Public speaking is a talent before it becomes a skill. A talent is a latent ability, something that is dormant inside you. When you work at it, it becomes a skill.

If you do have a potential talent for speaking and you work at it, you are likely to receive encouragement and recognition for your talent, which then makes you want to continue, which in turn helps you get better.

However, if you don’t have a talent for speaking, but nevertheless work at it without receiving encouragement and recognition, you are likely to give up, and will therefore not develop the skill.

The hard thing is to persist in the face of discouragement.

Churchill passed out when giving his first speech in the Commons.

FDR bombed over and over again when he was a young Secretary of the Navy. His wife Eleanor thought he was hopeless.

Woodrow Wilson had terrible nerves and worked like a fiend to overcome his fear.

And our own Bill Clinton was booed for his interminable speech at the 1988 Democratic convention.

Yet he, and all the others, went on to become highly respected communicators.

I feel like quoting someone famous on the subject of persisting.

Emerson: “Move confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.”

Or the great Japanese folk saying: “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”

It’s the only way to sculpt talent into skill.

I just finished working with a client who had to prepare and deliver an after dinner talk to clients in a museum. Her firm planned to take the clients on a private tour of the museum, feed them dinner, and then she was to stand up and offer them a short talk on investment opportunities in the current turbulent markets.

We spent a few hours crafting the talk, and another couple of hours getting her to verbalize it. At the end of the rehearsal, it was still not right, but she had to go. It was Friday afternoon–the weekend called.

As we parted, I made a few suggestions.

1. Cut it. Your audience is primarily in their 60s and beyond. They will have been on their feet, drunk a few glasses of wine, and will be looking at their watches thinking of bed.
2. Say it aloud at least five times over the weekend (she was to speak on Monday night).
3. Don’t drink any wine until you’ve spoken.
4. Go to the museum tonight, or over the weekend, to see the room where the dinner will take place. Find out where you will stand, what the acoustics are like, and whether you need a microphone or a lectern.
5. Wear something red.
6. Keep it simple, upbeat, and story-like. Don’t drill down into an analysis of the investments.

A few days after the event, I called her. “How did you do?” I asked.

“I give myself a 7 out of 10,” she said.

“How come?” I asked.

“Well, it was too long, they couldn’t hear me, the room was horrible, I didn’t go to see the room over the weekend, I had to cut it on the fly, which made me nervous and look discombobulated.”

“Great!” I said. “Now you know. After dinner speaking is intense. It is intimate. Your audience is on top of you. The rooms are often not good for speakers. There’s noise in the room. The audience is tired and drunk. They want to be entertained–period. They want funny stories and they want them short.”

“It was intense,” she said.

“You’ve had an experience,” I said. And I quoted Mark Twain: “Good judgment comes from experience. And where does experience come from? Bad judgment!”

I told her not to be discouraged. Most people fail their way to success.

She said she was not discouraged, and looked forward to trying again.

She’s a trooper.

Webinars seem to be a promising, cost-effective way of building relationships with prospects, but they’re hard to do well. As a medium for communicating with groups, they have their own quirks and require a lot of preparation. Here are a few rules of thumb.

First, define your desired outcomes in terms of what the audience will get out of attending your webinar. What are the problems they want to solve, and what are the questions they want to have answered? Then outline your main points (not too many) and gather evidence to support your main points.

Finally, create or select your slides. Please note that strategy comes first, then the selection and arrangement of content, then the slides come last…not the other way around!

Then rehearse. Time yourself. Build your confidence by building your certainty that you know how to bring your material to life and get it done on time.

Okay, now that you’ve prepared well and rehearsed, it’s SHOWTIME!

Start with a really good visual. Get them to focus right away.

Follow the new 45-60 second rule: display no visual longer than 45-60 seconds.

Use color to divide each slide into thirds: beginning, middle, and end–each a different color.

Slides should be even simpler than normal.

Timing is key. Work through your material rapidly.

Have an engaged listener in the room with you so that you have a real face to talk to–one that sends you signals to which you can repsond.

Maintain a high energy level. Webinars are like radio: The higher the excitement level, the more likely listeners are going to stay tuned. Rev it up.

Use a second speaker. Get yourself interviewed, or interview someone else.

Prepare questions for Q&A, just in case nobody has a question.

Keep your answers to questions as brief as possible. Be diplomatic at all times. And hit one of your main points in your response.

Eliminate all extraneous graphics.

Beware clip art and cutesy stuff. No puppy dogs.

Keep it business like and professional. Do not hype yourself with give aways and promotions.

Finally, make it crystal clear what is the next step for your listeners. It should be easy to contact you by phone, email, or regular mail.

Effective speaking has many enemies. A partial list would include a speaker’s lack of experience, stage fright, lack of training, no clear point, too much information, and finally, no clear flow, or structure.

We could go on. But the items on the list are only those enemies that hide within the speaker himself. What about the external enemies–the environmental obstacles, including those that hide within the audience?

Certainly one of the most stubborn opponents you can face as a speaker is an audience that has endured a morning’s worth of presentations, escaped into a lunch of heavy food and sweet desserts, only to be herded back into their seats to listen to you!

This is a test that separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls. Such an audience can be somnolent, indifferent, and murderously hard on your ego.

What should you do?

1. Throw a match on them. Light them on fire. Henry Ward Beecher, one of the greatest preachers in American history, once found himself on a hot day in a town in West Virginia known to be Death Valley for speakers. Sure enough, that afternoon, as he was being introduced, he saw that half the town was already dozing. He rose from his chair and, wiping his brow with a large handkerchief, strode to the front of the platform.

“It’s a God-damned hot day,” the clergyman began.

A thousand pairs of eyes opened wide. An electrical shock straightened the crowd erect. Beecher paused and then, raising a finger of solemn reproof, went on, “That’s what I heard a man say here this afternoon.”

He proceeded into a stirring condemnation of blasphemy–and took his audience with him.

2. Keep it interactive. Ask the audience questions. Ask them to discuss something in small groups for a few minutes. I’ve seen speakers ask the audience to shout in unison a product name whenever he mentioned the name in his speech. They got into it and listened carefully in order to be part of the chorus.

3. Keep it short and sweet. This is true always, but especially true after lunch. Don’t try to take the audience on a death march through your comprehensive analysis of photosynthesis in the genus papaver somniferum.

4. Speak and move with energy and verve. You are the leader, and your followers need to be inspired. Breathe some life into them.

5. Tell stories. The Golden Rule of after-dinner speaking is to make a simple point by telling a whimsical but relevant story. The same rule should apply to after-lunch speaking, even though your audience is not seated at their lunch table but back in the conference hall.

6. Know your enemy. Your enemy is the food in their stomachs that demands their attention, even as you demand their attention from the lectern. You must be more compelling than the food that drags them into the arms of Morpheus. Your talk must be flavorful, adequately salted and spicy with a variety of fascinating facts, insights, and bold opinions that are sprinkled with a dash of style, passion and humor.

In other words, you’ve got to be well-prepared, well-rehearsed, and well-seasoned to capture and keep their attention.

For other highly challenging speaking environments, go to How to Give Good Webinar

In the Jobs section of the New York Times, on Sunday March 30th, Phyllis Korkki has written an article entitled The Adroit Speaker Doesn’t Wing It.

That’s true and not true. I believe wholeheartedly in preparing, rehearsing, getting feedback, even scripting a speech or presentation. But then, once I have internalized the content, I boil my talk down into bullets and let myself wing it.

Rehearsal enables spontaneity. Jazz musicians work on their riffs, (their chops) in rehearsal so that they can improvise in performance. But much of that improvisation has been grooved into their muscles during hours of practice.

I don’t want to be married to a script, and I don’t think audiences want us to be married to scripts. They appreciate the fact that scripts can keep us on point, but they do not like the fact that scripts force us to read to them.

Ms. Korkki quotes Linda Blackman, founder of Executive Image in Chicago on the causes of stage fright. She says we get stage fright because:

1. We’re afraid we will look foolish
2. We’ll make a mistake (?)
3. We will disappoint the boss
4. Our expertise will be questioned
5. We may not have prepared properly

There are other reasons as well. We may have had a traumatic experience in childhood associated with humiliation, such as answering a question in class and hearing the entire room erupt in derisive laughter. Such an experience opens a pathway in the brain that makes it more likely we will experience the flight or fight syndrome.

The ancient Greeks called this dreadful sensation glossophobia. Glossa is Greek for tongue, and phobos means fear.

The Greeks also had another word that could describe stage fright: agoraphobia, which is the fear of crowds. Agora is the Greek word for marketplace.

According to some surveys, public speaking is the number one fear in America, followed by the fear of illness, heights, deep water, snakes and bugs, financial problems, and death.

Death is number seven, which means that most people would rather die than give a talk. Seinfeld once quoted this fact on his show and quipped, “That’s why, when you go to a funeral, you’d rather be in the box than deliver the eulogy.”

It has been shown that the blood chemistry of a soldier about to go into battle is the same as that of a speaker about to go on stage.

Overcoming stage fright is a multi-channel enterprise. Ms. Korkki’s article stresses the importance of preparing your script, but there are tens of thousands of well-prepared speakers who are terrified and ineffective.

Preparing your script is a brain function, but good speaking is not entirely cognitive. It also requires the heart and the body–in other words, your emotions and your spirit.

Dr. Charles Strobel of Yale University offered a more wholistic approach. His research indicated that there are two ways to alter a distressing inner state. One is to include positive self-talk and mental imagery as you prepare. The other is to use your body to impact your inner feelings.

For instance, Strobel proved that smiling blocks the enzyme in the brain that causes us to experience fear. He encouraged deep breathing, which can have the same effect, and showed that the best way to get a deep breath is to yawn–although not in front of the audience.

He also demonstrated that by simply manipulating your posture–by standing up straight and acting as if you were feeling comfortable, you change your blood chemistry.

The power of visualizing the results you hope to achieve is an established psychological technique. The power of using gesture and movement to alter inner states is less widely known, but it is another example of how emotion influences the body, and how the body can influence our emotions.

I once had a colleague who said that everyone is in two businesses: their own, and show biz. He didn’t go far enough. Every business is show business. Business would be impossible without acting skills. Theater artists have the talent to believe in the imaginary circumstances of the script and act so as to induce the audience to believe in the characters and the story. A business communicator must also believe in her product, idea, or service—and speak so as to create belief in others.

As a business speaker, if you are lucky enough to believe in your message, you have a better chance of making others believe—not guaranteed, but a better chance. If you don’t believe in your product, you’ve got to scratch and claw your way into belief. How? How do you hoist yourself into contagious belief? The simplest way is to rehearse.

Find the reasoning. Find the words. Find the attitude. Find the gestures that make you feel connected with yourself and the subject. If you’re not turning yourself on when you talk you’re turning the audience off. I know that when I’m excited about some domestic issue at home, I’m more engaging. If I feel connected to my thoughts and believe wholeheartedly in the power of my reasoning, my demeanor is (if I do say so myself) captivating. My wife and teenage daughter actually listen to me.

My domestic rant may not be the best template for a corporate or scientific presentation, but bear with me. Which is more convincing: a speaker’s conviction or her reasoning? Isn’t that the same as asking which blade in a pair of scissors does the cutting? You need both. Intelligent people will dismiss conviction without clear thinking. And reasoning without an emotional investment by the speaker is busywork—boring, pedantic, and inconsequential to all. You need both—reasoning and conviction.

Rehearsing aloud, you acquire both. And they feed each other. You find words that bring your thoughts to life, and when your thoughts are lively, you grasp them with greater conviction and infuse them with passion. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Eloquence is reason set on fire.” Rehearsal can help you find the reason and set it on fire.

So what are the standard excuses that the business presenter makes when she says she can’t or won’t rehearse?

No time! (He’s making slides five minutes before show time, making his performance slide.)
No need! (She’s done the same talk a thousand times; her suit could make it, and often does.)
No sense! (He thinks rehearsal makes him stale. Without it, he’s cooked.)
No standards! (Everybody in her company/industry is mediocre. Why should she be any different?)
No ego! (He doesn’t want to experience the awkwardness and vulnerability of finding his own voice, alone or in front of colleagues. Wimp!)
No show! (She thinks showmanship is unprofessional, which smacks of sour grapes. She’s probably afraid she doesn’t have the gene.)
No guts! (If he doesn’t rehearse, he’ll have an excuse when his talks flab out and fail.)

A good presentation can make a career. A bad one can leave you clinging to the suburbs of success for years to come. Actors get a month; we only get a few days. Let us remember that business without show business is no business. Rehearsal makes our thinking crisper, our language more vivid, and our passion a better ally. Without rehearsal, we have no show. If you have any sense, you’ll rehearse.

For more on what constitutes preparing for important presentations, see Ford Harding’s Blog.

If you work for a company, and your job entails public speaking, you are paid to speak.

That’s right, you are a professional speaker–in the same business as Anthony Robbins, Jack Welch, and Malcolm Gladwell.

Your company is paying you to make something happen when you stand up to address a group.  They are paying you to be clear, hold attention, and create value for the audience.

That value may be informational in nature.  Or inspirational.  Or intellectual!

For instance, you might be trying to change the way your company does research, or launches its products.

You might be responsible for energy management at your company, and you’ve been asked to find ways that manufacturing can reduce its carbon footprint.

You might even be responsible for bringing in business at large industry gatherings by demonstrating thought leadership on issues facing your industry.

When you consider each one of these opportunities, you suddenly find yourself in the cross hairs of the classic issues of public speaking.  Those issues, from the audience’s perspective are:

1. Do I trust and/or like the speaker?
2. Does the speaker understand my deep-seated concerns?
3. Has the speaker built a strong case for what he wants me to do?

If you’re trying to change the way your company does research, or launches its products, your credentials will be questioned.  Those people whose jobs will change as a result of your proposal will point out the weaknesses of your plan.  If they don’t know you personally, their criticism will be that much stronger.  In fact, no matter how much evidence you supply to buttress your argument for change, they will oppose you.  People are not convinced to change by reason alone.  They need to be “encouraged,” which means that they need you to “put courage into them.”

If you strive to reduce energy consumption within your company, and you are running around giving presentations urging people to make changes, you have a serious challenge on your hands.  Again, do they know you and like you?  Do they respect your expertise and your knowledge of their business concerns?  When you address them, do you use their language?  Do you speak to them about what is most important to them?  For instance, if manufacturing is wasting energy, but they are hitting their productivity goals, then why should they disrupt their processes to make the changes you suggest?

Speaking to industry groups to demonstrate your thought leadership requires showing off some original thinking without giving away the store.   It might even mean being entertaining.  After all, people don’t remember that much of what you say, but they do remember how you make them feel.  And bringing in business requires a high degree of The Triple AAA Theory of sales and marketing:  be available, affable, and attractive.  People like doing business with people they like.

Enough said.  Since your job requires you to speak, you are by definition a professional speaker.  And how do you compete as a professional speaker?  Like all the other pros–athletes, musicians, actors–you practice!  You rehearse!

And how do you practice?  You take the actions to develop your presence, personality, and delivery skills as much as you work on your message.

A great message from a lousy speaker is easily forgotten.  Unless the delivery stands guard over the material, the material will evaporate, no matter how precious it was in itself.

When transforming your house into a dream home, talk to three architects.

When getting heart surgery to transform the quality of your life, talk to three surgeons.

And to transform your sales presentations, talk to three consultants.

I have three people in mind. The first is Ford Harding, a sales consultant to professional service firms and the author of Creating Rainmakers, (Wiley 2006) and other books on selling professional services. Ford has helped umpteen thousand professionals get over themselves and bring in business.

The second is Suzanne Lowe, a marketing consultant and author of Marketplace Masters: How Professional Firms Compete to Win. As Ford says, she can get a burlap bag full of cats, dogs and canaries to hum the same tune.

The third is me, Sims Wyeth, a presentation coach whose mission is to transform the personal impact of business presenters.

To officiate, we have assembled a panel of fifteen objective judges selected for their diversity along multiple dimensions.

Here are THE FIVE DON’TS OF SALES PRESENTING in no particular order.

Don’t even go to the presentation if the client won’t meet with you ahead of time so you can learn what they want and why they want it. Your time is extremely valuable, as is theirs, and you should not waste either their time or yours by pursuing an opportunity for which you are not suited, or by traveling to recite information they could read in a brochure, e-mail, or website.

Don’t assume that the presentation begins when you stand in front of the room and open your mouth. In reality, you began presenting when the prospective client first encountered you and your team—perhaps months before, on the phone, on the web, or in person, when their search for a provider began. Your behaviors, and your tangibles (including your brochure and office) throughout the preliminary discussions and scheduling of the presentation play a significant role in their ultimate decision

Don’t be late, unprepared, sloppy, rude, poorly dressed, or tense when you enter the meeting room. People want to do business with people they like and trust. A sales presentation is a formal social occasion as much as it is a business transaction. Therefore, be attentive to all aspects of the conversation. Show interest at all times. Do not slouch in your chair, Blackberry under the table, conduct side conversations, scowl, be boring, or dominate the conversation. A bad dinner guest is the same as a bad salesperson.

Don’t elevate prospects to a higher status than yourself, nor should you look down your nose at them for any reason. You do the potential partnership a disservice on both counts. Treat your prospects as equals—partners with whom you can be yourself and speak your mind.

Don’t go there to sell them anything. If you do, they will smell it. Go there to help them. Don’t make the presentation all about you. Make it all about them.

If you would like to submit additional Sales Presentation Don’ts, Ford, Suzanne, and I are glad to pass them on to our totally objective board of fifteen judges for rating.

To see a marketing expert’s choices for presentation Don’ts, go to Suzanne Lowe’s blog:

To see a sales consultant’s, go to Ford Harding’s blog.

You are currently on Sims Wyeth’s Blog.

A friend of mine, who is a very successful consultant, told me that she has lost her confidence as a speaker. For twenty years she has been speaking to large groups of clients and potential clients with success.  Now she feels very unsure of herself.

She reports to me that she’s terrified of going blank.  While she used to trust herself to speak without slides, and instead drew pictures on a flipchart or whiteboard, now she prepares a script and a set of detailed slides.  She says that her voice shakes, her hands tremble, and her eyes dart from side to side as she speaks.

I respect this person, and feel honored to be trusted with her struggle.  She told me that she has gotten a medication to help her, and it works.  She’s feeling better.

But that solution is not appropriate for everyone.  It’s expensive, might cause side effects, and some of us are opposed to pharmaceutical assistance when it comes to our “valor under fire.”  Plus, it could take the edge off–the edge that makes great musicians play dramatically better when under pressure to connect with a live audience.

What can you do if you lose your nerve, and feel your performance skills deteriorating?

Refuse to speak?  Few of us have that option.

Confess to the client or the meeting host that you are having a crisis of confidence and ask to be relieved of the duty to address the room?  Not a good idea–not unless the client or host is a long-time friend who will keep your secret and cover for you.

Lie, and say you’re not feeling well?    That’ll work.  Once.

Pray?  That could work for some.  After preparing like a maniac, throw yourself on the mercy of your God.  Trust your fate to His/Her guidance.  Give it everything you’ve got and hope that Someone is watching.

Rehearse more than usual?  Prepare so thoroughly that even if you pass out with anxiety you can still get your point across?   Yes!   The knowledge that you did everything within your power to ensure your success will strengthen you.  Anticipate everything that could possibly go wrong and develop a strategy for dealing with each potential disaster.  The performance will probably seem easy compared to the rehearsals.

Act as if you’re confident?  Absolutely!  We know instinctively that confidence is the essential ingredient for our success, and we constantly make every effort to demonstrate confidence to others.  A speaker without confidence does not inspire others to have confidence in her.

As a matter of fact, you can use posture and gesture to alter your inner state.  Just as emotions tend to shape our bodies, our bodies can also influence our emotions.  In private, find a gesture that gives you a good feeling (like Tiger Woods pumping his fist) and do it over and over.  Try it at different tempos.  Then, simply imagine you’re doing it while standing still.  The image of the gesture will inform your behaviors and stimulate a sensation that can help you overcome your negative feeling.

Smile?  Yes, if you can manage to do so.  Anxious speakers tighten the muscles of the face which makes a mask that listeners recognize.  Work hard to smile.  Charles Strobel of Yale University demontrated that a smile literally changes your brain chemistry and diminishes your experience of fear.

Lift your eyebrows?  Believe it or not, yes!  Lifting the eyebrows is a universal gesture that indicates surprise and delight.  It will help you feel those emotions, and it will make the audience respond positively to you.  By the way, raising the eyebrows also brings the voice forward and helps you be more expressive.

Remember to breathe?  Yup, that works too.  As you prepare for the event, and you feel anxiety rising, sit quietly and become mindful of your breathing.  Watch it come in and out.  Try counting your breaths while saying to yourself, “I’m breathing in ONE; I’m breathing out ONE.  I’m breathing in TWO; I’m breathing out TWO,” all the way to TEN.  Then start again.

While you’re doing this, send your mind on an inspection of your body.  Check out your legs, your lower back, your shoulders, your neck, your forehead.  See if any area is experiencing tension.  If so, tell it to relax.  Or imagine that you’re breathing in and out through the tense spot.

Here’s another technique.  Count your breaths from 100 to zero.  The effort to concentrate on your breath while counting backwards takes the mind away from your pre-occupation with your anxiety.

Finally, envision yourself succeeding–over and over again.  Picture it in detail.  What do you look like when you’re succeeding during the speech?  What do you sound like?  What are you doing?  What’s the audience doing?  How do you feel while you’re succeeding in your vision?

Confidence can be defined as the expectation of positive outcomes.  Talk to yourself in a positive manner, so that your subconscious mind absorbs positive messages.  Do that long enough, and your self-image changes.  You begin to think of yourself as, “The kind of person who speaks well in public.”

And that can make a huge difference in your performance.