Nick Morgan - Public Speaking Advice and Commentary

President Obama as alpha male

One of the things that happens when you become President of the United States, or leader of any kind of nation or organization, is that people begin to defer to you.  And they signal that deference with their body language in a whole host of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. 

One of the not-so-subtle ways was beautifully illustrated by the new Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, in a recent news conference where he sat alongside his boss.  The best view is several minutes into the video:  http://tinyurl.com/clkz9k. 

When we want to show that someone else is in charge, we keep our heads lower than the top dog’s.  And you can see Geithner doing just that as the new conference continues.  It’s amusing because Obama’s characteristic stance while sitting is to put his elbows on his knees in a ‘let’s get to work together’ pose.  That means his head is pitched lower, making it harder work to stay below him.  Geithner manages it by leaning forward and mirroring Obama’s stance, only a little more so.

Obama would make it easier on his subordinates if he sat up straight!

A subtle way in which we defer to those in power over us is that we match our low-frequency speech sounds with his or hers – literally getting in synch with the leader.  I talk more about this wild and wonderful way of showing deference in Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.  For this space, it’s enough to say that both the leader and the follower are unconscious of the matching up, but it is an important part of deferring to the top person.  We’re not sure yet to what extent we register that deference unconsciously.  More research needs to be done. 

How to ace that job interview

Here’s hoping you’re not looking for a job right now, but if you are, remember these three tips for success. 

When two people meet, especially for the first time, a little non-verbal dance begins.  It’s a dance that’s hard-wired into us – something we learned eons ago as cave people – and it’s all about survival. 

Recent brain research shows that our bodies send out signals to the other people in the room that fire unconsciously in our brains – and are read unconsciously by the other people – before we are even consciously aware of the others. 

The first question your body asks, in effect, is ‘friend or foe’?  If you’re not prepared to answer that positively, you’ll send out a million little body signals that you’re braced for a fight.  The other person’s body will respond automatically, tensing up just as fast as you do. 

That means that any hope of a positive connection is over before you even open your mouth – unless you come in with the attitude of ‘this person is my friend, and I’m really glad to see him/her’.  If you don’t do that preparatory work, your body will almost certainly betray you.

So the first and most important task to prepare for a job interview is to spend some time just before it begins telling yourself, I’m about to meet a friend.  If it helps you, picture someone you’re very close to – a spouse, a family member, a significant other, a close friend – and with whom you’re very relaxed.  The point is to get to your unconscious mind before your instinct does.  That takes a little practice, but the payoff is enormous.

Second, keep your torso open – don’t cross your arms, fold your hands over your stomach, or put your arms in front of you – as much as possible.  Keep yourself oriented toward the interviewer.  The idea is to present your heart so that the interviewer will trust you.  Slight changes in orientation are instantly ‘read’ – again, unconsciously – by the other person.  If you move away, or point yourself away from him/her, the interviewer will trust you less. 

The point here is to be tactful, graceful, and open.  Don’t contort yourself to stay open, but do your best not to close off, move further away, or turn a shoulder toward the interviewer.  There’s a reason the phrase ‘cold shoulder’ still resonates with us. 

Third, prepare what you’re going to say.  If the body language conversation is positive, that means that you’ve got a chance to be heard.  So prepare three important (brief) messages about how you can solve a problem the organization has, and make sure you work those into the conversation – tactfully.  That means you’ll have to do your homework, to know what the organization’s issues are.  

Keep the focus on solving problems for the  organization, and you’ll find the communication during a job interview surprisingly positive and even fun.  

I go into all this in more detail in the new book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, and also in an earlier series of blogs on interviewing last August: http://publicwords.typepad.com/nickmorgan/the-job-interview/ . 

Good luck and be open!

How does Tony Robbins Do It?

When asked who they think the best public speaker around today is, many people say “Tony Robbins.”  He’s certainly one of the most financially successful – he made $30 million in 2007.  The good news is that before you put down lots of money for one of Robbins’ self-help seminars, you can check him out on TED and see for yourself -- http://tinyurl.com/3hl5dy.  My analysis:  Tony makes the 20-minute talk seem long.  Several times during the video I looked at my watch, thinking, is it over yet?

But that’s because of several reasons, reasons that are seminal for Robbins’ success.  Overall, he's one of the more intensely focused and emotional speakers I've seen.   

First of all, Tony has the mechanics of public speaking down.  He is a master of the basic techniques.  He moves purposefully in relation to the audience, going toward them to make his points, and stopping and planting his feet to complete the thought.  So there’s a lot of motion, which is interesting, but it’s not random, which is irritating.  He’s focused entirely on the audience.  To do that, he has to know his material cold, and he does.  You can see the fruits of endless practice in his mastery of the basics.  His face is mobile, and he uses the basic four facial gestures easily and naturally. 

He uses the heart posture and open gestures to build trust with his audience.  (See Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma if you want to know more about this and the other fundamentals of building trust and authenticity.).  Oddly, he keeps a hand in his trouser pocket during most of the talk, and he has a nervous tic of constantly stroking his nose – two distracting and ultimately off-putting gestures I wouldn’t recommend – but his performance overcomes both those obstacles. 

His voice is his best feature, however.  He talks at a tremendous clip – nearly twice the average rate, by my rough count – but he does pause just enough to keep it from being bewildering.  I imagine he’s working really hard to say everything he needs to in the 20-minute time slot allowed.  Most importantly, though, he keeps his voice at a relatively high pitch, conveying emotion and intensity, and that’s what makes us watch him, even if we find him a bit arrogant and self-centered.  The number of self-references in the 20 minutes was impressive given that the topic was about what motivates people, not “Tony Robbins:  what makes me tick.” 

That pace and intensity would rapidly become overwhelming if he had more than 20 minutes.  I assume in his longer seminars he lets up a bit, but I suspect it’s at the center of his success: he’s figured out how to project tremendous emotional intensity and that makes him charismatic.  It’s like watching the proverbial car crash – you can’t take your eyes off him.  

In addition, his voice is roughened, which also conveys strong emotion.  I’ve never heard him live, so I can’t tell if this is a technique or the result of a bronchial infection, but it works.  Jesse Jackson is a master of this as well; check out his 1992 Democratic convention speech to see what I mean.  Again, this technique would not work well over much more than a 20-minute talk.  It’s like being shouted at; the effect palls quickly.

But overall, Tony Robbins is a highly professional master of the public speaking genre.  You may end up not liking him much, but you won’t take your eyes off him. 

Michael Fabiano demonstrates how to be a great public speaker

Michael Fabiano, Vice President - Strategic Initiatives, at NBC Universal was kind enough to share this picture with me after a recent public speaking success.   The caption he sent underneath the picture read as follows:  “This picture sums up my feelings about Morgan's book (Give Your Speech, Change the World) and how it helped me!”  Fabiano has transformed his public speaking by working on the principles in the book. 

His body language tells the story – you can’t help responding to the picture because he’s so obviously open and ready to engage with the audience.  When you first start to work on your non-verbal ‘conversation’, you’ll find that it feels risky, exposed, and uncomfortable.  But for the audience, it’s welcoming and engaging.  That’s because being open to strangers does go against our hard-wired instinct to be self-protective in that situation.  This goes back to our cave-dwelling days when the group coming up over the hill at you probably meant you no good.  Nowadays, we have a different problem – how to engage large numbers of people we’ve just met – and our instincts can betray us in that situation.  Michael’s done the hard work of retraining his instincts, and you see the great result.  Kudos to him!

Can you trust Obama?

A Princeton researcher has done a study on what makes a trustworthy face, even in repose: http://tinyurl.com/7h5gkn.  What’s fascinating about the study is that it connects with other research on facial expressions conducted over the years by Paul Ekman and others (http://www.paulekman.com/). 

Overall, the gist of the research is this.  The structure of your face affects how people receive you.  But, as I’ve been telling clients for years, there are 4 basic facial expressions that increase the likelihood that people will trust you, like you, and rate you favorably in a lineup.  They are:  wide-open eyes, raised eyebrows, the smile, and nodding. 

So, if you’ve got a deep indentation between your eyebrows, or heavy ones that appear to be lowered at the inner part above your nose, or a thin chin, or shallow cheekbones – opening your eyes, raising your eyebrows, and smiling will greatly mitigate the effect of these given facial attributes.  Nodding will then go a long way toward building agreement. 

As I argue in Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, people’s unconscious ‘take’ on you begins before they even have conscious reactions to what you say.  So, your speech or presentation is conditioned by your expression, your posture, and your gestures before you even begin to speak – for good or for ill.  It’s something you want to manage and control if you want to be an effective communicator.

The good news for Obama is that the answer to the question, can you trust him, is ‘yes’.  His face scores high on trustworthiness, and, more important, his brilliant use of facial gestures – from his megawatt smile to his eyes and eyebrows – ensures that he will be trusted, as long, of course, as his administration stays on track! 

President Obama invites us to go on a difficult journey.

Like a lot of other folks, I’ve been anticipating President Obama’s inaugural address for months now.  It’s the beginning of a new era, and the 44th president could have recited a nursery rhyme and I would have been content.

Nonetheless, it’s worth studying the speech and its delivery for what it can teach us about rhetoric.  So here goes.  Overall, the speech was very good, not great.  When times are tough, you need to rally people to a cause.  Did Obama do that?  Yes, he did.  But the archetypal story that he told was “stranger in a strange land” rather than a quest, and the quest story is better for enlisting your listeners in a cause. 

The speech needed to be authentic more than any other quality, and Obama was certainly that.  He gets high marks for the honesty with which he described the problems we face as a country and as a world.  His delivery was charismatic, certainly; he crowded the podium to reach toward the people on the Mall, and his voice had its usual music.  It rose and fell with the authority of a preacher, or a new president who knows exactly where he wants to take the country.  (He's got to fix that thumb-and-forefinger gesture, though; it just doesn't add anything to the occasion and it looks calculated.  He looked better when he just gestured naturally.) 

At the heart of the speech was the following line:  “For the world has changed and we must change with it.”  That’s a “stranger in a strange land” message, and it doesn’t have the power of the quest.  But it was entirely appropriate for the day, and the times.  As President Obama said a moment later, we face “a new era of responsibility.” 

The speech was about all the problems we must fix, all the wrongs we must address, and all the hardships we must undergo.  Thus it was entirely appropriate to the occasion.  But the lines that got the biggest applause were addressed to the shadowy warriors of terrorism in Pakistan and elsewhere around the world:  “We will not apologize for our way of life. . . . We will defeat you. . . .  Our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. . . . “ 

Obama invited us to go on a journey with him, and it's not journey that will lead us home.  It is a journey to -- as he said -- "an uncertain destiny."  He asked us to work for the common good, so that our grandchildren will say of us, “we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safe to future generations.” 

That's a tough message for a new era of responsibility.  He's asking a lot of us.  How will we measure up?   

What Obama Should Say: The 44th President's Inaugural Address

For my blog today, I've teamed up with Harvard.  The post can be found here:  http://tinyurl.com/87kzul.  Let me know what you think!

Video blog on achieving authenticity and charisma in public speaking

For my blog today, I'm posting an excerpt from a recent speech I gave at Harvard:

 
http://tinyurl.com/88luy4

It's about the relationship between content and body language in communications, and how to achieve authenticity and charisma.  This is the topic of my new book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, published by Jossey-Bass last week.

If you're interested in a 30-minute DVD, please email me at:  nick@publicwords.com.

President Bush's last news conference and self pity

Never defend yourself in public against things that you haven’t been accused of; you’ll simply raise more questions than you forestall.  President Bush gave a classic demonstration of this faux pas near the end of his last news conference.  (http://tinyurl.com/79uqck)

Here’s a transcript of the moment.  It came when a reporter asked the President about when President-elect Obama would feel the full weight of the office.  The President was calm talking about the Oval Office and Obama’s family.  But then the bitterness came out when he suddenly went on a rant about self-pity: 

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, that's a great question. He'll -- he will feel the effects the minute he walks in the Oval Office. At least, that's when I felt. I don't know when he's going -- he may feel it the minute he's -- gets sworn in. And the minute I got sworn in, I started thinking about the speech. (Laughter.) And so -- but he's a better speech-maker than me, so he'll be able to -- he'll be able to -- I don't know how he's going to feel. All I know is he's going to feel it. There will be a moment when he feels it.

I have never felt isolated and I don't think he will. One reason he won't feel isolated is because he's got a fabulous family and he cares a lot about his family. That's evident from my discussions with him. He'll be -- he's a 45-second commute away from a great wife and two little girls that love him dearly.

I believe this -- the phrase "burdens of the office" is overstated. You know, it's kind of like, why me? Oh, the burdens, you know. Why did the financial collapse have to happen on my watch? It's just -- it's pathetic, isn't it, self-pity. And I don't believe that President-Elect Obama will be full of self-pity. He will find -- you know, your -- the people that don't like you, the critics, they're pretty predictable. Sometimes the biggest disappointments will come from your so-called friends. And there will be disappointments, I promise you. He'll be disappointed. On the other hand, the job is so exciting and so profound that the disappointments will be clearly, you know, a minor irritant compared to the –

At this point a reporter mercifully broke in with another question, and the moment passed. 

The transcript doesn’t do justice to the oddness of the moment, because it’s all in the body language.  Watch the video.  Bush’s anger suddenly leaks through, as he bashes self-pity.  But no one had asked him about it, and so we wonder why he’s suddenly attacking that emotion.  Is it something he’s wrestling with himself?  We don’t know, but it’s the most memorable part of the news conference, and a great reminder not to defend yourself against attacks that haven’t yet come your way. 

How unconscious intent can sabatoge your communications before you start

We are all unconscious experts in reading other people’s intent.  We do that by evaluating their gestures in a part of the brain that never reaches the level of conscious thought.  That has profound implications for public speaking and communications in general.

First of all, our ‘read’ is incredibly fast.  The nanosecond someone walks toward us, we have already evaluated him or her in terms of threat.  Our unconscious brains are constantly asking, ‘is this person friend or foe?’ and if the answer is ‘friend’, we relax and greet the person.  If the answer is ‘foe’, adrenaline courses through our system, we tense up, we breathe shallowly, prepared for fight (or flight) and so on.  All of that happens before we’ve even had a conscious thought about the other person.

That means that, for a communication (or a speech) to be successful, you must prepare beforehand so that the encounter can go well.  If you just walk up on stage, full of your own nervousness and agenda, before you even get to the podium you will have sent, and received, ‘foe’ messages to the audience.  All hope of a successful exchange will have gone before you start. 

In order to overcome your natural nervousness, you have to start a positive train of associations and behaviors going.  You have to begin by intending to be open, or else the opposite will happen before you know it, literally.

So that’s your first job as a speaker, and in communications generally.  Start by being open, before the communication gets underway.  Avoid setting off our ancient survival mechanisms, and work on a positive agenda.  It will mean the difference between failure and a chance of success.

I go into this work in much more detail in my new book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, published by Jossey-Bass on January 5, 2009.

Roland Burris' first steps as Senator-designate are not steady ones.

Why did Roland Burris accept a hopelessly tainted appointment as the junior senator from Illinois?  He didn’t need the work.  He’s had a long career as a lawyer and a public servant, first as Comptroller, then as Attorney General for the state of Illinois.  His career has been on the whole successful, aside from a controversy around the Rolando Cruz murder trial in the mid-80s.  (Cruz was exonerated by DNA evidence; Burris was criticized for being on the wrong side of that issue and going after Cruz even when the evidence was mounting that he might be innocent.)

Burris ran in the Democratic primary for the Senate in 1984 and lost; perhaps he just wants the job. 

In his first news conference as the Senator-designate; Burris made a bad job of it. (http://tinyurl.com/7mou58)  He was defensive and confrontational where he should have been honest.  He tried to change the subject, talking about world events, the economic meltdown and associating himself with Barack Obama rather than the man standing beside him, the embattled governor. 

What should he have said and done?  First of all, he should never have taken the appointment, even if he wanted to be Senator a great deal.  Of course it would be ‘tainted’; the appointment will always be associated in the public’s mind with Blagojevich and his foul-mouthed attempts to sell out his integrity and the dignity of the office of governor of Illinois. 

Perhaps, though, he was thinking about the end game.  In politics, a week is a long time, and he’ll have a couple of years to create a positive impression in the voters’ minds to counteract the negative one.  Perhaps he thought, take the appointment, do a great job as Senator, make the people love me, get re-elected.  But the problem with that scenario is that it depends largely on how long it takes Illinois to get rid of Blagojevich and what kind of taste it leaves in the mouths of the voters.  Over those future events Burris will have very little control.  

Burris’ micro-expressions reveal anger and disdain in the news conference.  But his words were bland.  Therein lies the real problem.  We would have respected him if he had been honest with us, saying something like, “I thought long and hard about this.  I was afraid my appointment would be hopelessly tainted because of the Governor’s difficulties.  But in the end, I decided that the people of Illinois needed a voice in Washington more than I needed to take it easy and enjoy my golden years with my grandchildren.  So I ask you to give me a chance to show that I can be your servant and advocate.  And I promise you I will work harder than anyone else on behalf of the people of Illinois.” 

Public folks (and their lawyers) almost always go with the urge to stonewall and pretend that nothing untoward is happening.  That’s a huge mistake, because it doesn’t pass the average person test – what would the average person do and say under these circumstances?  Whenever you get away from honest, direct emotions, you begin to lose the public, and ultimately you lose your mandate. 

Roland Burris’ first day as Senator-designate was not a propitious one. 

 

Is Sanjay Gupta Authentic?

Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon, CNN commentator and host of a Sunday morning medical program on CNN, has been named Surgeon General by President-elect Obama.  There’s no question that he’s a multi-talented guy with enough energy for seven normal people, but how does he stack up as a communicator?

Another way to put the question is, given that Gupta is working around the clock to bring us health care news we can use, and saving lives as a working surgeon, why does he rub so many people the wrong way? 

I like the guy, and I wish him well, but the reason that he gets up some people’s noses is that he tries too hard.  Watch him arguing with Michael Moore on YouTube, and you’ll see someone who is simply moving too fast, in terms of emotions, for the average viewer to follow.  One second he looks concerned, the next mildly remonstrative, the next he’s shaking his head ‘no’ and taking issue. 

As I explain in my new book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, (http://tinyurl.com/5pq49q) authenticity derives in part from openness and connection with the audience.  Gupta does well on the first criteria but not so well on the second.  By letting his face telegraph a series of emotions, reactions, and opinions from nanosecond to nanosecond, he runs into a paradox.  This overreaction makes it look like he’s not actually listening to the other people on screen, and by extension, his audience.  As a result, we don’t feel connected with him.  We feel broadcasted at – a very different thing.

One of the paradoxes of achieving authenticity in the YouTube era is that you must work at it.  Just being yourself won’t work – you’ll look clumsy, awkward, or, in Gupta’s case, over the top.  He needs to throttle back, cool down, and slow his reactions to allow the audience to enter into a discussion with him. 

You know, Caroline Kennedy wants to be Senator. You know.

Caroline Kennedy has gone public with her desire to take Senator Clinton’s soon-to-be-vacant New York seat – and with her ‘you knows’.  On one two-minute YouTube clip a buzzer notified us of each one, and there were more than 30. 

What’s going on?  How serious a public speaking flaw is the verbal tic?  And what can Kennedy do about it?

Caroline Kennedy is not ready for prime time.  She needs a coach.  She should have done the work before the opportunity came up.  Apparently everyone up to now in her life has been too polite to mention her verbal tic, but our magnificent unfettered free press suffers from no such handicap and the damage has been done.

That said, how serious is the verbal tic?  It’s only serious if everyone notices it, and in this case they have.  Ums, ahs, you knows, and so on, are the verbal staples of teenagers, and they drive their parents crazy, but as long as they’re talking to other teenagers, it’s part of the tribal identification and it’s OK.  It’s not OK for Caroline Kennedy, because we expect more from a public figure than we do our teenagers. 

I’ve been asked many times by and about speakers whether or not ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ – the grown-up equivalent of ‘y’know’ – are fatal for speaking.  Again, the answer is only if people notice.  President-elect Barack Obama has a fairly serious “ah” habit, but few people notice, and his general reputation for eloquence and charisma means that he doesn’t get called on it.  Not a problem for him.  And anyway, we want our President-elect to choose his words carefully now, right?

How can you work on a verbal tic?  The first step is to have someone point it out to you.  I was giving a speech on public speaking a number of years ago, when a charming Southern woman near the front raised her hand (about 2 minutes into my speech) and said, “You claim to be an expert on public speaking, but I’ve counted half a dozen ‘ahs’ in the first 30 seconds of your speech.  Why should we listen to you?”

I banished ‘ahs’ from my speeches after that incident.  But my immediate response at the time was to ask the audience if anyone else had noticed, and they hadn’t.  In fact, they took the woman to task for her rudeness and her disruption.  She later apologized.  But I was grateful for the learning opportunity.  Really.

The next step is to begin to monitor yourself, closely.  Every time you’re tempted to say ‘you know’ or ‘ah’, simply become silent until the next word is ready.  You’ll soon find that the annoying tic is gone from your speech patterns. 

And if you’re slow to succeed, get a friend to fine you a dollar every time you slip.  You’ll be amazed at how fast that works.