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.

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.

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.

Meghan called.  She was a high school senior, my daughter’s friend and highschool classmate.  She had a summer job selling for the CutCo Knife Company, and wanted to make a presentation to us in our home. 

I said, “Yes,” although my wife was uncomfortable that she might have to say, “No,” to Meghan.  So she arranged to be out of the house when Meghan arrived.

On the appointed evening, Meghan carried her hefty sales case through the front door and set up on the dining room table.   While she was unpacking her wares, she asked me if I would please get her a glass of water.  I did, and when I returned to the dining room and sat down, she asked me to get the knives we currently used and bring them in.

I went back to the kitchen and returned with the knives.  When she was all set up, she asked me, “How would you describe your current knives?”

“Old, dull and inadequate,” I said.

“Why do you say that?” she asked.  I described how hard it was to keep them sharp, how some of the blades were so old they were worn thin, and how some of the blades wobbled in their handles.

 She pulled a length of rope from her case, and asked me to cut it with my sharpest knife.

“My sharpest?  That’s not saying much,” I said, taking my grandfathers old carving knife that was probably a good 70 years old.  It had a hardwood handle.

Meghan held the rope down on a cutting board that she pulled from her bag.  “Count the movements back and forth,” she said. 

 I began to saw.  It took fourteen saws.

“Now hold it down for me,” she said.  She picked up one of her new knives from a wooden block.  I grabbed one of the lengths and held it down.  “You’re stronger than I am, but count the saws it takes me with this knife,” she said.

 It took her four.

“Let me try that,” I teased her, as if she had done something slick.  I took the knife from her while she held the rope down on the cutting board.  Expecting it to be difficult, I pressed hard with the new knife and sawed through the rope in two strokes.

 I was impressed.

Meghan asked me to bring my best pair of kitchen scissors to the table.  They were also old, and could not make a dent on the rope.  She got out her CutCo scissors, and not only cut through the rope with ease, she also cut a penny in half.

I was pretty much sold.  She gave me information about the steel and the handles.  She showed me the different sets I could buy.  My wife came home and I called her in to the dining room.  She sat down reluctantly, and I asked Meghan to do the rope trick.  She had my wife count the strokes, etc. etc. and I saw my wife change from skeptic to true believer in a matter of seconds.

“Do the scissor trick,” I said.  Meghan cut the rope and the penny.  I saw Sharon’s eyes wander over to the full set of kitchen knives displayed on the table in a butcher block case.

We ended up buying all the kitchen knives and a set of 12 steak knives.  They remain in their butcher block on the kitchen counter seven years later.
                                                         ______

Selling by telling is what most of us do.  But selling by doing is more powerful because it’s active and experiential.  You could say that conversation is also experiential (in that we experience it) but words are more likely to get caught in the filters of the mind and not reach the muscles.  

I know of one law firm that goes to major corporations who are shopping for a new legal advisor, and begins by saying, “We can do the March of a Thousand Slides, or we can have a discussion about your issues so you can get a feel for what it’s like to work with us.” 

More often than not, the clients look at each other and choose to have the discussion.   

An active audience is more likely to be moved than a passive.  Hitler knew this, unfortunately, and had his followers do their “Sieg heils,” throughout his speeches. 

Meghan was trained by a very successful company.  She got me to do things—bring water, bring knives.  She got me to say things, “Old, dull and inadequate.”  She had me cut rope, and compare the old with the new.  It was sensational—literally sensational—in that it gave me a sensation, like driving a new car after you’ve been driving your old one for 10 years.

Plus, she was Meghan, my daughter’s friend, and the daughter of my friend Merrill.  She was in a strong position to win my business. 

According to Robert Cialdini and others, there are at least 25 proven Principles of Persuasion.  Meghan may have invoked 7 in her brief visit to our dining room. 

What can we as business speakers, and as sales professionals, learn from this exchange?  Stay tuned for more. 

You are a visual. Every move you make, every step you take…they’ll be watching you.

This is good news because once you know this, you can take control of the message you send by aligning your gestures, movements, and facial expressions with your words.

Who you are speaks more loudly than what you say. Actions speak louder than words. You are a visual message. Master your body language.

A report to a senior executive group is not a conversation, although it should sound conversational.  It is a communication designed to facilitate a prediction or a decision.

In order to sound conversational you need to be relaxed.  Ironically, relaxation comes from the tension of hard rehearsal.

Get to your recommendations as soon as possible. Don’t make them wait to find out why you are there.

Describe the benefits of your recommendations, preferably in quantitative terms—such as gross margin, time to ROI, or % of market share. Best case, base case, and worse case scenarios also add clarity and credibility.

Describe the costs, positioning them as reasonable compared to other similar projects that you can identify.

Include the downside if they decide not to follow your recommendation.  A favorable statistical confidence interval on your estimates of upside and downside will help.

As usual, occasionally get out of the abstract and into the concrete.  Illustrate the benefits of your recommendation with stories about other companies.  Likewise, dramatize the cost of not accepting your recommendations.

Senior executives tend to be big picture people.  Keep your remarks as short as possible.  They probably have to listen to a number of presentations at one sitting.  If you tell them everything they’ll remember nothing.

Don’t read bullet point slides. It’s the #1 thing people hate.  After all, why go to the trouble of a meeting if all the speaker does is read.  The senior people need to see you bring your idea to life, and demonstrate the character traits necessary to make it happen.

In terms of delivery, this is not the time to display your wild passion.  Just be extremely clear about what you want to do, why it’s a good idea, and how you plan to get it done.

Take away:  help them make a decision or a prediction.  In the fewest words possible.

When scientists present, they usually start with methods, then move to findings, conclusions and perhaps recommendations.  There are good reasons for this, and it can provide some drama.  Yet any communication we are willing to pay for is built in the exact opposite way.
 
As consumers, we want the conclusions up front, and the facts and reasoning to follow in support.  We don’t want to wait for the point. 
 
At the start of a presentation, how the information was developed is less important than why the audience should care.

I think there are all kinds of voices that work for the audience, as long as they feel real and communicate enough emotional energy to engage the interest.

A few vocal things that can get in the way are:

1. Uptalk. Rising intonations at the ends of sentences, making the speaker sound like a goofy teenager.

2. Glottal fry. Gargling your words. Grinding your vocal chords to make the sounds at the ends of words. That bubbling splashing frying sound that comes (mostly) from young women.

3. Mumbling. Failure to shape the consonants in your speech, and failure to project belief in what you’re saying. It’s both a mechanical and a psychological problem.

4. Speaking too fast. Not good when you’re speaking to senior leaders–makes you look nervous. Studies show you and your point of view are more likely to be “derogated” if you speak too quickly, although listeners tend to rate fast talkers as more “extroverted.”

5. Speaking too slowly. A much rarer problem. Makes you sound like you just fell off the back of a pumpkin truck. Kind of a country bumpkin pumpkin. Plus, you’re a stark contrast to all the fast talkers around you.

All of these things can be addressed and corrected with some basic voice training.

We have been helping speakers for over twenty years increase the persuasive impact of what they say and how they say it.

The voice may not demand the same intellectual resources as strategic messaging, but like it or not, it is required equipment if you want to move the mountain of corporate opinion.

We are judged by how we speak, write, and think…in that order.

And people will long remember what you sound like after they’ve forgotten what you said.

(Unless you happen to be like the speaker in the picture, in which case they will remember what you said and how you sounded.)

New research shows that when people need help getting a job done, they’ll choose a congenial colleague over a more capable one.  This tendency has big implications for every organization–and for everyone who seeks to be persuasive as a presenter.

When given the choice of whom to work with, people will pick one person over another for any number of reasons: the prestige of being associated with a star performer, for example, or the hope that spending time with a strategically placed superior will further their careers.  But in most cases, people choose their work partners according to two criteria.  One is competence at the job, the other is likability.  Obviously both things matter.  Less obvious is how much they matter–and exactly how they matter.

To gain some insight into these questions, researchers at Harvard Business School asked people in North America and Europe how often they had work-related interactions with every other person in the organization.  They then asked them to rate all the other people in the company in terms of how much they personally liked each one and how well each did his or her job. 

These two criteria–competence and likability–combine to produce four archetypes (see the above quadrants on the graph):  the competent jerk, who knows a lot but is unpleasant to deal with; the lovable fool, who doesn’t know much but is a delight to have around; the lovable star, who’s both competent and likable; and the incompetent jerk, who …well, that’s clear enough.

These archetypes are caricatures, of course.  Companies weed out the hopelessly incompetent and the socially clueless.  Still, people in your organization can be roughly categorized in the matrix, I’m sure.

The research showed that no matter what kind of organization studied, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk.  Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools.

The studies done in four very different organizations consistently showed that most people would choose a “lovable fool” (someone who, to varying degrees, is more likable than competent) over a “competent jerk.”

At first glance, such a choice is both understandable (it’s nice to be around people you like), and cockeyed (why would you prefer to work with someone who is, to a certain degree, incompetent?)

The answer has something to do with social networks, and getting work done without friction.  After all, if everyone likes the fool, they’ll help him out and enjoy doing it.  In fact, the lovable fool may actually contribute to the productivity of the group. 

Isn’t it strange how powerful personality is?  A good personality covers a host of sins.  I’m always drawn to a speaker with a personality, and I think I’m more likely to buy what they’re selling and remember what they say. 

And isn’t it wonderful that we can point to evidence that being more likable than competent is valuable to the work process–more valuable than being a highly competent jerk?

Looks like an emotional decision can be rational after all.

I am still holding my ground against Ford Harding.  We have been debating the relative merits of raising FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) in persuasive arguments, or GOG (greed, opportunity, and glory.)

For previous exchanges, please click on Fud, Gog, Ethics and Rhetoric and Fud in Public Speaking and Persuasion

Ford seems to think that GOG is better than FUD.  I think they work together, and that one is not better than the other.

I follow what the ancient Greeks taught.  Aristotle taught that speakers need to make three types of arguments in order to be persuasive.

The first is the ethical appeal:  you argue that you are a trustworthy source of information.  You do this by casually referencing your experience or expertise, and perhaps with some self-effacing humor.

The second is the intellectual appeal.  You argue by stating your point and then proving it with reasoning and facts, or you present your facts and reasoning and then conclude with your point.

The third type of argument is the emotional appeal.  You try, through stories, or humor, to arouse an emotion in your listeners.

Cicero, the great Roman statesman, thought the emotional appeal was the most important.  He said, “…tickling and soothing anxieties is the test of a speaker’s impact and technique.”

Ford, please note that he said, “… tickling AND soothing anxieties,” and Cicero was no slouch as a speaker.  He knew what he was talking about.  He seems to be saying that whenever we propose to an audience that they make a decision, we should bring up the pros and cons.

For instance, you might say that if the listeners don’t do what you recommend, A, B, C and D are the negative consequences they might expect.  However, if they decide to do what you suggest, you would argue that they could enjoy X, Y, and Z.

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, or anyone, that your reasoning should be fair and balanced.  Using FUD or GOG is ethically neutral.  One is not more virtuous or ethical than the other.  It is not our technique that makes us unethical, but our intention.

And by the way, most speeches, articles, plays, novels, and movies are structured in the same way.  They single out a problem, consider its implications, and explore solutions.

Humans like problems because problems resemble puzzles, and we love puzzles.  We derive great pleasure from solving them, and grow as a result.

FUD gets our attention on the problem.  GOG drives us toward a solution.

They are the one-two punch of human growth and accomplishment.