For my blog today, I'm linking to an interview I did this week with Thomas Clifford, filmmaker and Fast Company expert blogger on how to use the principles I talk about in creating and appearing in film and video: http://tinyurl.com/mehdhr
Enjoy!
I’m going to do a series of blogs on achieving authenticity in public communications. Authenticity is the sine qua non of our age. We all want it, and when it’s lacking in a public figure, we turn off to that person. I talk more about authenticity in my book, Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, but these blogs will cover a condensed discussion of the topic.
The first step in achieving authenticity is to be open – transparent – in your communications. Why is openness so important? Fundamentally, openness is a willingness to acknowledge all facets of your persona—to own everything without defensiveness and with honesty about intent. Without openness as a first step, authenticity is not possible.
One of the many ironies of public life today is that the secrets you try hardest to keep will almost certainly be revealed sooner or later. Furthermore, the public will be interested in them only to the extent that you continue to conceal your intent behind your actions. As soon as the human context is clear and we understand fully, we begin to move on.
So let’s take openness apart. How do you achieve it? Three main ways….
1. Openness begins with clarity of intent. As humans, we believe that actions, especially ones directed toward us, are meaningful, and we want to know their meanings. Children learn early to ask, “ Why? ” until their parents run out of answers. They are trying to delve into and broaden their understanding of intent.
Because intent is so important to us as humans, clarity of intent lies at the very heart of being open. If I know what you intend, I can understand you, and my willingness to be open to you increases. The simplest way to be clear about your intent is to tell me early in our communications together.
2. Your language should take responsibility rather than evade it. “ Mistakes were made” is a classic way politicians use to apologize or admit errors without actually doing so. That’s a passive construction that leaves the crucial actor, the politician, out of it. Unfortunately, we all know what he really means, so once again the politician reveals more than he intends by attempting to conceal. And we assume the worst. Open language therefore favors active verbs.
3. Frame the context of a communication early. The first questions on everyone’s minds when people communicate are about the whys of the meeting or event or conversation: Why are we here? Why is this important? Why is this relevant to me? We are trying to frame the encounter, whether it’s a negotiation, a keynote speech, or an ordinary business meeting. Our first need is to be oriented, and we can’t begin to pay attention to anything else until that’s taken care of. So answer your audience’s need to know why, and do it quickly, simply, and directly. Clear, honest framing is essential for open communication.
If you fail to create the context, that question will dog the proceedings from then on. And if you’re duplicitous about the context, then when the betrayal comes, it will be fatal to trust and the possibility of further open communications.
In casual communications, this step is accomplished quickly and effortlessly because of understandings that already exist. When two friends meet, for example, one will say, “Wassup?” to the other, and the conversation will pick up where it left off. Indeed, it will take a conscious effort in reframing to move the conversation off its usual tracks if one of the conversationalists wants to talk about something serious or different from the normal course of affairs. In more formal settings, a good communicator knows that openness requires agreement on the agenda in order to avoid problems and recriminations later. The phrase, “You never told me that. . .” is a listener’s way of registering that an agenda item was not agreed on. The danger is that when the other person says that, he is letting himself off the moral hook, at least to some extent. You may be stuck with the problem and the blame.
When an issue has been announced, briefly discussed, and added to the agenda, it becomes everyone’s issue. If it is sprung as a surprise later, it will be your problem and your fault. The more intimate the relationship is, the more like a betrayal it will seem. Everyone (until they learn better) has had the experience of neglecting to tell a spouse or significant other some vital bit of information. For example, you go to a party where the host is about to move to Bora-Bora. You forget to tell your spouse that vital detail, who finds out what everyone else knows at the shindig. Brace yourself for an indignant, “Why didn’t you tell me! ” on the car ride home.
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.
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.
I’ve written about using the power of the 5 basic stories that Western culture has to make your speeches stronger, ‘stickier’ and more instantly graspable. Look here: http://tinyurl.com/6sdl5v or here: http://tinyurl.com/nxblef for more detailed information. Today, I’m going to revisit the stories as a quick refresher course.
The most fundamental of the stories is the Quest. Here, case the audience as the hero. Enlist them in your quest – bring them with you to accomplish something difficult. A new product launch, a business launch, a re-organization – quests are best invoked when you want to ask for sacrifices from your audience and you need them to overcome obstacles.
The nature of change today readily involves the second story: Stranger in a Strange Land. In this story, the rules, the terrain, the marketplace – something complicated and pervasive – has changed, and the audience needs to learn new rules in order to master the new situation. Most consultants should invoke this story, since it allows them to play the mentor – the expert – in the story, the one who knows the new rules and can explain them.
The third story is the Love Story. We can use this in organizational life more often than you might think. Mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, even different parts of an organization working together – all of these can be love stories. The strength of the love story is that we expect the road to be rocky – boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back is the old-fashioned version. That means that you have ways to deal with problems when they come up if you use this story.
The fourth story is Rags to Riches. This story is always powerful, but never more so than in a recession. The strongest version is the individual one, which is why the lottery does well in good and bad years. So cast your story in personal terms and you’ll engage your audience strongly. Tell them how they’re going to get rich, not how the company is going to get rich.
The fifth story is Revenge – never underestimate it. Revenge is a very powerful motivator, so don’t leave it off the list because you’re squeamish. Many a business pushes itself to succeed because of the competition, and that’s at base a revenge story. Think of all the small software companies that began in order to take on Microsoft! Think of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.
Invoking each of these stories on a thematic level can be a wonderful way to increase the impact and power of your speeches. Don’t be too literal about it. Don’t say, ‘we’re on a quest’. Instead, say, ‘the journey will be long and difficult, but at the end of it is a pot of gold and glory we can all share’. You’ll have the audience engaged instantly; everyone knows and loves these stories. And we all want to be heroes.
It’s the commencement address season, and the advice of the age is: be yourself. This advice has a variety of forms, some interesting, some less so. Sometimes it comes under the rubric of ‘following your bliss’ and other times it’s more about authenticity. But everyone is agreed that being yourself is important.
How do you make that new and compelling? If you’re Ellen Degeneres, you make it funny: http://tinyurl.com/r8vavt. The speech is a great reminder that humor always makes its own rules. In other words, if you’re funny, you can get away with just about everything else.
So think of this as Ellen’s Three Rules for a Successful Commencement Speech.
1. Be funny. Humor is so rare at the podium, that a funny speech will fall like manna from heaven. But humor is hard to do, and hard to do well. You run the risk of offending some portion of your audience. So be warned. Humor takes guts.
2. Be real; tell real stories. Ellen leavens her humor with some very serious stories from her own life and her struggle to find her niche. Authenticity is essential, especially if you’re going to be funny, because we only trust people who show us their hearts.
3. Be brief. Ellen’s speech lasts less than 10 minutes. It’s hard to imagine why you would want to go longer. Attention spans used to be 21 minutes; recently some have argued that they are shrinking – to 10 minutes. If that’s true, then it’s the new right length for commencement speeches.
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.
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.
For my final blog on humor in public speaking, I’m turning to wit. Wit is the humor that creates charm, impresses with intelligence, and gets the girls. So be witty.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. How do you achieve wit? I have three suggestions, but first begin by watching J. J. Abrams, the TV and movie producer and director of hits like MI-3, Lost, and the new Star Trek: http://tinyurl.com/6649cn. The talk is witty, as is the man. This TED.com talk is also full of insights into creativity that will stick with you once the wit has worked its charm and moved on.
First Suggestion: Don’t try too hard. Wit flows from passion for the subject. If you feel strongly about something, you will find wit in the subject and you will share it with your audience. Unless of course you’re a corporate accountant who’s idea of fun is a late night with a multi-celled spreadsheet.
That said, one of the wittier speakers I’ve heard was a lecturer on accounting, who used the Wells Fargo company as his example, back in the day when it had to account for losses of the strong box because of marauding Indians. His passion for the subject of accounting led him to this witty way to explain an otherwise dreary subject.
Second Suggestion: Wit is all about upending expectations. The wit is in the surprise. J.J. shows a clip from the “Lost” pilot episode, with a downed aircraft and lots of gore and mayhem, with very impressive special effects. He says, “Ten years ago if we wanted to do that, we would have had to kill a stunt man…. Take Two would have been a bitch.” You’re not quite sure where he’s going, but the second sentence is witty because it is surprising.
Third Suggestion: To be witty, take the subject, but not yourself, seriously. Wit begins with yourself, with self-deprecation. It’s one reason why the British are so much better at it, culturally speaking, than Americans. The British are expert self-deprecators, probably because they have to put up with more pomposity in the form of 2,000, rather than 200, years of tradition and history. But when pressed, we can do it too. J. J. Abrams says, of filming Mission Impossible III, that his favorite scene is the one that involves shooting a dangerous drug up Tom Cruise’s nose. He says, “I quickly learned that there are 3 things you don’t want to do. Number two is hurt Tom’s nose.” The scene, which you should now go back and watch again, actually has Tom Cruise’s hand shooting the dart-filled gun up his own nose (because he knew how hard to push).
That’s the magic of the movies. And that’s wit.
Why is most public speaking so awful? Why do
we subject our fellow human beings to this form of torture when there
are so many better things we could all be doing, like cutting our
toenails, baking snickerdoodles, or watching re-runs of The Prisoner?
You’re in a ballroom with no windows in some random airport hotel. The
lighting is dim. The whir of the heating system fills your ears with
white noise. The colors around you are shades of grey and beige with
puce trimmings. You’re only awake because you’ve had 1300 cups of
coffee from the urn in the hallway. Let the speaking games begin. It’s
a diabolical sensory deprivation experiment. Why is most public
speaking so awful? Beyond soulless venues and Death by Power Point,
speakers make the same four mistakes over and over again, continuing
the sorry state of the art.....
For the rest of this free e-book: http://www.changethis.com/58.06.PublicWords
Irony is the humor of the era. At its worst, irony is a cheap, easy way to get a chuckle and avoid making a commitment. At its best, irony is a memorable way for the alienated to comment on the ‘in crowd’, the powerless to bring down the powerful, and the hip to skewer the not-so-hip. John Hodgman provides a brilliant example of wonderful irony on TED.com: http://tinyurl.com/6abzzm. Check it out for how to do irony well. There are 3 rules for making irony memorable rather than cheap.
Hodgman begins by talking about Enrico Fermi, the brilliant Italian physicist, and aliens. The kind that come in space ships and land in the Nevada desert, that is. Hodgman says, “Isn’t it strange that he only asked for one thing? A gift of two healthy sperm whales? That’s not true, but it is strange.”
Rule Number One. There’s considerable wit in what Hodgman does, but the predominant mode is ironical. “The aliens might be very far away,” he says, in explaining why we haven’t seen them yet, “Even on other planets.” He brilliantly illustrates the first rule of great irony by providing an overall narrative that is different from what he is apparently talking about. Hodgman’s apparent narrative is all about his (non) encounters with aliens, but his real narrative is all about how he, a nerd, found love, got married, and remains in love today.
It’s a very sweet story, told with delicacy and tact – and irony. Most cheap irony lacks the meta-narrative that gives a good story its structure. Cheap irony is usually just a pot shot at something the narrator doesn’t like but can’t do much about.
Rule Number Two. The second rule of great irony is that something important has to be at stake. In Hodgman’s case, it’s love. He is traveling in Portugal with the girl who becomes his wife, and she goes off on her own to check out a beach. She’s a long time coming back to the hotel, and Hodgman realizes how alone he is in the universe. As he says, “I could not call her on a cell phone because the aliens had not given us that technology yet.”
But what’s at stake can be anything important that the speaker-narrator cares about. Cheap irony has nothing behind it – no alternative that it is proposing. Powerful irony points to a better way.
Rule Number Three. The third rule of irony is that its viewpoint has to run counter to the one held by those currently in power. Again, in Hodgman’s case, the predominant viewpoint is that nerds can’t find love. After all, it’s the Prom Kings and Queens that get love, right? Hodgman quietly and ironically insists on the contrary, that nerds can find love, too. “Even though we are married, I love her and wait for her still,” he says, perhaps the best last (ironical) line of a love story in recent years.
Humor is hazardous to the health of public speakers. Most speakers want to be funny, but you’ve got to do humor well, or it falls flat and that’s worse than no humor at all. This week, in honor of May and May Day, I’m going to talk about how to manage humor in public speaking.
Traditional jokes – with punch lines – are the hardest to do. My first rule of the week is, don’t try traditional humor. But if you’re determined – or you think you’re funny – then here are a couple of tips for making the experience good for both you and the audience.
Let’s start with an example of a funny speech: http://tinyurl.com/c67xez. Emily Levine is a self-proclaimed trickster and a very funny person. She’s Harvard-trained and still manages to be hilarious. Does that make her a Type-A comedian? Anyway, Emily’s humor is all about finding the contradictions in modern life that we’ve stopped noticing. Stuff like the following sign in a beauty salon:
Ears pierced while you wait.
Just imagine the alternative. I’ll leave my ears hear until 5. I’ve got a couple of errands to run. But I’ll be back to pick them up. What? I couldn’t hear you.
Trickster humor is all about finding those sorts of contradictions and pointing them out. Also about crossing boundaries that are normally left intact. If there were an Olympics in martyrdom, my grandmother would have lost on purpose…..
Check out Emily and learn from her. She’s a comedian in the classic sense – she tells jokes. That’s very hard to do. As you watch the talk, note how she ‘sells’ her jokes with her body. When she talks about not hanging up on telemarketers, because Emily Post says it’s rude, she devises another strategy. After the telemarketer has delivered about half his pitch, she says, “I interrupted with, ‘You sound really sexy’. He hung up on me!” She says the ‘really sexy’ line with a husky voice, and sells the punch line with a pelvic stance. The tone of voice and the posture are essential to the humor.
So, if you’re determined to attempt traditional comedy in your speeches, then practice selling the jokes with your body language and voice. You’re got to be 100 percent committed to the joke – body and all. And then you’ve got to have a back up plan for recovery. Study tapes of Johnny Carson – he was the master of what to do when the first joke goes flat. Often his comebacks and reactions were funnier than the original line.
Beyond that, look for the contradictions. That’s where the humor is, and the punch lines. Traditional humor is all about setting up expectations and then violating them, crossing the boundaries of expectation. And finding connections where no one else sees them. Good luck.
Working with senior executives I get a lot of opportunities to see the communications mistakes that CEOs and top leaders make – over and over again. Here are the three I witness on a regular basis.
1. They live in the bubble and think it’s the universe. Leaders at the top are surrounded by assistants, V-Ps and SVPs, security – all the human apparatus of success. That apparatus is tuned to its leaders’ needs – recognizing them, satisfying them, anticipating them. The result is that a bubble is created, inevitably, that is very pleasant to live in and easily mistaken for the entire cosmos. It breeds a kind of self-centeredness even in the most humble of people. And in terms of communications, it pushes leaders into believing that everyone is interested in the same things they are interested in, and focused on the same issues and challenges that they are focusing on. As a result, leaders have to work hard to re-imagine the world from other perspectives in order to communicate well with them.
2. They mistake numbers for vision. As soon as you get below the level of a company where the options are fabulous and the handshakes are golden, people need something to motivate them beyond their salaries. Most people need to believe that the work they’re doing helps society in some way. CEOs and other leaders have already made the translation of worth into the next quarter’s profit margins, because they live with those numbers everyday, but most employees don’t. Leaders need to translate the numbers they understand into the language of purpose that the rest of the world understands.
3. They think information is persuasion – and they don’t do enough of either. Once again, because leaders have already accepted the argument that what they’re doing is worthwhile, they don’t need to hear the reasoning behind the company’s plan going forward. But their employees, and certainly the public at large, are not as deeply invested in the company’s logic, and so they need more than just information. They need to know why. It’s not enough for a CEO to inform the employees about a new venture. The leader also needs to tell the employees why the new venture is worth the effort.
Top executives too often communicate too little. When they do communicate, they expect their employees and the world to pay breathless attention. They need to remember that information is not persuasion, that numbers are not vision, and that the bubble is not where most people live.
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.
Here’s a quick and effective method for preparing a presentation when you're under the gun and can't spend a lot of time brainstorming. Ask yourself the following 5 questions:
1. Who is your audience? You need to know the demographics, the size of the audience, the time of day, but also what they’re thinking about. What are they afraid of? What are they hoping for? To cut through the audience’s mental clutter and engage them, you have to know what’s going to get in the way.
2. What do you want that audience to do differently as a result of the speech? Speeches are best constructed in reverse. Start with the end point – where do you want them as you wrap up? Ask them to do something small that is symbolic of that, or a first step toward that. Build the speech backward from that point.
3. What’s the problem the audience has for which your information is the solution? Before you can start talking about your expertise, your passion, the stuff you know, you have to set it up in the audience’s terms. Let’s say you’re an expert on sleep deprivation, and you’re talking to an audience of orchestral musicians. Then start by talking about their impossible schedules – how constant international travel takes an insidious toll on the health, creativity, even performance skills. You’ll get their attention. Then, tell them how proper sleep patterns will cure all those ills.
4. What’s a brief story, anecdote, statistic, factoid, or question that sums up this problem? Start with that story or line. It should take about 1-2 minutes. Did I ever tell you the story of the tympanist who fell asleep during the 1812 Overture? The point is to frame the topic in a way that’s more interesting than an agenda slide. It whets the appetite of the audience, tells it what’s in store for it, and doesn’t give the game away.
5. What’s the elevator pitch for this talk? I’ve written about elevator pitches before. They’re the one-sentence reason why a prospective audience member should attend. Once you’ve written or prepared the speech, figure out the elevator pitch. Then go back through your speech and throw out everything that doesn’t relate to it. You’ll have a tight, well-crafted presentation that works well with your particular audience. You’re ready to go.
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.
Imagine you’re settling into your seat in the movie theatre, popcorn and soda at the ready, waiting happily for the latest James Bond movie to start. You can’t wait to see what the proverbial high stakes opening chase before the credits will be – how many explosions, how fast, how many bodies littering the ground.
Instead, as the lights dim, an image of Daniel Craig, wearing a business suit and tie, appears in front of you on the big screen. He’s standing in front of a Power Point set up, and he proceeds to put up an agenda slide for the upcoming movie. He then reads the half-dozen or so lines off the screen, telloing you in some detail about what's going to happen, saying between each one, “And then, and then, and then.” And at some point, he says, “Oh, and the item you’ve all been waiting for, the coffee break. We’ve got donuts and muffins.”
How’s your experience of the movie so far? And yet, this is precisely what way too many speakers do in meeting after meeting, presentation after presentation, telling people what they’re going to say before they say it.
How much of a Bond movie is the surprise and the suspense? Why do people purposely set out to kill the surprise and suspense (what there is) in a business presentation?
Instead of an agenda slide, then, here are several ways to get your audience through the experience with a little more grace and excitement.
First, since audiences come into a presentation asking Why? – why am I here, why should I care, why is this important to me? – answer that question for them with a quick story that sets the scent. It should be one to three minutes, tops. And at the end, point the moral and set the scene by saying something like, “So it’s people like Jack that are demanding change, and that’s what I want to talk to you about today – why change is so important in this industry.”
Now the audience knows why it’s there, what the subject is, and they have some taste of the urgency of the subject because of the compelling story you’ve told them.
Second, begin with a startling statistic. “Did you know that one out of every three students at State Univ is considering dropping out because of financial difficulties?” Again, that sets the scene and tells everyone why they’re there without giving away everything in advance.
Third, begin with an audience poll. “Let me begin by finding out something about you. How many of you have done time? How many are on the lam? How many are considering returning to the state of their original arrest to clear their records?” This kind of interaction with the audience immediately involves them and begins to make the room “smaller” – and your talk more of a conversation.
Fourth, start with a contest, or a quiz. Award prizes. I’ve seen this work well many times. Ask easy questions. Or provocative ones. I once saw a speaker (back when the Internet was young) use this technique to talk about coaching businesses to use the power of the Internet to make boring products into interesting (and profitable) services. She held up a tube of toothpaste and asked the audience, “Is this toothpaste a product or a service?” After a second’s thought, some smart, awake person shouted out, “A product!” The speaker smiled, said, “Great!” and gave the toothpaste to the audience member. Again, she held up another tube of toothpaste and said, “Is this a product or a service?” Another bright spark in the audience said, “A service!” Right, said the speaker, and handed out the toothpaste. Now the audience had the idea, and soon they were shouting out answers with enthusiasm in order to pocket the (modest) gifts. It was a perfect way to energize the crowd and introduce the topic, which the speaker then went on to discuss seriously.
Finally, begin by appealing to a different on of the five senses than hearing or sight. Hold up a prop, one that is relevant to your talk, and pass it around. Let people touch it, heft it, smell it, and so on. I once saw this technique used very powerfully by a doctor who was advocating for a kind of radiation therapy in front of a Congressional committee. The topic was intensely technical and complicated. The doctor was asking for more money and insurance coverage for a treatment program that worked better than the standard one. It involved a copper tube that aimed the radiation more precisely than the standard treatment. So the doctor passed the copper tube around the congressional committee members. It made an otherwise mysterious and difficult-sounding treatment surprisingly down-to-earth and understandable.
Avoid the agenda slide. Be creative. Keep your audiences awake with these other techniques.
I blog a good deal on non-verbal communications because every communication is two conversations, the verbal and the non-verbal. When those two are aligned, you can be an effective communicator. When the two are not aligned, people believe the non-verbal always. That makes the non-verbal conversation extremely important – a show-stopper, in fact, for someone giving a speech.
But let’s say you’re passionate about your topic, you’ve rehearsed, and you are open to the audience. In short, the speech goes well in non-verbal terms. OK, all of that is ‘table stakes’. In order to get a message through to the audience, you still have to put the content together in ways that the audience can hear it.
One of the most important ways in which you can increase your verbal power – and the audience’s comprehension – is to use rhetoric that works well on the ear. It’s difficult to assimilate information through the ear. We only remember 10 – 30 percent of what we hear as audience, so it’s up to you, the speaker, to make it as easy as possible for us.
And the single most important rhetorical device you can use is the ‘Rule of Threes’. What is it? I’ve already used it in this (written) blog – look at the first sentence of the second paragraph. When you give people a series of items, always make sure there are three items in the series.
Why is this so important? It’s a psychological thing – groups of three sound complete to us. In this way, you will sound authoritative, and the audience will listen more closely to what you’re saying, and remember it better.
There’s a comical instance of this rule that shows how powerful it is. The great orator Winston Churchill, speaking to the House Commons just after he had been appointed Prime Minister as WW II was getting underway, on May 13, 1940, said: “I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined the Government, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’”
So popular was the line that the public took it up and turned it into ‘blood, sweat, and tears’, and that is the way it was remembered. And, indeed, a pop group was formed with the name in the 1960s, Blood, Sweat and Tears. Thus the power of the rule of threes.
Churchill’s remark came in a speech that had an even better line: “You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory – victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” Here, he obeys the rule of threes, in spite of the fact that he repeats the word ‘victory’ five times in the sentence, because the structure of it is framed around the three repetitions of the word.
Use the rule of threes whenever you can. Your audiences will find it satisfying, authoritative, and compelling.
Let’s imagine that you’ve been given the assignment of closing out a conference. You’re the final speaker and you want to leave the audience happy, motivated, and ready to come back for more. Assuming you’re not just going to give your usual speech and wish the audience bon voyage, you want to figure out some way to sum up the conference without just going over the main points of each of the preceding speakers. That’s way too boring, so I'll suggest 5 ways to close out a conference with style, in order of ascending complexity.
1. Give a brief, focused summary that talks about "Here are the 3 most important ideas I've learned. Here's what I'm going to do differently when I get back to the office. Here are the 3 ideas we should look for more information on going forward."
2. Focus on the future: give a short talk on the implications for the future of some of the key ideas you heard. Use these to fit in some of your favorite ideas or issues that weren't addressed fully during the conference.
3. Poll the audience for their ideas about aspects of #1 & 2. In other words, quote people you've interviewed along the way for the 3 most important ideas, what they're going to do differently, further research, implications, etc.
4. Take along a video camera, and interview audience members during the 3 days. Get their very quick reactions to selected talks, ideas for the future, etc. Then show the video as the closer. (I've used this last idea at several conferences to huge enthusiasm, because people love to see themselves on camera, and the idea builds cohesion and excitement during the 3 days. It works best if you have a camera AND a sound person; the quality is much better. But it can be done with a simple hand-held video camera.)
5. (Just for fun.) Play a quick game of conference trivia. Offer prizes (cash, easy things to carry, champagne, gift certificates) to all who can answer the questions (of what went on during the 3 days). This means that you have to pay close attention during the entire conference, for good trivia.
Have fun!
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.
I was inspired by David Meerman Scott’s great post on public speaking (http://tinyurl.com/dndzw7) to write about 3 steps to achieving public speaking nirvana – that zen-like stage where you’re in the zone and time is suspended and you and the audience are one, or very nearly so.
First, you’ve got to know your material cold. So many people tell me that they just ‘wing it’ when it comes to public speaking. This method occasionally works but mostly leads to disaster. It’s a favorite of CEOs, especially, for some reason. I suspect it’s because after they’ve finished winging a speech, they come down off the stage and ask a nearby SVP, “No, really, Jim, how did I do?” Jim loyally praises the CEO to the skies and the CEO thinks, “I’ll do that again.” Those kind of speeches are never as good as the deluded CEO thinks they are.
Instead, practice the speech until you know it so well that you can pick it up at any point and deliver the rest of it. Know the ‘spine’ of the speech – what you’d say if you only had 5 minutes to give it. That’s the gist of the ideas, in order. Know the stories that you tell, and be able to cut and paste on the fly if necessary. Know the speech so that it fits like an old, familiar glove. Know the opening and the closing as well as you knew your mother when you were a baby.
Second, forget the speech and focus on the audience. Once you know the speech completely, thoroughly, and utterly, you’re ready to be giving it with 75 percent of your brain while spending the other 25 percent watching the audience ‘get it’. What that means is that you stop thinking about the speech as you talking and think about it as the audience learning the fabulous idea you’re there to impart. Get to know how the audience reacts at every step along the way. When do they lean forward? When do they get lost? (Fix that part.) When do they laugh, and when do they cry? When do the lights go on? What are the highs and lows? Soon you’ll know the audience’s speech as well as your own. That’s when you’re ready to take it home.
Third, forget the speech and the audience and focus on the content. This is the step where you find simplicity again beyond the complexities of speaking and listening at the same time. Reinhold Niebuhr, the great theologian, once gave a speech to a rapt crowd of students. At the end of speech, he took questions. One student asked him, “Professor Niebuhr, you have devoted a lifetime to studying religion, and good and evil. You have witnessed great suffering as well as great joy. What in your mind is the essence of Christianity and what does it have to say to the human condition?” And Neibuhr replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know, because the Bible tells me so.” That comment was profound for the assembled audience because it represented the simplicity beyond complexity. Once you’ve mastered your speech, yourself, and all the audiences you will ever speak to, you’re ready to find that simplicity and come back to communication being just about content, because all the barriers to communication are gone and nothing gets between you, the audience, and the message. That’s public speaking nirvana. Enjoy!
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.
Stewart Brand is one long-term cool individual. He was associated with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, he founded The Whole Earth Catalog, and he wrote one of the most interesting books on buildings ever written: How Buildings Learn. That last one will change the way you think about habitable space. If you haven’t read it, you should before you buy a house to live in.
So we’re talking about someone who has been around a long time in human terms and who has a deep perspective on the way humans live on the planet.
Currently, he’s working with an organization that encourages really long views. For example, he’s working on a project that’s trying to develop and find a home for a 10,000-year clock. That’s a hundred centuries.
Where do you locate something like that? It has to be a place that will withstand an enormous amount of change, to say the least. Brand manages to make the quest for a good home for the clock a story about stories – specifically the 7 stages of the mythic adventure: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stewart_brand_on_the_long_now.html.
First, he says, you have to get an image of the goal in your mind. Then, you need a good jumping off point. Third, you must go through a labyrinth. Fourth, you need a beacon – something to help you find the goal. Fifth, you need a payoff – and a secret, unexpected payoff. Sixth, you need to return, and last, you need a memento of your journey.
He quite seriously investigates a remote mountain range in Nevada for all these properties. Most of it matches pretty well.
It’s a very entertaining subject. Unfortunately, it’s delivered in an amateurish way.
Brand’s talk beautifully illustrates the danger of speaking on the fly. He clearly wrote the talk shortly before he was to deliver it. The result is that a normally confident, engaging speaker is tied to notes, too many slides, and a podium that gets between him and his audience.
He spends too much time with his head in his notes, or figuring out which slide comes next. The talk itself needs editing and tightening. The organizing principal of the 7 stages of a mythic adventure doesn’t quite allow him to cover everything he wants to cover, so he wanders off into the other areas, undercutting the inherent strength of the core of the talk.
It’s too bad; it’s like watching a famous musician learn a new piece, with all the mistakes and hesitations all-too-clearly visible.
What separates the mediocre and the excellent in public speaking? Practice.
Samantha Power works at Harvard, and writes about U.S. foreign policy, especially as it concerns war and genocide. Her talk on TED.com is remarkable for two reasons. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/samantha_power_on_a_complicated_hero.html)
First, she discusses, with passion and insight, the issue of U.S and global response to genocide. She gives us all a grade, as befits a part-time academic, and it’s not good: a ‘C’ at best.
Second, she manages nearly to scupper her (ultimately successful) talk with one persistent problem with her body language.
Samantha begins by contrasting our relatively feeble response to genocide in the 20th Century with a somewhat stronger one in the 21st. She points out that when the genocide began in Rwanda, there were lots of letters to congressmen here in the U. S. worried about the endangered apes, but none about the endangered people. By contrast, the response to Darfur has been much more visible, if not yet successful.
What’s the difference? Chiefly the work of an anti-genocide movement of college students, high school students, and evangelicals. This movement has made it politically impossible for national leaders to ignore what’s going on as they have before.
Power traces the history of war, destruction and genocide in recent years through the biography of the remarkable Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian who was the UN’s point person wherever human misery was greatest, until he was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq – in part because a war predicated on the connection between Iraq and terrorism had made no plans for dealing with terrorists once the government was overthrown.
Sergio was a complicated man, one who struggled with the ‘dance with the devil’ he was forced into in these places of terror and human misery around the world. When he first began his work, in the independence campaigns in the 1970s, he would denounce evil, loudly and clearly, waiving the UN charter under the noses of generals and junta leaders around the world. As time went on, he began to denounce less and compromise more, in an effort to save more of the hapless populations he was attempting to serve. And finally, he ended up somewhere in the middle, negotiating with the likes of the Khmer Rouge, but not ignoring their crimes either.
It’s quite a tale, and Samantha tells it well, except for one quirk: she talks with her head tipped on one side for virtually the entire 23 minutes. Why is that a problem? I call it the ‘Mr. Rogers gesture’ in my work with clients. What it does is give up authority. It’s appropriate if you’re asking a 5-year-old who has come running to you crying, ‘where does it hurt?’ But if you’re trying to hold forth on a very serious issue that cuts directly to the heart of our humanity, you can't give up your authority. Don’t do it when you're in front of an audience, as a general rule, except perhaps when you've asked the audience for a response. Even then, stay in charge. Keep your head on straight.
Is it possible to give an entire 20-minute talk without breathing? Of course not, but Virginia Postrel gives it a good go with her talk on glamour on TED.com. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/virginia_postrel_on_glamour.html ) The talk is fascinating because it shows all the reasons why breathing is the most important fundamental of good speaking. To breathe poorly or shallowly is to invite disaster.
Postrel’s talk is on the larger meaning of the word ‘glamour’, and she nails the content. Glamour once meant a spell, as in, to cast a glamour – to make something appear other than it is. It was associated with witchcraft. From this beginning, Postrel weaves a whole talk on how glamour is essentially falsification to achieve an end. Glamour hides the wires, the work, and looks effortless. Glamour is graceful, mysterious, and transcendent, like Heddy Lamar and Grace Kelly. And so on.
It’s an interesting riff on a word. But the problem comes because Postrel never stops for breath, and her rapid-fire delivery soon grates on the ear and annoys the mind. We want her to pause, for God’s sake. Land on a point and shut up! Why won’t she pace herself and the audience?
More than that, her voice gets hoarse, especially at the end of phrases, because she runs out of air. As a result, the whole delivery becomes annoying. The timbre of her voice suffers woefully from her lack of deep breathing, and the audience soon can’t stand to listen to it.
So poor breathing prevents the audience from fully absorbing the talk, and prevents the speaker from delivering it well. It puts a strain on the voice, ruins the timing, makes the voice harder to understand, and the content as well. Watch this talk to learn, viscerally, the importance of good breathing.
A talk on glamour has to be glamorous, and to be that you have to have a bit of mystery. A runaway freight train is not mysterious, and neither is a runaway speaker. Nice try, Postrel, but without breathing you can’t be glamorous on glamour.
Continuing my tour of TED.com, the amazing resource for those who want to study ideas and the public expression of them, I’m taking on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html)
Mihaly is the expert on ‘Flow’, that state of happy absorption into any creative process that he has documented as part of a life-long research project on happiness.
What's Mihaly's insight? It turns out, alas, that money doesn’t buy you happiness. In fact, beyond a certain minimal level, happiness does not increase with increased material wealth.
Happiness does come with flow, at least for creative people involved in doing things they like to do. The composer creating music, the poet writing a lyric poem – or the CEO running a business. Each of these can experience flow on the job.
I’m a big fan of Mihaly’s work, and highly recommend his books, including Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, which describes the state in question in greater detail.
Unfortunately, I can’t be a fan of Mihaly’s presentation style. He begins with a moderately interesting story, only somewhat relevant, of hearing Carl Jung speak about how Europeans coped with the tragedy of WWII. But it’s not until 2:41 minutes into the talk that he uncrosses his arms and looks up for the first time. After that, he’s still got his head down, looking at the floor, pacing randomly, connecting with the audience only occasionally. My guess is that he’s modeling his behavior on professors he’s watched over the years, and that’s a mistake.
He seems to be carrying an enormous psychological weight around, a little odd for someone who studies happiness. A little more bounce in the step would seem more consistent with his message. But maybe he studies happiness because it eludes him personally.
As the talk goes on, he does open up his gestures, but he then turns to the screen and talks to the slides, constantly backing up away from the audience until the end of his talk, where he disappears into the darkness at the corner of the stage, asking ‘OK?’ of no one in particular. Clearly, public speaking is not where Mihaly experiences his flow. Buy his book; skip the lecture.
My second pick from the extensive TED.com archives is a talk by the noted scholar Jared Diamond on “Why Societies Collapse.” It’s a classic instance of brilliant content married to a faulty delivery. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse.html)
Diamond describes five reasons why societies fail. He uses as an example the European settlement on Greenland, that began in the 900s or so and died out roughly 500 years later. First, Jared says, societies can have a destructive effect on their environment. In this case, the Norse immigrants contributed to soil erosion through their destructive farming techniques, among other problems.
Second, climates can change. Unfortunately for the Norse, the world turned cold in the 1300 and 1400s. Third, relations with friendly neighbors can weaken. The ties to Europe faltered during the cold spells because of difficulty in traveling back east. Fourth, relations with hostile neighbors can affect survival. Here, the Inuits knew a good deal about survival during the colder era, but the Norse were unable to learn from them because of the two societies mutual incomprehension. And finally, political, cultural and economic factors can prevent a society from seeing and responding to the impending collapse. The Norse were heavily invested in their Christianity and in particular building cathedrals, and that effort was misguided to say the least in a land that was barely suited for hard-scrabble subsistence farming and raising sheep.
It’s quite cozy, in a slightly perverse way, to contemplate the unwise actions of a long-dead civilization. But Jared smoothly makes the transition to our era, and we soon realize that we’re failing, too, on all five factors. Just to make sure we don’t miss the point, Diamond lets us know that societies don’t decline gradually; rather, they collapse rapidly, within a few decades. He notes that those in his audience who are under 50 will be witness to our collapse unless we manage to rise above history and change the ways things are going. It's a scary message.
And what about the scholar’s delivery? Diamond has a commanding presence that he throws away because of his natural introversion. He swallows his voice, bringing it out reluctantly from the back of his throat half-strangled. He does move from his notes at the podium out to the audience, but he doesn’t clearly define that end point well enough, and he tends to wander in between the two points like a lost sheep.
His gestures are defensive; he constantly crosses his arms and brings his hand to his face. But the worst aspect of his body language in terms of connecting with people is his head posture. Naturally enough, as a scholar with a lot on his mind, he leads with his head, looking down and rarely connecting with the audience. As he warms up, he begins to direct fleeting glances at his audience as if he’s surprised that anyone is still there, but they don’t last long enough to help.
All in all, an arresting and thought-provoking message marred by a hopelessly introverted delivery. The classic absent-minded professor restricts the reach of his message because he doesn't know how to deliver it effectively.
If you don’t know TED, you should get to know it. TED.com is a repository of hundreds of fascinating short speeches, on every subject under the sun. It’s a tremendous opportunity for speakers and students of public speaking to study the great and near-great on line in tidy little packages.
What’s fascinating to me is how mediocre, on the whole, these brilliant people with wonderful ideas are. They’re nervous, they pace randomly, they talk to mediocre slides, they are defensive – they are a catalogue of how not to do it. That’s partly why they’re so inspiring – even the best have feet of clay. their humanity makes them feel more approachable.
And yet, the quality of the ideas does shine through, usually. These people are opinionated, often a tad condescending, convinced of their righteousness, academic in the bad sense of the word – and yet fascinating.
I’m going to spend the week talking about a few speakers from this treasure trove, but don’t take my word for it. Go deep into TED.com and check them out for yourself.
My first pick, because I’ve been a fan of space flight ever since Star Trek, is Carolyn Porco, a NASA person, and head of the unmanned flight to the moons of Saturn. I’ve picked her talk to illustrate the right use of visual aids. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/carolyn_porco_flies_us_to_saturn.html)
Carolyn’s slides are, quite literally, out of this world, being pictures of Saturn and its moons. She does manage to convey something of the magic of space flight that NASA’s spokespeople usually manage to kill. And her story of what the team found on a moon of Saturn – the first time humans had landed anything on a planet in the outer solar system – is arresting.
That said, she commits the classic mistake of an inexperienced speaker. In her nervousness, she starts out with her hands close to her side, nervously pacing hither and yon, and her gestures are circular, and repetitive, rising from the waist and spreading out, as if she’s trying to unload something, because she is: her adrenaline.
Speakers instead should find ways of channeling their adrenaline that connect with the audience and build trust and credibility.
Once Porco gets into her topic, she settles down, and becomes quite effective. It’s a good speech, and one to be studied for an effective use of visual aids.
Once again, I’m going to dip my communications toe into dangerous waters and discuss the final presidential debate. Just to get the inevitable out of the way from the start (and no doubt infuriate McCain supporters), I’m going to declare a winner along with most of the rest of the viewers: Obama.
Here’s why. As a communications coach, I was looking for alignment between the content and non-verbal ‘conversations’, as I call them. Senator Obama presented a calm, thoughtful approach to his various subjects. There were lots of conversational markers indicating organization and precision – lots of ‘there are 3 reasons for that’ and ‘here’s why that won’t work’, and so on.
He also answered questions in the way that I coach people to when faced with an impromptu speaking situation: give the headline, give several supporting reasons, repeat the headline. (Although he didn’t always get to the last step because of time.) That approach to content makes audiences think you're in control and you're smart.
His accompanying non-verbal conversation was polite, attentive, and deliberate. Some said “defensive and dull,” but I would not agree, at least with the first adjective of that pair. My hunch is that two things are going on. First, Obama is a thoughtful, cool, low-key guy – a consensus-builder, not a firebrand. Second, he was coached to stay calm, cool, and low-key, given that the world is in financial meltdown and most of us probably want a steady hand at the presidential tiller.
Obama looked at McCain when he was speaking. He rarely interrupted him. He kept his facial reactions limited to occasional wry smiles. He was playing poker, and he had his game face on. His was a controlled performance.
By contrast, McCain was in constant motion. When Obama was talking, McCain rarely looked at him. He rolled his eyes, he smirked, he smiled false smiles, he scribbled notes, he sighed like Al Gore back in 2000 – in sum, he looked cranky and untrustworthy, and even rude at times.
That’s because his content and his non-verbal conversations were not in alignment much of the 90 minutes. He frequently attacked Obama, but, because he’s apparently anxious not to appear too angry, he swallowed his evident fury and gave us the false smiles. The result was unnerving. We deeply distrust people who smile to hide anger underneath. It’s an unconscious response, for the most part, that we have to all mixed messages like that. McCain would be much better served by just getting angry, and showing it.
McCain’s content was disorganized, rambling, and repetitive. He must have mentioned Joe the Plumber 15 times. He frequently would start a thought, interrupt himself, and start another line of thought. This speech pattern is typical of someone who is attempting to conceal a strong emotion.
McCain was at his best when he turned to Obama and sent him a zinger, like the comment that if he wanted to run against George Bush he should have run in 2004. There, the non-verbal anger and the anger in the content aligned, and he was effective. I thought that was the best line of the debate, and I'm a Democrat.
TV is a cool medium. It craves emotion; emotion fascinates viewers. When you dial it back, like Obama did, we watch you more closely to find out what you’re thinking. When you’re conflicted, as McCain was, you’re also fascinating, but for the wrong reasons. It’s like a train wreck. You can’t take your eyes off it, but you know something is going wrong.
In the end, alignment between your verbal and non-verbal messages is key, because that demonstrates authenticity. On that level, regardless of politics, Obama succeeded and McCain fell short.
And what of archetypes? How can you use them to help create powerful speeches?
Let’s first figure out what archetypes are. Basically, an archetype is a model of a character, or part of a character. The word and concept have been around for a long time, but they was made famous, so to speak, by the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.
When Jung talked about archetypes, he meant primarily aspects of a person – the Self, the Shadow (your Dark Side) and the Persona (the face you put toward the world). But he also talked about a host of other kinds of people, and aspects of people and the natural world, that could be archetypes, from the child, hero, mother and wise old man to the fish.
The idea is that your particular mother resonates for you with the archetypal mother in some ways, and not in other ways. You may develop a mother complex as a result. We live at our best and most fully when we’re in harmony with all the archetypes we summon up.
Jung believed that archetypes were real – a kind of bridge between our inner psychological world and the real world out there. More than that, we all have access to universal wisdom and understanding through and with these archetypes.
OK, so what does that mean for speakers?
I think we can invoke the power of the basic archetypes by naming them at appropriate moments in our stories and by using them as ways to connect with the audience. Words like ‘child’, ‘mother’, ‘father’ and so on have enormous resonance for just about everyone in your audience. The trick is to let your audience do the work, creating the associations, by giving them enough detail to get their minds working, but not so much that you stop them from using their imaginations.
Archetypes work best in simple stories that allow audiences to fill in the blanks. You need to craft these stories – really parables – with great care so that they are not hackneyed or silly. If you do it right, you can create powerful, memorable stories that call us all to our best, archetypal selves.
I’ve blogged before on the fundamental stories of Western culture, so I’ll just mention them briefly here. They’re important to invoke in your presentations because we all respond to them – that’s why they’re fundamental.
If you ask your employees to embark with you on a long and arduous journey to develop a new product, they’ll complain about the obstacles along the way, unless you invoke a Quest story. Then, the obstacles are to be expected because that’s what happens on a quest. The heroes (your audience) meets obstacles and suffers reversals – but eventually overcomes them all to reach the goal. Don't make the mistake of casting yourself as the lone hero -- always bring the audience along with you.
The Quest story is the basic one, and audiences get the idea very quickly because the story is so deeply ingrained in our psyches. Quest stories have heroes, journeys, obstacles, mentors, and most importantly a goal at the end. For more information on the subject, read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the definitive book on the subject. There are many others that take the idea and apply it to writing, scriptwriting, and so on. Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey, is a good example. For more detail on how to apply these ideas to speeches, see my book, Working the Room, reprinted in paper as Give Your Speech, Change the World.
After the Quest, the other stories are: Stranger in a Strange Land, Love Story, Rags to Riches, and Revenge. There are other theories that offer more stories, but I’ve always found the other ones to be kinds of Quests, and so I stick to these five. Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots is an example of one of the other theories, but his book seems to me to make the whole business more complicated than it needs to be. He says he spent 30 years writing the book, and maybe that’s the problem.
The way to think about these stories is as thematic ideas that you invoke as you go through your speech. You might do it with a specific reference to a particular, well-known Quest story, like the Holy Grail, the Wizard of Oz, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or you might use the elements and the language of a Stranger in a Strange Land story in order to bring the audience into that magical space without actually telling them bluntly that ‘you’re on a quest’. It’s better in this case not to be blunt, but rather to evoke the stories with their unconscious power to orient us and bring us into a space where we see the outcome as ordained by the structure of the story.
Once you’ve picked your thematic story and you’re off on a Quest or you’re all Strangers in a Strange Land, then you want to think about using archetypes to get further storytelling mileage out of our common mythology. I’ll talk about those next time.
How do you create a great story for the purposes of public speaking? There are a couple of ways to think about it.
My favorite structure for a persuasive speech is the problem-solution structure that I’ve blogged about before. You can either hold to that structure, and tell stories at various points along the way, as examples and supporting evidence and so on, or you can treat the whole speech as a story.
In either case, think of your stories as having three acts. The first act presents an idea or a situation that will engage the audience (Romeo meets Juliet and falls in love). It’s best if this idea or situation is one that, once it has happened or been told, cannot be undone. (Romeo cannot ‘unmeet’ Juliet.) If you give your audience some information at the beginning of your speech that they don’t know, it has the same effect. Our customer base has been eroding for the last 16 quarters, and just today I learned that it’s official – we’re now down for 17 quarters. We can’t afford to go on like this….
Needless to say, it should be information that is of interest to them – it should be about a problem they have.
The second act raises the stakes on the earlier idea or situation. (Romeo marries Juliet despite the feud between the two families.) Once again, it should be something that cannot easily be undone. If we have another down quarter, we’re going to have to close manufacturing plants in Chicago and Ohio.
The third act precipitates a resolution, either favorable or unfavorable, by posing a question that must be resolved. (Romeo kills Tybalt in a duel, thus resulting in his banishment. Will Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after? Answer: no.) To turn things around, I’m starting a new product line, code name Lemmings, that will excite customers once again and bring them flocking back to our stores. Just as no one in the play Romeo and Juliet ever literally asks the resolving question out loud, you don’t have to in your speech. You do have to resolve it, and the best way is to get your audience to undertake some action to enlist them in your persuasive moment. I've put prototype Lemmings underneath your chairs. I'd like you now to please take them out of their boxes and try them out.
Just as the rest of Romeo and Juliet fills in around these key moments with scenes that explore the consequences of these interesting, fateful actions, your speech should too.
That’s the basic structure of a good story. Next time I’ll talk about the fundamental stories and the archetypes and how you can use them to make your presentations more powerful.
I was asked recently about how archetypes can aid in public speaking, and that suggested a series of blogs on storytelling, structure, plots, and archetypes as they figure in speeches and presentations.
So let’s begin at the beginning. Why tell stories in speeches? Only because they are interesting, they help people remember what you say, and they are a good way to convey information and emotion memorably.
Mark Turner, a writer and philosopher who has been associated with the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Center for Neural and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Maryland, goes even further. In his landmark book, The Literary Mind, published by Oxford in 1996, he says, “Story is a basic principle of mind.” In other words, he argues that we think in terms of stories. We learn from the high chair that if we push a glass of milk over, white liquid spills on the floor, a parent comes running making noises, mops it up, and kisses us on the top of the head (if we’re lucky). That’s a story, and it’s a basic understanding of cause and effect by which we make sense of our world.
There are actors, actions, objects, and results. It’s all good fun, it’s memorable, and it’s how we continue to think long after we’ve left the high chair.
How does that apply to public speaking? Most people organize their talks in lists of information. (Five reasons to join our exciting investment program.) Unfortunately, the human mind is not constructed to remember lists very well. Once you’ve told me 3 things, to remember the 4th I’ll have to forget the first. ‘In one ear and out the other’ pretty describes how we respond to lists. Yet everyone who has heard, seen, or read it once remembers the story of Romeo and Juliet.
So if you give speeches more like Shakespeare and less like the phone book, you’ll be much more memorable. That’s why stories are important. Next time I’ll talk about structure and how to create great stories.
For the partisans on both sides, post-debate analysis is all about spin. But nonetheless, I’m going to try to give a fairly evenhanded reaction to what I saw in terms of the alignment of the two conversations, the verbal (content) and the non-verbal (body language). I’ve been waiting until the passions cooled a little on the Palin-Biden debate, just because people are so unreasonable on that subject. So here goes. SPOILER ALERT: I’m going to say tough things about all four candidates. DON’T READ THIS if you’re a hopeless partisan who sees criticism of your candidate as unpatriotic or worse.
Joe Biden – on the plus side, he had good command of the facts, he appeared to take the debate seriously, and he was respectful to his opponent. On the negative side, he kept his hand in his pocket too much, and when he registered passion (or at least pique) his voice went high and nasal, and stayed that way too long. When you keep a hand in a pocket, we wonder what you’re hiding, and when your voice goes nasal, we find it irritating. He needs to support with good breathing when he takes his voice higher, and keep his hands where we can see them. NO WHINING, JOE!
Sarah Palin – on the plus side, she appeared relaxed, after quite a bit of initial nervousness. She has impressive poise for someone who has just been thrust onto the national scene. That poise served her very well during her speech at the Republican convention; less well with Katie Couric because you could tell when she was trying to bull her way through an answer. It would have been better to admit that she didn’t know. She’s allowed; she’s only been ‘at this for five weeks’.
In terms of content, she stuck to her prepared answers on taxes and energy, regardless of the questions. Sometimes that worked, but often her bridging was weak and it was blatantly obvious she wasn’t answering the question. Audiences don’t like people who don’t respond to the question; bridging is an important art and skill and she needs more practice.
Her folksiness either grated on you, or you loved it. All the shout-outs, the you betchas, and the say-it-ain’t-so-Joes – that either made you believe she was just like you, or it made your skin crawl. Her winking and condescension toward Biden would have been outrageous if their gender roles were reversed; I found it off-putting. But her main problem was an inconsistency in the two conversations – she smiled when she was actually angry. That makes us not trust her. DON’T SMILE WHEN YOU’RE ANGRY, SARAH!
John McCain – on the plus side, McCain sounded best when he was talking about his service to his country. Then, his voice has the right timbre and gravitas. On the negative side, when he was criticizing Obama, his voice went high and nasal, like Biden’s, and sounded condescending. As a result, he was irritating. If you watched the audience reaction meters on CNN, you saw that happening in real time. Whenever he went negative, the dials went down, as much because his voice was irritating as anything else.
But McCain’s main problem was happy feet, when he was talking, and when he was listening. Once again, audiences look for alignment of the two conversations. When they are not aligned, we believe the non-verbal. So, when McCain says that he’s got the experience, a steady hand, and can handle our scary economic problems, but his feet are wandering all over the stage, we believe the feet. Unconsciously, we think he’s wandering, mentally, just like he is physically. PLANT YOUR FEET, JOHN!
McCain's wandering around when Obama was answering just looked rude.
Barack Obama -- the best debater of the four in terms of clarity, logic, and coherence of his answers. He planted his feet when he addressed his audience, and so we believe that he has the mental solidity a president needs. Obama’s problem is that when he tries to display passion, his voice goes up, but the rest of him stays cool. He pinches his thumb and forefinger together when he’s making a point, regardless of how he feels about it, and the result is that he appears too passionless. LOSE THE PRISSY GESTURE, BARACK! Obama needs to let us see some real temper, or we’re going to think he’s aloof, and we won’t trust him. We need to see that he’s got some skin in the game.
Working with clients, I regularly hear the following comment when we’re talking about presentation structure: “Tell ‘em what you’re going to say, say it, then tell ‘em what you said.” The client will nod enthusiastically at me while saying this, expecting me to agree wholeheartedly.
My heart sinks.
This is lousy advice for 2008.
Why? Let’s look at what it means in practice. It means an agenda slide. And if the agenda is complicated, it means a long agenda slide, filled with words. I’ve even seen agenda slides with the breaks highlighted, as if those were the most important moments of the day. Of course, given the thinking of the people involved, they probably are.
Then comes the actual talk, filled with dense information. Then, at the end, everything’s repeated. The summary can often last 5 or 10 minutes.
The problem is that our minds don’t work this way. It’s not the right order. It’s not the way we need to hear things.
And it’s boring.
If you’re going to hold people's interest in this information-saturated age, with its shrinking attention spans and increased demands on time, then you’re going to have to present your case in the right way.
We’ve all become very smart about absorbing information, and we recognize moments when we don’t have to listen. An agenda slide is one of those moments. If you start with one, you’ll find that most of the audience will be on their BlackBerrys. Because you haven’t really started yet. They’ll check out in the same way at the end, when you start your summary. Or worse – they’ll ignore the middle and only listen during the summary.
Instead, begin by framing the discussion, preferably with a compelling, 1 – 3 minute story or anecdote, one that sets up the problem but does not give the rest of the talk (or day) away. Jump right in – Aristotle called it beginning in the middle of things – in medias res. Think about movies and TV today – they don’t begin with a long list of credits. They hook you first with explosions, murders, and the like. The credits come later, if at all. That’s your competition. Ignore it at your peril.
If you don’t have a great story, then talk about the issue in a high-level way: “We’re going to show you why widgets are not the right way to go in this market, and we’re going to follow that up with some recommendations that may surprise you. We think you’ll find them exciting. We’re certainly excited to talk about them with you.”
That’s in lieu of an agenda slide.
Then, answer the question, what’s in it for me? – where ‘me’ is the audience. Go into a problem that the audience has for which your information is the solution. After you’ve shown the audience you understand its problem, then and only then are you entitled to offer your solution. If you do it in this way, you’ll find happy, receptive audiences.
The ‘tell ‘em what you said’ idea came from World War II, when the armed services had to give identical instructions to large numbers of people so that they would all fight the war in the same way. It didn’t matter if it was boring. They were orders. Then, everyone who survived the war came back and went to work in the corporate world. They used the same mental template for speeches and presentations. Bad idea if you have to be interesting, but who was going to tell ‘em different? They were war heroes.
Today, you have to be interesting. So don’t repeat in this way. Repetition is important, but in different ways. Next time I’ll talk about repeating in interesting ways. Let me say that again: my next blog is about repetition.
And what of trust, the other feeling that audiences look for in a speaker, and that speakers need to establish with their audiences? Trust has both a verbal and a non-verbal component, and I’ll start with the verbal (the content).
You establish trust with an audience by solving their problems. Think of the doctor you take that mysterious ache to, for her diagnosis. If she holds forth on all the possible diseases that could be causing the pain, she’ll establish her credibility with you. But if she cures your ache, you will trust her as a doctor.
So building trust is in large part the art of understanding your audience deeply enough to ensure that your expertise will solve their problems. I once gave a talk on creativity to a group of CIOs in South Africa. The talk was not, let’s say, a success, because I had misjudged the audience. I thought their biggest problem was a lack of creativity, but they sure didn’t think so, and thus my witty, wise, and highly entertaining prescriptions for enhancing creativity in the workplace fell on profoundly indifferent ears. I did get some nice press coverage because the local press was quick to pick up the idea that more creativity for CIOs was a great idea. Just not the CIOs.
There has to be a good match between audience, topic, speaker, and the speaker’s expertise. If they don’t match, be prepared to leave town quickly.
Remember, too, that solving problems is both an emotional and intellectual activity. Doctors who form a good (communication) bond with their patients are much less likely to be sued for malpractice, regardless of how good their advice actually is. It’s all about trust. Use your expertise for the solution, but remember to tell stories about how your work has transformed people for the better, so that your audience can imagine itself in the same position. It’s the stories that build the emotional bond and cement the trust relationship you’re creating with your audience.
Also, remember that speaking is a poor way to convey information. We only remember something like 10 -30 percent of what we hear in a typical speech. So keep your solutions simple and allow the audience to interact with you to try out the solution, or take the first step toward it, or something similar. If they have a chance to be active, there’s a much greater likelihood that they will remember what you’re preaching.
Next time, I’ll wrap up with how to build trust non-verbally.
I’m continuing my suspension of my normal blogging campaign one more day to talk about campaign ads. Senator McCain’s campaign recently sunk to a new low with ads that said Senator Obama had supported sex ed for 6 year olds, when in fact it was training to avoid sexual predators. And there were others, equally misleading.
Now, Senator Obama’s campaign has responded with ads that suggest that McCain is aligned with Rush Limbaugh in opposing immigration reform. Not true. And there have been others, equally misleading.
It’s time to say that this is not OK. Yes, smear tactics and misleading public statements have been around since politics began. In ancient Rome, politicians hired thugs to walk through the streets spreading lies about their rivals. One of the dirtiest political campaigns in U.S. history was the second one, when John Adams, a Federalist, won by 3 electoral votes over Jefferson, the Democrat-Republican. Both sides slandered each other outrageously; the standards of journalistic verity were even lower than they are now.
But that’s no reason to tolerate this low form of behavior now. The Internet makes it possible for fact-checkers to work with formidable speed. Of course, the Internet spreads lies as fast as the truth, but nonetheless the truth will out if enough people demand it.
Both campaigns have claimed that their politics would be different. Indeed, Senator Obama’s campaign seemed to live that promise for much of its almost two-year history. But now?
Senator McCain’s claims of change and maverick-ism and a new approach in Washington are a little shakier given that he’s been around in Washington for 3 decades. But nonetheless, that was his promise.
So what’s going on? Why can’t either campaign resist getting down into the mud? It isn’t enough to point the finger at the other guy and say, ‘he did it first!’ That’s infantile behavior, and your mother taught you better. It’s time for both parties to stand up and say, enough. Politics as usual has given us weeks like this one, when the atmosphere is so poisoned that it seems almost impossible for politicians to create bi-partisan deals when they are necessary for the future of the country.
Enough of the bad behavior. There’s too much at stake.
I’m going to do a series of blogs on the basics of public speaking in honor of the Fall, the presidential campaign, and my new book, Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, coming out in December from Jossey-Bass. So here goes with the first 'basic' of giving great speeches.
Speeches should be about one thing. No more. You should be able to sum up your presentation in one sentence – the elevator speech. We must remain strong to fight communism, promote peace, and improve the economy at home. That’s a one-sentence summary of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. Help me work toward realizing my dream of racial equality. That’s the elevator speech for the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” oration.
You get the idea. Great speeches – successful speeches – confine themselves to one clear message. And this is not a message like some company’s anodyne vision statement. It should have a real point of view, emotion, and involve the audience in some way.
The great weakness of many political and business speeches is that they try to do too much. They lack clarity and punch, because the speaker won’t confine him- or herself to one topic and one point of view. Politicians want to bond with as many people as possible, naturally, and so must constantly fight the temptation to try to be all things to all people. Or they take the laundry list approach, figuring that a speech that goes on forever will have something for everyone in it.
Business people suffer from the same temptations and have to fight the same battles. Both groups also often want to avoid offense to some faction, and so make their language fuzzy in an effort to anger no one. In so doing, they usually manage to confuse everyone.
If you can’t summarize your talk in one clear sentence, you’re not ready to speak. Figure out your elevator speech and get back to us.
I've had a number of comments on my recent posts on commencement speeches and John McCain's wandering hand. So I'd thought I'd continue the discussion here.
People have sent me some great commencement speeches, analyses of them, and links to video. It prompts a comment right from the start: being a member of the audience and reading a speech are two very different things. An audience member is part of the performance art that is a speech. Readers come after the sparks have flown; they're late to the discussion.
The reason is, of course, that delivery is just as important to speechmaking as content. The non-verbal conversation, as I've talked about before, is just as crucial to comprehension and success as the verbal. You have to get both right.
And the non-verbal conversation is what everyone was bloviating about when John McCain's hand went wandering. What did he mean? Why did he pause so long? What was up with that hand?
The crucial point here is that it's a mistake to try to read specific meanings into hand gestures, or body language in general, as if it were a secret code. We are all unconscious experts in understanding body language at the emotional level, but most of us are poor at consciously decoding non-verbal communication.
Hence, I labeled my analysis of what John meant as speculation. Only someone very close to John, and used to his gestures, would be a good analyst of what he meant. Perhaps his wife understood immediately, but the rest of us are much better off just reading the emotion he was conveying, not intellectually trying to decode something more specific. Let your gut tell you what the other person is feeling, and don't try to analyze gesture too consciously, and you'll be more accurate more of the time. McCain was flummoxed, clearly, but more than that is difficult to be precise about.
We are already expert readers of body language, as long as we let that part of the brain that's good at it do its work. It's when we try to consciously decode gesture as if it were a system of precise signals that we get into trouble.
