Here are the reasons, in no particular order, why America needs better public speaking.

1. 1. Kids coming out of school have spent their lives staring at computer screens and saying, “like,” “know what I mean?”, “er,” and “like he goes…and then like she goes…,” and, “like you know what I mean—other stuff.”
2. This won’t cut it.
3. Smart people are often more interested in showing how smart they are rather than trying to land their thought on the gray matter of the listener.
4. People do business with people they like and trust.  They judge us primarily on how we talk.  If you can’t talk good, it’s an uphill battle for ya.
5. Smart people think that their expertise is sufficient for success. They are wrong.  There are countless embittered geniuses who have been shoved into a career closet because they struggle to connect with others.
6. Schools don’t teach “rhetoric” anymore, yet it was a staple of a university education for centuries.  It taught you how to argue persuasively, and how to sniff out an illogical argument.  Democracies need citizens who can sniff out bad arguments.
7. Increased competition in almost all fields has led to the commoditization of products and services.  If you don’t want to be forced into competing exclusively on price, you have to somehow make your product or service distinct.  One way to do that is to present yourself and your ideas more effectively than the next guy.
8. People tend to know more and more about less and less.  Good communication skills can help you speak the language of the audience, and thereby gain acceptance for your products, ideas, or services. 
9. People do business with people they like. If you are not relaxed and authentic at high stakes moments, you are not at your best, and you lose a major opportunity to connect with your audience. 
10. Your ability to speak well has a disproportionate impact on your success because early in your career the only time your boss’s boss sees you in action is when you’re presenting.

There may be other reasons, but these are the ten that tumbled out of me this Monday morning.

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

Samantha Miller  has created a list of 100 Cutting Edge Blogs: What You Won’t Learn in B-School.

In the spirit of full disclosure, the blog you are reading is on the list.  We do not know Samantha, and were pleasantly surprised when she e-mailed us to tell us we were included.

Samantha has scoured the blogosphere to bring you 100 blogs that will fill in the gaps left by your formal business education.

The blogs on the list are animated by the spirit of the following bit of wisdom:  Training teaches the rules but experience teaches the exceptions.

Whether you traffic in the world of science, marketing, consulting or high tech product invention, you have probably learned that you crawl toward success through trial and error.

Getting a degree can’t hurt.  A degree gives you a map.  But having experience seep through your skin into your bones gives you a feel for the terrain.  And that is a very different capability. 

It is said that it takes ten years  to make a great lawyer; ten years to make a great surgeon; ten to make a great musician, etc., etc. I think Malcolm Gladwell recently underlined this old truth in Outliers, his book about great achievement.

Samantha’s blog is divided into categories, and I’m sure you will find it useful, with or without a map.

If you tell me the rules of presenting are self-evident, that they’re so easy, there’s no need to study them, I’ll say, “They’re easy in theory, but hard in practice.”

Tell me persuasive speaking is unethical—mere manipulation, and I’ll say, “No.  It depends on your motives.  The art of persuasion can be used for good or for ill.”

Tell me that you won’t even try because you lack the presenter’s gene, and I’ll tell you that with deliberate practice most of us can improve.

And that can be decisive.

I just spent two days with a private equity firm preparing the executives of a portfolio company for a sale to another financial buyer.

As you may know, the practice is standard:  Potential buyers meet with company executives to perform due diligence on the past performance, future opportunities, and to get a feel for the executives themselves.

In this case, an investment bank had prepared the slides.  The first order of business at the meeting where the current owners, the company executives, and the investment bankers gathered was to go through the deck, page by page, and attempt to agree on what should be said on each slide.

It was not pretty.  The executives were seeing the deck for the first time.  They knew their business inside and out, but they were not accustomed to seeing it presented as the bankers did.

A long day of haggling and nit-picking ensued.  Some executives were tongue-tied and frustrated trying to deliver the content as the bankers had drawn it up, and scripting by committee continued into the wee hours.

The prospect of a slide deck making the executives look less than professional and knowledgeable began to loom over the group. And the subsequent reduction in the perceived value of the enterprise also flitted through the collective consciousness in the room.

While there are many lessons here, the simplest take-away is to let the speaker find his own way into the vast terrain of his knowledge.  A deck prepared by outsiders sends him into his own head from a point he’s unlikely to have encountered before.  As a result, he feels lost—a stranger to his own experience.

Don’t start with the slides, unless they ignite your passion and curiosity about the subject.  Start instead from a place that seems right to you, the speaker. 

Some of us prefer a wide angle shot of the topic, a broad overview supported by a deep dive into the underlying information.

And others prefer quite the opposite—a close-up view of one telling detail followed by an explanation as to why that granularity is representative of the whole.

Still others want to speak of their own experience, why they love the topic, or simply give a clear outline of the points they will make.

In fact, there are as many ways of organizing a talk as there are people.  But the way should be suited to the person, not to the third party that wrote it for hire. 

The speaker must find the thread that leads his own mind into the dense fabric of his expertise, and allows him to weave for the listeners a vision of his knowledge.

Once he’s got that, he can prepare the slides.  Without it, he will stumble around in a web of information, with no grasp of a through-line, and create at best a patchy image of the thing he’s trying to describe.

Don’t start with the slides.  Start with what you want to say, and say it the way that makes it yours.

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

Empathy is our ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of others.  It makes us more successful in our personal lives and in our careers because it makes us able to connect with those around us. 

Leaders and managers need empathy to build a bond with their direct reports one-on-one.  But perhaps even more important to their rapport with others is the ability to display their empathy as public speakers.

It is at such high-stakes moments that listeners develop in their hearts and minds a snapshot of the speaker’s character—an image that they carry with them.  If a speaker lacks empathy—that is, if she demonstrates a lack of understanding of their view of the issues under discussion and their feelings—her audience will disengage from her.

One way to demonstrate empathy with an audience is to talk about them.  Make your content listener-centric. 

For instance, if you are presenting a new product to a sales force, it would be best to begin by demonstrating that you understand the challenges the reps are currently facing in the marketplace.

If presenting the same product to a new customer, begin by demonstrating that you are familiar with the difficulties of their business.

Only after you have shown an understanding of their situation should you introduce your product as a solution to their needs.

As you elaborate on your product (or service) you will be continuously linking its features and functions to the needs of your audience.

The actual content of your presentation will be all about how cool your product or service is, but you will have framed it around their experience

This may seem manipulative, but it’s not.  Remember, empathy is not the same as sympathy.  Sympathy implies that you feel the same as the other person.  Empathy only means that you understand how they think and feel.

By using your powers of empathy, you are more able to get and hold their attention by making your ideas more relevant to their frame of experience.

If you are truly trying to help them, your skill is not manipulative.  It is caring and constructive.

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

Presentation Pointer:  All value is perceived value

Advertising adds to the intrinsic value of products by changing our perception of them.

So says Rory Sutherland, whose short Ted Talk deserves your attention, especially the section on Diamond Shreddies. 

Your ability to present well adds perceived value to the intrinsic value of your knowledge and character.  People who look good, sound good, and make compelling sense in high stakes moments have an unfair advantage over those who don’t because their value is more widely perceived.

Do not dismiss the power of perception.  All value is perceived value.

When preparing a talk, ask yourself if your audience wants to solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity.  Maybe they want to do both.  Whatever the case, they’ll want to calculate the risks.

Solving the wrong problem wastes time and money and leaves the real problem unsolved.  And whenever we pursue an opportunity, there are unforeseen dangers.

To be persuasive as a speaker, diagnose the causes and consequences of a business problem and enumerate both the benefits and the risks of action in pursuit of gain.   Second-guess everything.  Nothing is a slam-dunk.

If you don’t want to talk about it, don’t put it on the slide.

Knowledgeable people in the audience notice small details and ask penetrating questions. Less knowledgeable people lob random questions to probe for weaknesses in your argument and character.

If it complicates your point, and there’s no ethical reason why the audience should know it, leave it out.

Many people acknowledge that President Obama is a good public speaker.  At the same time, many note a significant difference in the quality of President Obama’s speech between those occasions when he uses a Teleprompter and those when he speaks extemporaneously.

They assert that his oratorical gifts are actually not as great as they seem because when he speaks without a teleprompter he says “er and uhm” like the average oratorical duffer, and often pauses awkwardly once he starts a sentence, as he seems to re-think how to arrange the thought into words that will not play against him.

While I’ve noticed a certain partisan tone when this distinction is made, I too feel concerned about the use of TelePrompters.  They seem to make public speech more dead than alive. But would we prefer that our leaders step to the lectern and reach inside their breast pocket to withdraw a written speech?

Barbara Tuchman, the great American historian, had a few radical thoughts on this subject.  She suspected that Teleprompters would bring down our democracy.

She said, in an interview with Bill Moyers, that the devices were “the most devastating tool that technology’s invented…” Our public men, “don’t speak spontaneously. You don’t hear them meet a situation out of their own minds. They read this thing that’s going along there in front of them. Words that have been created for them by PR men or by advertisers or whatever. And this is not the real man that we see. And it allows an inadequate, minor individual to appear to be a statesman, because he’s got very good speechwriters. Mr. Reagan! Boy! And to read the stuff off, because he reads it very well. He’s an actor, I guess, a trained actor. … you never know what he’s reading. Nor do you really know this with any of them. They learn it very fast…the teleprompter–is a really, in my opinion, it’s a terrible tool, because what we have is an artificial result.”

Then Bill Moyers says,  ”And yet George Washington had Alexander Hamilton as a speechwriter. The Farewell Address, his final major statement as he exited the Presidency, was largely penned by Alexander Hamilton. Is there a correlation?”

And by the way, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address had help from William Seward, his Secretary of State.

Then Tuchman says, “No, because the teleprompter shows the person in a situation which is not real, and which is phony, and which is deceptive. The thing is, you see, that we’re a public that is brought up on deception, through advertising. From the moment we are children, we learn that some kind of cereal is going to make us strong and win races and one thing and another, and the next thing you know, if you use a particular kind of toothpaste, you’re going to marry Gary Cooper, or at least have a glamorous romance somewhere; all that is deception.”

She raises some questions.
1. Are teleprompters a form of deception?
2. What’s the difference between a teleprompter and a piece of paper with the speech written on it?
3. Do we want our Presidents to speak without benefit of speech writers, teleprompters, or written notes?
4. How important is it that our President be a good “communicator”–meaning a strong advocate for his ideas and for our country.
5. What are the skills, attributes, and behaviors of a good communicator?

These are questions that are worth answering well, and ones that we at Sims Wyeth explore.

Oh!  One more question!  What about PowerPoint? Don’t most of us use it as a teleprompter to remind us what to say?

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills andpublic speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips atwww.SimsWyeth.com.

We are often asked to kick-off meetings.  What’s the best way to get everyone focused on the task at hand, and demonstrate our own capacity for effective leadership?

1. Start on time.  Or, if you must delay, acknowledge those who are present and inform them you would like to wait for a few minutes.
2. Begin your opening remarks by looking at the big picture.  Reframe what has happened in the recent past, or will happen in the immediate future, that makes this meeting necessary.
3. Define the particular challenges, problems, issues, or questions that the group needs to address.
4. Speak about the consequences of the unsolved problems, or the opportunities that exist if the group succeeds.
5. Then do your house-keeping and your laying of the ground-rules.  Typical items include time to end, objectives, items on the agenda, times for each item, and methods to be used to accomplish the goals.
6. Be brief, energetic, and connected eye-to-eye with those seated at the table with you.

The tone is set by the leader.  This is true of companies, football teams, schools and meetings.  You can do it well, and the more you do it with mindful attention to the above, the better you will be.

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.