Nick Morgan, Public Words

Perelmuter Live at the Public Words Speaker Forum 2010: a Speaker Bureau Chief Speaks

Ever wonder how you can launch your own (paid) public speaking career or take your existing practice up to the next level?  Here’s your chance to get the straight story from one of the best:  Martin Perelmuter.  Martin launched Speakers Spotlight a few years back and has already managed more than 12,000 speeches in over 30 countries.  In an industry that suffers from shady practices and indifferent quality, Martin is a standout for integrity and transparency.  He’s also a warm, funny, delightful speaker himself. 

Now you can hear the bureau guy speak on the record on the state of the industry, how to launch or improve your own career, and the secrets of the industry.  Who gets hired, and why?  Who are the best working today?  And how much money can you make?

Sign up today for the Public Words Speaker Forum 2010 and learn from one of the industry leaders. 

Catch Steve Farber Live at the Public Words Speaker Forum 2010

A few years back, a writer inspired us all to take a remarkable leap of faith as leaders, in two books:  The Radical Leap and The Radical Edge.  Steve Farber carved out some very original territory as a speaker, writer, and thinker on what it takes to lead successfully today, while sticking close to your values and leading from the heart.  His books have become bestsellers and his speaker career has exploded, as his no-holds-barred, brash, direct, and honest approach has inspired audiences around the world to leave the ordinary behind and seek the extraordinary everyday. 

Recently, Steve has published a new book with some equally challenging ideas in it:  Greater than Yourself.  The book is all about how you should commit to lifting someone else up by mentoring them in a new, more focused way, to become greater than yourself. 

Like all of Steve’s books,  Greater Than Yourself is written in the form of a story, and the author is masterful at creating characters and situations that draw you in, keep you involved, and inspire you to try this at home. 

Steve’s speaking at the Public Words Speaker Forum on June 11-12, and he’s going to reveal how he’s created a career for himself and inspired millions of others about his ideas of service, heart, and authenticity.  Don’t miss him!  Sign up today!

You can read Steve’s blog here, find his books here, and see him on video here. 

The most creative speaker ever - Josh Linkner

Want to meet the most creative person on the planet?  His name is Josh Linkner, and he’s speaking at the Public Words Speaker Forum 2010 on June 11-12 in Boston.

Josh has started 4 Internet-based companies, sold the first 3, and built the fourth into a powerhouse presence that does 300 times more business than its nearest competitor.  The company is ePrize and it has transformed the prize and sweepstakes industry. 

At the same time, Josh has pursued a career as a jazz guitarist. In fact, he’s been playing professionally for more than 25 years, and still gets to regular gigs, even as he’s launching his next endeavor:  to save the business world from its creativity deficit. 

Josh has achieved his extraordinary success by constantly and passionately applying creativity to everything he does.  Early in its successful run, ePrize was already dominating the competition.  Josh wondered what could be done to keep the energy and enthusiasm going when the temptation to rest on the company laurels was becoming more and more tempting.  So he came up with Slither.  Slither is the company that is always one step ahead of ePrize, always making aggressively competitive moves to keep ePrize off balance, steal away its customers, and put a dent in its market share.  Of course, Slither is an imaginary company, invented to keep ePrize focused.  But it has become a fun way to come up with new ideas, stay energized, and keep growing. 

Now Josh has written a soon-to-be-released book on creativity, Disciplined Dreaming, and he’s launching a speaking career to help other companies and teams re-charge their creativity and keep ahead of their competition.  As Josh puts it, creativity is the only competitive advantage companies have left.  Everything else can be copied by a teenager with access to the Internet. 

Catch him now, while he’s still on the way up, speaking at our Public Words Speaker Forum 2010.  Check out his blog here, and see him speaking here. 

David Meerman Scott live at the Public Words Speaker Forum 2010

David Meerman Scott has ridden the wave of social media with the bestselling -- and best -- book on it, The New Rules of Marketing and PR.  David is in hot demand as a speaker around the world, talking about the New Rules, the World-Wide Rave, his second book, and generally educating people from Dubai to Dubuque on the intricacies of social media. 

Now he’s about to launch a third book, Real Time Marketing and PR, which takes the concepts in his first book a light-year or two further.  David’s insights will change the way you think about how businesses should be managed and run in this instant Internet era. 

David is debuting the speech on the new book (due out  in October) at the Public Words Speaker Forum 2010.  Register here to get the first hearing on David’s revolutionary thinking.  David is always a great speaker, and this opportunity to hear him talk about his new book for the first time just may help you launch a new business or revolutionize the one you’ve got now. 

Check out David’s blog here, his currents books here , and his speaking here.  And don’t miss the chance to hear him live on the subject of his yet-to-be-released book. 

Pam Slim Live at the Public Words Speaker Forum 2010

A few years back, a worker bee got fed up in corporate America, quit her job, became an entrepreneur and consultant, and later on wrote a direct letter to CEOs everywhere, telling them in no uncertain terms how badly they were living up to the ideals of leadership, caring for their people, providing meaningful work experiences, and living their values. The open letter struck a chord that reverberated loud and long around the Internet and the traditional media. It was picked up everywhere from USA Today to The New York Times. 

Before very long, Pam Slim was writing a book and speaking around the world on how to “Escape from Cubicle Nation,” start your own business and become an entrepreneur. Not long ago, the book by the same name was published, to genuine and generous acclaim.

Pam is an inspirational figure for entrepreneurs, wannabe entrepreneurs, women, and worker bees trapped in dead-end jobs everywhere. She has been extraordinarily selfless as a coach, using her platform and social media savvy to help many other people in their quest to escape from cubicle nation and launch their own businesses. We’re very pleased to be featuring Pam at our conference June 11-12 talking about her experiences and presenting that genuine, caring thoughtful insight and help that has earned her a legion of fans and followers. You can sign up for the conference here. You can read Pam’s blog here, buy her book here, and become one of her Twitter followers or Facebook friends here. See her speaking here, get inspired, and don’t miss Pam live at the Public Words Speaker Forum 2010.

Authenticity and charisma -- can they be learned?

William Arruda of Reach Personal Branding interviewed me recently about Trust Me, authenticity and charisma.  Here's the audio file:  http://bit.ly/cL56fY.  Enjoy!

5 Stories that Will Make your Presentations Powerful

Here's a link to an article I recently published on Forbes.com on the five stories that will make your presentations powerful:  http://bit.ly/8XtlXR.  Enjoy!

Two rules for successful presentations

For my blog today, I'm linking to a recent article I posted on the Harvard Business Blogs that's getting a good deal of comment.  Here's the link:  http://bit.ly/cVrXbV.  Enjoy!  

How to pitch an idea – and pick the right medium for your pitch

Most of us find ourselves having to pitch an idea – whether it’s a proposal for a new business initiative to a boss, a VC pitch, or a proposal of marriage – when the stakes are high and we care a great deal about succeeding.  How to increase the chances of success? 

1.  First, think about your audience.  Start any serious endeavor that involves a pitch by thinking hard not about how you feel but how your audience feels.  If you don’t succeed in getting in the minds of your audience you won’t succeed in changing those minds.  What are their top concerns?  What are they afraid of?  What do they want?

2.  Second, think about the best medium for your pitch.   What’s the best way to get your message across to this particular audience?  Is it a casual conversation?  A formal document?  A presentation?  A presentation with Power Point slides?  A blog, a book, a series of articles or white papers?  A PR campaign?  A romantic dinner with roses, champagne, and a ring?  Every audience and every pitch has an optimal medium, and too many people make the mistake of assuming that, say, a Power Point slide deck is automatically the best medium for all messages.  Not so. 

3.  Third, think about how your pitch solves a problem that the audience has.  Few people are interested in hearing new ideas just for the sake of those ideas.  We have enough information engulfing us, thanks.  But we are always ready to hear how someone or something might solve a problem that we have.  So tie your pitch to a problem or need that the audience has and you’ll get a much friendlier hearing. 

4.  Fourth, think about what you want your audience to do differently as a result of hearing your pitch.   A classic mistake that people make when pitching an idea is to forget to close the sale or actually ask for the thing that they want.  People rarely say ‘yes’ to questions that haven’t been asked.  Don’t forget to make your pitch.

5.  Finally, think about how you’re going to make your pitch.   You’re now ready to write the article, the book, the speech, have that conversation, or ask for that hand in marriage.  If you’ve thought hard about steps 1 -4, your chances of success have already multiplied.  Good luck!

How to become a top dog: first, act like one

Working with an executive recently on body language, charisma, and presence, I noticed something odd about the way he was standing as we worked on a mock interview.  I was playing a high-status person, because one of the issues the executive wanted to work on was showing up well with his peers – other executives, similar-status colleagues, and so on.  What the executive was doing was essentially freezing in place. 

That reminded me of studies of conversations between different status people.  One finding is that when a lower status person is talking with a ‘superior’, he or she tends to freeze in place. 

So I halted the role-play and asked the executive what he was thinking about.  He reported that he was working very hard on thinking about what he was going to say next. Was it that the mental effort required was causing him to freeze up, or was it his feelings of lower status? 

Either way, the unconscious effect on me was to elevate my status and to signal to me that this client was low on the totem pole. 

The important point is that it didn’t matter what the executive was consciously thinking about; what mattered was the way he showed up.  To anyone else in the room, he looked like a peon, not a player. 

So we worked on loosening up this executive’s body language and getting him to think like a Jedi master.  As I’ve said before, you can either work from the inside out, on your emotional intent, or you can work from the outside in, on freeing up your body to look and feel like a top dog.

Either way works; if you can do both at once, you’ll get there even faster.  What happens if you start with the body is that you get a good feedback loop going – your mind says, “I must be a player because I’m standing like one.”  If you start with the mind, it signals to the body what to do.  Our unconscious minds dominate our behavior, but you can inject a new idea into the unconscious mind either way.  The results are well worth it.  If you want to become a top dog, you have to first act like one. 

How much is a public speaker worth? How much would you pay?

How much is a public speaker worth?  A fellow blogger recently tabulated the top ten here: http://bit.ly/9kSPj1

Who are they? 

Following is the (short) list with their per speech speaking fee: 

Donald Trump, $1-1.5 million

Ronald Reagan, $1 million

Tony Blair, $616,000

Bill Clinton, $150,000- $450,000

Rudy Guiliani, $270,000

Alan Greenspan, $250,000

Lance Armstrong, $100,000 and up

Al Gore, $100,000-150,000

Richard Branson, $100,000 and up

Sarah Palin, $100,000 and up

It’s an interesting list.  All but three are former politicians, thus confirming the idea that it may be public service at the time, but afterward you can cash in.  The others are celebrity CEOs or sports figures. 

Do the numbers appall you?  I often get incredulity or indignation from people not in the speaking business when I talk about how much more down-to-earth business speakers make (anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000 per speech and up). 

But just looking at the number itself – for an hour’s worth of work! – is not thinking about the money in the right way.  Those speakers earn their money, and here’s why. 

Think about a typical business conference.  Let’s say there are 300 – 500 attendees.  It’s held at a nice hotel in some destination city, like Boston or London or Vegas or Paris or New York or Tokyo or San Francisco.  A typical budget for the entire conference is $1.5 to $2.0 million (USD).  So that speaker fee that seems so high is something like 2 % of the total.  Barely even figures.  As one meeting planner told me once, when we were haggling over a client’s $25K fee, “OK.  That’s less than we spend on coffee and donuts at the 10:30 break!”  And yet, for that sum, a headliner will leave his or her family, fly in coach long distances with an unpleasant airline, put up in a lonely room at the hotel, eat indifferent food, and then do his or her level best to charm a roomful of strangers, before heading home again. 

You may well attend the conference because of that headliner, so the drawing power of the person has to be figured in the fee.  If an extra 100 people attend because former President X is speaking, at $3,000 per, that’s another $300,000 in the coffers of the organizers.  And that’s probably on the low end.  It’s not hard to see how the relatively small investment in a headlining speaker pays for itself quite quickly. 

Now think about what it takes to become a headliner.  There are years of preparation involved for a speaker to be able to cash in on his or her fame.  Ideas, research, books, public service, inventions, innovations, businesses – real accomplishments that take time and perseverance.  You don’t just start speaking.  You come to it because you’ve starred in some other world. 

So that $40K is not just for the hour of speaking – it’s for the lifetime of preparation. 

Speakers earn their fees if they change the world by moving an audience to action.  If you’ve been in one of those audiences, you know what I mean.  An hour spent with a great speaker can set you off in a new direction, opening your life to new thoughts, experiences, and ventures.  What’s that worth? 

Five quick steps for a successful presentation

Last week I was talking to architecture and design students about delivering a great presentation and helping them think about how their body language was a second conversation that would dominate the first – the content – unless the two were aligned. 

I asked them how much time they spend preparing their presentations.  “An entire term,” was the typical answer – because they work on their models for the whole term.  Then I asked them how much time they spent thinking about their body language – the second conversations – for delivering that presentation. 

“None,” was the typical answer.  So design students may be the worst offenders, but we’re all guilty of underestimating the second conversation.  By that I mean that we all spend a good deal of time researching, planning, and writing our speeches, but precious little time planning the choreography.

And yet it’s the choreography that will undo all that great design work in the presentation, especially, as I wrote yesterday, if the student spends all her time looking at the slides rather than the audience. 

So here’s my takeaway – spend as much time preparing your second conversation as you do your first.  And why not?  It’s at least as important.  You simply cannot be successful without it. 

How should you prepare?  Here are 5 quick steps for ensuring a successful second conversation.

1.  Decide where the high points of your speech are.  Then practice the speech moving toward the (imaginary) audience on those important points.  Move away from the audience when you’ve finished the point.

2.  Decide on the emotional message of your speech.   How do you feel about the message you’re imparting to the audience?  You want to convey that enthusiasm, passion, excitement, anger, or fun to the audience as strongly as you experience it.  The only way to do that is to find out what it is, focus on it, and then make a practice of calling up that emotion before you give the speech. 

3.  Check your posture.   Your posture powerfully signals how you feel about your subject, your audience, and yourself.  So rehearse in front of a video camera, imagining that the audience is there and then watch yourself on tape.  How do you look?  Confident or hesitant?  In charge or submissive?  Like a powerful person or merely taking up space?  Then stand up like a soldier at attention, but without the tension; release it by rolling your shoulders, and tensing and relaxing your big muscle groups.  You’re ready to go. 

4.  When you get to the room, check your choreography.  Rooms often present challenges of one kind or another for speakers.  Does the stage form a barrier between you and the audience?  Is it hard to see everyone?  Are there aisles to go up, or are you blocked?  You need to create your choreography on the fly, often with very little time.  Find a central point to begin, from which you can see the whole audience.  Then find places to foray out into the audience (without tripping over yourself or anyone else).  In that way you can plan your moves before you being to speak. 

5.  Before you begin to speak, find the emotional core you’ve identified for the speech and get into it.   Do this by remembering the last time you felt that sort of emotion strongly.  Use all your sense memories to recall it:  what did it smell, taste, feel, sound, and look like?  Once you’ve called up that emotion, you’re ready to speak. 

How do you tell a CEO from an analyst?

Recently I was working with an executive who wanted to show up with more charisma.  As the day progressed, we tried some role-playing of the situations in which the executive typically found himself.   One was a one-on-one conversation with a potential client – a high-status client.  The executive often became tongue-tied in these sorts of half-social, half-business situations, and wanted some help in figuring out what to say. 

I played the high-status client, and the executive played himself.  And the conversation was indeed a bit stilted, but as the role-playing continued, it was something else that began to catch my eye.  The body language of the executive was far more important to what was happening than his chit-chat. 

So we stopped the scene, and showed him the replay.  He was astounded.  He said, “You look like a CEO, I look like an analyst!”  In his lexicon, an ‘analyst’ meant a lower-status person.

I had to agree.  He looked like an analyst.  How did he telegraph his lower status?  His body language was partly closed; he was holding his hands defensively in front of his stomach.  But more importantly was his posture:  a slight slump in his shoulders, sagging inward and collapsing his chest.  The executive was giving up all his authority by closing off and failing to take up the space that a CEO or high-status person must take.  He simply wasn't taking charge in physical terms.   

And he could see it immediately; that’s the power of video.  We talked through what he was seeing and what he could do to change it.  In this situation, you either change your posture or your thinking.  I prefer working on both, but some people get faster results from one or the other. 

In the next role-play, the executive concentrated on standing like a CEO, and the result was astonishing.  He was transformed; his persona opened up with new authority and his chit-chat even improved.  The problem was not that he couldn’t think of anything to say.  The problem was that he hadn’t figured out how to inhabit the role of a CEO.  Once he saw what he was doing physically, he freed himself up to fill the role; the difference was immediate and profound.

Lesson from the Designers: Don't Talk to Your Slides

Last week I attended a day-long conference at the Harvard architecture and design school, where I was speaking about how to pitch your project – your building, your design, your vision of a new landscape.  I was the last speaker of the day, so I had the fun of watching everyone else talk about the changing nature of design and how to sell it in the new world of complex teams and public input. 

But as the day progressed, I had to focus more and more on the spectacle of some very smart people failing to connect with the audience because of a very simple problem:  they talked to their slides. 

Now, these are polite people as well as smart ones, and there is no way that they would turn their backs on anyone while having a conversation with them one on one.  So why do they think it normal behavior to give the cold shoulder – or the even colder back – to a whole roomful of people? 

As designers, they were of course presenting a lot of slides, most of them beautiful.  Nothing wrong with that.  But so bewitching were all these slides, apparently, that the speakers couldn’t take their eyes off them.  And that’s where things started to go wrong. 

Put together a speaker with his back to the audience, a warm room, a long afternoon, and the roar of a projector, and you have a recipe for unconsciousness.  And that’s what happened.  By the time I was supposed to speak, the audience had lost most of its wits and all of its hope. 

More about how I woke them up in a later blog, but for now the takeaway is that you should never, ever turn your back on the audience to speak to your slides.  Know your slides.  If you have to look to see what the next one is, then do so, but don’t talk at that point.  Look first, then turn to the audience, then talk. 

The only motion that’s interesting to the audience is motion toward it (or away from it); take care of whatever business you have with your slides in the second or two between them.  Then turn to your audience and talk to them about whatever’s on that slide.  It’s disengaging, uninteresting, and rude to turn your back on the audience.  Never, ever talk to your slides. 

Power Point: illustration or enemy combatant?

The New York Times recently ran an article on a Power Point slide.  The slide surfaced in a high-level military briefing about the US’ Afghanistan war policy, and it has to be seen to be believed:  http://nyti.ms/9FEtcv

As General McChrystal apparently remarked at the time, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.” 

At least they’re laughing over at Army command.  Far too many businesses put their executives, managers, and front line staff to sleep on a daily basis with slides that are scarcely less complicated.  The advent of the Army Slide of Infamy and Confusion seems like a good time to write again about what a Power Point deck is not – or should not be. 

1. A Power Point deck should NOT be a set of speaker notes.   Far too many PP decks are designed to be exactly that.  Prepared in a hurry, under-rehearsed, and nervous-making, these sorts of decks contain densely worded lists of notes so that the speaker knows what to say.   And frequently, the speaker just reads slide after slide.  It’s difficult to imagine anything more boring.

2.  A Power Point deck should NOT be a template to design a talk.   This one may surprise you.  Why shouldn’t you use PP to design a talk?  Isn’t that what it’s for?  The problem is that when it’s used this way, PP contributes to a talk that is just a set of slides, with no beginning, middle, or end.  A talk needs to have an arc, so that the audience can follow it.  Lacking inherent structure, talks become lists of slides, and we can only remember 4 or 5 items in a list.  How many slides were in your last PP deck?

The giveaway for this sort of PP-designed talk is the transitions between the slides.  If the speaker says, repeatedly, “What this slide shows is XXXX,” then what you’re getting is just one damn slide after another, with no real structure. 

3.  A Power Point deck should NOT be a ‘leave behind’ deck of great density and length.   Power Point is a bad software program for long documents.  The headline–bullet-point-subsidiary-line format makes it very difficult to create a longer document that is actually readable.  And its limited capacity for handling dense charts, graphs and data sets makes PP a poor way to present lots of information.  Far better to use Word, or Excel, depending on the nature of the document or the data. 

4.  A Power Point slide should NOT contain more than six lines of prose.   A simple test to see if you have too many words on your slide is to print it out, and drop it on the floor.  Now stand over it and look down.  If you can’t easily read all the lines on the slide, it has too many words on it.  Typically, more than 6 lines becomes unreadable. 

5.  A Power Point slide should NOT contain anything except pictures, simple graphs and charts, and the occasional quote from Winston Churchill.  The proper use of PP is to illustrate your talk with a picture that conveys emotion, a chart that makes a numerical relationship clear, or a graph that does the same.  Very occasionally, a wonderful (brief) quote from some deep thinker can provide variety and a moment of reflection (but see #4).  For a great book on the right way to design and use slides in a talk, see Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen. 

Every communication is two conversations - ignore the second at your peril.

Every face-to-face communication is two conversations, the content and the body language.  Most of us spend a great deal of time preparing the first conversation for our important meetings, presentations, speeches, negotiations and so on.  But how much time do you spend preparing the second conversation – the non-verbal one? 

If you’re like most people, you give some thought to what you’re going to wear, and you may recall a rule or two that your mother or a mentor taught you – along the lines of stand up straight…look people in the eye…give them a firm, friendly handshake, and so on.  But that tired old retinue doesn’t even begin to address the complexity of the unconscious nonverbal exchange that people carry on once they’re in sight of one another. 

What happens is that when the two conversations are aligned, you can communicate your carefully prepared content effectively.  But as soon as there is any mis-alignment between words and actions, people believe the nonverbal every time, and your message is sunk, gone, useless, empty, null and void. 

In practice, that means that if you’re selling confidence in some form, but you start out with a little nervousness – a very human and typical situation – you won’t be believed.  Most business presentations are failures because of this simple, yet powerful truth:  the executive doing the talking has some mismatch between his or her content and emotions.  Perhaps you’re there to talk about the rosy future of the company, but internally you’re harboring a few doubts about the viability of the whole thing, especially after the initial angel investment runs out. 

Mismatch.  Most of us are not very good actors.  Our bodies will betray that diffidence, the audience will pick up on it, and the game will be lost. 

All of us have an extraordinary unconscious ability to read the body language of others, but only in some very basic ways.  We pick up on nervousness, fear, confidence, sexuality, hunger, openness and its opposite, trustworthiness and its opposite, credibility and its opposite, and so on.  These are basic readings on how safe or dangerous other people are relative to our survival and the survival of the species. 

We have mirror neurons that have one job and one job only:  to pick up on the emotional states of the people around us.  We do that in nanoseconds, long before conscious thought or speech can take place.  It’s why when your spouse comes home on some momentous day, you ask immediately, “What happened?”  You just know that he or she is bursting with news – you can see it radiating out of them.  That’s the power of the unconscious mind and mirror neurons.  

That power is limited, however, in a particularly important way for people who want to communicate through speeches, in meetings, and so on.  The unconscious mind is really only asking “what does that behavior mean for me?” 

So if you’re standing up to give a speech about the future of the company, or the success of a new product, and you’re a little nervous, the unconscious minds out there in the audience don’t make allowances for those natural jitters.  No; those minds immediately start thinking “danger!” even before you’ve opened your mouth. 

That’s why it’s so important to give some real thought to your body language before it betrays you.  You’ll be tempted to move away from the audience, or simply to move – we call it “happy feet” at Public Words – to try to discharge some of that nervous energy.  Instead, move toward them, because that builds trust.  You’ll be tempted to clutch your hands protectively in front of your stomach, because all eyes are on you, and you feel self-conscious.  Instead, keep your torso open and pointed toward the audience.  That similarly builds trust and makes the audience feel safe.  You’ll be tempted to speak in a breathy, or nasal voice (of which you’ll be completely unaware) because the adrenaline coursing through your system will be pushing you to take short, shallow breaths.  Instead, take deep, slow breaths from the belly.  The one you’re not hiding from the audience. 

Great presenters, negotiators, and leaders choreograph their speeches and meetings by planning where and how they’re going to stand, move, and sit in order to ensure that their messages and their body language tell roughly the same story.  And they do the hard work of becoming self-aware of their persona, what they look like to other people, so that they don’t send inadvertent nonverbal messages that contradict their content.  Every communication is two conversations. 

 

The most important rule in giving a speech: Tell an emotional truth

When giving a presentation, if you’re like most people, you’re going to be feeling exposed until you can get away to the bar once it’s all over.  You’re going to feel like you’re on trial.  And, of course, despite the fact that your audience does want you to succeed, success is still yours to lose.

So you’re nervous for a good reason.  You are on trial.  Don’t expect it to feel great until it’s over. 

All the more reason, then, to be very careful about the emotional story that you’re telling.  Because your body is going to be ready to give you away time and again.  Your body is perfectly happy to radiate nervousness, discomfort, and a compelling desire to flee for the exit.  But none of that supports your content very well, unless you’re giving a speech about terror. 

For most people, talking about a business goal, or an idea for a new direction to take the organization in, or a report on how the last quarter went, their emotional relationship to the content is a mixed one.  But it’s precisely that mixed message – some belief, some skepticism, some terror – that you probably don’t want to convey to the audience. 

When you’re preparing to give your speech, then, find a compelling emotional truth that the speech embodies and spend some time focusing on that.  You need a strong one to overcome the natural tendency for nerves.  Is it hope, or excitement, or triumph, or anger, or -- ?  You decide.  But make it a good one, be clear about it, and spend time in the day and minutes before your presentation thinking hard about that emotion.  What does it feel like?  What does it smell, taste, sound, and look like when you last experienced that emotion strongly?  Put yourself into that sense memory and it will bring the emotion alive. 

Then, when you are focused, go out and give the speech.  You will find that you are better able to connect with your material and with your audience, because you are grounded in an emotional truth.  Your mixed messages will fade away, and you will radiate charisma and success.  And you can still head to the bar when it’s over.