In my first blog on Q and A I talked about structural issues – when to take questions, and what to do about your agenda.  In this blog, let’s get into some tips for handling the questions themselves successfully.

1.  Always, always repeat the question.  People often start talking before the mike gets to them, or from a corner of the room where not everyone can hear them.  Repeating the question back to the questioner ensures that you’ve got it right.  “Let me make sure I understand you.  What you’re asking is whether or not the bungee cords were strapped on by those little hooks or some other means of fastening, right?”  In addition to making the exchange more interesting for the rest of the audience – because they know what’s going on – you get two further advantages.  First, you get a little more time to think up an answer.  And second, you get a chance to re-phrase the question subtly – not too much – so that you can answer a better, clearer, or more interesting question. 

2.  Listen to the whole question.  As speaker, you’re in adrenaline time, while the audience is in normal time.  You’ll hear the first part of the question and be tempted to assume the rest.  You’ll be moving already, nodding to show you understand, and getting ready to cut in and deal with it. 

Big mistake.  Wait out the question, stand still, facing the questioner, and listen to the entire question with your whole body.  Why?  People ask questions to get answers, sure, but also to be heard and seen.  It takes courage to ask a question in front of, say, 600 peers.  So reward that behavior.  Show courtesy to the questioner.  Wait the question out.  You’ll get more and better feedback, and by showing respect to the audience, you’ll get respect back. 

3.  If the questioner runs on too long, go to plan B.   Some questioners ask questions to pontificate, to berate the speaker, to hear themselves talk, or simply to put forward their own point of view…forever.  In that case, here’s what you do.  Start walking toward the questioner, keeping your eyes fixed on him, and when you reach him, turn so that you’re standing, facing in the same direction as he is sitting, next to him.  That will silence 99 % of this irritating subset of questioners. 

If you’re stuck on a stage and can’t get to the questioner, then you simply have to interrupt.  Wait until the questioner pauses for breath, and say, “Let me stop you there so that I can answer the first part of your question…..”

4.  Try to surface the underlying emotions in the question.  If you want to connect more powerfully with your audience, listen hard for the underlying emotions, and play them back to the audience.  “What I hear you saying is that you’re frustrated by the unacknowledged increase in the number of sports metaphors in everyday discourse, is that fair?”  When a speaker (correctly) labels a questioners’ emotions, the connection created is surprisingly strong.

5.  Finally, here’s a little secret to control the flow of questions.  If you want to encourage questions, finish your answer with, “What else?”  That will bring several more questions.  If you want to end the flow of questions, finish your answer with “Anything else?”  You’ll get one more question at most.  It’s a way of controlling the question flow without the audience realizing it.  Try it, it works.   

How do you handle Q and A?  The traditional way is to take the first 45 minutes of an hour to talk, and then stop, saying, "I'd be happy to answer your questions now." 

What happens?  You handle a few good questions, and then the session starts to run out of gas.  Finally, there's one dumb or irrelevant last question, and the hour is mercifully over. 

Think about it -- the last thing the audience remembers hearing is therefore not your brilliant words, but that last dumb question. 

Instead, take questions at 20 minutes, and 40 minutes.  (Those timings happen to coincide with our natural attention span, which is about 20 minutes, give or take.)  Then, take one last question at 55 minutes and wrap up with the stirring words (on message) that you've been saving for the end.  Result?  Your listeners come away with your brilliant final thoughts echoing in their ears. 

Much more effective.  But how do you handle those questions at 20 minutes and 40?  What if somebody in the 3rd row raises a hand and asks a question that, you're afraid, will take you a little off subject and put finishing on time in jeopardy.  What do you do?

Start by remembering why you're there to give a speech.  Not to hear yourself talk.  You could give a speech in the privacy of your own bathroom for that.  The point of public speaking is to communicate with a group of people.  So you haven't succeeded in that endeavor unless someone has heard and understood you.

The audience is all-important.  And when you think of it like that, why wouldn't you take the time to answer the question? 

So don't worrytoo much about your agenda.  Do worry about how the speech is coming across, and what the audience is getting out of it.  If someone asks a question, answer it.  You should know your speech and your content so thoroughly that you can easily adjust on the fly to take into account your audience's feedback.

That said, you do have the right to sort through the questions and pass on the rude, the irrelevant, and the idiotic.  But never let on that you think a question is idiotic.  Just deal with it quickly and painlessly and move on. 

Back in my teaching days at Princeton University, I was showing a videotape of Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech as an example of great rhetoric, brilliantly delivered.  The discussion moved on to Patrick Henry's Give me liberty or give me death speech.  A student raised his hand and asked, "Do you have any videotape of Patrick Henry?" 

For a split second, I honestly didn't know what to say.  The guffaws of fellow students quickly tipped the hapless junior off, and he blushed bright red as he realized his error.  We moved on.  That student probably got a lifetime's education in a couple of seconds right then and there. 

There are stupid questions, and you don't have to answer them all.  But you are there for the audience, and mostly it's your job to respect their reactions to your talk and respond accordingly.

The first question you should ask when preparing a presentation is, who’s my audience?  But that question requires more than a one-word answer.  It’s the beginning of an exploration of the exact circumstances of your audience – who, what, when, where, and why – everything about them you can determine. 

Why should you care?  After all, isn’t it a matter of integrity to say the same thing to everybody?  Yes and no.  The message, fundamentally, has to be the same.  But the shape that it takes may need to be entirely different.  Would you use the same words to describe World War II to a group of six-year-olds as you would to a group of adults? 

This time, let’s look at speaking to audiences who are from a different culture than you, and perhaps speak a different primary language.  There are 3 things to remember above all else. 

First, don’t attempt jokes unless you’re absolutely sure that they will translate.  Most jokes don’t -- humor is local to an extent that's hard to imagine unless you've spent a good deal of time in another country. 

Second, take all the colloquialisms out of your talk when you’re speaking to non-native speakers.  “That dog won’t hunt” may make perfect sense to you because you’re from Georgia, but it won’t in India. 

And third, slow down!  If you’re working with a translator, cut your speech by at least a half, more to be comfortable.  If you’re simply talking to people for whom your language is a second or third, then slowing down allows them to translate in their heads. 

I do recommend making the attempt to connect with your audience by beginning with a traditional greeting or opening in the language of the country you’re in – but unless you’re fluent, don’t try to do the whole speech in that language.  Your accent will probably offend – or at least grate on the ears of – many in your audience. 

The first question you should ask when preparing a presentation is, who’s my audience?  But that question requires more than a one-word answer.  It’s the beginning of an exploration of the exact circumstances of your audience – who, what, when, where, and why – everything about them you can determine. 

Why should you care?  After all, isn’t it a matter of integrity to say the same thing to everybody?  Yes and no.  The message, fundamentally, has to be the same.  But the shape that it takes may need to be entirely different.  Would you use the same words to describe World War II to a group of six-year-olds as you would to a group of adults? 

This time let’s think about gender and age.  Some of the clichés are, by and large, true.  If your audience is mainly women, avoid the football metaphors.  If your audience is mainly under 30, don’t talk about the stagflation of the 70s. 

But how do you balance authenticity and a desire to sound hip, if, for example, you are in your late 40s and have only a passing familiarity with social media?  You’re talking to an audience of 20- and 30-something techies – do you do your best to sound like an expert, or do you stick to examples of 8-track tapes and CDs?  

The solution is to make it real.  Spend a little time grappling with the issue in a real way, but be honest about your own perspective.  Authenticity means being able to say something like, “I’m not an expert on social media, but I do understand campaigns, and what I’ve learned from working on the Truman campaign is that….”

It’s your job to meet the audience more than half way by finding connections with them – but not by faking it.  Lose your authenticity and you’ll lose your audience in a heartbeat. 

The first question you should ask when preparing a presentation is, who’s my audience?  But that question requires more than a one-word answer.  It’s the beginning of an exploration of the exact circumstances of your audience – who, what, when, where, and why – everything about them you can determine. 

Why should you care?  After all, isn’t it a matter of integrity to say the same thing to everybody?  Yes and no.  The message, fundamentally, has to be the same.  But the shape that it takes may need to be entirely different.  Would you use the same words to describe World War II to a group of six-year-olds as you would to a group of adults? 

This time let’s think about the difference between audiences where most of the people know each other and when they don’t.  Examples of the former are to be found when speaking at a company annual meeting or awards ceremony, and the latter at a large convention of professionals in the same field. 

The impact on how you shape your speech is immediate.  If you’ve got some hard-hitting things to say about how bad bosses crimp profits because they decrease worker productivity – you can’t make it personal if bosses and workers are going to be sitting together. 

It’s a much different situation if it’s a group of professional managers, say, who don’t predominately know each other.  Then, you can get them talking about bad bosses and productivity and they’ll relish the chance to dish. 

On a host of levels, you can’t intelligently address an audience until you know whether or not the participants are acquainted. 

The first question you should ask when preparing a presentation is, who’s my audience?  But that question requires more than a one-word answer.  It’s the beginning of an exploration of the exact circumstances of your audience – who, what, when, where, and why – everything about them you can determine. 

Why should you care?  After all, isn’t it a matter of integrity to say the same thing to everybody?  Yes and no.  The message, fundamentally, has to be the same.  But the shape that it takes may need to be entirely different.  Would you use the same words to describe World War II to a group of six-year-olds as you would to a group of adults? 

Let me begin this week of 5 quick blogs on audience in 5 days by talking about why audience size matters – and in ways that you might not expect.

Small audiences (less than 100 people) are easier to interact with, of course, but the mistake that most speakers make is to think that real interaction isn’t possible with a large audience.  So those speakers resort to dumb shout-outs (raise your hand if you like raisins!) with large audiences because they believe that nothing else is possible. 

In fact, audiences both large and small thrive on direct interaction with a speaker.  Don’t be afraid to sally out into that audience of 600 people and have a real conversation with one person here and another person there – on the other side of the audience.  The result makes the room feel small to everyone – in a good way. 

It takes more energy on the part of the speaker, but the results are extraordinary. 

Large audiences are different in two important ways.  First, they want to laugh more than small audiences, so give them a chuckle or two from time to time.  And second, they react more slowly than a small audience, because of the sheer physics of sound waves.  So slow down, and give them time to react.

Next time – what to do when an audience knows each other, and when it doesn’t. 

When you’re standing up in front of a group of people ready to give a modern business presentation, your ancient instincts take over.  Honed over a million years of evolution, your body says to itself I’m in danger!  I must be prepared! thanks to your ancestors’ battles of survival of the fittest from the cave person era.

Here’s what happens, thanks to evolution.  Your muscles tighten, your brain starts working faster, your breathing becomes shallow, your hands get clammy with heat and perspiration – adrenaline is coursing through your system, readying you for a battle that will never come.

And that’s the problem.  Your body language signals to the audience in front of you (the audience dressed in modern business clothes, not the cave people) that you’re defensive, ready to fight.  Because of the mirror neurons we all have in our brains, the audience mirrors your emotions.  It responds with defensiveness of its own.  Both sides of this modern attempt to communicate are being hampered by ancient instincts to fight or flee.

The possibility of open, honest communication breaks down, probably for the duration of the talk, and you haven’t even started yet.  All of this happens in the blink of an eye, unconsciously, before you even have the chance to think about it.  It’s just the bodies in the room communicating with one another.

Another modern business presentation tanks.

In my next blog:  What you can do about it. 

When I’m asked about the secret to good public speaking, my first instinct is to respond, "It's a journey you take the audience on, both intellectual and emotional, involving both content and delivery, and it’s a complex process, an art form, involving lots of moving parts." 

But if I'm pressed for one rule only, it would be this:  have fun. 

That's right -- have fun. 

Could it possibly be that simple? 

Audiences have provisionally given up their authority and bestowed it on the speaker.  They want the speaker to succeed.  Otherwise, they've wasted their time, and who can afford to do that these days?  The best thing the speaker can do is to signal to the audience that he or she is having a good time.  It will let the audience know that it is in good hands.  It can relax and enjoy the experience. 

That creates a virtuous circle -- happy audience, happy speaker -- and those good vibes go a long way toward creating a good experience for all. 

Of course, the hard part about having fun is that most people are nervous when they speak, at least at the start.  So how do you relax and have fun when your heart is hammering away, your palms are clammy, and you're thinking to yourself, I will never, ever agree to do this again?

Focus on the audience.  If you can stop thinking about yourself, and start thinking about the audience, you've got a chance to begin to enjoy yourself.  Remember, a speech is not primarily about you, the speaker.  It's about whether or not the audience is moved to action. 

So relax, forget about you, and have fun.   

A few years back I did a version of these.  Today, I was inspired to update them. 

 

I.  Thou shall speak authentically, from the heart.

 

II.  Thou shall focus on the audience.

 

III. Thou shall not use Power Point as speaker notes.

 

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

 

V.  Thou shall speak with all appropriate passion, and not be boring.

 

VI.  Thou shall tell stories and not kill thine audience with endless data.

 

VII.  Thou shall not make a sales pitch for thy company or thy services.

 

VIII.  Thou shall not begin with talk of thyself.

 

IX.  Thou shall not speak through thy nose, or at the floor, or while advancing thy slides.   

 

X.  Thou shall not exceed thine allotted time.

 

 

(*unless thou is really, really funny.)

 

When you stand up to speak in front of others, you're risking a great deal.  You can fail to engage the crowd, you can make a fool of yourself, you can attempt too little or too much and miss the mark.  And while the risk is almost always greater in your own mind that it is in reality, it is a real risk nonetheless.

Knowledge of that risk is what causes people to play it safe when they’re preparing their presentations.  Ironically, that’s the most dangerous tack to take.  Playing safe means you go for the dull rather than the emotional, the read rather than the conversational, and the preachy rather than the interactive.  All of those choices feel safer and are in fact liable to produce a much worse presentation.  They are choices that close you off to your potential audiences rather than opening you up to them. 

Then, when you get up to speak, you’re thinking to yourself, "Why did I agree to do this?  It could all go horribly wrong!  People are going to think I'm an idiot!" or something along those lines.

The result of that emotional self-talk is a series of behaviors that, alas, tends to increase the likelihood that precisely the feared result will occur.  People who fear failure in speaking are defensive, and that defensiveness shows up in a variety of ways, all bad. 

They may pace nervously -- the familiar 'happy feet' of some speakers.  They may clutch and un-clutch their hands in front of their stomachs.  They may cross their arms, hide their hands behind their backs, or keep their arms firmly fixed to their sides, only waving their forearms, in a characteristic gesture of many business speakers that I call the 'Penguin flap'. 

All of these gestures, and others besides, signal nervousness to the audience.  But more than that, they signal that the speaker is trying to protect himself.  The speaker, in fact, is shutting off part of herself from the audience. 

The result is that the audience begins to feel the same way.  That’s because we have these neurons in our brain called mirror neurons that copy the emotions of the people around us.  When we’re focused on a speaker, and that speaker is behaving as if it’s important to protect himself, we feel danger and want to protect ourselves too. 

The result?  Everyone closes down when it’s most important to be open. 

And it gets worse.  If the audience sense that the speaker is holding back, it will not connect with the speaker – in fact, it will fail to trust him (or her).  The work of shutting down and closing off will wrap up with everyone the opposite of where they should be. 

That's not of course what the speaker intends, but that's the tough luck of public speaking. 

If you're preparing a presentation, then, go for openness. Risk big, rather than playing it safe.  Then, when you’re actually delivering, try to begin right away avoiding self-protection.  Get over yourself and your nerves.  Put your focus on the audience.  Be open to the audience.  If you can manage that, they will carry you and give you back far more energy that you put out. 

The irony is that the best way to protect yourself in public speaking is to give up any thought of self-protection at all. 

Speakers do stupid things, like any other group of people.  The problem is that they subject whole audiences to boredom and, yes, pain as a result.  So it’s not only the speakers themselves who suffer.  In an effort to mitigate the suffering, here are 5 of the most egregious stupid speaker moves.  If you know someone who perpetrates these, tell them!  Stop them!  You’ll be doing the windowless meeting room world a huge favor. 

1.  You Can’t Read This, But…..

As regular readers of this blog will know, one of my particular pet peeves is badly done Power Point.  Well, the worst offense is all too common.  The speaker throws up a slide (I choose the phrase deliberately) and it contains a dozen lines of text, or a chart that has dozens of boxes, labels, and tiny data points.  Then the speaker says, “You can’t read this, but what it’s saying is…..”  If you know we can’t read it, why are you showing it to us?

2.  ‘Guess What’s In My Head’ Questions

There’s a truism in the legal world that you should never ask a witness a question to which you don’t know the answer.  I’m sure that’s good advice, but when you’re working with audiences, you should never ask a class of questions that involve haranguing the audience about things that you know better than they do.  “Why isn’t it a good idea to choose the red ones over the green ones?”  Questions of that sort are “gotcha” questions and they kill audience enthusiasm and participation.  Instead, ask open-ended questions about the audience’s experience.  “Which have you found work better in your life, the red ones or the green ones?”

3.  ‘It’s All About Me’ Introductions 

I have seen an astonishing number of speeches start with the speaker going into a 5 – 10 (15!) minute description of himself and his company.  That’s not only boring, it’s rude.  It’s bad enough in a conversation when someone you’ve just met insists on talking only about himself, but in front of an audience the offense is compounded because the audience has no escape options.  If you’re not going to be introduced by someone else, then begin the talk with a brief frame for why the topic is important to the audience.  Then, once you’ve established what’s in it for them, spend one or two minutes – no more – telling the audience very briefly why you’re passionate about the subject. 

4.  Sales Pitches Disguised as Presentations  

I was at a conference recently where one of my competitors was presenting the afternoon before I had the keynote address.  Naturally, I attended his talk, curious as to what he would talk about, and anxious not to repeat advice if he had already given it.  I was appalled to discover that all he talked about was advertising his business and what clients would get out of working with him.  “This is how our patented method for improving your company’s communications works….”  Once again, this is a rude and thoughtless way to proceed with a captive audience. 

5.  Not Waiting for the Audience

How many times have you sat in an audience and watched a speaker ask a question, only to answer it himself after waiting a nanosecond or two for a response.  Getting none, the speaker plows ahead, creating a perfect feedback loop that entirely eliminates the need for the audience.  Why ask questions if you’re not interested in what the audience thinks?  People often ask me how long they should wait, and the answer is 6 full seconds.  If you count 6 seconds out in your head, by the time you get to the end of that seemingly interminable sequence, someone will speak.  Promise.  Don’t answer your own questions.  You’re just telling the audience it doesn’t need to be there. 

That’s my list for today.  I confess to having committed one or two of these myself, partly why I know them so well.  What stupid speaker tricks have you, ahem, witnessed?  Friends don't let friends make these mistakes!   

For my blog today, I'm pointing to a podcast I did with digital marketing guru Mitch Joel.  He's always interesting to talk to -- you can check out the results here.  Enjoy!

What are the 5 most important quick ideas for improving your public speaking?  I’m going to go for broke this week and blog on 5 quick takes in 5 days.  Put them together and you should have a good ‘cheat sheet’ for fulfilling your resolution to improve your public speaking in 2012. 

5.  Make your speaking personal – talk to individuals.  Many people have been told to talk the foreheads of the audience, or look just over their heads.  That’s the wrong approach.  But don’t just make eye contact.  When trying to use that advice, most people find their eyes darting all over the room.  That makes you look furtive. 

Instead, focus on real individuals in turn, and talk to each one as if you were having a conversation with them.  How long you spend with each person depends on the topic, where you are in the talk, and a host of other issues.  But if you talk to one person for 30 seconds to a minute or so, and then move on to the next one, that’s good starting practice.  And pick people in different places in the audience, so that you bring everyone in and make the room feel small.  If you’re willing to walk around a bit, you can make even an audience of 500 or 1,000 people seem small. 

There you go.  5 days, 5 ideas, 5 quick ways to improve your speaking this year.  Good luck and here’s to better speaking in 2012. 

What are the 5 most important quick ideas for improving your public speaking?  I’m going to go for broke this week and blog on 5 quick takes in 5 days.  Put them together and you should have a good ‘cheat sheet’ for fulfilling your resolution to improve your public speaking in 2012. 

4.  In delivery, don’t fall into the Power Point Triangle of Death.  I have seen so many speakers, even confident, highly paid speakers, talk to their slides instead of the audience.  It’s a dead giveaway that the speaker is using the slides as speaker notes, and it’s a nearly unforgiveable sin.  Here’s what happens.  The speaker stands between the computer and the screen, forming a triangle.  Then, all of his motions and gestures are confined to that triangle, and are not focused on the audience.

Why is that bad?  Because we’re only interested in motion toward (or away from) us.  Motion by the speaker that is toward the screen or a random computer causes us to check out.  If you don’t think this is the case, watch how interested you are when someone half-turns away from you, or gives you the ‘cold shoulder’.  You check out; you can’t help it.  Same thing is happening to your audience if you’re not always moving toward them, and away when you are changing the subject or moving to a new topic. 

Learn your slides so that you don’t talk to them, or your computer.  Talk to the audience.  Always.

What are the 5 most important quick ideas for improving your public speaking?  I’m going to go for broke this week and blog on 5 quick takes in 5 days.  Put them together and you should have a good ‘cheat sheet’ for fulfilling your resolution to improve your public speaking in 2012. 

2.  Don’t do Q and A at the end.   Most people who have an hour speaking slot talk for 45 minutes or so and then take questions.  Here’s the problem with that.  People’s attention spans last about 20 minutes, by most measures, so by 45 minutes, you’ve taken your audience through 2 attention cycles and haven’t given it a chance to respond or clear up any confusions.  And once the questions do come, you’re at the mercy of the questioners.  The session ends, not with your brilliant, prepared thoughts, but with the last dumb question some yo-yo finally dredges up.

Instead, stop for questions at 20 minutes and 40 minutes.  Then, if you wish, give people one last chance to ask questions at 50 minutes, but save 5 minutes of your speech to finish with, so that you deliver a killer close and control the ending, which is what the audience remembers best. 

Over the years I’ve learned that there are no cosmic rules in Public Speaking.  There are answers to challenges and speaking problems – and then better answers.  But the mistakes most people make come from silly rules they’ve learned long ago, half-remembered, and applied incorrectly.

That said, there are tips that, judiciously applied, will make your life better as a public speaker particularly when responding to speaking crises.  And particularly around the holidays, when you may find yourself giving the occasional last-minute speech, or toast, or standing in for someone who is unable or unwilling to hold forth.  The opportunities for things going wrong seem to multiply at such times.   

So here, in the spirit of holiday giving, and in no particular order, are some of my favorite secrets from a quarter-century in the public speaking business as a coach and a speaker myself.  Most of these I’ve learned the hard way, through mistakes, embarrassment, and pain – some of it mine.   

1.  Don’t take on a technical problem alone.   If something goes wrong, and you think you alone have to fix it, the seconds it takes to do so will seem like eons.  And if you can’t fix it, you’re toast.  Instead, bring the audience in on it.  “Are there any computer experts in the room?”  That sort of question will get you at least 3 engineers dying to help.  Then, it’s everyone’s problem, not just yours.

2.  If the audience is much smaller than expected, throw away your script and make it a conversation.  Give a brief version of your talk and then go to Q n A.  Talk it up, say, “this gives us a chance to get into a deeper discussion about what’s really on your minds.”  Which leads me to….

3.  Have a 3- and 20-minute version of your talk ready to go, in addition to the long one.  You will run into the situation where your host comes up to you and says, “we’re running a half-hour late and the chef can’t hold the soufflés.  You’re going to have to get done in 30 minutes.”  This is your chance to be gracious and play the hero.  Smile and wrap it up in 20, leaving 10 for Q n A.

4.  Ignore the negative people in the audience.  Play instead to the nodders and smilers.  Most speakers want to be loved, and so they will inevitably try to win over the few negative audience members.  This is the wrong choice, because of those things we have in our heads called mirror neurons.  They fire when we see someone near us experiencing an emotion, especially someone the speaker is focusing on.  So if you fixate on the negative people, the folks around them will feel the same negative emotions.  You’ll actually increase the negative feeling in the room.  Instead, find the nodders and smilers and focus on them – you’ll soon win everyone over.  Which leads me to….

5.  If you have a heckler who won’t shut up, go to him and stand facing the same way as he is sitting, right next to him or just behind him.  This will silence all but the most psycho of hecklers.  And you won’t have to say a word. 

6.  Don’t save Q n A to the end.  Instead, take questions 20 and 40 minutes in, then wrap up, take a few more questions, and finish with a strong close.  The reason for this is that attention spans last about 20 minutes, so it’s a good way to refresh your audience.  And finishing with a strong close means that the last thing your audience hears won’t be some random question, but your stirring conclusion. 

7.  If someone asks a question, the most important response is to repeat the question, clarifying it for the whole audience.  This gives you a little more time to come up with a good answer.  And it means that the whole audience will be involved.  And it flatters the questioner.   If you can (correctly) identify the emotion underlying the question, the audience will find you particularly insightful, no matter what answer you provide.  “What I hear you saying is that you’re frustrated by the lack of organic yak milk available in grocery stores today, is that correct?”

8.  Acknowledge the elephant in the room.  Immediately.  Whatever goes wrong, the audience will be on your side and help you solve it, if you acknowledge the problem right away.  If you don’t, the audience will stop listening to you and start wondering about the problem – how long will it last, how bad is it, how is it like other similar problems – etc.  You’ll lose them. 

9.  Finish a little bit early.  No audience ever wished that a speaker ran long, and many applaud a shorter talk.  Especially as the day goes on, audience’s attention spans wane.  After dinner, and with drinks, you shouldn’t talk for more than 12 minutes, max. 

10.  Close with “thank you” – and wait for the audience to applaud.  A ‘thank you’ signals the end of a speech.  So, if they do applaud – and they will, if you say ‘thank you’ – then acknowledge the applause and wait it out.  Don’t leave with an audience still clapping furiously – they’ll feel cheated.  Clapping is an audience’s way of giving something back to the speaker.   Let them do it. 

What have you learned?  What are your hard-won secrets for success under duress?  Again, in the spirit of the season, I’ll give away a free copy of my first book to the runner-up, and a free copy of my latest to the winner of the best tips you post in the comments or send to me via email. 

Dacher Keltner studies embarrassment, that moment when you feel, as he says, in a recent interview in the Boston Globe, “This is the worst moment of life. I have just given a talk with my zipper down, or I’ve just called this guy by the wrong name, or I farted in my yoga class.” (You can see the full interview here: http://b.globe.com/vmsB5W.)  What he’s learned is surprising, and has an important lesson for public speakers and communicators everywhere.

What happens when we get embarrassed is that we feel shame for the initial faux pas, then we blush, and then we get embarrassed that we’re showing signs of being embarrassed.  There’s a double jeopardy going on, especially if we think everyone has seen the blush as well as the initial incident.  And so the moment feeds on itself. 

Especially in a public setting, it can be difficult to get back on track, as your mind returns to the incident, and the blush, again and again.  One of my most embarrassing moments as a speaker (out of many) came a number of years ago when I was presenting in the UK for the first time.  I had some videos to show (this was the VHS era) and I couldn’t get the videos to work.  The audience was mostly engineers and IT experts, and it didn’t take them long to sort out the problem:  the incompatibility of the US and UK video formats.  The embarrassment came when I realized that the audience realized that I had been completely unaware (until that awful moment) that there were different formats.  How could I be so stupid, so clueless, so unaware?  I blushed, and for the rest of the talk replayed in my head the moment of my realization, and my ignorance.

Afterwards I did the only possible thing:  I repaired to the bar and downed a few glasses of Guinness, accompanied by members of the audience who were only too glad to toast my ignorance.

It turns out I shouldn’t have worried so much.  What Keltner has found is that embarrassment displays indicate the overall goodness of the “embarrassee” – and the witnesses know this.  So when we witness you being embarrassed, we like you better, trust you more, and are more likely to cooperate with you. 

In short, being embarrassed means that you’re human, and we like you better for it.  So don’t dread those moments of embarrassment as a speaker or a communicator – they’re doing good things for you with your audience. 

For my blog today I'm pointing to a recent article in Success magazine on virtual meetings.  In it, I offer 5 tips for a successful meeting.  Enjoy!  http://bit.ly/nhmOv2

For my final podcast based on Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, I talk about the 4th step in the communications series I discuss in the book:  Listening.  Too little listening is going on among us today, and when it does happen, it's often at a superficial level.  Here, I discuss how to listen at a profound level that will bond you strongly to the person you're communicating with. 

 

Trust Me Podcast 10

In this, the 3rd podcast in the series from Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, I focus on the 4 steps of the title -- how to align your body language and content for effective communication.  The podcast lasts about 5 minutes.  Enjoy!

Trust Me Podcast 3

 

 

The bad news:  there are thousands of presentations every day, everywhere around the world.  Most of them use Power Point, badly, as speaker notes, with more words or numbers on each slide than anyone can read. 

The results are predictably boring – no, excruciating  -- for their hapless audiences.  That’s human misery on a massive scale. 

The good news:  in an effort to make the world a better place, here are 10 things to do instead of Power Point.  Ways to make your points without the sleep-apnea-inducing effects of boring slides.  Ways to pep up your presentations without much additional effort.  Your audiences will thank me.

1.  Use props.  For most workers, in a cubicle world, it’s sensory deprivation from 9 – 5.  The whirr of computers and the A/C.  The hum of colleagues chattering away.  The beige walls of the cube farm.  The fluorescent lighting.  It’s amazing anyone stays awake.  Offer the audience, then, something physical.  Instead of describing that new product on a slide, show them a prototype.  Pass it around.  Let the audience get physical.

2.  Use music.  We have an emotional response to music which is much more powerful than we do to most words.  Especially words like “3rd Q results” and “product optimization.”  So add a soundtrack to your presentation.  It will bring it to life.  Do obey copyright and licensing laws, please. 

3.  Use video.  Video –good video -- has all the life in it that static slides lack.   A good clip can enchant, move, and thrill and audience in 60 seconds.  You can create the right emotional atmosphere to begin or end a speech – or to pick it up in the middle. 

4.  Use a flip chart.  Create any visuals you need right there in front of the audience.  No need for technology.  Just a magic marker and your arm.  The act of creation draws the audience in where a slide doesn’t. 

5.  Ask the audience.  Of course, the best way to draw the audience in is to draw them in.  Ask them to tell you their stories – as they relate to the topic at hand.  Ask the whole audience or just selected volunteers. 

6.  Ask the audience – 2.  Break the audience up into small groups and get them to respond to a challenge that you set, a question that you ask, or a problem that you pose.  Then have them to report back to the whole group. 

7.  Ask the audience – 3.  Play a game with the audience – relevant to the topic.  Award prizes.  Audiences love to compete.  Just don’t make the questions too difficult or the prizes too expensive – or too cheap.  Only Oprah gets to give away cars. 

8.  Ask the audience – 4.   Get the audience to design something – new products, plans, or ideas.  Give them plenty of paper, sticky notes, ipads, or whatever you have on hand that they can play with. 

9.  Ask the audience – 5.  Have the audience create video responses to what you’re talking about.  Hand out a dozen flip cams and get them in groups.  Give them a limited amount of time – 10 minutes, perhaps.  Then show some of the video to the whole group on the big IMEG screen. 

10.  Combine any 3 of these to create huge audience buzz.   Stop thinking of a presentation as a static activity where you show slides to a catatonic group of fellow humans.  You passive, them active.  Instead, treat them as co-conspirators in something exciting, educational, and fun. 

Every communication, and so every presentation, ultimately has to be 2-way to have integrity and to feel authentic.  That means that you should involve your audiences in your presentations -- and not just at the end in Q and A.  That's so 20th century!  In this podcast, based on my book Give Your Speech, Change the World, I talk about 4 ways to involve your audience with real client examples for each.  It lasts about 8 minutes.  Enjoy!

 

 

For podcast #3, I've put all my best tips from 2 decades of coaching into a top ten list.  The podcast is 7 minutes -- but you'll get a lot out of it!  Enjoy. 

 

 

10 tips - Podcast 3

 

I spoke last week to an Air Force Special Ops team, and to a pharmaceutical company, about persuasive communications.   Today, I’m talking to a group of Harvard mid-career students from all over the world about the same subject.   Each time I talk I spend some time making sure I understand their particular issues in the realm of communications, so that the advice I give them is focused. 

What’s fascinating is that such different groups often face the same challenges – in different guises, of course – across professions, fields, age, gender, culture and global divides.   In particular, I see three issues that come up over and over again.

1.  Lack of Authenticity 

When you experience a lack of authenticity, it’s because the messenger isn’t one with the message.  You’re saying the words, but you don’t believe what you’re saying.   That’s always been difficult to carry off – and why would you try? – but it’s even more difficult now.  

One of the unintended consequences of an interconnected world is that it has become much harder to deliver inauthentic messages anywhere.  People are too hip, too quick, and too connected to be fooled.  From the protestors demanding freedom in the Arab world to patients asking about the efficacy of a drug, to students worldwide, you can’t give them oversimplifications, half-truths and distortions.   They’ll smoke you out. 

It’s now a transparent world, and our communications have to become truly authentic in response. 

2.  Lack of Connection 

The second problem I see is a lack of connection with the audience.  You’re passionate about your message, but you haven’t taken the time to understand what the particular needs of specific audiences are.  One size never fits all.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that if you take the time to understand each audience, you will begin to see the common elements that tie them together. 

All communications, like politics, is local. 

3.  Lack of Passion

The third problem that comes up over and over again is lack of passion.  For a variety of reasons, the communicator isn’t delivering his or her news with the passion necessary to get the message to stick.  Once we’re open to you, and we see that you’re authentic, only your passion will keep us focused on you.  There’s simply too much going on today in our lives, and in the world, to listen to anyone who isn’t completely passionate about what he or she does.

Get passionate or go home. 

What am I missing?  What problems do you see with communications in your work?  What comes up again and again? 

 

For my blog today, I'm connecting to a podcast I did with Connie Dieken on her Influential Leaders blog.  Connie is super smart and does her homework and we had a great conversation about leadership and why leaders today need authenticity above any other quality.  The link will take you to Connie's blog, and links to both the podcast and a pdf of the transcript are right there.  Enjoy, and thanks, Connie!

 

Virtual meetings are both a necessity in these straitened times -- and a curse.  Once you cut out the visual elements of meeting face-to-face, the interpersonal bandwidth shrinks from fast to dial-up.  But there are ways to make virtual meetings more productive.  Today, I'm linking to a blog I did yesterday for HBR.org on making virtual meetings a little more useful.  Enjoy!

Does the size of an audience matter to you, the speaker?  Should you do something different if your audience is large or small?  What about if you’re prepped for a big turnout and you only get six people?  Or you’re prepared for 100 and 250 people show up for an SRO event?  What then?

OK, size does matter, but not in the way you’re probably thinking.  Let’s get the misconceptions out of the way first. 

You can – and should – still be interactive with an audience even if it’s large.  I often work with speakers who are used to audiences of, say, 35 – 100, and are just facing the prospect of 300+ audiences.  They tend to assume that the interactivity they’ve gotten used to in the smaller audience won’t work with the larger one.  So, they want to know, what do I do instead? 

The answer is that you continue to be interactive.  Virtually everything that works in an audience of 35 will work with an audience of 350 or even one of 1000 – you just have to work much harder to put more energy out, to ensure that the directions are much clearer, and that you allow much more time.  It’s a larger ship and it takes longer to turn it. 

To be sure, you may have to simplify some exercises a bit, but surprisingly little.  The main idea to keep in mind is that you have to still think of yourself as speaking with a few people.  You’re still having a conversation. 

I once gave a speech on teaching to graduate students who were going to be teaching for the first time.  We expected maybe 50 students to show up.  500 arrived.  I decided on the spot to keep to my plan, which was heavily interactive.  I waded into the audience and had one-on-one conversations.  It worked beautifully, because I kept the 2 rules of interactivity in mind:

You must have no doubt that the audience will respond.   When I waded into that audience, I was not going to allow the audience to sit on their hands.  I demanded (and got) a response.  That’s the mindset you have to have. 

Whatever the audience does give you is wonderful.   This second rule is of course true of audiences large and small.  The things people think of to say or ask on the spot are not always earth-shattering.  No matter.  Treat them with the respect due the courage that it took to speak up. 

OK, so what about an audience that is different in size from the one you’re expecting?  What do you do?

If the audience is smaller than expected, be prepared to throw out your prepared remarks.  Audiences can get uncomfortable if they think they’ve decided to attend a presentation where few other people show up.  They fear that the speech is going to be a disaster for some reason, and they didn’t get the word.  So acknowledge the ‘elephant in the room’ and make a virtue of it.  “I love that there are 7 really dedicated people here!  You must really care deeply about (the topic)!  Let’s just have a conversation and make sure that we answer all your questions!” 

If the audience is larger than expected, be prepared to adjust your technique.  It sounds like a nice problem to have, right?  But in fact an audience that is bulging at the seams can cause real problems.  The folks in the back might not be able to hear you, the standees are going to feel put upon because they have to stand, some people may not be able to see your visual aids, and so on.  Here, you need to be sensitive about what’s going on in the room and make a huge effort to accommodate everyone.  Repeat what you’re saying for people in the back.  Offer to stop and let some people go half-way through if they want to so that they’re not exhausted by the chore of standing for an hour.  Explain your visuals, or find some way to distribute them -- after the fact, perhaps.  Whatever the difficulties are, be sensitive to them and offer your audience help to the extent possible.  Attendees will deeply appreciate the courtesy and will reward you with their devotion. 

Overall, a large audience is different from a small one.   Large audiences move more slowly, take in your wonderful insights more slowly, and respond more slowly than small ones.  You have to wait for them.  Large audiences want to laugh and have a good time.  You shouldn’t pander, but you should be prepared to relax and have a laugh – at your expense, if necessary. 

You need to put out more energy for a larger audience.  You need to work the room even more vigorously, and make sure that you’re talking to everyone, including the back row, not just the first few rows of seats.  And finally, you need to focus your passion even more clearly so that your message travels the larger distance to the wonderfully big audience. 

What are your experiences with audience size?  Share your insights and stories in the comments. 

“The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.” An old friend of mine, a speechwriter, used to say that to me. He meant it as a challenge. It was his way of saying that, if you’re going to take all the trouble to prepare and deliver a speech, make it worthwhile. Change the world.

Otherwise, why bother? Preparing speeches, giving speeches, and listening to speeches—each of these activities is fraught with peril. The opportunities for failure are many, and for success correspondingly few. An oft-quoted study suggests that executives would rather die than speak. Of all their fears, public speaking is number one, and death comes much further down the list, just before nuclear war. That must explain why they often put off the task of preparing speeches to the last minute—or give the task to someone else.  

If speechmaking is hard work for presenters, it’s also hard work for their audiences. Most business presentations are dreadful—boring, platitudinous, and delivered with a compelling lack of enthusiasm. 

People don’t remember much of what they learn from speeches—something on the order of 10 to 30 percent. With some business talks I’ve attended, that failure rate must be close to 100 percent. How many presentations have you sat through where your mind started wandering a few minutes into the talk and never really came back? Where you surreptitiously picked up your smartphone and started planning your calendar for the next millennium or two? Where you ended up more familiar with the number of acoustic tiles in the ceiling than the number of points in the outline of the speech?

So why do we bother? We bother giving speeches because of the opportunities they offer presenters with passion and a cause. There is something profound about gathering a group of people together in a hall and giving them the full force of your ideas presented live and in person. There is something essential about the intellectual, emotional, and physical connections a good speaker can make with an audience, something that cannot happen on the printed page. There is something powerful about the chemistry that happens in the moment of contact that no other medium can reproduce.

It’s what I call the kinesthetic connection. It’s something I’ve observed in over 25 years of teaching and coaching public speaking. When it happens, it’s powerful. When it’s missing, everyone feels it—even the hapless speaker.

Why People Will Always Give Speeches

We still need speeches. We need them to move audiences to action. People may learn to believe in your expertise from the printed page. But they will only be moved to action if they come to trust you from hearing and seeing you offer a solution to a problem they have. That kind of trust is visceral as well as intellectual and emotional, and it only comes from presence.

From the audience’s point of view, we still need to validate our impulse to action by seeing our champions, to test the sense of their messages and the integrity of their beings. Partly, we’re reading their nonverbal messages, those gestures and habits that we learn to interpret unconsciously for the most part, the ones that tell us something about the credibility and courage of the presenter. Partly, we’re testing to see if they can structure and present their ideas coherently in real time, abilities that tell us about how articulate and organized they are. And partly, we’re watching to see if we can find some sense of common humanity in the speaker, in order to make common cause with that speaker’s passion.

When Roger Mudd asked Ted Kennedy, on 60 Minutes in 1980, why he wanted to be president, Senator Kennedy famously fumbled the answer. Millions of Americans watched Kennedy at close hand, thanks to the eye of the camera, and judged his incoherent, rambling answer to lack credibility. The campaign was over almost before it began. Kennedy had changed the world—not in the way he intended, perhaps, but inescapably and irretrievably nonetheless. Potential backers slunk away from the Kennedy camp. Potential workers joined other campaigns. Potential voters resolved to find another candidate. And all of that happened through the faux-familiarity of television. Imagine how much more devastating it would have been in person. 

Does changing the world seem like a daunting challenge? There’s good news buried in the challenge. With a powerful, audience-centered presentation, you can change the world. And that goes whether you’re talking to a small group of employees or colleagues—or a keynote audience of thousands. The principles are the same. 

And there’s more good news to come: Regardless of how good you are now, you can learn how to give a better speech, one that makes a kinesthetic connection with your listeners. One that creates a sense of trust in you and moves them to action.

You Need to Listen to Your Audience

At the heart of this connection lies a counterintuitive truth: the secret to forming a strong bond between you and the people in the audience is to listen to them—from the very beginning.

Wait a minute, you say. I’m the one that has to do the talking. How can I listen to them? And what do you mean by kinesthetic? You’ve already used that word twice.

The answers to these questions are related. Let’s take the easy one first. Kinesthetic means being aware of the position and movement of the body in space. And to listen to the audience, you need to listen (and to show you’re listening) with your whole body. To give a simple example, consider the nervous executive in front of the shareholders for an annual meeting. He has some less-than-spectacular numbers to report, and everyone knows it. He’s prepared for the worst. He begins his talk with a curt, “Good morning,” arms folded, staring tensely over the audience members’ heads, looking into the middle distance, trying not to acknowledge the anger he sees in front of him. He immediately launches into a defensive talk aimed at minimizing the damage and second-guessing what the audience might ask him.

Not a pretty picture. Contrast that with a different executive in a similar pickle. She knows the meeting is going to be tough, but she’s ready. She stands up in front of the shareholders, smiles, and asks, “How are you?” Her arms are comfortably open at her sides. And she waits for a couple of seconds, making eye contact with at least one of the audience members on the right hand side of the room. Then she asks, no longer smiling, raising her eyebrows to invite response, “Are you angry about last year’s numbers? [Pause. Looking at someone else, on the left, now.] You have every right to be. We’re as disappointed as you are. Let’s talk about them. What’s on your mind?”

Not many chief executives would have the guts, frankly, to take the second approach. But which company would you rather hold stock in?

The second executive is well on the way to giving an audience-centered speech. She’s going to find kinesthetic moments to connect with her audience, and she’s begun by actually listening to them—reading their entire range of responses, including the nonverbal—from the start.
Indeed, even in this simplified example, the key to success is in making those rhetorical questions real. When you ask, “How are you?” of an audience, wait to see how some members of that audience actually are. Don’t continue until you’ve learned the answer, either verbally or nonverbally. It’s a small but vital way to begin an audience-centered talk. Success in public speaking is made up of a myriad little moments of connection like that.

And one big thing: charisma. That’s the magic quality, isn’t it? The one that everyone craves. And yet charisma doesn’t come from doing something difficult or esoteric that it takes years to master (and lots of expensive advice from speech coaches like me). We know now, thanks to the communications research of the last thirty years, what charisma is. Quite simply, it’s focused expressiveness.

Expressiveness is the willingness to be open to your audience, both verbally and nonverbally. To show how you feel about your subject. To get past nervousness and self-consciousness and get to the stuff that you care about, and give that to the audience. That’s why they call it “giving a speech.” If you can unlock your own passion about the subject, and give that to the audience, in a focused way, you will be charismatic. The audience will not be able to take its eyes off you.   

And so we’re back to audience-centered speaking, and kinesthetics. The only reason to give a speech is to change the world. You accomplish that by moving your audience to action. To do that, you have to be willing to listen to the audience, and to give it your passion. To get to that happy state, you need to find kinesthetic connections with the audience.

That’s audience-centered speaking in a paragraph. It’s a simple as that.
   
And lest you think that when I say “changing the world” I’m only talking about the big speeches (the ones that CEOs give to shareholders, for example) understand that I’m talking about every speech ever given. These principles apply to all public speaking, whether to five thousand people or five, for a grand public occasion or simply a regular meeting to report on 3Q numbers. After all, if you give a brilliant, inspiring, audience-centered presentation about those 3Q numbers, you will change the attitudes of your team in the room with you. And if you change their attitudes, you just might change their behavior. And if you change their behavior, you’ve changed the world in the only way that counts. 

So that’s my wish for you in 2011:  that you’ll start changing the world with every speech or presentation you give. 
   

This is the final installment in a week on selling and communication.  Five days, five tips.  Put all of these to work and I guarantee you improved results for virtually any kind of selling. 

Involve your customer with small steps to get them comfortable to take the bigger ones. 

It’s imperative that you don’t do all the work in the sales process.  If you keep your clients passive, don’t be surprised when it’s hard for them to suddenly get active and agree to close the sale.  Too many salespeople think that it’s all up to them.  But the real secret is to get the customer working on the deal too.  Begin with little steps, steps that don’t involve big commitments, and then work up from there. 

In the 1987 comedy Tin Men, 1960s-era aluminum siding salesman Richard Dreyfuss initiates a younger protégé into the magical world of sales.  In one call on a housewife, Dreyfuss drops a dollar bill on the floor, and allows the housewife to pick it up for him.  He explains to the initiate that he can tell whether or not he’s going to get a sale with this trick.  If the housewife picks up the bill, she’s a nice person and can be talked into aluminum siding.  If she doesn’t, she won’t be won over.

The psychology is right, but the execution is wrong.  Dreyfuss should have been seeking to create a real relationship with his customers, rather than just exploiting them.  And by getting them involved, not in sneaky tests of their malleability, but in genuine steps along the road to the sale, he would have increased the amount of aluminum siding gracing the houses of Baltimore. 

Take your clients from passive to active.  Involve them in the process.  Don’t do all the work. 

What are your communications sales secrets?  Let me know, and I’ll put the best ones in a follow up blog. 

Here are the 5 communications sales tips in an easy list:

1. It’s not about your product, it’s about listening to your customer’s need.  

2. It’s not about eye contact; it’s about personal space. 

3. To close a sale, you need to first establish two things with your customer:  credibility and trust. 

4. Closing a sale is all about understanding the customer’s decision-making process.

5. Involve your customer with small steps to get them comfortable to take the bigger ones. 

What would you add to the list? 

 

I’m doing a week on selling and communication.  Five days, five tips.  Put all of these to work and I guarantee you improved results for virtually any kind of selling. 

Closing a sale is all about understanding the customer’s decision-making process.

Where are your clients or customers when they get in touch with you? 

Are they happy with the product they have, but want to be reassured that they made the right decision? 

Or are they in the throes of the problem, uncertain of which way to go, looking for answers? 

Or have they already decided on a course of action, and are basically looking for you to take the order? 

Each of these states of mind requires very different handling; it’s axiomatic that you need to understand your customers clearly in order to be able to talk to them effectively. 

Customers in the first stages of decision-making just need help with framing the problem.  Less information is better.  Just give them a statistic, or a very brief verbal portrait of what the future might look like.  Do you realize that the 2011 version of the Fabulator uses half the energy of its predecessors? 

Customers deep in the problem want information – comparisons, data, detail.  This stage is where all that product or service knowledge you have is actually useful.  Don’t go to the point of eyes glazing over, but do satisfy the urge for information.  Both models will get the job done, but the Fabulator-B is smaller and quieter, not to mention faster operating. 

And clients who have already made up their mind will appreciate some visualizing of the benefits, but very little else.  They don’t want to be slowed down, so don’t make it hard for them to buy.  You’ve made a great choice.  The Fabulator Supreme will take care of all your issues and also make you a spectacular cup of morning coffee.  Now let’s get that paperwork out of the way. 

That’s why it’s so important to listen to your customers before you launch into any kind of explanation.  If you don’t know where they are, you can’t point them to where they should be going. 

I’m doing a week on selling and communication.  Five days, five tips.  Put all of these to work and I guarantee you improved results for virtually any kind of selling. 

To close a sale, you need to first establish two things with your customer:  credibility and trust. 

To succeed with an audience, or a customer, you need to establish credibility first and trust second.  Credibility comes first, because that’s what happens when you show that you understand the customer’s problem.  Trust comes second, because that’s what you establish when you solve that problem. 

Failing either one, your relationship with the client or customer won’t be durable.  Without credibility, you’ll find that your customer will be likely to go elsewhere in search of expertise, even if they trust you as a human being.  Do you really understand my paint color issues?  Without trust, a client will be tempted to mine you for expertise, and then go make the ultimate purchase from someone else.  Will you really follow through on the after-sale? 

How do you establish these two key aspects of a relationship?  Begin by listening to the customer’s problem.  Show that you understand it as well or better than the client does, and you’ll create credibility.  She gets that I loathe chartreuse!  Finally, someone who knows something about paint!

Then, show how you can solve that problem.  You’ll forge a strong bond of trust with that client when you take away the point of pain that sent them to the marketplace in the first place.  That shade of lavender will be perfect for the room. 

Credibility and trust.  The two key ingredients for a strong, enduring relationship with a customer. 

I’m doing a week on selling and communication.  Five days, five tips.  Put all of these to work and I guarantee you improved results for virtually any kind of selling. 

It’s not about eye contact; it’s about personal space. 

Of course eye contact is important to communicating – and selling.  But it’s not as important as most people seem to think.  The exquisite dance of eye contact between two people who are talking to one another is largely regulated by our unconscious minds.  The point is to signal – along with a symphony of other gestures – when one person is done or almost done and the other person should start talking.  It’s only noticed when one person indulges in too much – or too little – eye contact.  Then it interferes with the regulation of the conversation. 

It’s like catching the eye of a waiter.  A good waiter makes it effortless; the harried or incompetent make it difficult. 

More important to communication and to sales is the amount of space between the two people.  We all have incredibly sensitive monitoring capabilities keeping constant track of where we – and everyone else – is in space.  It’s for obvious safety reasons, it’s mostly unconscious, and it works very well. 

We monitor four zones of space.  Twelve feet or more is public space – and our unconscious brains don’t pay much attention to that, because that means that people are far enough away that we have time to react. 

Twelve feet to four feet is social space.  That’s warmer, and our brains are now paying attention, but it’s still a cool relationship.  Things heat up in personal space – four feet to a foot and a half.  And things get really hot in intimate space – a foot and a half to zero. 

Here’s what’s important about that:  The only significant things that happen between people happen in personal and intimate space.  As a sales person, you can’t go into intimate space, usually, so here’s the takeaway – to close a sale you must get into the personal space of the client/customer.  It’s why car salespeople spend so much time shaking your hand – they want to build your trust by getting into your personal space repeatedly.  Good tactic, just a bit overdone. 

For the rest of us, a successful sale involves the delicate art of creating trust without pushing it.  Use personal space subtly and tactfully and you’ll accomplish this with style.  Let the eye contact take care of itself, unless you’re the Rainman. 

I’m going to do a week on selling and communication.  Five days, five tips.  Put all of these to work and I guarantee you improved results for virtually any kind of selling. 

It’s not about your product, it’s about listening to your customer’s need.  

Most salespeople know that they should listen to the client, but too few of them do, and usually not soon enough.  And they don’t listen in the right way.  You should be listening for the underlying messages more than the superficial ones.  What emotion is the (potential) customer putting forward?  Excitement about a new purchase?  Fear about a new technology?  Resistance to change?  Resentment at the old product? 

What’s memorable – and important to people – in communication is emotion; that’s what you should be listening for and responding to, not just the expressed content.  If you acknowledge a client’s emotions, and figure out an appropriate way to respond to them, you’ll be his favorite salesperson in no time. 

Begin by reflecting back the basic messages.  “So what I hear you saying is that you’re in the market for a new flibbertigibbet, is that right?”  Once you get the basics settled, then move on to the emotions.  Ask questions to elicit them, like, “Were you sorry to see the old one go, or was it good riddance to bad rubbish?”

Keep it light; this is a sale, not therapy.  But don’t duck from stronger emotions if they come up.  Put on your therapist hat and go to work.  Your goal in all this is to be able to complete the following sentence:  “Customer X is in the market for a Y, and she’s Z about it.”  X is the customer, Y is the product, and Z is the customer’s attitude. 

You’ll have time to sell your customer on products, features, and upgrades later.  For now, focus on establishing a connection.  We want to feel that connection is real and strong enough to last through the after-sale (or repeat-sale) care, so don’t rush it or fake it.  Connections between people get established at the surface first, but if they’re to be durable, then they must have emotional glue to hold them together. 

For my blog today, I'm very pleased to announce the 'publication' of a new eBook, "7 Steps to a Great Speech."   The eBook is published by a new venture, New Word City, that has partnered with Starbucks and iTunes to bring new ideas to you in a very convenient digital format.  The book details how to both write and deliver a great speech, in 7 short chapters.  New Word City is charging a small amount for the book.  The venture was started by some really smart refugees from the print world, and I wish them well as they try to figure out new ways of publishing in digital formats.  Let me know what you think!

One of the hazards of speaking in public is that some percentage of the audience will not agree with you.  And some small percentage of that group will express itself physically.  Political figures most often run this risk, but anyone who represents an organization or cause faces a similar risk. 

The most famous of such incidents, at least measured by YouTube views, was former President Bush’s encounter with an Iraqi shoe. 

 

 

President Bush beautifully illustrated the power of the unconscious mind in this incident.  He ducked right on cue, because his unconscious mind was scanning the surroundings looking for danger and trying to keep him safe.  We are capable of monitoring something like 11 million bits of information per second unconsciously.  By contrast, our conscious minds can only handle something like 40 bits per second.  That’s probably why the record of public officials throwing out the first pitch is so dismal:  they’re thinking consciously about what they’re doing. 

 

 

 

 

President Obama recently dodged a book hurled at him by a disgruntled citizen:

 

 

 

Here, it appears that the book was out of his peripheral vision so that he never even saw it. 

Other politicians have not been so lucky:

 

 

 

So, given that there is little your conscious mind can or should do about incoming missiles, is there anything the alert public speaker can do to prepare for this kind of mishap? 

Turn the problem over to your unconscious mind.  If you really think that there’s a risk of brickbats, or rotting vegetables, or shoes coming at you, then as you mount the stage, say to yourself something like, “I am alert and ready to dodge anything thrown at me.”  That’s all you can do.  The alternative, cowering behind a very tall podium, is really not preferable. 

There are two other options to consider.  The first is to create speeches that seriously take in the opposing points of view.  One reason why the populace is so angry and inclined to hurl things at its leaders is that there is precious little dialogue and way too much monologue – and sheer distortion – in the political world today. 

The ancient Greeks derived a structure for a speech for precisely this occasion.  In rhetorical circles, it’s known as the “residues method.”  What you do is set out the issue first, in relatively brief terms, but including the relevant data.  Then, you discuss the alternate points of view – seriously, with respect – without mocking or distorting them.  Take them seriously.  Then, politely point out what you think are the flaws in that reasoning.  Once you’ve discussed the several possible points of view, and rejected them for cogent reasons, what’s left is your point of view – the residue of the argument.  Then you can say why that argument is, in your opinion, the best. 

That method will disarm your opponents because they will feel that at least they’ve been heard.  And disarmed opponents will be less likely to throw things. 

Former President Bush gave a great example of a residues speech that had the intended effect back in 2001 when he discussed the issue of using stem cells in scientific research.  It’s worth studying the speech because it offers a serious discussion of the various sides of the issue – something that seems almost quaint today.  But it had the desired effect, and largely put to rest the political debate about the issue for several years. 

And the other option? 

Hire really great security. 

Technology will fail you.  Audiences will go cold – or fail to show up.  You’ll forget to say something important.  What happens when things go wrong – when you’re staring what seems like failure in the face?  Here are 5 ways to help you recover. 

1. Remember, the audience doesn’t know what you haven’t done or said.

Giving a speech is especially tough for perfectionists – the kind of people who are often asked to give speeches.  Why?  Because you know what you should be doing, or you should have done, and when reality falls short, it’s debilitating.  So try to see it from the audience’s point of view.  If it isn’t wrong in their eyes, it’s not wrong.

2. Enlist the audience’s help with technological problems. 

If you take the burden of solving a technological problem on your shoulders alone, then everyone in the room will be watching you attempt to fix it.  The seconds will seem like eons.  And the audience will rapidly get impatient.  Instead, make it everyone’s problem by asking if there is a really smart, nice technophile in the room.  At least 4 engineers will leap to your rescue and the problem will become everyone’s.  I once had to give a speech at a Harvard Business School event in one of its very high-tech auditoriums.  The speeches were back-to-back that day, and so I had to break my rule of always rehearsing in the room beforehand.  The A/V person was nowhere to be found.  So naturally the sound didn’t work on the videos I wanted to play.  I enlisted the help of a couple of really smart biz school students and the audience as a whole waited patiently with me as they tried to figure out what was wrong.  The students were not able to figure out the problem, and so I gave the speech without the videos.  The audience treated me like a hero, rather than an idiot, because I had carried on without my usual accoutrements. 

3. Be in the moment and remember there are no mistakes. 

It is easy to say and hard to do, but Improv teaches that there are no mistakes, only happy accidents.  This philosophy is fabulous for public speakers.  If you can genuinely stay in the moment and respond to whatever happens with courage and a positive attitude, the audience will love you for it, and forgive you anything that goes wrong – which said audience will probably not notice anyway. 

4. Take a time out and turn the issue over to the audience. 

Sometimes, things go wrong that are apparent to the audience.  There are hecklers, or you go blank, or a person dressed as a gorilla wanders through the hall.  That last actually happened to me once, but that’s another story for another day.  When the glitch is obvious, or you see a train wreck coming, it’s always good to pause and say, “Let me pause here for a moment and take everyone’s temperature.  How are you doing?  What questions do you have for me so far?”  Usually, the several minutes of the time out are enough to get the presentation back on track.

5. If all else fails, throw out the rest of the agenda and go to Q and A.

Just as no one ever complained about a speech that ended early, no one objects to opening up the floor to Q and A.  Of course, the disadvantage is that you’ll most likely lose forward momentum; audiences’ questions meander, circle back, and repeat.  But that’s OK if the audience is engaged.  Just keep a close eye on the energy levels, and cut things off just before the audience starts to flag. 

For an hilarious take on how to cope when Power Point lets you down, here’s a short video from my favorite corporate humorist, Tim Washer.  Enjoy!

 

Most public speaking—especially business speeches and presentations—has never entirely caught up with its audience’s changed expectations. Our ordinary speaking styles have become more conversational, but public speakers haven’t learned to deliver the physical closeness that mirrors the closeness and casualness we see all the time on television.
   
Moreover, the candid personal disclosure that we have grown to expect when we are seemingly so close to a televised speaker (they're in our family rooms and bedrooms) hasn’t become part of public presentations for the most part—especially, again, in business presentations. After all, no self-respecting CEO is about to pattern his or her presentations after the intimacy of Oprah.
   
So we’re left with some clumsy disparities in public oratory. There is the disjunction between the trappings of traditional public speaking—the podium, the large auditorium, the stage, the lighting—and a style of discourse that is now more conversational than declamatory. Even more significant, a yawning gap exists between an audience’s ingrained expectations, shaped by half a century of watching television, and the behavior of most business, educational, and governmental speakers. Even in the relatively intimate setting of a small conference room, the typical speaker is kinesthetically disconnected, though he or she isn’t physically distant from the audience. Instead of occasionally moving toward the audience to establish a personal connection, speakers usually move back and forth between the podium or projector and the screen in a weirdly hypnotic, solipsistic form of what could be called presentational dance – the Power Point triangle of Death. They might as well be talking to themselves. The audience sits watching in suspended animation through this faux-kinesthetic routine until the question-and-answer session at the end, when attendees are offered a brief chance to move and perhaps to speak.
   
Also, while the speaker’s tone may be more conversational these days, the audience’s intuitive expectation of a personal message delivered at close range usually goes unfulfilled. With the lights turned low so that slides can be seen, with little kinesthetic stimulation from the speaker, and with little opportunity for the audience to respond in turn, the crowd will gradually tune out. The overall, if unintended, effect is to disconnect the speaker from the message, the message from the audience, and the audience from action—the main reason for the oratorical effort in the first place.
   
In a word, it’s boring. And it’s boring because medium, style, and message no longer connect. We expect intimacy, like what we see on television, and instead we get poorly structured, unemotional corporate-speak. 
   
Indeed, given the skewed evolution of public speaking content and delivery against the backdrop of the enforced intimacy of modern media, the wonder is that speeches are ever interesting at all. The few speeches that do manage to ignite an audience’s passion are exceptions to a dismal rule of mediocrity.
   
How can we change this sorry dynamic? By learning to develop content that is appropriate to the aural genre of the presentation, by rehearsing it to find the kinesthetic moments—the opportunities for connection with the audience—and by learning how to deliver it in a conversational style that is compelling for audiences today. By developing, in short, the audience-centered rhetoric needed for the twenty-first century.

The first time you give a speech is exciting, unnerving, and inevitably filled with an awkward moment or two.  In the speaker’s mind, disaster lurks around every turn of your pages of notes, or every click of your slides.  Of course, the audience doesn’t know what it hasn’t seen before, so it won’t be anything like as aware of your gaffes as you are.  The trick is not to show your fear, as the surgeon said to the nurse, lest you unnerve the patient. 

I was in California this week giving a speech for the first time, and all my own words from Give Your Speech, Change the World, and Trust Me kept coming back to me.  It was highly annoying.  I had no excuses.  I had to structure the speech properly, I had to rehearse, I had to focus on the audience – or I wouldn’t even be taking my own advice. 

As it happened, inevitably some things did go wrong.  The group was larger than I expected, so the interactive moments I’d planned were more difficult to pull off than I thought they would be.  Chiefly, when I brought a couple of volunteers to the stage to demonstrate some ideas about body language, it took too long to give the volunteers their instructions, and the audience got a bit restive. 

Note to self:  Audience participation is high risk-high reward.  Structure it carefully!

And then I succumbed to my biggest weakness – I love taking questions and having a spirited give-and-take with the audience.  I lost track of the time and didn’t cover as much of my planned outline as I’d intended.  I was able to finish on time, thanks to the big countdown clock thoughtfully provided by the conference organizer, but I eliminated the last couple of points I was going to cover and jumped to the end.  Another time, I’d manage the questions better and cover more. 

Note to self:  you don’t have to answer every single question – your own agenda is important too.

The biggest difference between the new speech and others that I’ve given a number of times, however, is that I didn’t know how the audience was going to react.  With a familiar speech, you know where the audience is at all times and you can adjust on the fly accordingly if necessary.  With a new speech, you don’t know, and so it’s all one big adjustment on the fly.  As a result, it’s much more hit-or-miss than familiar speeches.  And as much as rehearsal helps, you still don’t have much of a sense of how an actual audience will react until you’re in front of one.

Note to self:  know your speech cold, and preferably rehearse it in front of a (friendly) actual audience, even if you have to hire one. 

How was your first time?  Do you have any stories of memorably good or bad first time speeches?

Just finished speaking at the CIO 100 conference, smoothly run by Maryfran Johnson and her team of pros, and I was struck by a question I received near the end of the talk.  The audience and I had been discussing how to keep communication strong even among the young technorati, who are used to having their heads down in laptops, Blackberries, iPhones, and so on.  My answer to that was to use the power of personal space.  When you come within 4 feet (to a foot and a half) of someone, you have his undivided attention – that’s evolution.  And thanks to mirror neurons, the whole audience will feel close to the speaker at the same time.  I've blogged in more depth about this brain research, and written about it in Trust Me. 

The next question focused in on those young technical wizards being used to long distance virtual relationships.  Was something basic changing about the way we form relationships, what were the nature of those relationships, and was the younger set able to invest in these connections the same way that everyone else invests in “real” face-to-face relationships? 

My answer addressed on the nature of trust in the virtual world.  And it seems to me that the short answer is that as trust is different, so these relationships are different, and it’s precisely because of the ways in which we are hard-wired to form connections with people.  Trust in the virtual world is much more fragile, though perhaps easier to establish initially.  But the big difference comes when something threatens the trust. 

In face-to-face relationships where there is trust, one party may do something to screw up, causing friction, anger, and even a bit of mistrust to creep in.  But if the connection is strong enough, the issue will get thrashed out, the perpetrator will apologize, and trust will be restored.  Indeed, once restored, the trust may be stronger than ever.

How different it is in the virtual world!  Once trust is threatened, it’s instantly broken, and it’s virtually impossible to re-establish it.  People simply move on.  Since trust was more fragile in the first place, it shatters with very little provocation. 

I would say that the bigger worry about communications amongst the young technorati is that if most of their relationships are virtual, the fragility of those relationships may make them less able to get through the bumps and shocks that every (face-to-face) relationship naturally endures.  If you take the pattern of commitment from the virtual world, your understanding of the meaning of relationship will be attenuated and weak. 

What do you think about communications and trust in the virtual world?

View more photos of this event.

What can successful musical performers tell us about public speaking?  Having just sat in an uncomfortable seat somewhere around first base in Fenway Park to hear the J. Geils Band and Aerosmith, I’m thinking hard about the lessons that these performers can teach us.  I’ve come up with five so far, and I encourage you to post your own. 

If you haven’t seen either of these two monster rock and roll bands perform, then go to TED.com and check out Nora York, a chanteuse that dwells about as far away from Aerosmith on the musical spectrum as you can get – and yet teaches us some of the same lessons:  http://bit.ly/azWvWQ. 

1.  You’ve got to be willing to put it all out there.   The first thing that unites Steven Tyler, front man for Aerosmith; Peter Wolf, front man of the J. Geils Band; and Nora York, is that they are giving us all they have.  They’re not holding back.  They’re interesting because of that – they’re emotional, they’re occasionally over the top, and they never play it safe.  Too many speakers try to play it safe, and as a result, of course, ironically, they set themselves up for failure.  Ultimately, we want to connect with another human being at a rock concert, or at a speech, and if you’re not ready to connect, you should get off the stage. 

2.  You need to have a unique voice.   No one would ever mistake Steven for Peter for Nora – each is different, with strengths and weaknesses.  Steven Tyler is a huge talent, with a huge ego to match.  Peter Wolf works the crowd harder than the other two.  Nora York engages mind as well as heart in ways that leave the other two gentlemen in the dust.  The point is that they do best by being themselves, 110% of the time, with 150% effort.  Speakers need to do the same.

3.  Every performance needs to have an arc.   So you need to put it all out there, and be unique.  But not all at once, and not from start to finish.  Every speech, every performance, every interaction with the audience, needs to have an arc.  You can start out high octane, like Peter Wolf, and only take it down 20 minutes into the show.  Or you can build more gradually like Steven Tyler.   Or you can recite a poem that links you to ancient traditions and themes, like Nora York.  What you do is part of your voice, and your story.  But performance is an art form with generic demands, not a data dump.  We want first to engage, then build a connection, then go somewhere we’ve never been before, then come home.  Every performance needs to have an arc.

4.  You have to make it all about the audience.   Peter Wolf, of these three performers, works the crowd the hardest.  He was in the left field bleachers before the end of his part of the show.  But Tyler and York work the audience too, just in their own way and with their own story in mind.  Great performers know that an audience is what makes a show possible and they never forget that a communication hasn’t happened unless the audience has got it.  That’s why they call it giving a speech. 

5.  Little human touches are essential – and interaction is huge.  Each of these performers has a band behind them, and part of the way we judge and decide to connect or not with a performer has to do with how they interact with the others that perform with them.  When Nora York was done with her song, she turned to include the other musicians in the applause – a nice, generous move.  Steven Tyler and Peter Wolf both interact constantly with their band mates, even while they’re putting the audience first.  If you’re up in front of an audience solo, then how you react with the person that introduces you, and how you interact with the audience, become even more important.  If you’re part of a team presenting, then it’s a great opportunity to model good behavior and look like the kind of person we’d want to get to know.  (I’ve blogged on how to present as a team before.)  

OK, what else can we learn from rock and roll?  Let’s hear your insights.