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.

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.

That’s the Golden Mean, or the Golden Ratio It’s the method by which the ancient Greeks would determine how to build something in order to make it beautiful.

I like it because it suggests there is science to beauty, and that proportion is important in all endeavors, including speaking.

For instance, what is the appropriate mix between data and interpretation? Between entertainment and substance? Between self-revelation and listener-centric content?

All these elements–and others– need to be balanced in a highly effective presentation.

In fact, in any important business conversation, we need guidance to balance the myriad views that need to be heard…and spoken.

And there’s another ratio for highly effective meetings: the Listening to Talking Ratio.

Somewhere in the fog of being there’s an optimal mix.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching 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.

Susan Boyle has brought the issue of appearance to the fore.  Bottom line?  It’s hard to make it in this world without good looks and good clothes.

One thing you can control is your hair. 

I have  many female clients who don’t know what to do with their hair,  so they fiddle with it while speaking to groups.    Not good.

Your hair should not be drawing attention to itself when you’re presenting your ideas for consideration.  If your hair wants attention, let it get all prettied up at night when you go out.    When you’re presenting, you want your intelligence and your character to get attention, not your hair.

Therefore, fix your hair so that it does not shimmer, wiggle, wave, or otherwise transfix the average dude.  Make it a non-issue.  Hillary used a hairband.  Now she’s got her “do” lacquered down with ValSpar.

I remind you that being in business in akin to being in the military.  We all wear quasi-uniforms, we all take orders from the boss, and we all need to march together.  There’s not a lot of leeway for tucking your hair behind your ear 6 times a minute.

I like the bumper sticker philosophy that you see on pick-up trucks:  “Git ‘er done!”  Gals, git yer do “done” and then git up there and show us what yer made of:  good sense and guts!

Here’s the scenario. A bio-tech company will fly to Paris to convince influential French physicians to use their compound-in-development in clinical trials. The company has invited the French doctors to a nice meeting room in a nice hotel and plans to tell the doctors all about the compound.

When asked, “What is the purpose of the presentation?” they say, “To tell them about the drug.” I say I see it differently. I say it’s to help the French doctors come to the conclusion that the bio-tech company would be a great company to partner with, and that the drug is a versatile powerhouse that will almost certainly make it to market and get their names in the best peer-reviewed journals in the world.

When I lay out this plan, they say it is not scientific enough. I am sensitive to that. I like and respect the traditions of science. But I say, “This is not a scientific presentation. This is a business presentation. Science plays a part, but the goal is a business goal. You need these people to believe in your company and your compound. Our job is to induce belief in them, and raise that belief to the level of action.”

We take the scientific and corporate information they already have and restructure it to make a strong argument for partnership. There is some resistance holding out in the recesses of their scientific hearts.

I persist. This is a “decisional” presentation, I say. The French doctors will say, “Yes, No or Maybe.” There are risks for them. They could miss out on a good thing if they say no. They could miss out on better opportunities if they say yes. There are rational calculations to make, including the fact that they have practices to run, assistants to pay, and time to manage.

There are also non-rational issues. They would love to get their names on an important study. They would hate to work for years on a trial of a compound that never gets to market. Should they say no? Should they say yes?

In reality, I would guess their decision will hinge on what the most influential physician in the group decides.

This was a lesson in knowing the audience–in targeting their rational and non-rational needs. The bio-tech firm was relying on the science to do the job. It seemed to me the calculation was broader than that. For the doctors, the decision would be psychological as well as scientific.

Stay tuned.

No one likes to be pulled from a warm bed and thrust into a cold shower.  And many people I’ve met feel the same about being plucked from the blanket of everyday life to stand alone on a stage with a thousand pairs of eyes on them.   And so, when they find themselves on stage, they naturally seek refuge.

They seek refuge in two ways.  They disappear emotionally by making themselves small, or they try to dominate by increasing their size.

Disappearing emotionally is a remarkable human art.  Some of us have had an “out-of-body” experience when presenting, which is similar to the experience of passing out when in great pain: It’s a way of avoiding a difficult reality.

When I was very young, I caught a baby rabbit in my bare hands because when he saw me coming, he froze and played dead.  I walked right up to him, picked him up and took him home to show my mother.  I was very proud of myself.

Some of us become adept at disappearing emotionally as children, either because we observe that others are not emotionally present,  or we are taught that we should keep our thoughts and feelings to ourselves.  As adults, we might therefore use words, gestures, and a tone of voice that basically say, “I wish I weren’t here.”

We make ourselves absent or small by using words such as, “I guess,” “I think,” “Sort of,” “like, you know,” “kind of,” and many other common expressions that communicate uncertainty.

We absent ourselves by avoiding eye contact, slouching, hiding our hands, stepping back, and shifting our weight back and forth, as though we felt safer as a moving target.

And finally, we communicate absence or smallness by speaking too quietly, speaking too quickly, or using a rising intonation at the ends of our sentences, as though we were asking a question or seeking approval for our thoughts.

How do we make ourselves appear to be bigger than we actually are?

We use words that make us sound important, such as, “We anticipate experiencing considerable weather,” when we actually mean, “The plane ride will be bumpy.”

We might say, “We need to precipitate brand loyalty before the advent of competitive intrusion,” when we really mean, “Let’s get ‘em hooked on our stuff before the other guys come out with theirs.”

In other words, we try to sound like an institution instead of a person.

We make ourselves bigger with our bodies too.  We wear suits with padded shoulders.  We wear shoes with high heels.  We expand our gestures to occupy more space, like peacocks spreading their tails to frighten other males away.  And we practice a look of stern intention, focusing our eyes on one person at a time, as if to say, “I am a force to be reckoned with.  I will brook no dissent.”

Finally, we make ourselves bigger with our voices, by projecting more forcefully, be elongating vowels, by actually speaking in a sing-song cadence that echoes from the early 19th century but still lives in some of our political candidates.

We make ourselves smaller and bigger because we are scared.  We are scared because we are afraid of the audience.  We are afraid of the audience because we don’t know them, or we know them too well, or we simply have no experience speaking to groups.

We make ourselves small in the hope that we will not be noticed.  We make ourselves bigger hoping that the audience will not notice that we are small.  We change into something we’re not because we are afraid that, as we are, we are not all that impressive.

It’s a cop-out to be smaller than you are.  It’s a put-on to be bigger than you are.  The sweet spot is to trust that you’re big enough.

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 you have a better chance of making others believe in your idea, product, or service if you believe in them yourself.  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.

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.

Reason makes them think.  Emotion makes them act.

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.

I attended the World Health Care Congress in Washington and saw some remarkable presentations.  Here is a brief synopsis from my notes.

33% of health care costs in the USA are cardio-vascular; 20% cancer; 11% diabetes; and 10% obesity.

Does this mean that if we ate less and more wisely, we could eliminate up to 50% of the cost of health care in our country?

Does this mean we are a country that’s dying and going bankrupt because we eat too much?

Governor Bredesen of Tennessee said in his remarks that our health care system works the same way Safeway would work if, when we arrived at the store, a representative of Safeway escorted us around the aisles and put whatever he thought we might need in our cart.

Then, when we checked out, we would not be shown the bill.  Instead, it would be sent to a third party who was receiving a flat fee for providing us with food.

Is this what they call “a license to steal?”

They did a survey of the audience.  Over 80% of the health care professionals in attendance said that the American health care system is broken.  And these were people who work in it–whose livelihood depends on its survival.

Someone else said, “Why is it that as cell phones and computers get more technologically sophisticated, they get cheaper, while as medicine evolves in the same way it gets more expensive?”

We learned that measuring healthcare outcomes has unintended consequences.  Sometimes it’s hard to measure outcomes, so we measure processes instead and stop there.  Or we cherry-pick the patients we measure.  Or we otherwise figure out a way to game the system.

Furthermore, in some areas where outcomes have been measured and published, patients who review the data do not base their decisions on it.  Instead, they rely more on stories they’ve heard and on their relationships.

This is consistent with much of the work we do in the art and science of persuasion.  The power of statistics can be trumped by the power of a compelling story, and by the “ethical appeal“–classical rhetoric’s term for the power of the speaker’s character and relationship with the audience to make his argument more persuasive.

Finally, we learned that in order to effectively measure healthcare outcomes, we should:

1. Measure single conditions
2. Measure from the bottom up (allow departments to develop their own criteria.)
3. Use both intermediate and final outcomes when measuring.
4. Feedback the data to the people so they can continuously improve the measurement system.

This made me think that I should use these principles when helping clients improve the outcomes of their presentations.

Will do.

I know audiences don’t exactly jump for joy when attending presentations, but speakers are often puking in the bathroom minutes before they go on.

I am interested in cures, or coping strategies, for intense speaker anxieties.  We need to put our heads together to figure out a smorgasbord of techniques to calm us down.

I’ll go first.  These are the ones that I use.

1.  Work on the content until I’m convinced that it will do the job and hold the interest of the listeners.

2.  Rehearse aloud so that I can deliver the talk in my sleep.

3.  Practice making big, whole-body gestures during rehearsal and just before I go on.  This helps me break through the physical tension and “holding” that may constrict my expressiveness.

4.  Memorize the beginning and the ending.

5.  Remind myself that I am a pretty good showman when I make up my mind to be one.

6.  Remind myself that the audience wants to be entertained, even if they’re at a funeral.

That’s the first half dozen.  I welcome your home remedies, and any research that you know of.  Let’s build a stockpile of cures that lead to courage, presence, and expressiveness.