Is one of your resolutions to improve at work? Maybe you’d like to be more organized, more proactive, a better manager, or a more inspiring leader. Improving your communication skills can help you improve in all of these areas.
To help you meet your goals, here are five excellent books on public speaking (available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and other popular spots).
I love these books because they are fun to read, full of great suggestions and ideas, and personal: in each of these books, the authors tell their own stories with verbal pizzazz.
In no particular order, or more accurately, in the chronological order in which I discovered them, here they are:
Moving Mountains: Or The Art and Craft of Letting Others See Things Your Way; by Henry Boettinger
Quote: “The key to getting and holding attention lies in having something new happen continually. If the sense of development dies, with it dies attention.”
The Articulate Executive: Learn to Look, Act, and Sound like a Leader; by Granville N. Toogood
Quote: “Just five minutes in front of the right audience can be worth more than a whole year behind your desk.”
Strictly Speaking: Reid Buckley’s Indispensable Handbook on Public Speaking; by Reid Buckley
Quote: “Corporate prose is the pits. It is uncivilized…characterized by a half-educated inflation of language…full of conceit…the enemy of clear sense. Where Shakespeare, in Hamlet, lugs the guts across the floor, American business “implements the removal of the remains from the premises.”
Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama; by Sam Leith
Quote: “The plain style to which we’re accustomed is no less a rhetorical strategy than the high style that will strike us as hammy or false. What seems to you ‘rhetorical’ today is, for the most part, rhetoric that isn’t working. “
Notice that each of these wonderful books have elaborate sub-titles that attempt to explain what the book is about. Those responsible for the titles were trying to be clever—rhetorical, actually. They were using words to attract readers, to persuade them to do something, like buy the book! But the clever titles might have made it hard for some people to quickly grasp what the book was about.
The last book on my list is different. It has no subtitle because the title tells you and the stocking clerks at Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Powells, Indiebound, and iBooks what the book is about. Here it is:
The Essentials of Persuasive Public Speaking; by Sims Wyeth (yup, that’s me.)
Quote: ”My uncle used to take me to the Central Park Zoo in New York to feed peanuts to squirrels. The squirrels were tame and stood on their hind legs begging with their paws hanging in front of their chests.
I see speakers with squirrel paws—limp hands devoid of life—and no matter how good the speech, I am not impressed. A squirrel-paw speaker doesn’t look like a person who can get anything done. “
It is presumptuous, I know, to elevate myself to the level of the authors I’ve mentioned above. And I feel a bit squeamish promoting myself. But if I don’t, who will?
Now that the new year is here, resolve to improve your ability to communicate and connect with the people around you. Read these books, or at least one of them. You’ll be a smarter communicator, and bundles of goodness could ensue.