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.

“Every word uttered evokes the idea of its opposite. “  –Goethe

In other words, when you assert your opinion, your listeners will reflexively search their own minds for a thought that could prove your idea flawed.  

To take the wind out of their sails, and to demonstrate that you have considered other perspectives, speak their thoughts for them, and explain why your idea is superior.

In this way, your talk takes the form of a dialogue between your proposal and reasonable objections to it.

You will be seen as credible and balanced, and your listeners will be more likely to agree.

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. 

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.

And you thought your job was to stick to the facts! Here are the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, making a strong point about making a point in their wonderful book Made to Stick.

          Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards.  Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire.  She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher.

          Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class.  Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does:  A journalists gets the facts and reports them.  To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why.

          As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment.  They would write the lead of a newspaper story.  The teacher reeled off the facts:  “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods.  Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.”

          The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers.  According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence:  “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School Faculty Thursday in Sacramento…blah, blah, blah.”

          The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly.  Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment. 

          Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.”

          “It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls.  “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point.  It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant.  And why it mattered.’” For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret—a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.

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.

The arts of music, poetry, literature, and drama have been around so long that each of them has templates.  To dismiss templates is to ignore the wisdom of the ages.

To name a few, music has verses and choruses, poetry has sonnets and haiku, literature has novels and short stories, and drama has setting, character, plot, and resolution.

Templates exist for speeches and presentations too.  Past to present to future is one.  Cause and effect is another.  Thesis, antithesis, synthesis is yet a third. But by far the most useful in the business world is the situation, problem, solution template.

 In business, define the problem first, then argue for your solution.

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.

I was looking for my childhood home on Google Earth, and caught a glimpse of it from 30,000 ft., then zoomed in and saw my mother’s herb garden at the bottom of the back lawn.

My Mom and Dad still live there, but I saw cars I didn’t recognize parked in the driveway.  The image was of late fall or winter because part of the lawn was brown, where my father had planted Zoisa grass in the early 1960s because he was at war with crabgrass and dandelions.

I saw the weeping willow given to them by my mother’s colleagues in Real Estate when my sister died in 2001.  It was leafless, more evidence of a cold month.

I saw no Jack Russell terriers leaping after tennis balls on the lawn.  It was a still image, one moment at the house I grew up in, viewed from the sky at a great distance, and then, as I zoomed in, from the point of view of a crow, perched on the limb of a nearby maple.

It reminded me that film-makers use wide angles and close-ups to tell their stories.  Wide angles create the setting, and close-ups bring us face to face with brutal reality.

Abraham Lincoln did this in the Gettysburg Address.  With his first sentence, he invites us to gaze at the continent and 90 years of history.

“Four score and seven years ago,” he begins, “Our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation….”

In one sentence he summarizes the historical setting for the audience—both time and place.  And then comes the close up.  “Now we are engaged in a great Civil War…”  With that sentence he locates his audience in time.

“We are met on a great battlefield of that war.”  Now we know where we are on that continent we saw in our mind at the beginning.  We are located in space—in Gettysburg, PA.

The President then went on to ask what we as Americans could do to honor the fallen, and his answer suggests that we rededicate ourselves to the principles of representative democracy.

Like me looking for my childhood home on Google Earth, Lincoln first fixed his listeners eyes on the big picture—the wide angle.  He drew them to consider the continent and the history relevant to the present. 

And then he brought to their attention the current conflict, and the bloody field where the bodies lay—zooming in on the problem, on the question that needed to be answered.

This is a powerful model for presentations.  Starting with the big picture, the setting in which the story takes place.  Then zooming in on the problem or opportunity that draws our attention.  Raising the questions that need to be asked and answered.  And then finally supplying an actionable and evidence-based answer.

I zoomed out from my view of my old home so I could see the woods my friends and I used to play in.  Still there, now owned by the Nature Conservancy, I imagined the woods held the ruins of our forts made of sticks and leaves, where we fought battles with imaginary Indians and went home for supper when it got dark. 

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.

The Constant Contact ads on NPR are annoying me.  They promise great business relationships through email campaigns.  Who are they kidding?
 
Giving a speech is a much better way to build relationships with prospects, and even that doesn’t work all the time. A lot of speakers have a boilerplate talk, and they blast it out regardless of who they’re talking to.

That’s basically what e-mail campaigns are like.  They lack intimacy, which is a pretty basic component of trusting relationships.

I estimate that most e-mail campaigns die in the dust bin of the spam filter.  And some get their senders classified as internet outlaws, as recipients either hit the delete button hard, and harbor resentment, or complain to the authorities about unwarranted email.

Getting spam is like being forced to attend a speech or presentation you don’t want to hear.  I often hear clients at large pharma companies complain that they are expected to attend presentations which have little or no relevance to their work. 
 
E-mail only gets opened if it’s from a trusted source.  People who don’t know this will spend a boat load of dough learning this lesson through experience.

And if the recipient opts in and gets crummy content as a result—content all about how cool the sender’s company and products are—then they will unsubscribe.

I know this from experience, as a sender and as a receiver.

To promise businesses that sending more e-mail is going to win customer loyalty is crazy.  Sending more email is going to drive customers away…unless…
 
…unless senders somehow find a way to connect with the interests of their readers, and Constant Contact isn’t about to teach them how to write well, or market well, or empathize with those on the receiving end of their junk. 

 It’s not about constant contact, it’s about relevant content.