt, but rather to evoke the stories with their unconscious power to orient us and bring us into a space where we see the outcome as ordained by the structure of the story. 

Once you’ve picked your thematic story and you’re off on a Quest or you’re all Strangers in a Strange Land, then you want to think about using archetypes to get further storytelling mileage out of our common mythology.  I’ll talk about those next time. 

Storytelling and archetypes -- 2

How do you create a great story for the purposes of public speaking?  There are a couple of ways to think about it. 

My favorite structure for a persuasive speech is the problem-solution structure that I’ve blogged about before.  You can either hold to that structure, and tell stories at various points along the way, as examples and supporting evidence and so on, or you can treat the whole speech as a story. 

In either case, think of your stories as having three acts.  The first act presents an idea or a situation that will engage the audience (Romeo meets Juliet and falls in love).  It’s best if this idea or situation is one that, once it has happened or been told, cannot be undone.  (Romeo cannot ‘unmeet’ Juliet.)  If you give your audience some information at the beginning of your speech that they don’t know, it has the same effect.  Our customer base has been eroding for the last 16 quarters, and just today I learned that it’s official – we’re now down for 17 quarters.  We can’t afford to go on like this….

Needless to say, it should be information that is of interest to them – it should be about a problem they have. 

The second act raises the stakes on the earlier idea or situation.   (Romeo marries Juliet despite the feud between the two families.)  Once again, it should be something that cannot easily be undone.  If we have another down quarter, we’re going to have to close manufacturing plants in Chicago and Ohio.  

The third act precipitates a resolution, either favorable or unfavorable, by posing a question that must be resolved.  (Romeo kills Tybalt in a duel, thus resulting in his banishment.  Will Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after?  Answer:  no.)   To turn things around, I’m starting a new product line, code name Lemmings, that will excite customers once again and bring them flocking back to our stores.  Just as no one in the play Romeo and Juliet ever literally asks the resolving question out loud, you don’t have to in your speech.  You do have to resolve it, and the best way is to get your audience to undertake some action to enlist them in your persuasive moment.  I've put prototype Lemmings underneath your chairs.  I'd like you now to please take them out of their boxes and try them out.   

Just as the rest of Romeo and Juliet fills in around these key moments with scenes that explore the consequences of these interesting, fateful actions, your speech should too. 

That’s the basic structure of a good story.  Next time I’ll talk about the fundamental stories and the archetypes and how you can use them to make your presentations more powerful. 

Storytelling and archetypes -- 1

I was asked recently about how archetypes can aid in public speaking, and that suggested a series of blogs on storytelling, structure, plots, and archetypes as they figure in speeches and presentations. 

So let’s begin at the beginning.  Why tell stories in speeches?  Only because they are interesting, they help people remember what you say, and they are a good way to convey information and emotion memorably. 

Mark Turner, a writer and philosopher who has been associated with the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Center for Neural and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Maryland, goes even further.  In his landmark book, The Literary Mind, published by Oxford in 1996, he says, “Story is a basic principle of mind.”  In other words, he argues that we think in terms of stories.  We learn from the high chair that if we push a glass of milk over, white liquid spills on the floor, a parent comes running making noises, mops it up, and kisses us on the top of the head (if we’re lucky).  That’s a story, and it’s a basic understanding of cause and effect by which we make sense of our world. 

There are actors, actions, objects, and results.  It’s all good fun, it’s memorable, and it’s how we continue to think long after we’ve left the high chair. 

How does that apply to public speaking?  Most people organize their talks in lists of information.  (Five reasons to join our exciting investment program.) Unfortunately, the human mind is not constructed to remember lists very well.  Once you’ve told me 3 things, to remember the 4th I’ll have to forget the first.  ‘In one ear and out the other’ pretty describes how we respond to lists.  Yet everyone who has heard, seen, or read it once remembers the story of Romeo and Juliet. 

So if you give speeches more like Shakespeare and less like the phone book, you’ll be much more memorable.  That’s why stories are important.  Next time I’ll talk about structure and how to create great stories.

Repetition

It’s hard to get started on a blog on repetition – I find myself wanting to say the same thing over and over again. 

Repetition is good.  Repetition is good.  Repetition is good.  It helps with comprehension.  But it has to be artful.  The old nostrum, ‘tell ‘em what you’re going to say, say it, and tell ‘em what you said’, is bad repetition, because it’s boring. I blogged about this earlier. 

Good repetition gathers force as it goes along, because the repeated word or phrase can handle the weight.  The repetition becomes memorable as it accumulates emotional meaning underneath the repeated word or words. 

There are many kinds of good repetition and you should use all of them. 

The most famous modern example of a first kind of repetition to use comes in Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech from 1963: 

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:  ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.’

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering (in) the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice…..

Here, the repeated phrase gathers emotional impact because of the specifics King attaches to it.  The phrase itself is evocative enough to carry the weight, and it works.  The technical term for this kind of repetition is anaphora. 

Here’s a second kind of repetition, of grammatical structure, from Chief Seattle in 1854:

And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth, these shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children shall think themselves alone in the field, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the woods, they will not be alone….

The repeated use of the conditional ‘shall’ has an incantatory effect, and the words are powerful. Technically, this kind of repetition is also known as anaphora, but it’s useful to think about both phrases and grammatical structure in looking for effective repetition. 

The third kind of repetition that works well in oratory is repetition with a difference.  You set up an expectation with a phrase and then reverse its order.  The most famous modern example of this kind of repetition comes in President John Kennedy’s inaugural address:

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country. 

My fellow citizens of the world, as not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man….

The technical term is antimetabole. 

Finally, there are a number of other less common forms of repetition that are effective in public speaking.  They have to be used with caution.  If you overdo them, the effect is ludicrous.  But if used with art and restraint, your words will approach the magical.  A few examples:

Blood hath bought blood, and blows have answer’d blows:
Strength match’d with strength, and power confronted power.

From Shakespeare’s King John; this is known as epanalepsis -- repetition at the end of a clause a word from the beginning. 

The crime was common, common be the pain.  

From Alexander Pope’s “Eloise to Abelard,” this is known as anadiplosis – the repetition at the beginning of a clause of a word from the end of the previous one. 

And last of all, once again from Kennedy’s inaugural:

Not as a call to battle, though embattled we are.

This is polyptoton -- repetition of words from the same root. 

The technical terms are not important, but the various kinds of repetition are.  They improve comprehension, they increase the emotional response of the audience, and they add luster to otherwise ordinary prose.  Repetition is good.  

What can we learn about communicating from the debates?

For the partisans on both sides, post-debate analysis is all about spin.  But nonetheless, I’m going to try to give a fairly evenhanded reaction to what I saw in terms of the alignment of the two conversations, the verbal (content) and the non-verbal (body language).  I’ve been waiting until the passions cooled a little on the Palin-Biden debate, just because people are so unreasonable on that subject.  So here goes.  SPOILER ALERT:  I’m going to say tough things about all four candidates.  DON’T READ THIS if you’re a hopeless partisan who sees criticism of your candidate as unpatriotic or worse.

Joe Biden – on the plus side, he had good command of the facts, he appeared to take the debate seriously, and he was respectful to his opponent.  On the negative side, he kept his hand in his pocket too much, and when he registered passion (or at least pique) his voice went high and nasal, and stayed that way too long.  When you keep a hand in a pocket, we wonder what you’re hiding, and when your voice goes nasal, we find it irritating.  He needs to support with good breathing when he takes his voice higher, and keep his hands where we can see them.  NO WHINING, JOE! 

Sarah Palin – on the plus side, she appeared relaxed, after quite a bit of initial nervousness.  She has impressive poise for someone who has just been thrust onto the national scene.  That poise served her very well during her speech at the Republican convention; less well with Katie Couric because you could tell when she was trying to bull her way through an answer.  It would have been better to admit that she didn’t know.  She’s allowed; she’s only been ‘at this for five weeks’. 

In terms of content, she stuck to her prepared answers on taxes and energy, regardless of the questions.  Sometimes that worked, but often her bridging was weak and it was blatantly obvious she wasn’t answering the question.  Audiences don’t like people who don’t respond to the question; bridging is an important art and skill and she needs more practice. 

Her folksiness either grated on you, or you loved it.  All the shout-outs, the you betchas, and the say-it-ain’t-so-Joes – that either made you believe she was just like you, or it made your skin crawl.  Her winking and condescension toward Biden would have been outrageous if their gender roles were reversed; I found it off-putting.  But her main problem was an inconsistency in the two conversations – she smiled when she was actually angry.  That makes us not trust her.  DON’T SMILE WHEN YOU’RE ANGRY, SARAH!

John McCain – on the plus side, McCain sounded best when he was talking about his service to his country.  Then, his voice has the right timbre and gravitas.  On the negative side, when he was criticizing Obama, his voice went high and nasal, like Biden’s, and sounded condescending.  As a result, he was irritating.  If you watched the audience reaction meters on CNN, you saw that happening in real time.  Whenever he went negative, the dials went down, as much because his voice was irritating as anything else. 

But McCain’s main problem was happy feet, when he was talking, and when he was listening.  Once again, audiences look for alignment of the two conversations.  When they are not aligned, we believe the non-verbal.  So, when McCain says that he’s got the experience, a steady hand, and can handle our scary economic problems, but his feet are wandering all over the stage, we believe the feet.  Unconsciously, we think he’s wandering, mentally, just like he is physically.  PLANT YOUR FEET, JOHN!

McCain's wandering around when Obama was answering just looked rude. 

Barack Obama -- the best debater of the four in terms of clarity, logic, and coherence of his answers.  He planted his feet when he addressed his audience, and so we believe that he has the mental solidity a president needs.  Obama’s problem is that when he tries to display passion, his voice goes up, but the rest of him stays cool.  He pinches his thumb and forefinger together when he’s making a point, regardless of how he feels about it, and the result is that he appears too passionless.  LOSE THE PRISSY GESTURE, BARACK!  Obama needs to let us see some real temper, or we’re going to think he’s aloof, and we won’t trust him.  We need to see that he’s got some skin in the game. 

Tell 'em what you're going to say....

Working with clients, I regularly hear the following comment when we’re talking about presentation structure:  “Tell ‘em what you’re going to say, say it, then tell ‘em what you said.”  The client will nod enthusiastically at me while saying this, expecting me to agree wholeheartedly. 

My heart sinks.

This is lousy advice for 2008. 

Why?  Let’s look at what it means in practice.  It means an agenda slide.  And if the agenda is complicated, it means a long agenda slide, filled with words.  I’ve even seen agenda slides with the breaks highlighted, as if those were the most important moments of the day.  Of course, given the thinking of the people involved, they probably are. 

Then comes the actual talk, filled with dense information.  Then, at the end, everything’s repeated.  The summary can often last 5 or 10 minutes. 

The problem is that our minds don’t work this way.  It’s not the right order.  It’s not the way we need to hear things. 

And it’s boring. 

If you’re going to hold people's interest in this information-saturated age, with its shrinking attention spans and increased demands on time, then you’re going to have to present your case in the right way. 

We’ve all become very smart about absorbing information, and we recognize moments when we don’t have to listen.  An agenda slide is one of those moments.  If you start with one, you’ll find that most of the audience will be on their BlackBerrys.  Because you haven’t really started yet.  They’ll check out in the same way at the end, when you start your summary.  Or worse – they’ll ignore the middle and only listen during the summary. 

Instead, begin by framing the discussion, preferably with a compelling, 1 – 3 minute story or anecdote, one that sets up the problem but does not give the rest of the talk (or day) away.  Jump right in – Aristotle called it beginning in the middle of things – in medias res.  Think about movies and TV today – they don’t begin with a long list of credits.  They hook you first with explosions, murders, and the like.  The credits come later, if at all.  That’s your competition.  Ignore it at your peril.    

If you don’t have a great story, then talk about the issue in a high-level way:  “We’re going to show you why widgets are not the right way to go in this market, and we’re going to follow that up with some recommendations that may surprise you.  We think you’ll find them exciting.  We’re certainly excited to talk about them with you.” 

That’s in lieu of an agenda slide. 

Then, answer the question, what’s in it for me? – where ‘me’ is the audience.  Go into a problem that the audience has for which your information is the solution.  After you’ve shown the audience you understand its problem, then and only then are you entitled to offer your solution.  If you do it in this way, you’ll find happy, receptive audiences. 

The ‘tell ‘em what you said’ idea came from World War II, when the armed services had to give identical instructions to large numbers of people so that they would all fight the war in the same way.  It didn’t matter if it was boring.  They were orders.  Then, everyone who survived the war came back and went to work in the corporate world.  They used the same mental template for speeches and presentations.  Bad idea if you have to be interesting, but who was going to tell ‘em different?  They were war heroes. 

Today, you have to be interesting.  So don’t repeat in this way.  Repetition is important, but in different ways.  Next time I’ll talk about repeating in interesting ways.  Let me say that again:  my next blog is about repetition.

Trust and credibility -- 5

And what about establishing trust non-verbally?  This is full, rich, and interesting topic that I can only sketch out here.  I go into much more detail in my next book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, due out from Jossey-Bass in December. 

So let’s talk about a couple of the most important things.  First of all, you must be open to your audience.  If you send out a non-verbal message that is anything but open, your audience will shut down too, and it will be impossible to establish trust.  That’s so important that I’ll say it again:  without openness there can be no trust. 

The bad news is that speakers can find an astonishing number of ways to signal that they feel a bit exposed in front of an audience.  This feeling is completely natural and understandable, but you’ve got to fight it. 

Practice being open, and you’ll gradually lose the self-consciousness.  How do you practice being open?  There are two ways.  Either work from the outside in, or the inside out.  Try both, and see which works best for you.  Or try a mixture of the two. 

The outside-in method is to force yourself to keep your arms away from your body, using them to gesture toward the audience, but never (or at least hardly ever) folding them in front of your body in some way.  As I said, the possibilities for self-protection are endless.  People keep their elbows close to their sides and just wave their forearms and hands, like a penguin.  People hold their arms parallel in front of their bodies, making chopping gestures (the first President Bush did this).  People put their fingertips together in the spider-doing-pushups-in-the-mirror gesture.  And so on and on.  All of these are closed gestures and all of them prevent trust from developing between you and the audience. 

The inside-out method is to focus on the intent to be open.  Feel it, and then watch your gestures follow suit if you’ve been successful.  Like I say, try both and see what works for you.

Second, since you’re trying to present authority to the audience, they won’t trust you if you’re too fidgety.  A little nervous movement at the beginning of a speech is natural, and forgivable.  But if you don’t settle down, we won’t trust you.

Once again, fidgeting shows up in a myriad of ways.  One of the most common is ‘happy feet’.  That’s the condition where the speaker wanders all over the stage, never coming to a full stop, pacing like a caged tiger or a lost professor.  You’ve got to plant your feet and make your points if you want your audience to trust you. 

Trust and credibility -- 4

And what of trust, the other feeling that audiences look for in a speaker, and that speakers need to establish with their audiences?  Trust has both a verbal and a non-verbal component, and I’ll start with the verbal (the content).

You establish trust with an audience by solving their problems.  Think of the doctor you take that mysterious ache to, for her diagnosis.  If she holds forth on all the possible diseases that could be causing the pain, she’ll establish her credibility with you.  But if she cures your ache, you will trust her as a doctor. 

So building trust is in large part the art of understanding your audience deeply enough to ensure that your expertise will solve their problems.  I once gave a talk on creativity to a group of CIOs in South Africa.  The talk was not, let’s say, a success, because I had misjudged the audience.  I thought their biggest problem was a lack of creativity, but they sure didn’t think so, and thus my witty, wise, and highly entertaining prescriptions for enhancing creativity in the workplace fell on profoundly indifferent ears.  I did get some nice press coverage because the local press was quick to pick up the idea that more creativity for CIOs was a great idea.  Just not the CIOs.   

There has to be a good match between audience, topic, speaker, and the speaker’s expertise.  If they don’t match, be prepared to leave town quickly. 

Remember, too, that solving problems is both an emotional and intellectual activity.  Doctors who form a good (communication) bond with their patients are much less likely to be sued for malpractice, regardless of how good their advice actually is.  It’s all about trust.  Use your expertise for the solution, but remember to tell stories about how your work has transformed people for the better, so that your audience can imagine itself in the same position.  It’s the stories that build the emotional bond and cement the trust relationship you’re creating with your audience. 

Also, remember that speaking is a poor way to convey information.  We only remember something like 10 -30 percent of what we hear in a typical speech.  So keep your solutions simple and allow the audience to interact with you to try out the solution, or take the first step toward it, or something similar.  If they have a chance to be active, there’s a much greater likelihood that they will remember what you’re preaching.

Next time, I’ll wrap up with how to build trust non-verbally. 

Trust and credibility -- 3

So what does credible body language look like?  With non-verbal communication, it’s always the whole picture that matters.  People read you unconsciously for the most part, and form an impression – an idea of your intent – which only becomes conscious if there’s something really unusual going on. 

That said, there are a couple of areas that are particularly important.  It’s possible that if you creep out on stage, hunched over, not making eye contact, with your arms protectively folded across your stomach, that you could ultimately establish credibility with the audience – but it would be very difficult.  You’d have to work extremely hard. 

Instead, stand tall and straight, head held high, like a soldier, but without the tension in your shoulders.  Keep a little tension in your stomach and lower back, so that your lower back is rolled forward and your tummy tucked in.  Keep a still ‘core’ – that is, your solar plexus area should be still and focused on the audience.  But leave some looseness in your shoulder and arms, so that your gestures can look relaxed and fluid. 

Plant your feet when you deliver a point.  One of the most common unconscious ways people give up credibility is by wandering around because of the adrenaline in their systems – what we call ‘happy feet’ in the business.  Oddly enough, it is often difficult to persuade speakers that they in fact have happy feet.  You almost always have to show them the footage, and then they say, ‘Omigod, you’re right!  I wander all over the stage!’  That’s because it’s unconscious behavior.  Motion that’s purposeful – going from point A to point B to deliver a thought – is inherently interesting.  Motion that’s random is not.  And it’s not credible. 

Of course, closed gestures can undercut credibility, because the audience is expecting you to be an authority with confidence, and closed gestures look defensive and not very confident. 

The other area that’s most important for credibility is your voice.  People often overlook this essential part of ‘body language’.  If your voice constantly goes up in a questioning tone, even when you’re making a statement – as many people’s does these days – then you’re not being credible.  Your voice should rise in pitch to show emotion, and come down to show credibility.  The only exception is when you’re asking real questions.