Nick Morgan - Public Speaking Advice and Commentary

What was wrong with Governor Jindal?

Why was Governor Bobby Jindal’s response to President Obama on Tuesday night so bad?  Both the content and the delivery were, in plain words, awful.  Here it is on YouTube:  http://tinyurl.com/art66e.  But don’t watch it, unless you want to know how not to speak on television, how not to construct a logical presentation, and how not to quote your father when talking to the American people.  There are a myriad better ways to spend 12 minutes of your life than watching Governor Jindal. 

Jindal began with a nod to President Obama’s election as the first African-American president and all that that signifies, but he went on so long that it became patronizing.  He told an inane story about hurricane Katrina, and used that as a way to talk about the Republican idea that Americans don’t need government to help them solve their problems.  “Americans can do anything,” he said, quote his father.  He repeated this quote a half-dozen times during the remainder of the speech, sounding more and more like Gomer Pyle and less and less like a credible future presidential candidate. 

Of course, the (Republican) government’s response to Katrina was criminally bad, but Jindal was talking out of both sides of his mouth, because he and his state government were busy spending billions of Federal taxpayers’ money on rebuilding New Orleans even as he spoke.  

He then went on to say that Republicans want everyone to have access to affordable health care, but that government is not the solution.  This is an argument based on a non sequitur, and one that simply sidesteps several critical issues.  For example, private enterprise has built the jury-rigged, outrageously expensive solution we have today.  We’ve tried it.  It has brought us to our current impasse, with even the insurers themselves now calling for the Federal government to help find a remedy. 

And Jindal simply ignores the inconvenient fact that President Obama’s proposed solution does involve the insurers rather than relying exclusively on the Federal government.  No one is proposing that the government is the answer.  But government has to play a role, because private enterprise has proven itself unable to come up with a solution despite having years to do so, enormous public pressure to improve, and real – and often criminal – examples of how they have failed in their own self-described mission to protect Americans against the financial impact of catastrophic illnesses.  

Jindal then talked about spending and the economic mess we’re in.  He called for less government spending, echoing President Hoover, who cut spending at the beginning of the Depression, thus ensuring that it would last longer and cut much deeper than it otherwise would have.  Thank goodness he’s not in charge of anything except Louisiana.  I see that he's taking all but about one percent of the Federal bailout money coming to his state. 

What about his delivery?  His smile was insincere; it didn’t reach his eyes, which were focused relentlessly on the camera and thus on us, the hapless viewers.  He read the teleprompter in an un-authoritative, sing-song voice that lacked conviction, energy, and interest.  His vocal tones were constantly rising, further undercutting his authority.  His gestures were out of synch with his words, making him look fake.  (I talk more about this in Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.)  Finally, he tipped his head slightly to one side, in what I call the Mr. Rogers gesture, making him look even less authoritative.  The combination gave the effect of a small boy delivering the Republican response.  It was childish in the bad sense of the word.  Not a good night for Governor Jindal or the Republicans. 

How did President Obama do?

President Obama’s address to the joint session and the country last night was a three-act drama.  The first third of the speech covered the economic mess, and was a well-constructed speech in itself.  Here, Obama addressed the short-term problems America faces.  The second act covered four initiatives:  energy, health care, education, and debt reduction.  These were the issues that President Obama identified as the most important long-term problems we must confront.  And the final third, the weakest section, covered the rest of the world and everything else. 

On the plus side, therefore, Obama took a good deal of my advice from yesterday, at least in the first two pieces of the speech.  If I were grading it, I’d give it a “B+.”  It was the best constructed State of the Union (or equivalent) message in recent memory.  On the negative side, the speech was still too long, and the journey through the three acts was not clear or strong enough to hold all his listeners enthralled for an hour. 

The first part of the speech was the best, and the best constructed.  Jumping right into the problem, Obama spoke of the parlous state of the economy:

You don’t need to hear another list of statistics to know that our economy is in crisis, because you live it every day.  It’s the worry you wake up with and the source of sleepless nights.  It’s the job you thought you’d retire from but now have lost; the business you built your dreams upon that’s now hanging by a thread; the college acceptance letter your child had to put back in the envelope.  The impact of this recession is real, and it is everywhere.

He then moved on to talk about the solution, re-establishing the flow of credit in the US banking system, in order to break the ‘destructive cycle’ of the credit freeze:

That is why this administration is moving swiftly and aggressively to break this destructive cycle, restore confidence, and re-start lending.

We will do so in several ways.  First, we are creating a new lending fund that represents the largest effort ever to help provide auto loans, college loans, and small business loans to the consumers and entrepreneurs who keep this economy running.  

Second, we have launched a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and re-finance their mortgages….

Third, we will act with the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times….

Finally, he called for action from the Congress to continue to solve our short-term economic problems:

So I ask this Congress to join me in doing whatever proves necessary.  Because we cannot consign our nation to an open-ended recession.  And to ensure that a crisis of this magnitude never happens again, I ask Congress to move quickly on legislation that will finally reform our outdated regulatory system.  It is time to put in place tough, new common-sense rules of the road so that our financial market rewards drive and innovation, and punishes short-cuts and abuse.

Had Obama ended his speech here, he would have made history with a short, well-constructed address on our current financial problems and how to work our way out of them.  But of course, he also had a larger long-term agenda to cover, and so he forged ahead to discuss his ‘blueprint for the future’.

The recovery plan and the financial stability plan are the immediate steps we’re taking to revive our economy in the short-term.  But the only way to fully restore America’s economic strength is to make the long-term investments that will lead to new jobs, new industries, and a renewed ability to compete with the rest of the world. The only way this century will be another American century is if we confront at last the price of our dependence on oil and the high cost of health care; the schools that aren’t preparing our children and the mountain of debt they stand to inherit.  That is our responsibility.

What followed was a list of the four topics, each one briefly developing the problem, and proposing a solution under the rubric of the budget Obama will soon present to the Congress.  For example, the President argued that we need to take action on energy because “to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.”

And he immediately proposed his solution:

So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.  And to support that innovation, we will invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.

This approach is much more like a traditional SOTU with their endless lists of problems and proposed legislative solutions.  President Obama’s innovation was to address only four big topics, and for that our attention spans commend him.

The final section of the speech was the weakest.  It contained a brief nod to the world beyond our borders.  It pledged to “end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them,” not that these two items have anything to do with one another.  It made the usual pledge to “root out the waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.” 

The speech then raced through Medicare, Social Security, honesty and accountability, tax breaks and increases, the two wars we’re fighting, our men and women in uniform, Guantanamo Bay, torture, negotiation, alliances, protectionism and the G-20, peace in Israel, and finally hope in the most unlikely places.  To illustrate that hope, he singled out the usual 3 heroes, a bank president, a school girl, and Greensburg, Kansas. 

In sum, a speech that began to tackle the limitations of the form of the SOTU, delivered well in the first two-thirds of the talk, and ended weakly in the third with the usual laundry list of issues, programs, and departments that the President’s team couldn’t bear to leave out.  Now we’ve got another reason to look forward to 2010: not only economic, but also continued rhetorical improvement, in this country. 

This blog is also posted on Harvard's site:  http://tinyurl.com/d2al77

What should President Obama say tonight?

The President’s State of the Union speech (SOTU) is one of the most anticipated and least watched speeches in the US public speaking calendar.  Why?  It’s indigestible.  Of course it’s too long – one of Bill Clinton’s was 81 minutes – but more than that, the current state of the SOTU art disrespects the audience.  It’s a huge waste of a rare opportunity to communicate with a large swath of Americans.  President Obama should repair the genre.  (Even though he's not calling his speech tonight an official SOTU, but rather a 'presidential address', that's what it is.) 

SOTUs of recent memory are long lists of nice-sounding legislation that will never be enacted and vast programs that will never be initiated.  The problem is, audiences can’t remember lists.  By the time we hear the fourth or fifth item, we’ve forgotten the first.  Lists never change minds; instead they irritate and bore audiences. 

A speech like that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the mind works.  A speech is an opportunity for us, the audience, to make up our minds about something.  And so it’s at the same time an opportunity for the speaker to change our minds, to persuade us of something. 

What President Obama should do is take us on a decision-making journey, one that will lead us through the valley of despair that is our current situation to the mountain of hope we all want to climb in Q2 or Q3.  That’s what great speeches do:  they respect the need of the audience to go through a decision-making process by structuring the speech in a specific way. 

Most recent SOTUs end with nods to pathetic or heroic figures sitting next to the First Lady in the balcony.  It’s better than discussing the merits of switch grass, but it’s a cheap sentimental trick that comes too late in the program to do much good.  Instead, President Obama should begin with a real story about an American that typifies the current state of things.  That story should take no more than 1 -2 minutes, but it should be telling.  That will frame the problem and get our attention. 

Then he needs to slog his way through the current winter of our discontent – the economy, health care, and, say, education.  He gets to pick the list, but it should contain no more than 3 items.  If you want your audience to stay with you, you have to focus.  We only remember 10 - 30 percent of what we hear.  Since our minds retain stories better than facts, Obama should introduce each topic with a brief story or two.  We need to create a health care system that works for all Americans.  Currently, our system promotes late intervention at the expense of ongoing care.  That means that Jane Doe couldn’t get help with her diabetes until it got so bad that she had to have her leg amputated.  Does that make sense?  That story is repeated all across America and with hundreds of illnesses. 

He should spend about 8 – 10 minutes on the problem section. 

Once the President has adequately explored the problems involved in the three issues he’s focusing on, he’s ready to propose his solutions.  More importantly, we the audience are ready to hear those solutions, because we’ve spent time in the problem.  Decision-making is an emotional process, and it takes time dwelling in the problem before we’re ready to move on.  Think how frustrated you have to be with your old car before you’re ready to contemplate buying a new one.  

This part of the speech should mirror the problem section.  If the President introduces 3 problems, he should cover 3 solutions.  The level of detail and length should parallel the problem section as well.  It’s rhetorically very weak to propose a hundred solutions for one problem, or to have one solution for a host of problems.   The timing of the solution, too, should equal the problem – another 8 – 10 minutes. 

The solutions the President proposes should contain concrete descriptions of the benefits that will accrue to us if we agree to them.  Audiences are not very good at imagining benefits, so it’s important for a speaker to lay them out clearly and specifically. 

To close, Obama needs to ask us to do something.  This action step can be rhetorical – during the campaign, Obama often got the audience chanting ‘Yes, we can!’ – but specific, concrete ones are better.  How can we help the country and the world get back on track?  How can we help our soldiers fighting around the world?  What can we do to solve the health care crisis?  What about education?  Audiences are full of active people being passive during the course of the speech, and they love to give back when they’ve been taken on the right journey. 

When President Kennedy famously asked us to do something for our country in his inaugural address, thousands of young men and women joined the Peace Corps and helped make the world a better place.  The SOTU is too important an opportunity to waste.  In roughly 22 minutes, the attention span of the average adult, President Obama has the chance to change the world.  He should take it.  He might even move the Congress to useful action. 

Are rich people ruder than poor people?

According to a new study, your body language gives away your socioeconomic status (http://tinyurl.com/dyld5v).  At least, your parents’ social status:  the study was conducted among college students in California, where all good status studies seem to originate. 

Students with richer, higher-status parents engaged in more fiddling, doodling, and grooming and other such rude behavior, while lower-class students raised their eyebrows more, laughed more, and generally were more engaging. 

Wait a minute, though.  Could it be that higher-status parents don’t do as good a job at raising their kids?  Or perhaps higher-status kids eat more sugar and junk food and so are more fidgety?  Or maybe the richer kids were offended that they weren’t being paid enough for their (expensive) time?   

It’s important to remember, with small-bore studies like this one (100 students were briefly interviewed) carried out on college campuses, the applicability to the rest of us may be limited.  This is not like say, good medical science, with control groups and double blind studies of huge numbers of people.  There are often too many possible explanations for the behavior that is studied. 

Instead of leaping to conclusions, then, it’s a good idea to wait for what the scientific world calls meta-studies.  These are studies of studies; they group many similar small research projects in one giant database with an eye to checking the overall reliability of the findings. 

In this way, the famous study by Albert Mehrabian from the 1970s, which sought to determine how people decoded the emotional attitudes of others, has been affirmed by meta-studies.  The study, you’ll recall, found that when we try to figure out what the speaker’s attitude is toward what he or she is saying, we look to the visual cues 55% of the time, the tone of voice 38 % of the time, and the content only 7 % of the time.  The study has been misunderstood ever since, as indicating that “it doesn’t matter what you say, but how you look” which was not the point at all. 

The point, again, was that people use primarily visual cues, and secondarily audio cues, to determine how a speaker feels about the words he/she is uttering.  That’s important to know, but it’s not the same thing as the message itself.  Mehrabian assumed that the message was getting through; the question was, what was the speaker’s attitude toward the message. 

The meta-studies confirm that we get our emotional subtext from visual cues about 2/3 of the time, from auditory cues about 1/3 of the time, and from content hardly at all. 

That insight you can take to the body language bank.  But let’s wait on the relative rudeness of rich and poor.  The data is insufficient for a real conclusion. 

Is an introduction important?

Why do speakers need introductions?  They’re often badly done – a hapless VP of Something has a piece of paper thrust in his hands, and he stumbles through a poorly written bio of the speaker that leaves everyone baffled about who she is or why she is talking to them.  Often, it’s a dry recitation of the resume of the speaker, covering items that are no longer of interest even to the subject of the dreary listing. 

But well done, introductions serve an essential purpose for the speaker and the audience and they greatly increase the likelihood that the former will succeed and the latter will be interested in the former succeeding.

What is this rough magic that introductions perform?  A good introduction saves the speaker an enormous amount of work.  Audiences want two things from their speakers: credibility and trust.  The introduction can take care of the credibility issue before the speaker has to open her mouth. That just leaves trust, and the speaker has 60 minutes to work on that. 

A good introduction provides an instant third-party endorsement of the speaker.  Your introduction should answer three questions: 

1.  Who are you (what are your qualifications to speak)?
2.  What are you talking about (what’s the subject, in terms the audience can understand)?
3.  Why should this audience care (how are you relevant to that audience’s needs, desires, wants or fears)? 

In short, a good introduction elevates the speaker in terms of the audience so that the speaker doesn’t have to do that work. 

A good introducer is someone the audience knows, who has some prestige within the group.  If the introducer needs an introduction, someone has screwed up somewhere.  Yet I’ve seen many a conference where the VP of Something is introduced by the VOG (Voice of God) over the PA system so that he can stand up and introduce, say, Marcus Buckingham, whom the audience already knows perfectly well. 

If no one is available to introduce you, that makes it much harder for you to establish your credibility.  The best way is to briefly and humbly give a couple of relevant sentences of your bio to orient the audience, and to jump in to your talk.  Don’t go on too long, because it’s simply not charming to talk endlessly about yourself.  That’s not the job of a speaker. 

An alternative that is extraordinarily effective is to prepare a brief video introduction.  We’ve done this for some of our clients and it works extremely well.  A professionally produced video has all the bells and whistles the VP of Something lacks, and it’s amazing what a soundtrack and a good script can do to build up an audience’s expectations.  Here’s an example: http://tinyurl.com/ae8246.

The Conference Information Overload Survival Guide

Sitting in the audience as a conference-goer, listening to a speech, or any kind of presentation, means working hard.  It’s difficult to retain information we’ve acquired through our ears.  Studies show that we only remember 10 – 30 percent of what we hear.  And judging those messages is a difficult task, too.  How do we decide on the fly what’s worthwhile and what’s junk?  We often are overly impressed with the sizzle of a fresh, well-presented idea, and don’t figure out until much later that the idea is actually a trivial one. 

So here are 4 questions to ask yourself as you listen, to test whether what you’re hearing is a good idea, or merely rhetoric.  Think of it as a conference survival guide.  

First, is it articulate? When you’re on the receiving end of rhetoric, listen closely for clarity. Articulateness is not only a virtue; it is also usually a sign of clarity of thought. The reverse is also true:  if the communication isn’t clear to you, it probably isn’t clear to the speaker.  If there’s a lot of jargon, that usually hides lazy thinking. 

Second, is there a real alternative? It’s always useful to ask yourself, when someone is putting forth an idea, whether there’s an alternative. If a politician says, for example, that he ‘supports our troops’, ask yourself, What’s the alternative? Could a politician say, “ I don’t support the troops ” ?  Obviously not.  If that’s the case, then there is no real idea behind the rhetoric. It’s only grandstanding. This is a good test to apply to your own communications as well.

Third, is the idea consequential? Check the importance of the idea. Does it amount to anything, or is it a tiny thought? Your time is valuable; don’t waste it listening to people rearranging the intellectual deck chairs on some virtual Titanic.

Fourth, does the idea shock but not surprise? A persuasive communication may shock us, but it shouldn’t surprise us. Indeed, good communication does need to shock, because otherwise it won’t get any attention in this information - saturated era.  Beyond that, we should be able to recognize the fundamental truth of it. Things that are both shocking and surprising are truly rare. When Luke learns that Darth Vader is his father, the audience is shocked but not surprised. Some part of us recognizes that it’s in some sense inevitable and logical.  Of course, Darth Vader is Luke’s father. That’s why the Force is so strong within him.  In your own communications, feel free to shock people, but try not to surprise them in this sense of the word.

Keep these four questions in mind as you listen to speech after speech at a conference this spring.  They will help you free your mind of clutter and stay focused on what’s important. 

Elizabeth Gilbert's vocal art

Elizabeth Gilbert was an accomplished author of journalism and fiction, with respectable sales and several awards to her credit, until 2006, when her latest work, Eat Pray Love, became an enormous bestseller. 

Now people ask her to do things like give lectures on creativity, and she does that very well, too.  Check out her speech on TED:  http://tinyurl.com/b6hs2k

Her take on creativity is predictably original, funny, and fascinating.  She says rather than define creativity as individual genius, as in “She is a genius; she writes wonderful fiction,” we should go back to the ancient idea that a genius is something like a small fairy that comes to the writer, or the painter, or the sculptor, and helps him or her out.  So, we should say, “She has a genius.” 

According to Gilbert, all kinds of good things flow from this change in perception.  Mostly, it takes the pressure off.  You don’t have to take all the credit – or all the blame – for the work.  After all, you had a daemon helping you.  The daemon can choose either to show up or not. 

Also, it takes the pressure off the next work after a huge success like Eat Pray Love.  It’s not Gilbert’s fault if the fairy doesn’t show up twice in a row.  Gilbert was there, doing her job.  She was writing.  The daemon?  Maybe she had other plans.  Maybe not.  Maybe she moved on to some other writer. 

As a speaker, Gilbert presents a fascinating personae of someone who is slightly nervous and shy, but still determined to acquit herself well.  So, she paces nervously and wrings her hands constantly, but she smiles and delivers her words wittily and well.  It’s quite an effective attitude to take on – in small doses.  Much more than 20 minutes and we’d begin to get tired of it.  But for twenty minutes, she holds the audience and appears to be humble at the same time. 

The reason it works so well?  Her voice.  It’s a wonderful instrument, warm, musical, resonant, and pleasing.  For a voice to work that well, Gilbert must have considerable technique.  And that undercuts her personae – that of someone who is unaccustomed to all this attention.  I say that not in criticism but in admiration.  The best kind of art appears the most artless.  Real genius makes the arduous look easy.  Gilbert’s art is formidable indeed. 

The Secret of Sir Ken Robinson's Charisma

If you’ve never heard Sir Ken Robinson speak, and you care about children, creativity or education, you owe it to yourself to go to TED.com and cue him up:  http://tinyurl.com/5gsyph. 

In 20 minutes, Sir Ken makes an unforgettable impression and an impassioned plea for changing the way we teach our children – all without raising his voice or breaking into a sweat.  His basic argument is that schools kill creativity by pushing one kind of learning down the throats of students, who are little polymaths who need to have the chance to try many different things to find what they’re actually good at. 

His evident compassion and his ironic wit combine to hold his audience spellbound until his close, at which point the entire group gets to its feet and starts applauding.  It’s a sign of a job well done.

What makes Sir Ken so successful?

First, he’s conversational.  He walks out to the center of the stage, and simply starts talking to the audience as if he was chatting with a friend over a cuppa.  Working with clients, over and over again I find myself telling them that the rules of public speaking that they’ve learned somewhere in the past just don’t apply.  Make it conversational.  Talk to us like you’re talking to friends.  We’ll respond. 

Second, he keeps his body language -- but not his passion -- to a minimum.  Many speakers have ‘happy feet’ – that annoying tendency to wander all over the stage when adrenaline grips your system.  It’s distracting, and the speaker is not usually aware of it.  I find with clients that it takes video to prove to them that they’ve been wandering. 

Random motion is simply not effective.  Purposeful motion is highly effective, but the next best thing is not to move at all.  In Sir Ken’s case, he has a pronounced limp, which he refers to obliquely at one point in his talk.  He’s talking about a dancer, and refers to himself with self-deprecatory wit.  It’s elegant and affecting at the same time. 

It’s not that every speaker is better standing still; in fact, were Robinson to do so for an hour, it would be off-putting.  But most speakers err on the side of too much random motion, so Robinson’s stillness is powerful.

Importantly, it's stillness combined with passion.  Some speakers lose all their affect when they speak, becoming automatons.  That's not interesting at all.  If you're going to stand as still as Robinson you must convey passion through the rest of your non-verbal delivery and through your eloquence. 

Third, he focuses on the audience.  What’s most powerful about Robinson’s delivery is that he focuses on the audience, both verbally and non-verbally.  He asks many rhetorical questions, and addresses the audience directly many times, but each time that he does he waits to see ‘the point land’ so that the audience feels that it has been listened to.  That quality of listening to an audience is a rare gift, and the secret of charisma.  I talk about it in much more depth in Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.  The bottom line is that you can learn to be as charismatic as Sir Ken Robinson if you will only focus on things you’re truly passionate about and learn to listen closely to your audience. 

What was wrong with President Obama’s first prime-time press conference?

President Obama forgot something during his first prime-time press conference last night:  hope.  His remarks were a stark reminder of Mario Cuomo’s line that ‘you campaign in poetry (but) you govern in prose’: 

I took a trip to Elkhart, Indiana, today. Elkhart is a place that has lost jobs faster than anywhere else in America. In one year, the unemployment rate went from 4.7 percent to 15.3 percent. Companies that have sustained this community for years are shedding jobs at an alarming speed, and the people who've lost them have no idea what to do or who to turn to.

They can't pay their bills. They've stopped spending money. And because they've stopped spending money, more businesses have been forced to lay off more workers. In fact, local TV stations have started running public service announcements to tell people where to find food banks, even as the food banks don't have enough to meet the demand.

As we speak, similar scenes are playing out in cities and towns across America.

Gone is the uplifting rhetoric of the campaign.  President Obama is giving us a cold dose of reality.   Will we be able to accept it?  President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave Americans good cheer and large measures of hope during the Depression.  President John F. Kennedy gave us wit and style when we were scared to death about nuclear Armageddon in the early 60s.  And President Reagan gave us his sunny optimism during the stagflation of the early 80s. 

President Obama needs to remember that we elected him to be honest with us, yes, but also to take us in a new direction, to eschew the politics of fear that have dominated the last 8 years, and to bring us hope. 

We know the situation is dire.  We don’t need caveats like this one: 

. . .The plan's not perfect. No plan is. I can't tell you for sure that everything in this plan will work exactly as we hoped, but I can tell you with complete confidence that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis, as well as the pain felt by millions of Americans.

That’s misplaced confidence.  We need a sense from our president as to how the crisis will end, not how it could get worse.  We like our reality in an admixture with a smile. 

What was extraordinary about President Obama’s first press conference was how easily he wore the mantle of president, a mantle that the previous holder of the office never put on comfortably in 8 years.  Obama is every inch a world leader.  Already! 

But he also needs to remember that the great presidents find hope even in the darkest times, and point the way forward for a nation that looks to them for leadership: 

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address was delivered at the lowest point in our nation's history.  And yet it showed the way forward with grace and wisdom.  That's what we look for in a leader when things are bleak.  

Bill Gates does something he shouldn't

Bill Gates appeared at the TED conference last week and made a presenting mistake that put his usual gaffe-ridden style in the shade.  He made the classic mistake of not respecting his audience: http://tinyurl.com/b5um5b. 

And it’s a shame, because he was talking about important, life-saving work that he and his Gates Foundation are doing around the world, specifically on stopping malaria and improving education. 

In many ways, it was a typical Bill Gates speech, perhaps a little better than most.  It was well-written, if a little self-absorbed, and the slides were neither overwhelming nor too wordy.  Not bad for the Chief Perpetrator of Power Point. 

To be sure, Gates evidenced his usual nervous, self-conscious body language, and he needs to work on his voice, but by now we’re familiar with those problems.  They weren’t really getting in the way of his delivery, because his status as one of the richest men in the world means that we’ll listen even if he looks like an uncomfortable nerd. 

The disaster happened about half-way through the speech, in the section on malaria.  Bill suddenly moved toward a little table placed in the middle of the stage, and released a (small) swarm of mosquitoes into the crowd, as he put it, of millionaires. 

He commented that he wanted the crowd to get a sense of what poor people were up against. 

I suspect most people in the audience had experienced mosquitoes before, if not perhaps the malaria-carrying kind, so the remark showed an insensitivity to the audience at that simple level.  But at another, deeper, level, it showed a lack of respect of the audience, and here’s where the presentation really went south. 

Respect for audiences should be paramount in a speaker’s mind, and that means treating them like adults, free to decide what hazards they want to face for themselves.  To release mosquitoes on a crowd feels like token harassment, and takes decision-making power away from that audience.  It’s arrogant and presumptuous.  And it’s a cheap stunt. 

Just because you’re a billionaire doesn’t mean you get to treat audiences like guinea pigs without their consent.  Respect for an audience should be the first and last thing a speaker thinks about when giving a presentation. 

The secrets of President Obama's communication success -- 5

For my final blog on the secrets of President Obama’s impressive communication skills, I’ll look at the few things he doesn’t do well.  It’s a short list, but typified in the following news clip: http://tinyurl.com/d9r8cf. 

In the talk, delivered a few days ago to Democratic lawmakers, President Obama takes on his critics concerning the stimulus bill that’s currently wending its way through Congress.  He ratchets up the volume, the rhetoric, and the tone of voice – all conveying real passion and indeed anger at those who would get in the way of what he says is vital legislation to avoid economic Armageddon. 

It’s an impressive performance except for one thing:  his gestures – what he does with his hands – don’t support the intensity of his words and voice.  He uses three gestures, mainly, and two of them especially are quite ineffective. 

First, he uses the admonishing forefinger.  While expressive, it’s not effective simply because no audience likes to be scolded.

Second, he uses a sweeping gesture of the hand, like a sideways karate chop.  This one is a little better, but it’s basically dismissive.  If you hold the palm up to your audience, that’s a very powerful and basic gesture that says ‘stop’.  So putting the palm down weakens the gesture, leaving it ambiguous and less effective.

Third, he puts his thumb and forefinger together like he’s rubbing some salt to test its coarseness.  It’s reminiscent of the gesture that some cultures use to mean ‘pay me some money’.  As Obama does it, it’s weak, even prissy.  He needs to lose it.

Much of Obama’s charisma and expressive power comes from the control and self-awareness he exercises over his voice, face, and rhetoric.  But his hand gestures, when he’s controlling his passion, remain curiously unconnected to the rest of him. 

Revealingly, about 12 minutes into the 14 minute link above, Obama goes off script for a minute, then reins it in again, saying “I get carried away.”  Right around that point, his gesture suddenly become natural, real, and expressive.  Then, once he gets himself back under control, the artificial gestures return.  He should stick to natural gestures to improve what is otherwise one of the most effective public speaking styles around today. 

The secrets of President Obama's communication success -- 4

The final category of non-verbal communication where President Obama stands out is in his facial gestures.  Most notably, his brilliant smile.  Studies have been done that show that people prefer more attractive speakers to less attractive speakers.  When I used to tell my public speaking students that, several would always raise their hands and say, “Dr. Morgan, we can’t help how we look.  What if we’re ugly?” 

I was always ready for that response, because there’s another study (and a whole lot of common sense) that says that people rate smiling faces as more attractive generally than non-smiling faces. 

So smile. You’ll be better looking, and better received as a speaker.  If you’ve got a megawatt smile like Obama’s, so much the better. 

The other facial gestures that work well for public speakers are three universally understood ones:  opening the eyes, raising the eyebrows, and nodding the head.  We open our eyes when we’re interested in something or someone.  We raise our eyebrows when we’re surprised, or we’re expecting a response – so it’s a gesture that draws audiences in.  And we nod in agreement, and to build agreement. 

President Obama uses each of these gestures, but in particular he is a great ‘nodder’.  Watch any speech of his, and you will see him nod at the ends of phrases and sentences.  This has the effect of affirming through body language what his content is saying.  It’s one reason why we find him so convincing as a speaker and President.  

These facial gestures are largely controlled by the unconscious part of our brain that controls intent, emotion, and attitude.  I talk a lot more about this in my new book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, but the gist of it is that you will have better results by focusing on your attitude, your intent, and your emotion than the physical act of smiling.  The smile will look real if it comes from your intent.  It is much harder to fake a real smile, because a real smile activates muscles all over the face, especially around the eyes, and when we try to smile mechanically, without the feeling, we tend to only activate the mouth.  The result looks insincere. 

Instead, find a real smile and study Obama’s facial gestures.  It’s only part of what makes him so authentic and charismatic, but it’s an important part. 

The secrets of President Obama's communication success -- 3

 A huge part of your success or failure as a speaker in front of an audience is determined before you even open your mouth. Your posture and your body language begin an unconscious conversation with the audience that either creates the possibility of a positive exchange, or its opposite.

President Obama’s posture and body language signal all the right things to his audience – openness, confidence, a positive attitude, and a take-charge authority. Obama stands tall, with a still central core, and relaxed shoulders and arms. It’s that combination of stillness and relaxation that so powerfully radiates confidence, authority, and ease at the same time.

How can you achieve a similar effect?

Thinking too hard about what your body is doing will make you self-conscious and awkward. Instead, you need to work at the unconscious level of intent that governs human non-verbal communication.

Here’s how you do it.

As I describe in detail in Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, you need to break the kind of effect that Obama achieves into four steps, steps that you layer one on top of the other as you become practiced at ‘taking the stage’ with the confidence of a leader.

The four steps in brief:

Step One: Being Open

Your first task is to approach an audience, a meeting, or an interview as if you were comfortably at home talking to a loved one or a friend with whom you’re very relaxed. The point is to imagine the encounter, practice it, note the nonverbal gestures that go with it, and then use this same body language when you’re in the less intimate setting. The overall idea is to relax and achieve an open stance so that you look at least as comfortable as the new President.

Step Two: Being Connected

Now you focus on your audience, whether it’s one person or many. Your nonverbal posture orients toward them, and you zero in on their issues and problems. As with openness, this is at once a question of message and body language – content and delivery. Continuing the role play from the first step, you might imagine you were trying to get the attention of your four year old, who is engaged with some TV show. What would you say? How would you act? Would you draw nearer to your child? Get down at her level? Grab her arm?

How can you translate that strong connection into the lukewarm one you have with, say, your direct reports at work? This step will give you the urgency that Obama has when he begins to speak – and everyone pays attention.

Step Three: Being Passionate

Here, you concentrate on your own feelings and emotions. How do you connect with the subject matter at hand? What do you want or feel toward it? What’s your underlying emotion during the encounter – not the irritation you might feel about a direct report who’s giving you excuses about why a project is going to be late, but rather your passion for the project itself? Once you know what that underlying emotion is, how do you show it? What’s your repertoire of emotions at work? Can you imagine expanding them?

Emotions are interesting; it’s why we watch TV avidly when disaster happens even though we know we shouldn’t. And it’s why we watched Obama when he cranked up the emotion in describing the challenges we need to face (and overcome) as a nation and a world in his inaugural address.

Step Four: Listening

Finally, authentic and charismatic communication requires that you listen to your audience. What is the underlying emotion of the person in front of you? Do you know what it is? If not, why not?

During the course of the meeting, the event, the conference, or the speech, what’s the journey you want to take that person or persons on? Where do they start, and where do you want them to end?

Obama has that rare ability among speakers to watch the audience and listen to them as he’s speaking. Paradoxically, it gives him huge charisma, because it leads to that feeling in members of his audience that ‘he was talking directly to me.’

If you practice these four steps until you can (almost) automatically work them into your preparation before an important speech, meeting or conversation, you will be able to approach President Obama’s ease and authority in similar settings. The trick is not to make it a conscious effort, but rather to work directly with your unconscious, because that is the level where most of your physical behavior originates.

The secrets of President Obama's communication success -- 2

A speaker’s voice is of course an essential part of the arsenal a speaker has to move an audience to action.  A great voice can carry a speaker far; a weak voice can kill a speech – or a career. 

President Obama’s voice scores high in the three areas a great voice needs:  resonance, presence, and authority.  Check the voice out here during the inauguration:  http://tinyurl.com/7cdnq7. 

Resonance comes from breathing – it’s the quality that makes a voice pleasant to listen to.  Using your diaphragm to breathe (also known as ‘belly breathing’) fills your lungs with air and gives your voice a full, round, easy-to-listen-to sound.  Like Obama’s. 

The right breathing is important because when you stand up to talk to a crowd, adrenaline surges through your system, and many people have a tendency to take short, shallow breaths as a result.  This is good for having the air necessary to flee a predator, but not good for public oration.  You have to fight the tendency by breathing deep from the stomach. 

Presence is the quality that allows a voice to be heard – and it involves just a touch of the nasal.  Actors and singers call this using the ‘mask’ of the face.  Americans especially have a tendency to swallow the voice, pitching it from the back of the throat.  That placement gives the voice a guttural quality, and puts a strain on the vocal chords.  Try to pitch the voice forward, in the front of the mouth, like the French do, and up in the mask of the face to give it carrying power.  Hillary Clinton has a little too much presence – her voice is ‘hard’, pitched to carry to the back of the hall.  As a result, it often sounds like she’s shouting.  That tone wears us out quickly.  (She’s better when she’s more conversational.)    Obama, on the other hand, has just the right amount of presence.  You can hear him clearly, but it’s not like a dentist’s drill. 

Finally, and most important, President Obama uses his voice authoritatively.  That means that his voice describes an arc:

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met.

Check out the video and notice how his voice rises and falls with the phrase and the sentence.  Rising tones indicate passion and conviction.  Falling tones indicate authority – at the ends of phrases and sentences.  President Obama has the voice down perfectly, and it’s a big part of how he conveys that solid, easy sense of authority.  Almost as though he was born to be president.

The secrets of President Obama's communication success

If you’re a Republican, you are probably not as excited as the Democrats, but just about everyone agrees that our new President is a formidable communicator.  What are his secrets?  In my blogs this week, I’m going to break them down and discuss them one by one. 

President Obama communicates powerfully and persuasively for several specific reasons and one overall factor:

1.  Use of the voice  
2.  Posture
3.  Facial gesture

The overall reason is authenticity.  Although it’s still early in President Obama’s tenure, he has begun well on a number of the issues that he campaigned on, and he’s given us an overarching impression that he is sincere, that he will keep his campaign promises to the best of his ability, and that he will tell us the truth. 

His inaugural address brilliantly conveyed that honesty and realism and helped make the case for his authenticity:

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met.

Giving us an unvarnished reality like that was absolutely necessary for President Obama during his first communication to us as president, because we already knew all of it to be true.  Audiences are usually way ahead of their speakers in this regard, which is why it’s so important for speakers to tell the truth to their audiences.  If you don’t, you lose your standing in front of the audience, in real time.  If you do, you get to continue, and you’re authentic.

President Obama has begun well; he’s powerfully authentic with his audience.  Next time, I’ll talk about how he uses his voice to convey authority and sincerity. 

In my last blog in this series, I'll talk about some of the things President Obama could do better.