Nick Morgan, Public Words

How good a speaker is Steve Jobs?

Steve Jobs has a near-mythical reputation in the presentation world as someone who has regularly wowed audiences over the years with his new product announcements at Macworld.  But just how good a public speaker is he really?  You can see highlights from the last 10 years of Macworld presentations here:  http://tinyurl.com/9qszxv.  I’ll probably get grumbles from Jobs’ fans for saying this, but he’s a good, not a great, speaker. 

 

To be sure, in business the bar is set very low, and of course Jobs is a better presenter than Bill Gates, but what you see when you review the decade-long run of new product announcements is someone who is never fully comfortable in his skin.  At the beginning of his run, he’s a classic geek – introverted, full of rough edges, intense, and passionate.  His public speaking clumsiness is offset by his passion, but he goes on too much about the bits and bytes – he a geek talking geek-speak.  It’s all about him and his products.  As time goes on, he matures as a speaker, opens up a little, and starts to relate to the audience a bit more strongly. 

 

In fact, his best performance is after his liver transplant.  He’s simpler and more direct, and it helps.  Your first aim as a speaker should never be to amaze the audience, but rather to take them on a journey that’s relevant to them.  If they get amazed along the way, great, but that’s not job one.  If you focus solely on that, you go for the presenting bells and whistles at the expense of substance, inevitably. 

 

From start to finish, Jobs’ best moments come when he waxes passionate about some cool new Apple product.  That’s when the subject, person, and audience meet most happily.  Technically, he’s still wandering around the stage a little too much, and he’s still using his hands to protect himself rather than connect with the audience, but the passion covers those public speaking sins pretty well.    

 

What can you learn from watching Steve Jobs?  Passion is the essence of good public speaking, but it doesn’t hurt to learn the craft as well. 

Put your unconscious mind to work to become a better public speaker

We’ve evolved to have some extraordinary skills.  Chief among them is a whole battery of brain cells and autonomic functions that focus almost exclusively on keeping us alive.  All mostly unconscious and incredibly efficient.  

 

That’s a good thing.

 

Unfortunately, not so good for public speaking.  Because the famous ‘fight or flight’ adrenaline response is marvelous for evading saber-tooth tigers, but not so marvelous when it goes into overdrive in response to an audience.  The (conscious) symptoms are uncomfortable, and unless you learn how to manage them, they may cause you to do something weird in front of that audience, like pace relentlessly back and forth in an effort to dispel the excess energy you’re feeling. 

 

So here are a couple of things to do to make that unconscious mind work for you in the modern world. 

 

First, redefine the uncomfortable symptoms as good things that signal that you’re enjoying the hyper-vigilance that comes from adrenaline.  Racing heart?  Clammy palms?  Sweaty all over?  Tell yourself all those symptoms are helping you do better. 

 

OK, that doesn’t help a whole lot, unless you’re very persuasive.  Second thing to do:  breathe slowly and deeply from the belly.  Three deep breaths should help. 

 

Third, and most important in the long run:  start talking to your unconscious.  The good news is that you can train it to work for you.  This kind of work is well understood by Olympic athletes, who spend a lot of time visualizing success, because they know that otherwise their unconscious minds will betray them by presenting an alternative (what if you don’t make it over the bar?). 

 

So when you’re about to fall asleep, start talking to that unconscious mind, telling it how wonderful a speaker you are, how good it feels to be standing in front of a crowd sharing your wisdom, and what fun it’s all going to be.  Then visualize the happy occasion.  Just like an Olympic pole-vaulter visualizing leaping gracefully over the bar. 

 

If you do this properly and thoroughly over a period of several weeks, you will find that your public speaking performance improves enormously and those jitters become far more enjoyable or go away entirely.  I talk about this in more detail in Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, but here it’s enough to say that you should try it, especially if you think that your nerves are getting in the way of a great performance. 

Authenticity and the Dalai Lama

For my blog today, I'm talking about the Dalai Lama and authenticity via this brief clip from a recent speech.  Enjoy!  http://tinyurl.com/yfgep8l

Are they committed to you? Did you close the sale? Decoding Body Language, Pt 8

For the final blog in this series, I'm focusing on commitment.  This is the moment that you close the sale, ink the deal, get the job, get the 'go ahead'.  It's a crucial moment, and it's essential to be able to spot it so that you don't do the wrong thing at the crucial moment. 

 

What does it look like? 

 

When people are committed, they lean in to you.  They are open, sometimes subservient, always sincere, and usually well aligned.  It begins with the eyes: they’re open wide, and focused on you. The face is similarly open. Most of all, it will be close to yours. Closing the sale is all about closing the distance. It’s why car sales reps constantly shake your hand. They’re trying their hardest to build commitment, and they know that the mind follows the body.

 

The torso is open and closer to you than it is if not committed.  There is no opposing chatter from the hands and arms, legs and feet. The person or persons may well be mirroring you if it’s possible in the circumstances.

 

The act of commitment often is signaled with a change in body language, indicating a decision has been made. Look for it — the yea or nay. At that point, put your unconscious mind into high gear. Ask yourself, Is this person committed? You’ll be able to tell very quickly if you see all the positive affect I’ve described — or its opposite.

 

Most of all, you’ll feel comfortable. Commitment is a positive statement, and because we’re social creatures, we humans like to achieve it. We’re uncomfortable when it doesn’t exist.  So you can detect it by the general sense of comfort that you get when it happens. That’s your unconscious telling you, Yes, it’s all good. They’re going along with this!

 

In essence, commitment is a kind of connection, and one that makes us feel good. You’ll know it when you see it, if you work with your subconscious. When it’s not there, people express their discomfort with all sorts of agitation, discordant body language, and attempts to leave.

 

Of course, some cultures cover these awkward moments with an excess of agreement, positive body language, and superficial attempts at commitment. When Westerners first do business in Asia, for example, they often find themselves misreading the Asian politeness and desire to save face for commitment. This is one instance when unconscious expertise can let you down.  The studies show that the basic body language is initially the same around the world, but it can quickly be covered with culturally determined body language nanoseconds later.  Without a lot of practice, the differences can be hard to spot. 

 

This is not the place for an extended discussion of cultural differences, but there are a number of excellent references on the subject.  It’s best to take cultures on one by one, when you’re going to visit another country, rather than trying to learn them all at once. Precisely because the body language we send out is deeply conditioned by our upbringings, when it isn’t biological, it’s hard to change.

 

In the end, basic authenticity is the same around the world.  As I discuss in more depth in Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, we humans are a social, empathetic species, and we crave the basic connection with others that comes from authenticity.  All successful communication begins there. 

Personal power and body language - part 7 in decoding body language

The story of power in a room is written in space and height.  It’s not very different from what pack dogs do, in fact. Look for the alpha dog. He or she will be the highest person in the room if at all possible. It’s why kings and queens have had thrones on daises since they began ruling others.

 

I used to ask CEOs I worked with to test this out by convening a meeting at a large conference table with the CEO highly visible in the middle. CEOs typically take the middle of the table, and sometimes the head, to express their power anyway.  Next, I instructed the CEO to sit tall in her seat at the start, but then to gradually sink down in the chair by sliding forward,very, very slowly.  Imperceptibly, in fact, to the conscious mind.  The result? Those in the room who wanted to express their subservience to the CEO unconsciously sank lower and lower in order not to upstage the boss. CEOs have reported to me that they’ve barely been able to contain their laughter as they’ve watched everyone at the table slide slowly toward the floor.

 

A truly hilarious instance of this took place when Richard Branson, the Virgin companies tycoon, was giving a speech at a conference at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan.  Branson is not a comfortable public speaker, so his clever staff had arranged for first a video, then a brief speech by Branson, and finally a question-and-answer session with a local TV personality in order to fill up the time as painlessly as possible for Branson.

 

When it came to the question-and-answer session, Branson, an unassuming man, sat in a relaxed way in his chair.  The interviewer, not wishing to be higher than Branson, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. Branson mirrored this behavior, but put his head a little lower than the interviewer’s.  Soon the two hapless public figures were crouched with their heads nearly between their knees, trying to carry on a serious conversation.  It was like watching a game of CEO limbo. 

 

Finally, the interviewer could stand it no longer and stood up, saying to the audience, “Let’s take some questions from you now.” There was an audible groan of relief from the audience, who had been made uncomfortable by this ridiculous display of humility without consciously understanding what was going on. Neither did Branson or the interviewer.

 

Powerful people also take up more space: they splay their legs out, or their arms, or hog more space in the room. It’s why important people get bigger hotel rooms than lesser folk, and it’s why tall people are statistically more likely to rise higher in their professions than shorter people. The alpha dog strikes again.

 

Powerful people employ a host of subtler signals of their dominance, from interrupting lesser mortals to talking more, to indulging in longer pauses. They make more eye contact, or less, depending on their choice. In fact, they dominate the eye contact and the physical touch — all the ballet of the second conversation. It’s why it takes training to meet Queen Elizabeth, and when you leave, you apparently have to back out of the room. All of that is simply to express her authority over the rest of us.

 

Powerful people may withdraw physically from a conversation, controlling its tempo and showing their power with this ability. I’ve seen people in a meeting lean back and put their hands behind their head in order to express their superiority over the rest of the room. It’s arrogant but effective.

 

Power in nonverbal display is all about controlling your own behavior and that of others. Once again, this is something that your unconscious is exquisitely attuned to. You will immediately know when you are in the presence of someone who believes she is powerful because of all the signals I’ve described, all of which you are unconsciously aware. 

Using body language to persuade others - Decoding body language, part 6

How do you tell whether someone is on your side or not?  The basic body language to look for to determine whether people are allied to you or opposed is overall physical stance -- their orientation.  This makes for entertaining people watching. Once you’re on to this aspect of behavior, you’ll find it’s easy to pick up.

 

Quite simply, people who are in agreement tend to mirror one another’s behavior. One will lead, and the other will follow.  This is especially easy to tell when there are three people present, and you want to figure out who’s on your side and who isn’t. Look for the one who has the same basic body orientation as you. For a test, move and see if the other person follows suit in the next thirty seconds.

 

Spouses, partners, and lovers usually mirror one another’s physical orientation when they’re together or with others and they’re in basic agreement. It’s interesting to watch couples for signs of mirroring — and its opposite. You can often detect trouble in the relationship before the couple is aware of it.

 

What happens in mirroring is more profound than just agreement or even connection, however. Because persuasion is an emotional as well as an intellectual activity, it comes from deep within the brain. When we agree with someone, we do so with our whole bodies. You can use this to drive agreement and create persuasion. Adopt a posture, and watch for others to adopt it. Once they have, change it slightly. If the others go along, you’re well on your way to persuading the room.

 

Your control of the body language in the room will both create and test the strength of your persuasion (or lack thereof).  The reason is that people’s bodies tell them what they’re thinking, not the other way around. It’s counterintuitive but true. Our minds basically say to ourselves, I’m aligned physically with this person, so I must agree with her.  That’s because we don’t like to think of ourselves as acting with no reason.

 

You must use this control of the physical orientation of other people with sophistication and subtlety. It must be combined with a series of steps that include other kinds of consensus building. It won’t work merely to come into a room, adopt a physical position, and expect everyone else to adopt your intellectual position too.

 

First, build agreement by adopting their positions, dealing with their concerns, and generally building on your openness to them and their openness to you. Do this work carefully while you’re talking through the issues important to the situation.  What you’re doing is aligning your two conversations and using both of them to persuade the others in the room. It takes considerable practice to do this with subtlety and effectiveness, but once you master it, you’ll find that your ability to persuade others will increase enormously.

 

 

How to tell if someone you love is lying

 

The best way to get a handle on the difficult question of spotting a lie is with your unconscious mind. Look at the whole face and torso, and ask yourself, Sincere or insincere? Then let your subconscious go to work. It’s very good at picking up whether the whole picture adds up to a consistent expression. For example, is the mouth set in a smile but the eyes are cold?  Insincere. Are the eyes fixed on you with beguiling stillness but the hands are nervously intertwining?  Insincere.

 

The next most important place to look after the face is the orientation of the head. Most of us, when we lie, turn our head away or tip it up or down so as to move it away from the other person. That's why you don’t want to focus too much on specific gestures, but rather let your unconscious mind pick up on the general situation.  If you look too much at the eyes, for example, you may miss the fact that the head is turned down and to one side. So again, ask yourself, Is this person sincere or insincere? And then take in the whole person. You’ll be able to tell most of the time.

 

Generally you’ll be able to pick up on the attitude of the other person right away, especially if it’s a loved one or someone you know well. I had a cancer scare a while back, a condition that turned out fortunately to be benign, but the morning that I came back from the doctor, my wife instantly asked me when I walked in the door, “What’s the matter?” She knew something was wrong because my whole body radiated concern.

 

So look for that overall feeling you get when you pose the question to your unconscious mind.  It's the most reliable way to tell. 

 

For those of you who are detail-oriented, you'll want to know some of the specific 'tells' anyway.  Beyond the eyes and face, look for the torso to be turned away (lying) or toward you (truth).  See if there are defensive gestures from the hands and arms and signs of agitation from the hands and fingers. And look for contradictory behavior from the legs and feet. If your spouse says, “No, everything’s fine,” but his feet are oriented strangely or his legs are awkwardly crossed away from you, those are signs to check into his story further.

 

Also listen for signs of strain in the voice. If the voice is carefully controlled or a little higher pitched than usual, the person may be attempting to conceal something.  The world’s best expert on lying, Paul Ekman, has found that people who are lying slow down (in an effort to control) their voice and even their facial gestures and other mannerisms. But ordinary people can also rush to get through an awkward-feeling moment. So the main thing to look for is variation from the norm, which you should know well. 

 

Spotting a liar in a group of strangers is a completely different exercise.  Ekman has made a career out of detecting micro-expressions that signal concealed underlying emotions.  But it's an imprecise science (unlike on the fun but inaccurate TV show, 'Lie to Me') because without much more detail, you don't know why the person is concealing the emotion.  Is it fear?  Rage?  Excitement?  To understand that, you have to get to know the person better, and that takes time. 

How to decode other people's body language - 4: gestures

What can hand gestures tell us about openness?  Not those obvious one like the peace signal, or the middle finger.  Those are known as 'emblems'.  No, the ones we all make when we talk -- the apparently meaningless accompaniment to speech, as we wave our hands to think of a word, or emphasize a point. 

 

These gestures signal intent all the time.  When people reach toward us with open gestures, for example, they’re usually signaling openness. Only rarely is it something else, like a left hook to the jaw. An embrace, the ultimate open gesture, is a combination of open hand gestures and open torso.

 

Openness can be read in the hand itself as well. What is it doing? Is it clenched or nervously kneading the other hand? Is it twitchy or attempting to conceal itself in a pocket?  Hands speak an endless and fascinating language; they are marvelous little weathervanes to the state of the soul within and its intents. If you make a practice of watching other people’s hands, you’ll learn about the state of their nerves, their defensiveness, their confidence, their anger, their happiness, their sorrow, their interest or boredom, in addition to their openness or lack thereof.

 

Many books on body language purport to give specific meanings of specific gestures, but this is a fool’s game. Each gesture can have a multitude of meanings. We cross our arms, to pick a simple example, because we’re defensive, to be sure, but also because we’re tired, we’re cold, or we want to hide an expanding belly.

 

If you’re looking for the answer to a specific question, then you can put that unconscious expertise to work for you.  Ask yourself, Is this person open or closed toward me? Then start looking for the clues that you need to make a determination.

 

The best way to do this is to pose the question to your subconscious mind first. Ask yourself at the beginning of the conversation, Open or closed? and wait for your intuition about the matter to become clear. Once you have a sense of the situation, you can start looking consciously for clues to confirm or negate your initial reading.

 

Suppose you’re at a job interview, and you want to know what your chances of success are. The first question you might want to consider is whether you are even in the running.  In other words, is this a real interview or a courtesy interview? So begin the interview asking yourself, Is this person open or closed to me? If the answer comes back closed, then you can be reasonably sure that someone else already has the job.

 

If the person seems open, you can turn on your energy and charm. You may want to be on the lookout for a change in that reading. What if the interviewer has been open for, say, the first forty-five minutes of the interview and then suddenly starts to send out closed signals? It might be time to change tactics or cut the interview short.

 

Has the interviewer made up her mind in the negative, or is she simply signaling that the time is up? You may want to ask some specific process questions (out loud) to see, such as, “What’s the next step? How will you go about making a decision?” Then the question to ask your unconscious mind is, Open or closed? If the answer is given in a closed way, you probably won’t get the job. If the body language at that point is open, you are still in the running. A bolder question in that same situation might be to ask, “How do I stack up against the other applicants?” Be prepared for both an answer you like and one you may not like!

 

Because adults become more or less adept in controlling their faces and upper bodies, it’s worth looking at the legs and feet for interesting counter signals. Often someone has composed his or her face in a friendly greeting, but the legs and feet (and the torso too) may tell a different story. The legs may be crossed away from you, signaling a closed orientation, or the torso may be twisted away, or the other person may simply increase the distance, even slightly, between the two of you.

 

More about all of this in Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. 

How to decode other people's body language - 3: Openness

In this third part of my series on decoding body language, I'm continuing with openness signals  from the face, head and torso. 

 

Flaring nostrils are the stuff of romance novels and books about horses. Nevertheless, there may be truth to the descriptions connecting sexual attraction to this part of the face, especially if research about pheromones and attraction turns out to be true.

 

It is certainly the case that a wrinkled nose can indicate disgust, or at the very least disgust at a bad smell. Extreme facial gestures like these are hard to miss and easily brought to the conscious. It is the subtler ones you should be more concerned about. By the time someone gets to the point of wrinkling his nose, he’s probably already told you how he feels or is just about to do so.

 

The mouth is capable of a thousand variations on the basic retinue of smile, frown, surprise, fear, and so on. In simple terms, look for the smile. That’s the universally understood sign of approval from others, and thus people who are smiling are more likely to be open to you than people who are neutral or frowning. But of course people can smile for other reasons; once again context is important to be able to distinguish a rigid, unhappy, or false smile from a relaxed, natural one that is welcoming and open.

 

Think about the whole face for a moment. How we orient our heads toward each other in space is extraordinarily revealing of our degree of openness toward one another.  I recently saw a news clip of two politicians meeting. The one was a presidential candidate, the other a potential endorsement the candidate was eagerly courting. The clip was brief, but as the two sat in side-by-side chairs, the potential endorser’s head was tipped back and away from the candidate. My take was that there would be no good news that night. 

 

As it turned out, the news came the next day, and the endorsement was not forthcoming; the vote went to the other candidate. In that case, the head told the story.

 

We move our heads away and out of the plane of the other person, either up or down, when we’re thinking or withdrawing in some way — from anger, fear, or a host of other possible negative emotions.  Once the person is done thinking, watch where the head goes. If the person makes strong eye contact and turns her head back toward yours, the answer is yes. Otherwise the answer may be no.

 

If the other person is a spouse or close friend, the underlying message may be something like, “I still love you, but the answer’s no this one time.”  In that case, the head may signal yes to the loved one in order to stress that the other person doesn’t want to change the underlying relationship, just signal an answer in the current discussion.

 

For the torso, nearness and direction signal degrees of openness. Fundamentally, the closer and more directly oriented the other’s torso is toward you, the more open that person is, and the farther away and more turned away from you, the more closed.

 

Next time I'll wrap up the discussion of openness with a discussion of hand gestures.  More on all of this in Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. 

How to read other people's body language-2: Openness and its opposite

 

The first possibility to check about others’ intentions is the most basic one -- their degree of openness (or its opposite). It's the most basic, because if people are open to each other, communication can begin.  If they are not, nothing good can happen.   

 

With a little practice, you should be able to size people up very quickly along these lines on an almost automatic basis.  Don't look for an instant read, however -- what people call 'thin slicing' these days.  In practice, it takes some time to establish a baseline of behavior with each new person you meet. The point is not to be able to perform this task instantly, but to be able to size someone up within a few minutes, with high reliability, in terms of whether this person is open to you.

 Let’s begin with the face. First, notice the forehead. Is it wrinkled or smooth? For most of us, our habitual attitude is expressed in our foreheads, especially after about age 30. The more wrinkles and the deeper they are, the more habitually open a person is likely to be.

 That's because a characteristic gesture of the open person is to raise the eyebrows, wrinkling the forehead, when looking for a response. Over the years, if you spend a good deal of time openly inviting response, you’ll get forehead wrinkles.  There are fakers, but on the whole the forehead is a reliable sign of overall orientation.  That does not mean that a person will be open or closed in any particular instance, but it does give you a sense of his or her general receptivity.

 Beyond the forehead, notice the mobility of the eyebrows.  How often and far do they move? People tend to raise their eyebrows when they’re interacting with others: looking for a response, asking a question, taking you in, and so on. So the amount and distance of motion are indicators of a general level of openness, and in the specific instance, when the eyebrows are up, openness to your input in the moment. Again, the movement may be in response to a question that the person has asked you, but it’s openness nonetheless.

 Now go down to the eyes themselves. Are they narrowed or wide open? You need to establish a baseline of how the person behaves in fairly neutral situations. That will give you an idea of whether the particular case is one of openness. Generally people open their eyes wider when they are interested in something or someone and close them when they are not, or are actively suspicious or wary of events, people, or actions.

Because people are so active with their eyes, you need to be careful to rule out environmental reasons. Is a bright light shining in the person’s face? That may account for narrowed eyes. It may not be because you’ve just offered the person a used car at an unbeatable price.  If you can, look at the pupils. How open or shut are they? Openness indicates interest, attraction, and arousal; the opposite indicates the reverse. Of course, the general level of lighting in the environment also affects the pupils, so you need to establish a norm.

 

I'll continue with the rest of the face and body in the next blog.  I go into much more detail about this in my book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. 

How to decode other people's body language - 1

We are all unconscious experts in reading other people’s intentions toward us.  We learned these skills in the woolly mammoth era because our lives depended on them, and the unconscious mind works must faster than the conscious mind.

But we are not very good at making this unconscious awareness conscious.

We can react with blinding speed, literally before we can think consciously, to duck a punch that some drunken lout throws in our direction, or to hop out of the way of an oncoming object.

 

That’s a good thing; it’s unconscious, and it works. But we are far less adept in general at noting consciously what everyone else in a meeting is really thinking, say, or evaluating who the chief ringleaders are in the party that’s against your plan for expansion, for example.

 

Yet those intentions are there to see. In the body language.  The problem is that, far from too little information about what others are intending, you actually get too much. People are constantly shifting, twitching, looking up, down, and sideways, raising their eyebrows, narrowing their eyes, scratching their noses. What does it all mean? How can you possibly monitor all of it in a room of ten people, or many more, and do so in time to react appropriately?

 

You can’t. It is too much information, too fast, and there is too much chaff intermixed with the wheat. Is Jane stroking her chin because she’s pondering your proposal? Or is she merely scratching an itchy chin as surreptitiously as she can? Is Jack folding his arms because he’s resisting your best attempts to talk the whole group into changing direction, or is he merely cold?

 

You can make yourself crazy trying to consciously monitor the constantly changing body signals of a roomful of people to little avail, because by the time you sort it all out, the conversation has moved on. Meanwhile, you haven’t been attending to the content of the conversation as closely as you probably need to.

 

Is there a way around this dilemma of needing to monitor gigabytes of streaming data about people’s intentions consciously and rapidly, while at the same paying close attention to the content of the conversations? There is. If, rather than monitoring the data generally, you look for confirmation of your own hypotheses about intention, then you can speed up and narrow the stream of information you need to take in.

 

So the real question is this: If you want to become a conscious expert in reading other people’s unconscious expression of their intent, how do you form hypotheses about that expression and confirm or reject them? The answer is to restrict your possible hypotheses to a few that you’ve identified before your meeting, conversation, or presentation. Then you can pose the single question to your subconscious mind and use that unconscious expertise we all have to give you a clear, reliable answer.

 

In the next 7 posts, I’ll discuss some useful ways to think about what other people intend:

 

Open — closed

Sincere — insincere

Allied — opposed

Powerful — subservient

Committed — uncommitted

 

You can, of course, add your own for specific situations that these don’t cover, but you’ll find that these work with a great percentage of human interactions where you need to monitor body language in detail.

 

I’ll examine each continuum in turn. The idea is to spend some time thinking about the nonverbal conversation in an upcoming interaction — an important one — and choose the continuum that most closely fits what you’re worried about or interested in, or represents the crux of the issue between you and the others involved.

 

Then, as I'll discuss, you let the power of your unconscious mind go to work and -- as if by magic -- you'll get a quick, accurate reading of what others are intending.  It takes a little practice, but it will change the way you 'read' others and it will improve your communications ability. 

 

Let's call it informed intuition.  I discuss it at much greater length in my book Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. 

The Ten Commandments of Public Speaking

 

I did an article years ago on the Ten Commandments of Public Speaking, and it’s time to update it.  Here goes:

 

 

I.  Thou shall know that a speech is for the audience, not the speaker.

 

II.  Thou shall not dump information on the audience; thou shall rather seek to persuade.

 

III. Thou shall consider the (twenty-two minute) attention span of the audience and keep it holy.

 

IV.  Thou shall not begin thy speech with a joke. 

 

V.  Thou shall remember that an invitation to speak is not a license to speak in a monotone.

 

VI.  Thou shall not wander the stage aimlessly but rather plant thy feet.

 

VII.  Thou shall not use more than one Power Point slide for every 3 minutes of talk.

 

VIII.  Thou shall use no more than ten words in at least 24 point type on thy Power Point slides.

 

IX.  Thou shall not end every declarative sentence as if it were a question, with a rising tone?

 

X.  Thou shall not exceed thy allotted time.

 

Is your voice right for public speaking?

 

Do you have the right voice for public speaking?  Many women push their voices too high, and men push them too low.  The result is that the voice lacks authority in the first instance and resonance in the second.  Neither one is good for public speaking. 

 

To find the right basic pitch for your voice, get to a keyboard.  Hunt for the lowest note you can comfortably match, and the highest.  That’s a range of typically 2 octaves, or about 16 white notes.  Then, walk your fingers up a quarter of the way from the bottom.  If your range is 2 octaves, that would be 4 notes (16 divided by 4 equals 4).  That pitch is your maximum resonance point.  You should be talking at that level much of the time, going higher to indicate passion, and lower to indicate certainty and authority. 

 

Once you’ve found your pitch, work on breathing.  Good public speaking voices have resonance, presence, and authority.  Resonance comes from proper breathing – with the belly, not the shoulders.  As you breathe in, expand the stomach, like an eye dropper.  Then, tense the stomach muscles and let the air trickle out as you speak.  Don't move your shoulders.

 

Presence comes from a touch of the nasal in the voice, but not too much.  Many of us have voices that are overly nasal, because we spend so much of our time hunched over computers, shoulders slumped, not breathing properly.  Try this.  Put your hands along your nose, and make a sound like a sheep bleating.  You should feel the nasal passages vibrating if you’re doing it right.  That’s a nasal-sounding voice.  Now, breathe from the belly, lose 95 percent of the nasal, and you’re ready to go.  Just a touch of the nasal gives your voice carrying quality, so that it can be heard clearly before an audience. 

 

Finally, authority comes from pitching an arc with your voice that starts at your correct pitch, goes up slightly during the phrase or sentence, and comes down again at the end.  Many people today say everything as if it were a question?  With their tone rising at the end of every sentence?  The result is maddening, and lacking any authority?  Don't do it!

 

For more information about the care and feeding of a great public speaking voice, go to my book Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. 

Are you as good a speaker as a 5th grader?

 

How many of you, on any given Monday morning, would rather go to the dentist than prepare and deliver a speech?  I daresay it’s a high percentage.  And why is that?  It’s because most of us find public speaking difficult – anxiety-producing, stressful, and high-risk.  Yet every now and then a 5^th grader comes along and makes it look easy.  Dalton Sherman is worth watching, because he’s amazingly good, especially for a 5^th grader, and because his verbal and non-verbal skills put many grownups to shame. 

 

Watch Dalton give the keynote to the Dallas Independent School Districts 2008 Back to School pep rally -- in front of 20000 teachers.  He’ll teach you a thing or two about public speaking.  Specifically notice how well he pauses, waiting for the audience.  Notice how he moves on a thought, toward the audience.  And notice how he works the entire audience, from one side of the stage to the other – even though it’s ‘in the round’.  Most grown-up public speakers don’t do as well in any of those areas. 

 

Here’s Dalton strutting his stuff:  http://tinyurl.com/lbfvzf

 

Of course Dalton lacks some subtleties and nuances that an older person might get out of the material.  But for 10 years old, he’s a phenomenon.  And he doesn't use a single Power Point slide. 

 

 

 

Great Contemporary Business Speakers-10: Sir Ken Robinson

 My final entry in this top ten list of great contemporary business speakers is a sentimental favorite:  Sir Ken Robinson.  Robinson is passionately devoted to spreading creativity around, first in education, and then in the rest of human endeavor.  I’m wholeheartedly with him on this project; it’s a life-long cause of mine too.  He’s written 2 books on the subject:  The Element (http://tinyurl.com/ycerpb6) and Out of Our Minds:  Learning to be Creative (http://tinyurl.com/ydvfnlo).

Robinson gave a marvelous plea for creativity in schools and more broadly in life at TED; you can see it here: http://tinyurl.com/mluw5k.  The talk is funny, thoughtful, and quite well-written in spite of appearing conversational and casual.  It’s very well done.  Check him out and get inspired.