Public Speaking Advice and Commentary

Is your non-verbal 'conversation' helping or hurting your career?

How are you showing up?  Is your non-verbal 'conversation' helping or hurting your career?  My partner and I worked with an executive of a major financial institution who had fought his way up from the streets to a top position. When we were brought in to work with him, he had been promoted to a board–level role, and that required that he act in a statesmanlike manner, and as a mentor to others.

He had no idea how to behave in this way. All of his experience had taught him that he had to fight to keep his position and that colleagues were competition. So when he went into a meeting with the board, he behaved the way he always had.

He was close to being fired.

Why?  We quickly discovered what it was that so turned off the board when we had him role-play his executive meetings. He would go into an ever-so-slight defensive crouch, tensing himself, lowering his brows in a suspicious stare that had successfully intimidated many rivals in his earlier days.

He was completely unaware of this closed behavior.  The 360-degree review he had received just after taking the new position had shocked him. He had no idea that people saw him as a nasty guy.

But now he realized that he had to learn a different way to relate to his colleagues. The board had no wish to spar continuously with a defensive, hostile executive; they wanted a colleague.

He had to change.

When we showed him the videotape of his role-play, the moment was transformational. He had had no idea that his body language was signaling defensiveness. His reaction was, “Oh, my god, I look like a punk!”  He knew that he couldn’t look like a punk and continue as a C–suite executive.

That ten-minute video review probably saved his career. 

It gave him the motivation to change, and he slowly but surely learned to open up and become more of a colleague. He adopted a new posture and began to sit up straighter. Gradually he was able to open up his hands and arms. All of this took time and conscious effort before the new behavior became as comfortable and automatic as the old.  But eventually he began to be perceived as the executive and colleague he wanted to be. 

How are you showing up?  Check your non-verbal communication before it undercuts your best conscious efforts to succeed. 

Can you 'thin-slice' listening? Malcolm Gladwell and the Kouroi myth

One of the most pernicious concepts widely circulated about listening is in the otherwise admirable book Blink. Malcolm Gladwell introduces the idea of what he calls ‘thin-slicing’ as a way of talking about how a very small sample can stand for a whole host of evidence under specific circumstances and conditions. Unfortunately, he equates the thin-slicing idea with the expert’s ability to instantly size up, for example, an ancient statue as real or fake because of a myriad clues unconsciously weighed, evaluated, and sorted.

Here is what Gladwell wrote:

In September of 1983, an art dealer by the name of Gianfranco Becchina approached the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. He had in his possession, he said, a marble statue dating from the sixth century b.c. It was what is known as a kouros — a sculpture of a nude male youth standing with his left leg forward and his arms at his side. There are only about two hundred kouroi in existence, and most have been recovered badly damaged . . . . But this one was almost perfectly preserved . . . . It was an extraordinary find. Becchina’s asking price was just under $10 million.  The Getty moved cautiously. It . . . began a thorough investigation. . . .A geologist from the University of California. . .spent two days examining the surface of the statue with a high-resolution stereomicroscope . . . . [He]concluded . . . the statue was old. It wasn’t some contemporary fake . . . .The kouros, however, had a problem. It didn’t look right. The first to point this out was an Italian art historian named Federico Zeri . . . . He found himself staring at the sculpture’s fingernails. In a way he couldn’t immediately articulate, they seemed wrong to him. Other experts weighed in, and the statue was finally judged a fake. The Getty was embarrassed, and the art world has a great story to tell.

What does this have to do with listening? The idea has lodged in the public mind that somehow we can all be expert thin-slicers based on a quick look, a brief listen, a glancing moment of attention. But Gladwell has confused our ability to make snap (because unconscious) nonverbal judgments about the intent of people and the danger quotient of situations we’re thrown in with an expert’s ability, when her learning is profound, to size up something quickly. The result has been that too many people now say, “Just let me thin-slice this.”

The only thing we’re doing there is getting a quick read on our impression of the other person’s intent. We are pretty good at it, but we can certainly be wrong, and it is most emphatically not the same as expertise in a field like art history.  They’re two completely different activities.

The former is almost entirely unconscious and instant, whereas the latter is primarily conscious but drawing on an unconscious sifting of the physical evidence brought to the conscious mind.  And it often is a slow process, where something niggles at the back of the mind for days before the expert is able to become fully aware of what is going on. That is what in fact happens to several of the experts in Gladwell’s fake masterpiece story.  They take weeks to figure out why the statue doesn’t seem real to them or to piece together their analysis, impressions, and unconscious deciphering.

My point is this: we can’t listen to other people by thin-slicing them. Listening takes time. When it is done right, it is primarily an emotional activity and only secondarily intellectual.

Emotions take time to express, be heard, be validated, and so on.  To listen well and deeply to another person, you must quiet your own two conversations, and let your verbal and your nonverbal channels attend to what’s being said to you. Listen with your whole body.

Who's the most powerful person in the room?

Sociologists Stanford Gregory and Stephen Webster of Kent State University conducted some fascinating research into the question of leadership at a very simple level.  They studied interviews on the Larry King Live show and tapes of British politicians and former U.S. presidents. Why this particular grouping of people? Because the issue of power and deference is bound to come up when high-status individuals are involved.

What they studied were the low-frequency sounds (below 500 hertz) that we all utter as we speak. The existence of the sounds themselves was well known to researchers but had been dismissed as irrelevant. Gregory and Webster found that in conversations and meetings, people rapidly match each other’s low -frequency sounds. In short, to have a productive conversation or meeting, we need to literally be on the same wavelength!

It gets more interesting: the researchers found that lower-status people match the higher-status people in the room.  You might expect that everyone would meet in the middle, but that was not the case. When Larry King was interviewing someone of very high status, he matched the high-status individual’s tones. When the interviewee was low status, he or she would match Larry King. The quickest to match Larry was Dan Quayle, presumably someone who had good reason to be deferential.

What’s going on here? Sorting out who is the most powerful person in the room is a game that humans have used for time out of memory because relative status is important to us. This need to defer and assert probably goes back to more primitive times when our lives depended on it. Now it’s more likely to be important when picking up sides for a sports team, jockeying for power in a business meeting, negotiating, or perhaps picking a new pope.

The point is that there is an unconscious element to it that is literally beyond our ken. Which happens first? And what are the criteria? Gregory and Webster’s research suggests that the process happens quickly, in the first few minutes of the conversation. So it’s hardly the case that much conscious thought has gone into determining who should be top dog. Rather, we see that an important part of our relationships to others is determined, at least in part, unconsciously. We are not the rational beings we like to think we are.

Conscious awareness of this unconscious process will arm you to resist the powerful and enable you increase your own personal power. 

Announcing the winners of the 'Worst Conference' contest

Thanks to all who participated in the “Worst Conference Experience Ever” contest.  We have a winner – a standout – and that could only be the entry from Mike, regarding the speaker who read from the tax code for “several hours with minimal commentary.”  I’m sure everyone will join in and offer their sympathy to the poor CFO who attended that presentation. 

Mike, you win an hour’s free (telephone) coaching for help in preparing any speech or presentation you have coming up.  Let me know via nick@publicwords.com how you’d like to schedule. 

Second place goes to Chris, who attended a Chamber of Commerce meeting (already, he’s got my sympathies) to hear from a judge who set an alarm clock up to keep himself to 20 minutes – only to hit the snooze button repeatedly, going on and on until the room was virtually deserted.  I wonder if the judge’s pronouncements from the bench are as long-winded!

Chris, you win a copy of my latest book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.  Please send your snail mail address to nick@publicwords.com to receive your prize.

Third place goes to Piet, whose heart-rending description of the conference where the speaker was a no-show, but delivered the speech via texting to his assistant in real time does deserve mention for the most surreal and stupid solution to a vexing problem. 

Piet, send me your snail mail address and you also get a copy of the latest book.

Again, thanks to everyone who participated, and congratulations to the winners.

Announcing the Worst Conference Experience Ever Contest

Recently, I called for an improvement in the way conferences are run and pointed out that the current downturn is an opportunity to make some long-overdue changes in conference behavior.  Conferences should involve their audiences more, and in more significant ways.  Conferences should tell coherent stories, not fill endless time slots. And conferences should use MCs as audience representatives.  Among other changes. 

To further promote these ends, I’m announcing a contest for the best story about the worst conference experience you’ve ever had.  First prize is an hour’s free telephone coaching either for a speech or a conference design.  Second and third prizes are copies of my new book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. 

The contest begins with this posting and will run through the end of next week.  Entries must be 200 words or less, and my decision is final.

So bring it on.  Was it a memorably bad speaker?  A particularly stupid theme or breakout session?  A location?  An audience?  What made the experience awful?  Dish it out, and we’ll compare notes as they come in.  It’s time to raise the game by punishing the evil-doers.

Did Obama's body language match his rhetoric?

Every communication is two conversations, the content and the body language.  When the two are aligned, a speaker can be powerful – even charismatic.  When they are not aligned, the audience believes the non-verbal every time.  How well did President Obama’s Cairo University speech yesterday measure up in this regard?

Obama’s elegant and sweeping rhetoric talked about openness, listening, and peace.  What did his second conversation talk about?  Caution, restraint, and an unwillingness to risk very much.  This was not an emotional performance.  It was a careful, measured one. 

Let’s take the second conversation apart.  President Obama has the posture of a leader.  He strode out to the podium with the confident and upright posture of someone in command.  His wave to the audience was that of a leader acknowledging the many. 

As he began to speak, Obama folded and unfolded his hands in a constrained, protective manner on the podium.  It’s one of the few ways he betrays a little nervousness, typically at the beginnings of his speeches. 

To set against that, his posture continued to be upright and confident, and as he started the speech, he nodded repeatedly, acknowledging the crowd and building agreement with them. 

The President has great stillness in his body; this is charismatic and signals confidence, because it’s at once poised and yet relaxed enough to show that his nerves haven’t got the better of him.  (Contrast this with all the lesser public speakers you've seen who repeatedly shift their weight from one foot to the other.)  He is a practiced and expert public speaker.  It’s just that he can’t quite figure out what to do with his hands. 

While he occasionally got the gesture right -- as for example when he talked about the overlap in views between Muslim and Christian he overlapped his hands quite naturally – most of the time, he used his characteristic and prissy thumb-and-forefinger gesture.  This gesture is less admonishing than the raised forefinger, but it retains something of that off-putting feeling, and it is not one in the natural human retinue.  It looks calculated and fake.  For example, when he called for people around the world to “say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts,” he used the thumb and forefinger instead of a more natural, open gesture that would have matched the words. 

The President repeated this pattern throughout the speech.  His non-verbal conversation was careful and half-closed even when his words were open.  Later, when he spoke of the “interests we all share as human beings” being “far more powerful than those that drive us apart,” he gestured as if he was holding something about the size of a loaf of bread in his hands.  Apparently, those shared interests are not very big.   

Similarly, when he talked about “equal justice” for everyone, his hands came back to the ‘parade rest’ folded position on the podium.  The hand gesture in that way spoke of a very carefully parsed out justice rather than a broad vision. 

The conversation of his hands was most natural when he said, “America doesn’t presume to know what is best for everyone.”  His open hand swept out across his chest in a gesture that unequivocally dismissed the presumption. 

At the close of the speech, when Obama said that “America respects all voices,” he used again the admonishing forefinger, suggesting that he was looking for a quid pro quo of respect back. 

President Obama is an extraordinarily polished, powerful, and persuasive speaker.  His posture, confident voice, and command of pacing together mean a highly accomplished delivery.  But he has still not figured out a natural set of gestures to go with his soaring rhetoric.  Overall, he radiates confidence and dignity.  Now he needs to figure out a set of gestures for his hands that is equally effective.

What did President Obama's Cairo speech achieve?

The reactions to President Obama's Cairo University speech are falling along predictable fault lines in the Middle East: http://bit.ly/pETKy.  But for more dispassionate observers, how did the speech go?  You can check out the text and video here: http://tinyurl.com/oz48ly. 

Opening with a greeting of peace, assalaamu alaykum, President Obama told the assembled Cairo audience that he had come to seek a new beginning:

I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles - principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

The speech went on to follow the classic problem-solution format of a persuasive speech.  Obama stated the problem in honest and forthright terms:

We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world - tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust.

So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, and who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.

His solution for this tension is the new beginning he calls for, as well as specific progress on 7 issues that contribute to the tension:  extremism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nuclear weapons, democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights, and economic development. 

This is elegant rhetoric indeed, and to the extent that good speech-making can open a door, or start a new dialogue, or re-set expectations, President Obama’s talk today should accomplish all those worthy goals.  

A note on his body language.  President Obama still has not figured out a natural set of gestures to go with his sweeping, well-delivered words.  His posture radiates confidence and dignity.  Now he needs to figure out a gestural rhetoric that is equally effective. 

Obama closed with a broad call for peace, repeating his theme of a new beginning: 

We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning, keeping in mind what has been written.

The Holy Koran tells us, "O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another."

The Talmud tells us: "The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace."

The Holy Bible tells us, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."

The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God's vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you. And may God's peace be upon you.

Peace-loving people around the world can only agree.  Now the hard work of practical steps, real commitments, and compromise needs to begin. 

Can a weak speaker with a great message hold an audience?

Can a weak speaker with a great message hold an audience?  That’s the question that a speaker like Ray Anderson poses.  And can he improve?  I’ll answer that question at the end.  But first, who is Ray Anderson?  You can watch him speak at TED.com: http://tinyurl.com/ndkn5w

Ray Anderson likes to call himself someone who’s made a journey from “plunderer” to “reformed plunderer” to “the greenest CEO in America.”  It’s quite a journey.  Ray is the CEO of Interface, a maker of carpet tile and broadloom carpets.  Some 15 years ago, Ray read Paul Hawken’s book, The Ecology of Commerce (http://tinyurl.com/ra4z4d) and decided that he had to turn his carpet company from a typical “take-make-waste” company to sustainability. 

The results have been – and continue to be – extraordinary.  Ray’s company makes Flor carpet tiles, which are sustainable and eco-friendly and also just plain cool (http://www.flor.com/).  The company has reduced its carbon footprint 82 % while growing by 2/3rds.  Ray estimates that the company is half-way to its goal of zero emissions by 2020.  More than that, costs are down, the products are better, the workers are more inspired, and the free advertising is incalculable. 

Now, Ray’s goal is to transform all of business.  As he says, ‘more happiness with less stuff’ is the big idea. 

So he’s got a great message.  The full story is told, by the way, in Tim Sanders’ excellent book, Saving the World at Work (http://tinyurl.com/r9t3qe). 

Unfortunately, Ray’s not an inspiring speaker.  His voice needs work; it’s pitched too high and his sibilants are too pronounced.  Worse, he doesn’t connect with his audience.  He reads his speech with his nose in the paper, and the result is a sing-song, solipsistic delivery that doesn’t inspire. 

But the audience at TED did get on their feet, slowly, and in sections, to applaud him when he was done.  Why?  The message is great, the man is a hero.  And the speech was short.

The solution?  Rehearse him in brief segments, getting him to get his head up from the page.  By looking down too much of the time, Ray appears to the audience to be closed off from them.  He needs to practice talking to a close friend, or a grandchild, and then he’d get the idea.  I talk more about how to do this here: http://tinyurl.com/qrv3yk.  Ray needs to learn to be as open with an audience as he obviously is to a great idea. 

A Conference (and Meeting) Manifesto - How They Can Be Better

The meetings and conference business has taken hits from the economy and Joe Biden telling everyone he wants his family to stay off airplanes.  But, much like the overall economy, the business is slowly turning around, or at least slowing its decline.  So this is a good time to take a moment to consider the conference business in general.  What could it do better when it comes roaring back in 2010?  Following are my three radical suggestions for improving meetings and conferences. 

1.  Conferences and meetings should tell unique stories.   Think about how conferences and meetings are typically planned.  A committee picks a theme.  Then someone finds a keynote speaker to open, and maybe one to close.  Then the committee divides the rest of the time up into 60-minute slots and fills them with ‘breakouts’, panels, workshop leaders, and so on.  The result?  From the conference-goer’s point of view, it’s like a regular workday, only worse.  You’ve got back-to-back meetings to attend, a day or days you don’t get to schedule, and uncomfortable seating.  The only choice you get to exercise is not to take part in some or all of the sessions.  Then you feel guilty for sneaking off to the gym, or your hotel room, or the bar. 

It’s a dreary prospect, because it could be so much better.  A conference should tell a story, one that unfolds and builds from the initial moments to the close.  Like any good story, there should be moments of high excitement, followed by moments of relative calm.  That’s different from panic and boredom in ceaseless alternation - a typical experience of a meeting now.  A good meeting should make linear sense from start to finish, in a way that allows attendees to retain what they see and hear rather than just feeling overwhelmed by the information. 

2.  Conferences should be for, by, and about the attendees.  A meeting or conference should feel participative, and you, the meeting attendee, should have some significant part in it beyond being a warm body.  Attendees should react, critique, judge, schedule, and vote for what they like and don’t like.  And that’s just for starters. There are many ways to give attendees a larger role in meetings and conferences, from making them part of panel discussions to creating discussion groups to having them manage Q and A. 

Every meeting should have an MC, or MCs, and they should do more than just point out the bathrooms and introduce the next speaker.  They should integrate, challenge, pull together, combine, disrupt, and generally function as the representative of the attendees, making sense of it all and demanding more from the speakers and other leaders.

3.  Conferences should be about more than just eating and sitting.   We live more and more of our lives in the splendid isolation of the Internet, with all the faux connectors like Facebook, Twitter, email, and the rest.  Getting together is an increasingly rare and important privilege.  Meetings and conferences should be constructed to take advantage of the gathered group.  Every meeting or conference should use the power of the group to give something back to the community in which the meeting is held.  Help a local charity, fix a local problem, champion a local hero, start a new movement.  There are many ways one could imagine making use of the combined energies of the people assembled.  It’s a crime to waste that gathered power. 

To be sure, some meetings and conferences do some of these things now, but not enough, and few, if any, get them all done.  Meetings take their toll on the environment, the workplace, and the families of the attendees.  It’s time to raise the conference stakes and make them serve us better. 

Where President Obama went wrong on the Guantanamo Speech -- and how you can do better

How do you argue your side of an emotional, contentious issue in a way that doesn’t further divide people?  President Obama’s recent speech on “Protecting Our Security and Our Values” delivered at the National Archives on May 21, 2009, was an example of a well-argued speech that unfortunately will only inflame the debate further. 

The speech is a clearly-constructed brief on what the Obama Administration has done to keep America safe – and how it has diverged from the previous administration’s attempts to do exactly the same thing.  However you feel about the politics of the matter, if Obama was hoping to still the debate, here’s where he went wrong:

After 9/11, we knew that we had entered a new era — that enemies who did not abide by any law of war would present new challenges to our application of the law; that our government would need new tools to protect the American people, and that these tools would have to allow us to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out.

Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. And I believe that those decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that — too often — our government made decisions based upon fear rather than foresight, and all too often trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, we too often set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And in this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans; politicians, journalists and citizens — fell silent.

In other words, we went off course.

Whether you agree or disagree with the analysis, you have to believe that this does not describe what the previous administration thought it was doing.  So, from the point of view of the other side, you can only feel that Obama has distorted your position.  And when you feel that your position has been distorted, you dig in, you don’t come around. 

What should Obama have done differently?  If you want bring the other side in, then you have to give its arguments full scope and credence.  You can’t ascribe haste, fear, and the trimming of facts and evidence to them, even if you believe that to be the case.  You can’t accuse them of setting aside their principles.  You have to argue the other side’s case on its own merits. 

Then, and only then, you can give your own position.  To forestall criticism and avoid inflaming a debate further, understand and be ready to give the other side’s position.  Fairly.  First.  And forthrightly. 

Jim Collins and his new book, How the Mighty Fall

It’s always dangerous to take on an icon, but here we go.  Jim Collins has written a new book, How the Mighty Fall, and he’s on camera talking about it: http://tinyurl.com/rymn9m

Collins is the Marcus Welby of the business world.  He looks and sounds the part of the sage business adviser.  And the first thing that has to be said about him is that he is a consummate, technically near-perfect speaker – at least on camera and on the small screen.  That doesn’t always translate to the large stage, of course – and vice-versa. 

On screen, then, he’s got wonderful pacing – talking quickly, but every now and then slowing down markedly on a key point to emphasize it.  His voice is authoritative, his gestures passionate.  This is one smart, articulate guy. 

It’s the message that’s the problem.  Good to Great  purported to identify the characteristics that made a company great, and the recommendations in it at least were actionable.  The issue was that the companies identified as such soon fell off the lofty perch Collins had put them on. 

That made How the Mighty Fall inevitable, I suppose.  But the problem is that the five stages here are not actionable points in the life of an organization.  Instead, they’re moral judgments.  From ‘hubris born of success’ to the ‘undisciplined pursuit of more’ to the ‘denial of risk and peril’ to ‘grasping for salvation’ and finally ‘capitulation to irrelevance or death’, these so-called stages are actually moral states lifted from the religious classic Pilgrim’s Progress.  The title gives away the plot, in this case. 

I won’t get any thanks for saying so, but Collins is a preacher talking sin, not a business thinker showing us how to revivify ailing companies or an ailing economy. 

Gary Vaynerchuk's 3 Rules for Success in Public Speaking

So I don’t know why I haven’t talked about the wine guy Gary Vaynerchuk before, but here goes.  You can see him waxing passionate about wine here: http://tv.winelibrary.com/.  And you can see him on Web 2.0 giving a talk on following your bliss and social media here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4. 

Either way, you have to agree:  you can’t take your eyes off this guy.  Why?  Three simple reasons.  In honor of the Wine Guy, I’ll call them Gary Vaynerchuk’s 3 Rules for Success in Public Speaking.

1.  Be absolutely passionate about what you’re doing.  Gary’s passion spills out all over the set, the stage, the audience.  He’s taking no prisoners, and the result is captivating.  It covers the many little ways in which he breaks some perfectly good rules of public speaking.  For example, in the Web 2.0 talk, he’s constantly pacing back and forth.  He only comes to a halt occasionally, and if the talk had gone on much longer, it would have become distracting, and ultimately wearying for the audience.  In small doses, it’s fine.  And of course, on his show, he’s behind a table for the most part drinking wine, so his energy goes into his face and his commentary, where it belongs. 

2.  Be absolutely authentic about what you’re doing.   Gary’s geekiness and occasional clumsiness are endearing because they reinforce his authenticity.  Authenticity is the single most important quality for speakers today.  Historically speaking, that’s because of the current mood in the country (and the world) thanks to AIG, bank bailouts, rampant hypocrisy in high places, 9-11 and probably Watergate too.  Whatever the precise reason, we are drawn to people who are authentic because we’re tired of being spun, lied to, conned, and generally abused by authorities.  I go into the need for authenticity (and how to achieve it) in my new book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. 

3.  Maintain a sense of humor about yourself.   If you follow rules # 1 and #2, you’ll get noticed.  But if you don’t have a sense of humor about yourself – and occasionally let it out for air – people will quickly tire of you.  Gary’s saving grace is that he’s funny about his passion and doesn’t take himself too seriously in the end. 

Study Gary for his inner qualities, not for his mastery of the technical detail of public speaking.  He's not a polished speaker, but he’s the real deal, and he’s absolutely wonderful to watch. 

What we can learn from Seth Godin

Seth Godin’s TED.com talk on his latest book, Tribes, recently became available on TED’s web site: http://tinyurl.com/o8cx5f.  What does Seth do right, and what does he do wrong as he tells us his latest idea?

We can all learn from Seth Godin on both counts.  First, what he does right.

Seth makes it all about the audience.  The typical speaker tells us about all the research he has done, and what it shows.  Seth tells us about – us.  How we all want to create change, lead a movement, and stand out.  Even if you personally don’t want that, you get caught up in the underlying emotional message:  you’re special.  It’s very hard to resist. 

Seth’s passion comes through because he is open to the audience.  Godin’s openness comes through in his body language and his inclusive language.  That creates a strong connection with the audience, so that we are ready to receive his passionate message.  If a speaker doesn’t begin by being open, we will reject the message.  It’s that simple. 

Seth uses humor to disarm any potential critics.  If we were inclined to say, ‘hang on a minute, not everyone can be a leader; that doesn’t make sense.  The world needs followers, too,’ Seth’s humor stops us from insisting too much on the logic.  His humor is contained in his slides – great visual humor that you can get in one blink, like the shot of the firefighters sitting posed for a picture outside a burning house. 

What does Godin do wrong?  Not much, but here are a few ways in which he could improve.

He wanders around the stage.  Seth has what we call ‘happy feet’ – he allows some of his adrenaline to come out in wandering around the stage.  The result is distracting and undercuts the effectiveness of his message.  It’s just harder to get what he’s talking about when his body provides a random visual distraction that way.

He allows his volume to get away from him.  Sure, it’s a big audience, and sure, he’s passionate.  But too much shouting quickly gets tiresome on the ear.  He needs to vary his pitch more, like he does his pacing.  Seth is an expert pauser for effect, and he should vary his volume too.

His speech strings too many ideas together that don’t really connect logically.  Godin begins with an assertion in the form of a question – what do ‘we’ – that is, the audience and Seth – do today?  We all want to change things, he says.  It’s an assertion grabbed from the air, and it doesn’t bear much logical thought.  To the contrary, most people hate change.  But never mind.  From there, he launches into a quick history of recent times:  from factories to television to leaders (and tribes).  Soon he’s talking about how to do it – ‘it’ being start a movement.  It’s all a bit loosey-goosey, logically speaking, and it’s really an emotional argument (that everyone – you and you and you – are potential leaders, all special), not an idea per se. 

But overall, this is a great communicator with a deep understanding of how to connect with audiences.  Study this TED.com talk for how to up your own game. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9 rules for survival in rock climbing and public speaking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timothy Ferriss and the 4-hour workweek

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

In short, the message provokes. 

Good message. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Character is king in public speaking

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

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

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

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

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

The five top speaking tips from the ancient Greeks

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

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

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

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

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

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

What research on play can tell us about public speaking

Pity poor Stuart Brown, who runs the National Institute for Play.  His job – and his passion – is to study play seriously.  That means he has to take an inherently fun subject and make it, well, god-awful serious, so that the NIH will fund him. 

His talk on TED is enlightening on the subject of play, and enlightening on the subject of public speaking, at the same time:  http://tinyurl.com/bgat4c.  In spite of the flaws, this is must-see video. 

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first, and then get to the good – and fascinating – news second.  The bad news is that Stuart Brown is a very serious scientist who takes a fun and funny subject and analyzes it way too thoroughly – to the detriment of his humanity and the topic’s.  Like all the talks on humor I’ve ever seen, he kills the subject, and not in a good way.  He goes into a head posture from the start, which makes sense, since he’s intellectualizing fun, and tells us some very serious things about play in a slightly pompous way that makes the whole thing not at all playful.  He barely looks at the audience, his delivery is slow and slightly ponderous, and he sounds more like a bank manager refusing a mortgage than someone talking about play.

And that’s the important public speaking point to take away from the talk.  Your subject and your delivery have to be consistent.  That’s so important that I’ll say it again:  your subject and your delivery have to be consistent.  If you can’t be consistent, your audience is going to reject you at some level as hypocritical, even if you’re just trying to be really, really helpful. 

That’s why people who present to children can’t be adult in the bad sense of the word.  It’s why business people who talk about putting the customer first can’t give a slapdash, under-rehearsed speech.  (The audience is the customer!  Hello!)  And, it’s why people who talk about humor have to be funny. 

OK, so the talk on play is not playful.  Inconsistency.  That’s bad.  But there is so much that is good in the talk that redeems Mr. Brown that overall the presentation does succeed.  The main reason is Brown’s evident passion for the subject.  He replaces the lightness of play with devotion to the subject, some beautiful pictures (of animals playing, for example) and even a slightly ponderous joke or two. 

Brown cares because his work began with a murderer who didn’t play as a child, and Brown saw the connection to the evil that came later.  In many ways, playing as children prepares us for life.  Did you know that people who don’t engage in building, carving, constructing, and so on with their hands as children don’t make good problem-solvers as adults?  And that the lack of play leads to depression?  The opposite of play is not seriousness, but – depression. 

Play improves memory, makes more of the brain more active, and helps with creativity and critical thinking.  And that’s throughout life – humans are unusual animals in the sense that most play during a specific time in their childhood and then don’t play (at least as much) when they become adults.  Humans play – should play, need to play – all their lives. 

Brown describes a fascinating study in which a group of rats were prevented from playing during their childhood.  Another group was left alone.  Both groups, now adult, were presented with a cat collar smelling of cat.  All the rats ran and hid.  The control group who had played eventually came out of hiding and resumed normal life.  The play-deprived group never came out and in fact starved to death. 

So get playing.  We need all kinds of play as humans – body play, object play, social play, fantasy play, transformational play.  Brown has categorized them all.  But don’t let his seriousness about the subject prevent you from taking away some wonderful and wonderfully important lessons from this video.  The play’s the thing.  So get playing. 

And the winner of the elevator speech contest is....

Thanks to everyone for the elevator pitch/speech entries.  It was a lot of fun to read them and to continue the discussion about this important kind of communication. 

I’m going to close out the contest with the three winners, counting down to first place. 

Third Place Winner:

Bored at the office? Do you work by yourself or with an old boring soul? If so, have you heard about coworking? Coworking is the newest way to work with others through the utilization of shared workspaces that focus on collaboration and communication. I am developing a coworking facility in downtown Fort Wayne. if you are interested please check out my blog….

Jodi, congratulations.  This pitch was clear and grabbed my interest.  I’d only recommend cleaning up the language as follows:

Do you work by yourself –or with someone you can’t stand? If so, have you heard about coworking? Coworking is the newest way to work with others in shared workspaces that focus on collaboration and communication. I am developing a coworking facility in downtown Fort Wayne. if you are interested please check out my blog….

This pitch started with the audience’s need, offered a novel solution, and followed up with action.  Good job. 

Second Place Winner:

As the Publishing Possibilities Coach, I will give you a simple way to choose which publishing option is right for your book project. In addition, I'll help you gather the resources you need to move forward and get it done.

Cheryl, nice job.  This pitch answers the felt need of thousands of would-be authors out there.  A definite winner.  The only suggestion for improvement I have is to put ‘you’ in the front and ‘I’ toward the end:

Would you be interested in a simple way to figure out which publishing option is right for your book?  As the Publishing Possibilities Coach, I will help you gather the resources you need to move forward and get it done.

And finally, the winner, a software company that is developing software to:

Connect users to their area of genius and help them develop the network to unleash it.

Short, clear, and it’s got some emotion.  Nice job, Troy, and I look forward to seeing the software. 

If the third place and second place winners would send me their postal addresses, I’ll send them the books.  And Troy, call me for your free hour of phone coaching when you want to set it up.

Cut through the jargon: 4 elevator pitches on education.

The educational field, like many others, can fall victim to its own jargon.  This is a particular problem for elevator pitches, because you have to grab your audience in a short time, and words that the audience doesn’t understand won’t help.  Let’s look at 4 elevator pitches in the education world that wrestle with this problem.

1.  I help you stay ahead of the workplace learning curve through customized learning events to improve supervision, communication, and leadership skills.

Katrina, the problem with this elevator pitch is that the educational jargon – “workplace learning curve”; “customized learning events” may mean something to you but really don’t convey much to the average person.  Give us a statistic or an arresting fact that captures the idea of the workplace learning curve rather than just asserting it.  Tell us about a particular customized learning event and maybe we’ll get the idea a little better.  You can still do this in a phrase or two.  Also, I would recommend narrowing the “supervision, communication, and leadership skills” net you’re casting.  What’s the difference between supervision and leadership, exactly?  And isn’t communication a leadership skill?  Is what you’re really talking about leadership?  You could say something like “leadership at all levels of the organization” and it would be stronger. 

Avoid the jargon and get specific. 

2.  Did you know that the education system is designed to leave children behind and that we teachers can simply fail students we feel are too much bother....and that it doesn't have to be that way?

Kevin, the problem here is that I don’t know what you do.  You state the problem well enough, but your solution is too vague.  Are you a teacher?  A school?  A method?  What are you offering? 

Get specific about what you’re offering. 

3.  Does your child's teacher even know their name? Does their school just seem to(o) big? Our school is a community that strives to build relationships with students, from the classrooms to the athletic fields. Critical thinking anchors our curriculum as teachers and students collaboratively engage in asking the tough questions. We invite you to visit for the day and experience the benefits of an education focused on the student.

Andrew, with this one I get the idea.  My only complaint here is that there is too much jargon and a lot of unnecessary words.  But with a little pruning, you get a great elevator pitch:

Does your child's teacher even know her name? Our school is a community that connects with students, from the classrooms to the athletic fields.  We get teachers and students working together asking tough questions.  Visit us for the day and see the benefits of an education focused completely on your child. 

Cut the jargon and bring the pitch to life. 

4.  Are you stuck in the "running but not moving" paradigm as it relates to your career? Or are you looking for an easier way to land the job you've always wanted? TAG helps you accelerate your career potential by matching you with well-placed mentors that are paid to help you succeed.

Jon, again, too much jargon.  Words like ‘paradigm’ and phrases like ‘career potential’ are off-putting.  But the basics here are strong.  A quick edit gives you this:

Is your career stuck?  Do you want help landing the job you’ve always wanted?  The Ascendance Group helps you get your career moving by matching you with well-placed mentors that are paid to help you succeed. 

Mentors are great! Release them from the jargon. 

Can elevator pitches be too short? -- 3 ways to go wrong.

Today, I’m looking at 3 elevator pitches that run the risk of being too short to have the necessary impact.  Let’s consider them in turn.  Each one goes wrong and fails to captivate the listener because of a lack of a different kind of detail. 

1.  By attending my presentation on investments, you have a strong prospect of owning a golf course in a few years rather than the few hours of teeing now.

Shankar, this elevator pitch promises great wealth “in a few years,” but I’m not persuaded because it doesn’t tell me what sets you apart from all the other wealth builders who would do the same.  It’s an all-too-common pitch and most people will respond to it with weary cynicism.  Tell us what makes you different, novel, compelling.  Give us a hint into your approach; how is it different from all the others? This one is specific about the wrong thing – golf. 

2.  I help you negotiate the minefields of international trade.

Lance, while I like the “negotiate the minefields” phrase, because it conveys an emotion – international trade is scary and I can help you get through it – you don’t tell me enough, again, to set you apart from the other minefield negotiators out there.  International trade may be a smaller universe than riches in general, but not a whole lot smaller and you still need to get a little more specific. This one has a good image, but not enough detail about the main idea. 

3. What if I told you that today, I could change the rest of your life for the better, once and for all?

Mario, thanks for sending this elevator pitch via a Tweet.  I love the idea, especially in the tail end of winter, to have my life changed for the better, but I’m old enough to want to know how you’re going to do it.  Do I need to pack a suitcase?  Wear sunscreen?  Or just change my thinking?  Your Tweet intrigues, but it doesn’t move me to action, because there’s not enough going on here.  Get more specific about who you are, what you’re offering, or why I should pay attention, and I’ll jump at the chance.  But not until then.  This one responds to an eternal wish – to change lives for the better – but not in a specific enough way. 

I talk more about elevator pitches, their uses and abuses in my new book:  Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. 

Four ways to use an elevator pitch/speech

One of the interesting results of the elevator speech contest is that we find out how many different ideas there are about what an elevator speech is.  So far, at least 4 have surfaced that seem useful. 

1.  The speech summary.   Here, you summarize a speech you’re going to give in order to focus it properly and make sure you actually know what it is about.  Far too many business presentations are unfocused and just a collection of slide thrown together at the last minute.  Working up a good elevator speech ensures that you have narrowed down the topic to the point that your audience can remember it and you can deliver it.  “You should attend my speech because I will show you how to get rock-hard abs and an improved sex life with 5 minutes of easy exercises a day.”  This kind of elevator speech has the word ‘you’, referring to the audience.  It has a need of the audience, and it has an emotion, either expressed or implied. 

2.  The “tell the boss what you do” summary.   Under this scenario, you run into the boss, or some important company exec, in the elevator, and he/she says, “Ah, Jones, isn’t it?  Now, what is it that you do?”  You have a few stops to explain that you are somehow central to the company’s mission and profitability.  Here, the pitch should talk you up, explaining why you’re essential and firing you would be a really bad idea.  “At Global Enterprises, we bring widgets to middle America and increasingly the world.  I am the widget counter.  Want to know how many widgets we sell?  Come ask me.” 

3.  The “catch the attention of the potential customer” pitch.   Under this scenario, you run into a nice-looking person in a public elevator, and he/she says (breaking all the rules of elevator conduct) “So what does your company do?”  And you respond with a way that your company has of solving customers’ problems more efficiently, more elegantly, or more precisely than anyone else.  “Stuck in traffic?  We manufacture a GPS system that sends a helicopter to your location, picks you up, and takes you to your destination in time for that vital meeting.  We even pick up your car and deliver it to your parking garage.”  This kind of elevator pitch should pinpoint a potential need and explain how your company meets that need or service.  The response of the audience (of one) should be “Wow!”

4.  The “we all really do know what we’re doing” test.   I’ve used this test when working on communications for large companies.  I ride the company’s elevator a few times, and ask people what the company does.  The responses are usually hilarious and all over the map.  Then, I explain to the exec that hired us that a company can’t possibly succeed unless everyone in it knows what the company is doing and can express that in similar ways.  It’s called alignment, and it’s a necessary (but not sufficient) requirement for company survival.  “We take the mystery out of finance by helping customers understand what investments they need for the long haul and then making those investments with them.  We stay the course.” 

What other uses of the elevator speech or pitch can you think of?

Analyzing the second elevator speech entry

The second elevator speech entry comes from Barb:

You need to see me as your best day on the stock market after your stock (h)as gone from knee level to head high, sell$!

My reaction to this one is that there’s not enough here to capture my attention thoroughly.  There’s too little information.  You presumably have something to do with the stock market, but what, exactly?  If you’re a broker, just promising that a stock will go up – especially in this current market – isn’t enough.  The promise sounds a little hollow, and what’s the added value that you bring? 

I would suggest figuring out a more original approach, and one that’s more sensitive to current conditions.  How can you help me in bear market, perhaps?  What makes you different from all the other brokers out there? 

This elevator pitch suffers from the “elephant in the room” problem.  When there’s a huge issue in the arena that you’re talking about, you have to address it.  In this case, with the market flat on its back, and everyone feeling the pain, you have to take that head on.  And then tell us why your perspective or approach or expertise sets you apart. 

It’s the principle President Obama used to good effect in his Inaugural Address.  He began the speech by directly confronting the difficult economic times we find ourselves in:

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

That kind of direct honesty creates a sense of urgency and authenticity, and from that a relationship can begin.  Barb, your elevator speech needs to do the same. 

The first of the elevator speech contest entries analyzed

Let’s look at the elevator speech contest entries as they come in.  I’m thrilled by the response – keep the ideas coming!  We’ll let the contest run a couple of weeks and then pick 3 winners. 

I’m receiving two kinds of elevator speeches – some that follow the rules and are in fact (very) focused versions of possible talks, and some that are elevator pitches, or very brief descriptions of the business you’re in.  I’m going to make an executive decision and look at both kinds on their merits. 

Here’s the first entry, and it looks like an elevator pitch:

I teach small business owners and entrepeneurs how to keep their pipeline full by doing what your mother taught you not to do, talk to strangers and master the "f" word, follow-up. If you know anyone who wants to be two minutes and two people away from their next referral, customer, or client, have them get a free copy of Rhonda's Rules at www.twominutenetworker.com. I am Rhonda Sher, the two minute networker.

What catches the attention here is all in the second line:  “what your mother taught you not to do, talk to strangers and master the ‘f’ word, follow-up.”  That’s fun, and memorable.  Can it be improved upon? 

Well, if that’s the memorable part, let’s get it up front.  Let’s also try to simplify the syntax a little and make the message a little easier to digest.

Do what your mother taught you not to:  talk to strangers and master the ‘f’ word – follow up – to get your next referral, customer, or client in two minutes.  Entrepreneurs, get a free copy of Rhonda’s Rules at www.twominutenetworker.com, from Rhonda Sher, the two-minute networker. 

There you go, Rhonda.  Thanks for playing, and thanks for the great elevator pitch.  Please weigh in, everyone, with your comments and ideas.  And vote for the best elevator pitch/speech. 

How are Presidents Obama and Bush alike?

Most people would say that President Obama and former President Bush are two very different personalities.  Approval for each is split largely on party lines, their policies are virtually opposites in many ways, and the one is famously gifted as a communicator, while the other is not. 

And yet there is one way in which the two leaders are very much alike.  Both are possessed with enormous self-confidence.  Indeed, many commentators wrote of former President Bush that his confidence was so absolute that it prevented him from seeing other sides to issues.  These commentators faulted him for a lack of self-reflection.  When he was asked at a press conference to discuss a mistake he had made, President Bush was famously unable to come up with any. 

Few of those same commentators would make similar comments about President Obama.  He has already admitted to mistakes during his short tenure in office.  And he is widely credited with being open to considering ideas from all parts of the political spectrum. 

But Obama oozes self-confidence even while he appears to be more open-minded than his predecessor.  And commentators today commend that self-confidence, arguing that we need a strong leader to take us through these difficult economic times. 

Why is self-confidence suddenly an asset for President Obama when it was widely considered to be a liability for President Bush?  Is there any difference between the two leaders’ self-confidence?  How can we understand the apparent about-face in the reaction of the general population to confidence in their leader?

The answer to these questions lies in both men’s non-verbal communication.  When President Bush presided at a press conference, for example, his self-confidence was undercut by his hunched shoulders, his halting answers, his querulous tone, and his defensive posture.  His self-confidence seemed to be at odds, therefore, with his non-verbal ‘conversation’ with the audience.   When we see this kind of internal tension, we tend to assume that there is something inauthentic going on. 

President Obama, on the other hand, has self-consistent body language.  His self-confidence is supported by his erect posture, his ready smile, and his confident tone.  The package appears to be authentic.  He appears to be a person who is comfortable in his own skin. 

Regardless of your political views, the two men are a case study in self-confidence and authenticity.  You can’t succeed with the former unless you have the latter.  I talk much more about this tension in my new book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. 

What was wrong with Governor Jindal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did President Obama do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he immediately proposed his solution:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Conference Information Overload Survival Guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Gilbert's vocal art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Gates does something he shouldn't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can you achieve a similar effect?

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

Here’s how you do it.

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

The four steps in brief:

Step One: Being Open

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

Step Two: Being Connected

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

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

Step Three: Being Passionate

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

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

Step Four: Listening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The secrets of President Obama's communication success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to ace that job interview

Here’s hoping you’re not looking for a job right now, but if you are, remember these three tips for success. 

When two people meet, especially for the first time, a little non-verbal dance begins.  It’s a dance that’s hard-wired into us – something we learned eons ago as cave people – and it’s all about survival. 

Recent brain research shows that our bodies send out signals to the other people in the room that fire unconsciously in our brains – and are read unconsciously by the other people – before we are even consciously aware of the others. 

The first question your body asks, in effect, is ‘friend or foe’?  If you’re not prepared to answer that positively, you’ll send out a million little body signals that you’re braced for a fight.  The other person’s body will respond automatically, tensing up just as fast as you do. 

That means that any hope of a positive connection is over before you even open your mouth – unless you come in with the attitude of ‘this person is my friend, and I’m really glad to see him/her’.  If you don’t do that preparatory work, your body will almost certainly betray you.

So the first and most important task to prepare for a job interview is to spend some time just before it begins telling yourself, I’m about to meet a friend.  If it helps you, picture someone you’re very close to – a spouse, a family member, a significant other, a close friend – and with whom you’re very relaxed.  The point is to get to your unconscious mind before your instinct does.  That takes a little practice, but the payoff is enormous.

Second, keep your torso open – don’t cross your arms, fold your hands over your stomach, or put your arms in front of you – as much as possible.  Keep yourself oriented toward the interviewer.  The idea is to present your heart so that the interviewer will trust you.  Slight changes in orientation are instantly ‘read’ – again, unconsciously – by the other person.  If you move away, or point yourself away from him/her, the interviewer will trust you less. 

The point here is to be tactful, graceful, and open.  Don’t contort yourself to stay open, but do your best not to close off, move further away, or turn a shoulder toward the interviewer.  There’s a reason the phrase ‘cold shoulder’ still resonates with us. 

Third, prepare what you’re going to say.  If the body language conversation is positive, that means that you’ve got a chance to be heard.  So prepare three important (brief) messages about how you can solve a problem the organization has, and make sure you work those into the conversation – tactfully.  That means you’ll have to do your homework, to know what the organization’s issues are.  

Keep the focus on solving problems for the  organization, and you’ll find the communication during a job interview surprisingly positive and even fun.  

I go into all this in more detail in the new book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, and also in an earlier series of blogs on interviewing last August: http://publicwords.typepad.com/nickmorgan/the-job-interview/ . 

Good luck and be open!

Can you trust Obama?

A Princeton researcher has done a study on what makes a trustworthy face, even in repose: http://tinyurl.com/7h5gkn.  What’s fascinating about the study is that it connects with other research on facial expressions conducted over the years by Paul Ekman and others (http://www.paulekman.com/). 

Overall, the gist of the research is this.  The structure of your face affects how people receive you.  But, as I’ve been telling clients for years, there are 4 basic facial expressions that increase the likelihood that people will trust you, like you, and rate you favorably in a lineup.  They are:  wide-open eyes, raised eyebrows, the smile, and nodding. 

So, if you’ve got a deep indentation between your eyebrows, or heavy ones that appear to be lowered at the inner part above your nose, or a thin chin, or shallow cheekbones – opening your eyes, raising your eyebrows, and smiling will greatly mitigate the effect of these given facial attributes.  Nodding will then go a long way toward building agreement. 

As I argue in Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, people’s unconscious ‘take’ on you begins before they even have conscious reactions to what you say.  So, your speech or presentation is conditioned by your expression, your posture, and your gestures before you even begin to speak – for good or for ill.  It’s something you want to manage and control if you want to be an effective communicator.

The good news for Obama is that the answer to the question, can you trust him, is ‘yes’.  His face scores high on trustworthiness, and, more important, his brilliant use of facial gestures – from his megawatt smile to his eyes and eyebrows – ensures that he will be trusted, as long, of course, as his administration stays on track! 

President Obama invites us to go on a difficult journey.

Like a lot of other folks, I’ve been anticipating President Obama’s inaugural address for months now.  It’s the beginning of a new era, and the 44th president could have recited a nursery rhyme and I would have been content.

Nonetheless, it’s worth studying the speech and its delivery for what it can teach us about rhetoric.  So here goes.  Overall, the speech was very good, not great.  When times are tough, you need to rally people to a cause.  Did Obama do that?  Yes, he did.  But the archetypal story that he told was “stranger in a strange land” rather than a quest, and the quest story is better for enlisting your listeners in a cause. 

The speech needed to be authentic more than any other quality, and Obama was certainly that.  He gets high marks for the honesty with which he described the problems we face as a country and as a world.  His delivery was charismatic, certainly; he crowded the podium to reach toward the people on the Mall, and his voice had its usual music.  It rose and fell with the authority of a preacher, or a new president who knows exactly where he wants to take the country.  (He's got to fix that thumb-and-forefinger gesture, though; it just doesn't add anything to the occasion and it looks calculated.  He looked better when he just gestured naturally.) 

At the heart of the speech was the following line:  “For the world has changed and we must change with it.”  That’s a “stranger in a strange land” message, and it doesn’t have the power of the quest.  But it was entirely appropriate for the day, and the times.  As President Obama said a moment later, we face “a new era of responsibility.” 

The speech was about all the problems we must fix, all the wrongs we must address, and all the hardships we must undergo.  Thus it was entirely appropriate to the occasion.  But the lines that got the biggest applause were addressed to the shadowy warriors of terrorism in Pakistan and elsewhere around the world:  “We will not apologize for our way of life. . . . We will defeat you. . . .  Our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. . . . “ 

Obama invited us to go on a journey with him, and it's not journey that will lead us home.  It is a journey to -- as he said -- "an uncertain destiny."  He asked us to work for the common good, so that our grandchildren will say of us, “we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safe to future generations.” 

That's a tough message for a new era of responsibility.  He's asking a lot of us.  How will we measure up?