Nick Morgan - Public Speaking Advice and Commentary

Obama's 3rd Prime-Time Press Conference -- How did he do?

Saying he’s “pleased but not satisfied,” President Obama presided over his 3rd prime-time press conference last night, marking the first 100 days of his presidency (http://tinyurl.com/ceaerq).  I’ll leave the politics to others to dissect; how is he doing as a public speaker?

Overall, Obama continues to grow in mastery.  However, he’s a very different speaker in governing than he was campaigning.  Obama the campaigner was dynamic, uplifting, charismatic.  Obama the President is serious, thorough, thoughtful, authoritative, and even a little dull.  Clearly, for him, governing is serious business, and the days of the fun and adrenaline of the campaign are long gone.

How quickly he has settled into the role of President!  If the press conference is any indication, Obama is completely comfortable in the role.  His voice, posture, and gestures are indicative of a man who stepped into the Oval Office ready to govern.  His legal training and intelligence show in every answer.  Look at his answer to a question about Pakistan’s nuclear security:

I'm confident that we can make sure that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is secure. Primarily, initially, because the Pakistani army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands. We've got strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation.

I am gravely concerned about the situation in Pakistan, not because I think that they're immediately going to be overrun and the Taliban would take over in Pakistan. I'm more concerned that the civilian government there right now is very fragile and don't seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services: schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of the people.

And so as a consequence, it is very difficult for them to gain the support and the loyalty of their people. So we need to help Pakistan help Pakistanis. And I think that there's a recognition increasingly on the part of both the civilian government there and the army that that is their biggest weakness.

Here, he manages both to reassure and yet warn the public and Pakistan at the same time.  It’s a careful, thoughtful answer that doesn’t leave much room for follow up questions – there are few chinks in his armor. 

Throughout the news conference, Obama ranges authoritatively over swine flu, world events, the economy, politics – everything that the press dishes out, Obama easily fields and responds to decisively.  In fact, compared to the last President, the balance of power with the press has shifted enormously.  Where Bush was combative, and occasionally flat-footed, Obama is confident and assured.  Even when Ed Henry tries to catch the President out on the difficult issue of abortion, Obama is more than equal to the task, giving a long, articulate, and carefully worded answer. 

This is a press that treats the new president with deference.  Obama is clearly the authority in the room. What he lacks in sparkle, he more than makes up in presidential heft. He is a master of the genre.

How to Get Ready to Speak: 3 Quick Tips

A speech is performance art.  Each time you speak, you are creating a live experiences for a new audience, and that raises a question:  how do you stay fresh for each occasion, and how do you prepare so that each occasion will be up to the same standard?

 

Speaking is at once head, heart, and body.  It has a lot of moving parts.  So here’s a quick program to carry out before each speech that will get you in peak form.

 

1. The Head.  Every speech has an intellectual ‘spine’ – the basic ideas that you’ll discuss during the course of the speech.  You should know what those are.  In order.  If you don’t, figure them out.  If you do, then run over those in your mind before your speech.  Think of it as the outline, and in an hour-long speech it shouldn’t consist of more than about 10 headings, give or take a few.  If you’re coming up with a lot more than that, you’re going into too much detail for this activity.  

 

This way, you’ll know the intellectual journey you’re taking the audience on and you’ll be more likely not to get lost.  If you know where you are, the audience will too. 

 

Finish this little activity by getting your first couple of lines in your head, so you don’t go blank when you first walk out on stage.  That’s a trick that actors use for opening night, and it helps get you through the beginning jitters.

 

2.  The Heart.  A speech is also an emotional journey, and you need to get that into your head (and gut) before you start, as well.  So spend a moment thinking to yourself, how do I feel about the material I’m discussing?  Excited?  Passionate?  Angry?  Try to experience that feeling, however you bring it to mind.  Recall a time when you felt that way strongly, or just focus on the feeling.  The point is to get into the emotional state you need so that you’ll make that clear to the audience when you begin.

 

3.  The Body.  Finally, you are a physical being delivering sounds in space to other physical beings, so pay attention to the state of your body.  If you’re nervous, that’s a good thing – that’s adrenaline helping you be on your best game.  It will help you think a little faster, stand a little straighter, act a little larger than life. 

 

But not too nervous.  If you’re quite jittery, or if the effects of adrenaline cause you to wander around the stage, or gesture like a windmill, or speak too fast for human ears to understand, then you need to practice some deep belly breathing before you start.  That will calm you, and if you practice it regularly, give you a consistent confidence over time.  Belly breathing starts, not surprisingly, in the belly.  You should expand your stomach like the bulb of an eye dropper as you take air into your lungs.  Hold the air with your diaphragmatic muscles (the ones just underneath your rib cage) and let it out slowly as you exhale.  Remember to breathe occasionally as you speak, too!

 

Paying attention to these 3 aspects of speaking just before you start will greatly increase the quality of your art.  Don’t neglect any of them; they work together to make up the performance art that is public speaking.  I talk more about this in my new book Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. 

The single easiest and fastest way to increase your charisma and impact as a speaker

Working with clients, I spend a lot of time coaching them on delivery skills as well as, of course, helping them write great speeches.  We get the whole range of ability, from brilliant to considerably less than brilliant, and I’m often in the position of conducting triage with a speaker who was trained (or learned his speaking habits) in the Cro-Magnon era.  I’m talking about the type who has 60 Power Point slides for a 30 minute talk, wants to stand behind a podium to read those slides in a monotone, and begins every speech with, “What I’m going to talk about today has seven parts.  The first part….”

Where do you start?

It’s always a battle to wean the speaker off the slides, but it’s worth fighting.  Once you persuade the client that there really is no reason to show the audience his speaker notes, you’re off and running. 

But issues like lack of expressiveness are much harder to combat.  They may be ingrained habits acquired over a lifetime.  And you may not have enough time to work with the client in the depth that it takes to free up the charismatic speaker lurking within.  Deep within.

So, when I’m performing triage, I often turn to a simple, easy way to increase your impact and charisma as a speaker:  get out from behind the podium.  Because we tend to trust people, broadly speaking, who move closer to us (excluding psychos and other scary folks), if you move toward the audience on your key points, finish the point standing near an audience member, and then move to another quadrant of the audience for your next main point, you will instantly increase your effectiveness. 

There are other reasons why this works, based in neurology, but this is quick version for a quick fix.  I go into this in much more detail in my book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, but this is enough to get you started. 

The 3 most common communications mistakes CEOs make

Working with senior executives I get a lot of opportunities to see the communications mistakes that CEOs and top leaders make – over and over again.  Here are the three I witness on a regular basis.

1.  They live in the bubble and think it’s the universe.  Leaders at the top are surrounded by assistants, V-Ps and SVPs, security – all the human apparatus of success.  That apparatus is tuned to its leaders’ needs – recognizing them, satisfying them, anticipating them.  The result is that a bubble is created, inevitably, that is very pleasant to live in and easily mistaken for the entire cosmos.  It breeds a kind of self-centeredness even in the most humble of people.  And in terms of communications, it pushes leaders into believing that everyone is interested in the same things they are interested in, and focused on the same issues and challenges that they are focusing on.  As a result, leaders have to work hard to re-imagine the world from other perspectives in order to communicate well with them. 

2.  They mistake numbers for vision.  As soon as you get below the level of a company where the options are fabulous and the handshakes are golden, people need something to motivate them beyond their salaries.  Most people need to believe that the work they’re doing helps society in some way.  CEOs and other leaders have already made the translation of worth into the next quarter’s profit margins, because they live with those numbers everyday, but most employees don’t.  Leaders need to translate the numbers they understand into the language of purpose that the rest of the world understands. 

3.  They think information is persuasion – and they don’t do enough of either. Once again, because leaders have already accepted the argument that what they’re doing is worthwhile, they don’t need to hear the reasoning behind the company’s plan going forward.  But their employees, and certainly the public at large, are not as deeply invested in the company’s logic, and so they need more than just information.  They need to know why.  It’s not enough for a CEO to inform the employees about a new venture.  The leader also needs to tell the employees why the new venture is worth the effort. 

Top executives too often communicate too little.  When they do communicate, they expect their employees and the world to pay breathless attention.  They need to remember that information is not persuasion, that numbers are not vision, and that the bubble is not where most people live. 

3 Original Speakers to Watch -- and bring to your organization

Here are 3 speakers that have messages that go against the current wisdom in their respective fields.  They’re great fun, they’re challenging the status quo, and they are likely to shake up your thinking.  Check them out.

Adam Hartung. (http://www.thephoenixprinciple.com/).  Adam is an experienced entrepreneur, consultant, and business executive.  He conducted research over a decade that convinced him that the current wisdom about business growth was wrong.  Focus on your core, says Adam, and you will end up missing where the marketplace is going.  Adam has a lot of counter-intuitive things to say about how to get your company growing again – even in hard times.

Lisa Merlo-Booth.  (http://www.relationalcoaching.com/).  Lisa has 15 years’ experience counseling individuals and couples and she’s developed some fascinating insights on how women can take control of their emotional lives and create healthy relationships around them, with their partners, their families, and their friends.  Lisa shows women (and men too) how to get out of that I’m-a-victim thinking and get healthy. 

David Rendall.  (http://www.daverendall.typepad.com/).  David is one of the funniest management speakers around.  He weaves stories of not-fitting-in with reasoned arguments for dealing with your employees’ flaws by embracing them rather than sending them to classes to try to improve them. When you focus on trying to train messy people to be tidy, for example, all you do is kill their creativity – probably why you hired them in the first place. 

If you’re looking for a new way of thinking, or wanting to shake up your workplace a little, these speakers fill the bill. Give them a shout!

9 rules for survival in rock climbing and public speaking

Matthew Childs gives a remarkable talk on the 9 rules of mountain climbing on TED.com: http://tinyurl.com/cqjd8v.  Obviously, he means the rules to apply to life, too.  What’s interesting is how well they apply to public speaking and communications.  Childs is not a great speaker; he’s too nervous to put the audience at its ease.  But his message is powerful nonetheless. 

1.  Don’t let go.   Just as in climbing, the consequences of giving up in public speaking are unpleasant.  Both disciplines require commitment and follow-through. 

2.  Hesitation is bad.   Passion and intensity of almost any kind are better than hesitating in public speaking.  Emotion attracts our attention, but the half-hearted approach does not. 

3.  Have a plan.  Trying to wing it in speaking, as in climbing, is almost always self-destructive.  Some climbs – and some speeches – are easy enough that you can fake it.  But preparation tells in the long run.  Have a plan.  Please.  For the sake of the audience as well as the speaker.

4.  The move is the end.  The point of this rule is that the moment is important, too.  Don’t be thinking so hard about finishing that you forget to be there when it counts.  Make your move.  Say what you have to say.  Be there.  Then finish the job.

5.  Know how to rest.  Getting proper rest before a speech, and taking little breathers during a speech, are both good ideas.  No one requires that you race at top speed from start to finish.  In fact, we prefer that you don’t.

6.  Fear sucks.   While audiences expect the jitters at the beginning, they also expect you to get over them.  Fear sucks because it gets between you, your message, and your audience. 

7.  Opposites are good.   I love this one, because contrast is one of the best ways to make meaning clear and to sustain interest.  Opposites are very, very good in public speaking.

8.  Strength doesn’t equal success.   What is the translation of this one into the public speaking realm?  It’s not just about volume, or speed, or size?  I suppose the lesson is that you can’t just power your way through a talk; a little judicial use of psychology and audience involvement will get you much further than just doing it all yourself. 

9.  Know how to let go.  The toughest time to be a public speaker, or any kind of performer, is right after the event is over.  At that point, you just want to have someone say, “You were wonderful!”  and let you collapse in your hotel room.  But many speakers do themselves psychic injury by second-guessing, replaying, and critiquing themselves right after a speech.  Wait.  Let go.  Look at the tape 24 hours later, when you’re back to yourself again. 

And finally, as Childs says, ‘balance rules.’  As in most things, success comes from keeping your balance.  That's a great final lesson for both speakers and climbers. 

Timothy Ferriss and the 4-hour workweek

Timothy Ferriss is the author of The Four-Hour Work Week ( http://tinyurl.com/cf5wxt ), a book that has generated an enormous amount of comment from reviewers who are cross with him because they believe it to be virtually fraudulent hucksterism, and those who sing his praises because the book (for them) exposes the fraudulence in the 40-hour work week. 

In short, the message provokes. 

Good message. 

But Timothy Ferriss the speaker is even more provoking and problematic.  His talk on TED.com (http://tinyurl.com/czrkbt )  either elicits strong praise or real dislike from those who have watched it.  The difference seems to be that those who can get past the man’s evident ego appreciate the intellect lurking behind the conceit.  Those who can’t get past the ego find him repellent. 

So why is it that so many audience members dislike ego so much?  And is there anything Ferriss – or another speaker afflicted with the same problem – do about it?

The short answer is that we dislike ego because as audience members we’re on the speaker’s side until he or she rejects us.  We want the speaker to succeed.  But if that speaker makes it all about him (or her) then we’ll eventually give up and turn off.  The solution?  Always make it about the audience.  Put your ego on hold and don’t talk about yourself. 

Ferriss starts his speech by committing the cardinal sin of inexperienced, highly egotistical speakers:  he tells a childhood story about himself.  He even shows us an awful childhood picture.  Amateur stuff.  Thus he digs a hole for himself that no amount of later charm will help much. 

What Ferriss is able to do is to look at certain human activities with fresh eyes, deconstruct them, and figure out how to become pretty good at them very quickly.  He needs to apply this skill to public speaking and figure out how to do it better.  Much better.  

In the TED talk, he mentions swimming, foreign language acquisition, and ballroom dancing as examples. 

Let’s see what he’s actually figured out in these areas.  Is it worth the fuss?  In swimming, he’s figured out that it’s better to stay below the water as much as possible, in order to be as streamlined as possible.  This is not news to anyone who watches the Olympics.  In foreign language acquisition, he’s figured out that if you memorize the 2,000 or so words that are most important, along with a few grammatical rules, you can get on pretty well.  Again, not news to anyone who has learned a language quickly. 

As for ballroom dancing, I’m less qualified to analyze this because my ballroom dancing is about as good as Ferriss’ apparently was before he started.  He basically offers 3 quick tips that (he claims) allow you to advance quickly in the art.  Fair enough, but once again, it strikes me that this is pretty simple stuff. 

His book is like that – it’s full of cheap tricks and shortcuts.  He won some kind of martial arts contest on a trip to Asia essentially by cheating – he figured out a way to get around the rules.  He got the prize but no one can admire him for the performance.  In case after case, the modus operandi is the same:  Ferriss games the system. 

What’s missing from the book, the talk, and Ferriss himself is some kind of passion for some aspect of human endeavor besides gaming the system.  That’s the other thing that audiences respond to – genuine passion for your subject.  Failing that, you won’t win an audience over – and you shouldn’t be talking.  Sit down, Timothy, and let someone who cares about something give a speech that will change the world. 

Three speakers for these times -- keep your eye on them.

Successful public speaking is a combination of the right person, the right audience, and the right message.  Timeliness is essential.  Some speakers persist in presenting their messages in spite of missing the audience – and the times.  The result is almost always the same:  few bookings. 

Let’s look at three successful examples to see how this concept works in practice. 

David Meerman Scott (http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/) is an extraordinary speaker who has a message and a ready audience because of the timeliness of what he’s saying.  His two books, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and World Wide Rave, both capture the essence of what you need to know about the new media and how it affects companies and individuals.  As the new media – blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and so on – surge in popularity, David is positioned perfectly to explain what’s going on to an audience understandably caught in culture whiplash by the speed of change.

But David offers something more important than that.  In these difficult economic times, he offers a way to take control over your media and your brand and ensure that the right things are being said about you – which will surely translate directly into sales and profits.  When life feels out of control, we need new ways to re-take control, and David’s message gives us a way to do that.

Tim Sanders (http://www.timsanders.com/) is another gifted speaker whose message, making the workplace – and the world – better and greener for the sake of humanity and the planet, is not only timely but essential.  In Tim’s three books to date, Love is the Killer App, The Likeability Factor, and Saving the World at Work, two of them New York Times bestsellers, he has consistently stood up for fair dealing, ethical behavior, and a ‘green’ attitude.  In this economic downturn, his message is more important than ever.  Why?  Because even if some are focused more on their own job safety than on the people or the planet around them, all the research shows that unethical behavior comes back to bite you.  When the economy starts to recover – and it will – customers, employees, and the public will remember sleazy dealing and exact revenge on the companies that have not acted well.  Call it Corporate Karma, or just call it the Golden Rule, it’s an iron law that brooks no exceptions.

Finally, Pam Slim’s message, Escape from Cubicle Nation, (http://www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/) has both timeliness and emotional appeal for workers who feel beset on all sides by demands to work harder in jobs that bring little satisfaction and less security.  Her book on the subject is due out soon, and companies with broader vision than merely the next quarter’s profits should jump to hire her to speak to their employees. 

Three speakers to watch and to emulate, speakers who combine the message, the audience, and the person into a compelling package that’s right for the times.  

The greatest 250-word speech ever written.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brough forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

At just under 250 words, Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address' packs more greatness in two minutes than any other speech.  Why is it so powerful?

The phrasing is biblical, and elegiac, as befits the dedication of a battlefield to the fallen.  The cause was great, and the suffering enormous.  Lincoln captures the sense that we all have, before so much death and destruction, of feeling inadequate to fully comprehend and honor what happened. 

But what made the speech truly great was that the President took his audience on a journey, from the founding of the nation, to the onset of civil war, to the uncertain future they all faced.  The point of his speech was not solely to mourn the fallen, but also to remind the living that there was a great war still to win and a cause to support.  This great speech looks to the future.   

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. 

And buried in the biblical phrasing there's a further device that works unconsciously on the audience, and the reader, to weave some incantatory magic.  I've discussed this speech many times with students, with clients, and with colleagues, and I always ask them what simple little word is repeated most unusually in the speech.  No one ever spots it.  Even Gary Wills, in his otherwise brilliant book on the speech, Lincoln at Gettysburg, doesn't spot it. 

When they look, people notice that the word 'we' is repeated 10 times.  But that's not unusual, or surprising, given that Lincoln was trying to rally the nation.  The speech was all about 'we'.  No, what is unusual is the repetition of the word 'here'.  ...as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives....the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here....the world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.  It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here....It is rather for us to be here dedicated....that we here highly resolve....

Eight times in 250 words -- two minutes -- Lincoln invokes the place -- the hallowed ground of Gettysburg -- by repeating the word 'here'.  As a result, he weaves some kind of spell on listeners, then and afterward, that is not consciously noticed, but unconsciously seems to have a powerful effect. 

Repetition is an essential aspect of great public speaking.  The trick is knowing what and how to repeat.  Take a lesson from Lincoln.  Sometimes its the little words that have the most power. 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brough forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

At just under 250 words, Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address' packs more greatness in two minutes than any other speech.  Why is it so powerful?

The phrasing is biblical, and elegiac, as befits the dedication of a battlefield to the fallen.  The cause was great, and the suffering enormous.  Lincoln captures the sense that we all have, before so much death and destruction, of feeling inadequate to fully comprehend and honor what happened. 

But what made the speech truly great was that the President took his audience on a journey, from the founding of the nation, to the onset of civil war, to the uncertain future they all faced.  The point of his speech was not solely to mourn the fallen, but also to remind the living that there was a great war still to win and a cause to support.  This great speech looks to the future.   

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. 

And buried in the biblical phrasing there's a further device that works unconsciously on the audience, and the reader, to weave some incantatory magic.  I've discussed this speech many times with students, with clients, and with colleagues, and I always ask them what simple little word is repeated most unusually in the speech.  No one ever spots it.  Even Gary Wills, in his otherwise brilliant book on the speech, Lincoln at Gettysburg, doesn't spot it. 

When they look, people notice that the word 'we' is repeated 10 times.  But that's not unusual, or surprising, given that Lincoln was trying to rally the nation.  The speech was all about 'we'.  No, what is unusual is the repetition of the word 'here'.  ...as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives....the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here....the world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.  It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here....It is rather for us to be here dedicated....that we here highly resolve....

Eight times in 250 words -- two minutes -- Lincoln invokes the place -- the hallowed ground of Gettysburg -- by repeating the word 'here'.  As a result, he weaves some kind of spell on listeners, then and afterward, that is not consciously noticed, but unconsciously seems to have a powerful effect. 

Repetition is an essential aspect of great public speaking.  The trick is knowing what and how to repeat.  Take a lesson from Lincoln.  Sometimes its the little words that have the most power. 

Character is king in public speaking

If you’ve never seen Coach John Wooden of UCLA speak, then check him out on TED.com:  http://tinyurl.com/cz6765.  He’s a reminder that Aristotle was right about his insistence that there are 3 ways to persuade an audience:  logic, emotion, and character.  In the end, it’s Wooden’s character that shines through and wins us over.  His essential kindness and humility are hallmarks of the man and we feel fortunate to ‘meet’ him as a member of his audience. 

There are a number of reasons why you might not give 'Coach' more than a cursory listen. He speaks too quickly, he doesn’t make much eye contact, and he speaks from a sitting position because of age and infirmity.  His message is simple and straightforward. 

And yet, it’s magic, because of the charm of the speaker.  This is what Aristotle meant by character. 

What’s his message?  Never try to be better than someone else.  Be the best you can be.  Study others, but only to learn from them.  Peace of mind comes from the self-satisfaction of knowing that you did the best you could.  Don’t whine.  Don’t complain.  Don’t make excuses.  The journey is better than the end, often.  Never be late.  No profanity.  Never criticize a teammate. 

As you can see, there’s nothing earth-shattering here.  But delivered by a great human being, even the simplest messages take on profound meaning.  Study Coach John Wooden, not for his speaking technique, or even for his content, but for his character.  In the end, it's the emotional connection a speaker makes -- or doesn't make -- with an audience that is at the heart of successful public speaking. 

Speech triage -- 5 questions to ask yourself to prepare a presentation quickly

Here’s a quick and effective method for preparing a presentation when you're under the gun and can't spend a lot of time brainstorming.  Ask yourself the following 5 questions: 

1.  Who is your audience?  You need to know the demographics, the size of the audience, the time of day, but also what they’re thinking about.  What are they afraid of?  What are they hoping for?  To cut through the audience’s mental clutter and engage them, you have to know what’s going to get in the way.

2.  What do you want that audience to do differently as a result of the speech?  Speeches are best constructed in reverse.  Start with the end point – where do you want them as you wrap up?  Ask them to do something small that is symbolic of that, or a first step toward that.  Build the speech backward from that point.

3.  What’s the problem the audience has for which your information is the solution?  Before you can start talking about your expertise, your passion, the stuff you know, you have to set it up in the audience’s terms.  Let’s say you’re an expert on sleep deprivation, and you’re talking to an audience of orchestral musicians.  Then start by talking about their impossible schedules – how constant international travel takes an insidious toll on the health, creativity, even performance skills.  You’ll get their attention.  Then, tell them how proper sleep patterns will cure all those ills.

4.  What’s a brief story, anecdote, statistic, factoid, or question that sums up this problem?  Start with that story or line.  It should take about 1-2 minutes.  Did I ever tell you the story of the tympanist who fell asleep during the 1812 Overture?  The point is to frame the topic in a way that’s more interesting than an agenda slide.  It whets the appetite of the audience, tells it what’s in store for it, and doesn’t give the game away.

5.  What’s the elevator pitch for this talk?  I’ve written about elevator pitches before.  They’re the one-sentence reason why a prospective audience member should attend.  Once you’ve written or prepared the speech, figure out the elevator pitch.  Then go back through your speech and throw out everything that doesn’t relate to it.  You’ll have a tight, well-crafted presentation that works well with your particular audience.  You’re ready to go. 

4 Steps to Authenticity and Charisma

For my blog today, I'm posting a video blog.  At under 2 minutes, it's a quick 'read'.  Enjoy!

http://tinyurl.com/cnyhzz

Five steps to creating a successful public speaking career

Dan Schawbel, a great blogger on personal branding (http://personalbrandingblog.com/), has just published a book on creating your own brand:  http://tinyurl.com/4un6g2.  It’s clear, concise, and useful for public speakers seeking to establish and grow a successful career.  It’s aimed at 20-somethings trying to ace the job market, but the advice in it constitutes a great primer for speakers of any age starting out and seeking to get a career going.  So, with thanks to Dan, here are my 5 steps to a successful public speaking career.

1.  Focus on your audience.  Speakers starting out usually are ready to speak to anyone, anytime, about anything.  But focus is the better way to go.  In an information-saturated age, people can’t get a fix on who you are if you try to be everything to everyone.  Instead, pick an audience and a topic.  Focus on them and you will be able to build your brand more quickly.

Questions Dan asks early on are a great place to start thinking about your niche as a speaker:

What would you like to accomplish?
Who is your target audience?
What brand elements will they respond well to?  Poorly to?
What brands (read: speakers) are successful and why?
How can you best showcase your talents through your brand?

2.  Become the expert in your area of focus.  It’s a big old world, and information is endless.  You can’t know it all.  Pick an area of focus and use that as a filter through which to look at the world.  Then check out every bit of news, opinion, and research in that area.  You’ll soon become knowledgeable and adept at sorting through all the latest developments in that field.  If you use the social media correctly, including your blog, people will soon come to you for expertise on that subject.  That will fuel the other aspects of your career.

3.  Establish the 3 points of your personal brand triangle.  Virtually all the speakers we work with have 3 areas of their business they focus on:  speaking, writing, and consulting.  Your income streams from each will vary, but be clear about what you want.  Are you primarily a speaker?  Then prepare for a life on the road and establish systems to support you in that.  Are you primarily a consultant who speaks occasionally?  Then figure out what companies and individuals will pay you for your advice.  Are you primarily an author?  That’s the toughest way to go, because of the nature of the book business.  Be prepared to write a lot, for many different outlets.  Create contacts in the journalism world and maintain those contacts assiduously. 

4.  Use social media to create and maintain your brand.  There’s good news here.  Just a few years ago, you were dependent on media to get the word out about you.  That meant cultivating contacts and begging them to talk about you.  But today you can start a blog, develop a Twitter following, and set up a Facebook page, and so on.  Each of these outlets supports and feeds the others if you do them right, and the result is that you can control the extent to which the world knows you.  Dan’s book is good on the subject of getting a blog going, as well as the other social media outlets.  Also study David Meerman Scott's blog and books; he's the grand master of social media and how PR works these days:  http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/.  His book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR is the classic in the field, and a huge bestseller:  http://tinyurl.com/dk9y9l

5.  Present yourself as a consummate professional.   The speaking business is highly lucrative, and highly competitive.  It’s intolerant of amateurs.  Speakers’ bureaus, meeting planners, association professionals – they are all risk averse.  They are your customers!  Treat them right.  They’re putting on a big conference, and they don’t want screw-ups.  That means that every interaction you have with them should be designed to put yourself forward as someone who will deliver an outstanding product with no muss, no fuss.  Your web site, your blog, all your marketing materials from your one-sheet to your DVD to your press kit all have to say ‘professional’ – and then the experience of you has to reinforce that.  If you deliver, you’ll get another chance.  If you screw up, they’ll never look at you again.  Word travels fast in this business. 

3 Reasons to Rehearse a Presentation

Is rehearsal important?  Can you get by without it in an over-scheduled world?  It’s odd that I should even have to pose these questions, but a surprising number of the people we've worked with over the years have tried to wiggle out of rehearsing even important speeches.

Speakers want to deliver charismatic, assured, memorable performances.  Some of them say they want to 'wing it', because thinking too hard about it or preparing too much will make them stale or boring.

Don't believe it, and don't credit that urge in yourself if it comes up.  It's just avoidance.  It's the fear talking.  And more importantly, it's wrong. 

Here are three reasons why you must rehearse in order to deliver a great performance. 

1.  A presentation is both a mental and a physical activity.   So for a presentation to look good and sound good, both your brain and your body have to know the speech.  You can ‘walk through’ a speech in your mind, but the only way for your body to learn the speech is by doing it.  In order to achieve the apparently effortless, natural-looking performance a great stage actor delivers, he or she rehearses for four weeks, give or take, doing the same thing over and over and over again until it has become part of not only the intellectual memory, but also the sense memory.  You should rehearse, at an absolute minimum, three times.

2.  Transitions are the key to an effortless-looking performance.  It’s in the transitions that the differences between a mediocre and a good speech show up most obviously.  The average business speaker creates a speech by pulling together a collection of Power Point slides, some borrowed, some new.  The speaker then shuffles the slides into some kind of order and thinks he’s ready to go.  What we get, then, is the following:  “What this slide shows is….What this next slide is talking about is…”  This kind of clumsy hopping from slide to slide is the mark of a half-digested, under-rehearsed speech.  In rehearsal, you’ll find the ways to make the transitions smooth and logical.

3.  Rehearsal gives you the strength to go the distance.   I’ve seen many an under-prepared speaker suddenly realize, half-way through the speech, that she’s still got 30 minutes to go.  There’s a moment when the speaker signals to the audience that it’s all taking longer than she thought, and everyone in the room picks up on the signal.  The result is that the audience begins to think of the speech, even if the content is good, as an endurance contest.  If you rehearse, you get a sense of beginning, middle, and end, and you learn how to pace yourself. 

Audiences will forgive the occasional verbal slip, but if you look like you don't know what you're doing, they'll write you off as a loser every time.  Rehearse.  Please.  For all of us.

The 3 most powerful ways to increase your personal charisma

In this information-saturated, attention-deprived age, your message has to be sharp and vital to stick in the minds of your listeners – and you have to be even sharper and more vital.  Following are 3 ways to increase your personal charisma to attract the attention you want.

1.  Increase your ability to be open.   At its heart, charisma is emotion.  Great actors and celebrities who have charisma reveal real emotion to us – that’s what captures our attention and draws us in.  The first step in that kind of revelation is openness.  Most of us close ourselves off to others without even realizing it.  It’s part of the automatic, unconscious danger signals our bodies send out to strangers and crowds and people in general when we meet them for the first time.  That’s a survival skill we’ve evolved from the cave, and it worked well then.  But now, we need to be open to audiences rather than braced for flight or fight. 

So, rehearse your presentations and speeches as if you were talking to a close friend, a spouse, or a family member with whom you’re completely comfortable.  Then practice transferring that openness to your actual presentations.  It will be difficult at first, but you will soon learn to have a relaxed, open conversation with your audience, and your charisma will take a giant leap forward. This technique works just as well with meetings, one-on-one conversations, and informal gatherings. 

2.  Get a clear emotional focus in mind.   Most of us, when we’re getting ready to present, or meet with someone important, are thinking about all the things that can go wrong, or we’re stressing out about the technology, or we’re wondering how long it’s going to be until we can get to the bar for a drink.  To increase your charisma, instead focus on the underlying emotional attitude you have toward your message.  Are you excited?  Passionate?  Eager to spread the word?  Focus on one of those sorts of positive emotions, and you’ll show up with much stronger charisma and clearer focus.

3.  Practice physical stillness.  Watch our most charismatic speakers, leaders, and celebrities.  You’ll notice that they avoid extraneous motion and fidgeting.  There’s a stillness at their ‘core’.  It’s at once physical and emotional.  They’re clear about what they’re projecting, and they’re physically focused on the task at hand.  Think in terms of keeping your torso still, upright, and regal, like a king or queen, and you’ll have a rough idea of how you should be holding yourself.

I talk much more about these ideas and techniques in my book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, but these 3 should get you started. 

The five top speaking tips from the ancient Greeks

Long before then-candidates Obama and McCain debated each other in the recent campaign, the ancient Greeks held forth on democracy (they invented it), the court system (they invented that too), and politics (Ok, that’s been around forever).  Along the way, they learned a good deal about public speaking and presentations.  Here are five of the best tips from a couple of millennia ago.

1.  Rather than organizing a speech around your data, organize it around the audience’s problem.  The Greeks were shrewd psychologists, and they recognized that speakers who talked too much about themselves or held forth too much on the subject they were expert in were boring.  So they invented the “problem-solution” structure for persuasive speaking.  Begin by talking about the audience’s problem, they recommended, and then move on to the solution – which is where you get to strut your expertise stuff.  That’s inherently interesting for the audience because it’s about them.

2.  Aristotle said you can persuade three ways:  by appealing to reason, to emotion, or to character (logos, pathos, or ethos).  Which one – or ones – you use depends on the audience.  To know which method will work best, and in what mixture, requires great insight into the state of the audience’s mind.  But we make decisions, in the end, emotionally.  So any attempt to persuade had better include at least some appeal to emotion.  We use logic to explain to ourselves why we made the emotional decision we did.  The appeal to character is generally a last resort.  “Do as I say because of who I am.”   

3.  Give reasons, examples, and lists in groups of threes.   The Greeks realized that a group of three sounds complete to use, perhaps for the same reason that a tripod stands firmly on the ground.  So organize your thinking – and persuading – whenever possible, in groups of threes.  The audience will find you more persuasive and will be less likely to argue with you. 

4.  In argument, don’t be fooled by the “either-or” choice.  The Greeks were canny debaters, and realized early on that a great trick was to give your opponent a choice between two unappealing alternatives:  “My worthy opponent is either soft on crime or ignorant of the reality on the ground.”  There is almost always a third way in life, so look for it.  On the other side, giving an audience a choice between two alternatives in a persuasive speech will almost always dissuade them from looking for a third choice, because it’s hard to do live in real time.  “You can either invest with us or die a pauper.” 

5.  In the end, humor is the short cut to persuasion.  The Greeks made great use of ridicule, irony, wit, and other forms of humor.  While their sense of humor would strike us today as a little heavy-handed, their insight, that if you can make people laugh, you can persuade them, still stands.  Don’t start your speech with a joke, because if it falls flat you’re off to a very bad start and it’s hard to recover.  But do let your natural wit shine through.  If you can get your audience laughing, they will go a long way with you.