Busy executives who want to improve their public speaking skills now have a new opportunity to master  effective speech and public presentation techniques with “Training the Speaking Voice”.

We are judged by how we speak, write, and think-in that order.  That’s why it’s crucial that professionals speak their thoughts in a manner that is easy to understand, and inspires trust and respect in their listeners.   Training the Speaking Voice, is a developmental process customized for each individual and group to achieve targeted outcomes.

We created the program after an increase in demand from executives and professionals seeking ways to improve the clarity and impact of their sound and enunciation, or with those who speak English with a regional or foreign accent.

The program is excellent for public speakers or executives looking to enhance their professional opportunities with dynamic speaking capabilities.  The exercises open up new possibilities for self-awareness as well as professional and personal growth. 

Typical voice and speech training issues include:

• speaking too softly
• speaking too quickly
• lack of expression (monotony of pitch, volume, and speed)
• vocal fatigue
• too many “ers” and “uhms”
• an accent that makes the speaker hard to understand

About Training the Speaking Voice

Training the Speaking Voice  is an Executive Education Program, customized for each individual and/or group, to achieve targeted outcomes.

Candidates for the program include those whose clarity or personal impact is impeded by an accent, or by less than optimal voice and speech habits.

The program follows an intuitive path.

1. First, we record & identify the voice or speech challenge.
2. We introduce exercises to address the issues.
3. The candidate receives coaching in person, and practices on her own.
4. We measure the change, report the results, and provide guidance for continuing growth and awareness.

To support the face-to face instruction, we provide easy to use written materials, customized recordings for home (or car) study, and web and phone tutorials.

More information is available online at http://simswyeth.com/voice-speech-training.php

I recently sat down to interview myself on the subject of speaker evaluation forms. Here’s the transcript of the interview.

What’s the use of a speaker evaluation form? First of all, I prefer the term assessment to evaluation. It sounds to me less clinical–less distant.

Sorry. What’s the purpose of a speaker assessment form? To help speakers get better. However, let’s distinguish between the uses of a speaker assessment form at a training course, and one passed out at the end of a live presentation.

What are the differences? A training course assessment form will be more detailed and analytical–more process oriented, more focused on the mechanics of speaking. A form meant to be filled out by audience members after a talk should be short and sweet, focused on what audience members took away from the experience and any suggestions they might have for improvement.

In what areas do speakers need to get better? In messaging, use of PowerPoint, and personal impact.

How should messaging be evaluated? The message of a good presentation should:

• be audience-centric
• define a business problem from the perspective of the audience
• pose a valid question about that problem
• answer that question satisfactorily in a clear and vivid manner
• compare the speaker’s answer to alternative answers
• argue why the presenter’s answer is better
• end by reminding the audience of the problem and asserting the need to think, feel, or do as the speaker suggests.

How should PowerPoints be evaluated? They should follow the principles of cognitive guidance, which are:

1. The Multimedia Principle; we learn better from spoken words and pictures than from spoken words alone.

2. The Coherence Principle; we learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.

3. The Contiguity Principle; we learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented at the same time or next to each other on the screen.

4. The Modality Principle; we learn better from pictures with spoken text than pictures with printed text.

5. The Signaling Principle; we learn better when the material is organized with clear outlines and headings.

6. The Personalization Principle; we learn more from a conversational style than a formal style.

This adds up a few simple rules.

• Headlines of slides should be short, assertive sentences that summarize the information on the slide.
• The body of the slide should be a visual–a photo, drawing, graph, scheme, etc.
• Bullet points should be kept to an absolute minimum.
• Put the details, or the speaker’s points, in the Notes section of the PowerPoint and hand the document out after the event.
• The speaker should introduce the next slide while the old one is still on the screen.

And finally, how should a presenter’s personal impact be evaluated? That’s a harder question. The simplest answer is she should be evaluated based on what she causes her audience to feel, know, or do. She should be judged by outcomes, not process.

How can presenters take control of the way they make listeners feel? By making a serious, sustained effort to understand how they are coming across and what they can do to improve. For instance, evidence suggests that tone of voice, image, body language, and clothing and grooming play a significant role in our impact on others.

But what role does intention play? You said earlier that messages should be listener-centric. Our intentions are important. We should align them with the interests of our audience. But we often have goals for a talk that are both overt and covert. For instance, ever since President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, the Republicans have been successful in winning the votes of working class white southerners. Since then, the overt goals of Republican speakers has been to convince those voters that the Republican platform is in their economic self-interest. The covert goal has been to play on their historical racial bias.

So what should A Really Useful Speaker Evaluation Form look like? It should be:

• On one page
• As simple as possible
• Be designed for a specific purpose
• Address messaging, PowerPoint, and personal impact
• Use a few specific criteria for each of those categories
• Leave room for subjective comments and suggestions
• Attempt to measure outcomes

Can you give us an example? Yes, here are two that I find useful. Neither is perfect. One is clearly for training purposes, the other is meant to be completed by audience members after a talk.

Training Assessment Form

And here’s a Speaker Assessment form meant to be filled out by an audience member after a talk. It was created by Cliff Atkinson of Sociable Media.

What I have to say about lecterns and podiums is academic, but nevertheless worth mentioning.

A podium is a raised platform on which a speaker (or an athlete) stands (look left.)  A lectern is the upright object on which he or she places her papers (look right.)

I know this because my schoolboy Latin tells me so.  Podium, as I remember, comes from the Latin word pes, pedis which means foot.  Think of the word pedal or podiatrist.

Lectern comes from lectere, meaning to read. Think of the word lecture.

There!  I have said it and will not say it again.

Um and His Cousin Er

I hate speech coaches who don’t let you say “Um!”  I listen to a lot of speakers, and a few “Uhms” don’t bother me.  They make the speaker seem normal and conversational.

On the other hand,  I try not to say them myself, and I DO get annoyed when the “Uhms” are too frequent, loud, or long.  For instance, I have occasionally had “Uhmmers” who take a breath and then emit a trumpet-of-an-uhm with the full force of their brand new tank of air.

Michael Erard has written a book about verbal slips and blunders called UM…SLIPS, STUMBLES, AND VERBAL BLUNDERS AND WHAT THEY MEAN. Here are a few tidbits.

• Verbal ”disfluencies” constitute 5% to 8% of the words we utter every day
• Verbal slips are different from verbal blunders
• We tend to-uh-notice slips and ignore-uhm-blunders

Well-known slips include the malapropism, as when Curly of the Three Stooges says, “I resemble that remark!”  It’s a confusion of words that sound alike–usually humorous.

Then there’s the eggcorn, a word used incorrectly, such as, “for all intensive purposes,” or “when all is set and done.”  “Eggcorn” itself is an eggcorn for acorn.

The spoonerism is also common.  It’s a reversal of the initial letters or syllables of words, as when Mr. Spooner (the supposed originator) toasted Queen Victoria: “Here’s to our queer old dean!”  More relevant for us is an intentional one attributed to Dorothy Parker: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”

Other common problems are, naturally the pause fillers (Um and his cousin Er); repeated words (“Will-will you marry me?”); repeated sounds (“B-but I just can’t!”); prolonged vowels or syllables, and restarted or repaired sentences.

Mr. Erard does not discuss “Like, you know, I mean,” but I think they do serious damage to one’s credibility.

By the way, did you know that tying down a person’s arm induces blunders while gesturing reduces them?

Did you know that speaking with your hands in your pockets increases blunders?

Did you know that Thomas Jefferson was “a verbal bungler with a lisp?”

Finally, the book makes the case that verbal blunders are normal, “an indelible mark of humanness,” although I have a suggestion.  Someone should begin to track the number of blunders the presidential candidates make and see if, over time, the one with fewer blunders wins more often.

Many of us are familiar with the work of Dr. Albert Mehrabian of Stanford University, who demonstrated in his research that 85% of emotion is communicated through voice tone and body language.

Many of us have read Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, who reported the work of Nalini Ambady of Tufts University, who discovered that some doctors who make serious medical errors are not sued, while some who make no errors are sued.  The cause for both these surprising findings comes down to voice tone: Ambady recorded all her subjects.

Error-free doctors who get sued have authoritative (non-empathetic) tones, while error-prone doctors who do not get sued have empathetic voices.  Perhaps the empathetic tone innoculates the less than competent physician by making patients less willing to damage his career.  (Patients might be thinking, ”He’s such a nice man.”) And likewise, the authoritative tone of doctors without medical errors may annoy patients, who will look for something to get upset about.

Now comes a study testing whether members of a native tribe in Ecuador, who know no English, can understand what English-speaking mothers mean when speaking to fellow adults, and then to their babies.

The answer is mostly yes.  When listening to recordings of the mothers, they identified the correct meaning of the speech to adults 64 percent of the time.  But when the English-speaking mothers talked to babies, they succeeded in grasping the meaning of the speech 75 percent of the time.  The report appears in the August issue of Psychological Science.

Those of us in business seeking to influence and lead others–what can we take away from this?  Most simply, that we might be able to improve the power of our spoken communication (to tribesmen and to our colleagues and customers) with greater expressiveness in our voice tone.

In my experience, some of us are reluctant to explore this aspect of effective communication.  We put more faith in mastering our content and organizing it in a logical manner.

I can only say what many have said before me:  expertise is necessary but not sufficient.   Logic may be the language of reason, but style adds to it life, sentiment, and shading.

The tone of a human voice is often more powerful than the words being spoken.   Ask the doctors whose insurance premiums have gone up.

Dan Heath looks like a buttoned up sportscaster as he sits in front of the New York skyline at a broad cherry desk.  His brother Chip  sits next to him, looking gleefully wonkish, with wire-rimmed glasses and a broom of fine hair combed staight down onto his forehead.

Together, they are the authors of Made to Stick, a business book that attempts to bottle what poets and artists have known since the dawn of time–that when it comes to words, surprising specifics are better than predictable generalizations–that blue butterflies works better than azure-hued insects.

In appealing simplicity, they lay out why this is so, and give examples from the marketing world.  For instance, one of the most successful campaigns in recent years has been Jared, the Subway spokesperson, who lost 245 pounds by eating Subway every day. 

Jared’s ad is simple–a fat guy lost a lot of weight.   It is surprising to learn that one can lose weight eating fast food.  It is concrete, especially when Jared holds up his gi-normous pants.  It is credible because Jared is like us–a regular guy.  It has emotion in it, because it is a story of triumph.  And finally, it works because it’s a story about a fat guy who was on a diet and made it work.

And that’s what you learn in this book.  They have an acronym for it.  SUCCES.  S for simplicity.  U for unexpected.  C for concrete.  C for credible.  E for emotion.  And S for story.

SUCCES helps us remember that simplicity is more persuasive than complexity.   That the unexpected grabs attention more than the predictable.  That the concrete is more graspable than the general and abstract.  That credibility with the audience is essential.  That emotion has to be present.  And finally, that narrational discourse is usually more interesting than rational discourse–in other words, stories hold attention.

All good stuff for presenters.  Now, how do we get this into our data-rich presentations?

As PowerPoint reaches its 20th birthday, Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal reflects on our love/hate relationship with “one of the most elegant, most influential and most groaned-about pieces of software in the history of computers”:

While PowerPoint has served as the metronome for countless crisp presentations, it has also allowed an endless expanse of dimwit ideas to be dressed up with graphical respectability. And not just in conference rooms, but also in the likes of sixth-grade book reports and at PowerPointSermons.com.

He also interviews PowerPoint’s creators, Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, to learn their perspective on how their well-intentioned brainchild has changed the world of communication. Surprisingly, he writes, “they aren’t the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint.” Gaskins, in fact, agrees with the harsh appraisals of infographics expert Edward Tufte, who basically fingers PowerPoint as a key culprit in the dumbing down of our civilization.

Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”

One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which it was intended. When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready.

Many of us use PowerPoint as both written and spoken communication. We expect our decks to serve two purposes. First, to be a compelling display of visual evidence, and second to be a complete record of our research, analysis and thinking.

Often because of this dual purpose, the visual evidence is actually not visual at all, but rather written in the form of bullet points, which demand that we read and listen at the same time, causing us to lose concentration.

Further, because we expect the document to be clear and useful to someone unable to attend our talk, the data, analysis, and recommendations are often obscured because we write complete sentences on the slides, distracting from the more relevant graphical evidence.

Even more fundamental, the experience of witnessing a PowerPoint presentation can feel like a disconnected jumble of thoughts. The slides are rarely arranged in a way that feels logical to the listener, even though we’re given an agenda. They seem to be separate from each other–they don’t often flow like a story–and so they are hard to remember.

Tufte suggests that PowerPoint decks tend to be NOT rigorous enough for scientific and engineering presentations, while being too busy and congested for some other purposes.

For instance, there is no reason why the CEO has to use PowerPoint when speaking about the values and attitudes he hopes to instill in the people who work for the company.

And scientists, engineers, and researchers ought to prepare a thorough and formal report on their work, and then use PowerPoint simpy to summarize their findings and recommndations.

We continue to use PowerPoint in the way that everyone uses it, except we don’t know if the way everyone uses it is optimal for creating clarity and understanding.

Something needs to be done. Huge amounts of time and money go into the creation of PowerPoint decks, and as far as I know, none of us know whether our approach is effective and efficient.

I suspect we can do better.

It pays to have friends in high places.

Eric Schurenberg, a neighbor and friend of long-standing, has seen fit to cast me as a poster child for the road less taken to riches. Since I am not rich, and hardly a good example of anything, except perhaps for my prowess in some unmentionable activities, I allow him a poet’s license to use me as he sees fit.

Eric is the Managing Editor of Money Magazine, and I suppose he knows that most of his readers are thinking about how to acquire ungodly sums of money. After all, anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with human nature knows that most of us are fantasizing about our future wealth at least 50% of the time.

The rest of the time, of course, we’re fantasizing about unmentionable activities.

On page 16 of the July edition of Money Magazine, Eric writes the following:

“I watched with a mixture of concern and awe as a friend, Sims Wyeth, walked out of a perfectly good vice president’s post at a consulting firm, in large part because he thought he could make more money on his own as a public speaking coach for executives. It took him six nail-biting months to land his first customer. But now that his business is thriving–with clients like KPMG, McKinsey & Co. and Pfizer–Wyeth can be philosophical about why he took the risk. ‘If you asked me to choose between being bored and being terrified,’ he says, ‘I’d rather be terrified.’”

Let me say that Eric was right to be concerned, while his awe was probably similar to the feelings most people have when watching Evil Knievel jump his motorcycle over three-dozen parked school buses.

I can say in my own defense, however, that I have managed to be born with–well, a pewter spoon in my mouth–spit it out with disgust, enjoy a career as an actor, teach several graduate and undergraduate courses in theater and communication, raise a child and send her to Yale, and remain happily married to a woman who has been called by the New York Times “mercurial.”

And all while sailing through the air straddling a rocket with a landscape dotted with school buses far below.

It’s the only way I could keep up with my friends in high places.

Science is making progress in understanding sexual desire.

Birds Do It. Bees Do It. People Seek the Keys to It by Natalie Angier was published in the New York Times on April 10, 2007.  It’s fun reading, and should provide even greater motivation for men to become more effective presenters.

Stephanie Sanders of the Kinsey Institute and Indiana University compiled a new, female-friendly questionnaire.  They asked 655 women ages 18 to 81 to complete a survey that they had used for men and then tweaked slightly.

It turns out men and women differ in many ways.  For instance, women do not accord so much importance to physical appearance.  In fact, many expressed a greater likelihood of being aroused by evidence of talent or intelligence–say, while watching a man deliver a great speech.

This is very good news for me, since I spend my waking hours trying to convince male executives that their ability to speak well is their greatest professional asset.

Now I can offer scientific proof that, if they work with me and give a knock-out presentation, they will have women fantasizing about them.

And since exaggeration is the backbone of marketing, I could even say, “Women will come up to you after your speech.  They will take off your glasses.  They will remove your pocket protector, undo your tie, and whisper in your ear, ‘I really like they way you nailed that market analysis.’

“Would you like to explore my SWOTs after work?”

On our honeymoon in Nova Scotia more than 25 years ago, my wife and I were amazed to see an albino crow rubbing shoulders with his black brothers, who showed not a shred of colorism.  I’ve never seen another.

Now along comes a book called The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  It takes its title from Karl Popper’s observation that only a single black swan is required to falsify the theory that “all swans are white” even when thousands of white swans are in evidence.

Mr. Taleb takes pains to inform us that all is not as it seems.  While we may think, for instance, that almost all phenomena follow the law of the bell curve, he points out that if 100 people are gathered in a room when Bill Gates walks in, the average net worth rises dramatically, and plotted out, the curve is not bell-shaped.

Instead, it follows an asymmetric, L-shaped pattern known as a “power law,” where most values are below average and a few far above.

I believe this is increasingly true in the hedge fund industry, where the lure of big money has enticed many people away from their steady jobs on Wall Street to start their own funds, only to find that a disproportionate amount of the money flowing into this alternative investment strategy goes to mega-funds, while the average start-up struggles to survive.

It’s probably also true in publishing, where most books fail to earn back the author’s advance, and a few are blockbusters.

Mr. Taleb points out that we like the bell curve–it seems democratic and sensible.  It’s comforting to think that most of us are in the middle, and only the very lucky and unlucky are out there on the edges.

But the bell curve is often a convenient fiction.  He cites Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), an early hedge fund that blew up after its Nobel laureate founders “allowed themselves to take a monstrous amount of risk” because “their models ruled out the possibility of large deviations.”

We believe in the power of proof and reasoning, but we are ruled by something much less rational.  I just came back from the WHCC (the World Health Care Conference) where I heard a fascinating presentation on the national effort to measure the quality of health care.

We all would agree, I think, that measuring is a good idea because it will enable us to choose the best doctor and the best hospital when we get sick.  But it turns out that when data is available, people ignore it and instead make their decisions based on the stories their friends and families tell them–even if the stories contradict the data.

Mr. Taleb goes on to entertain us with other examples of our non-rational decision making.  For instance, there is the confirmation bias, which is our tendency to reject information that contradicts our beliefs and accept information that confirms what we already believe.

As John Kenneth Galbraith said, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind or proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”

There is the narrative fallacy, which is our weakness for compelling stories; the problem of silent evidence, which is our failure to account for what we don’t see; the ludic fallacy (don’t you love these fancy terms??) which is our willingness to oversimplify and take games and models (remember LTCM?) too seriously.

And finally, there is epistemic arrogance, which I am pleased to learn is our habit of overestimating our knowledge and underestimating our ignorance.

What does this have to do with speaking?

Speaking is about influence.  We speak because we want to move others to think or do something.  If we are going to be good at it, we need to take into account the human tendencies that Mr. Taleb so effectively points out.

And as listeners, we need to be aware that clever speakers can mislead us.  It only takes one Hitler–one black swan or white crow–to falsify the theory that the judgment of the average man is the deep keel of a nation.