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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Executive speech coach, Sims Wyeth, helps dissect the nature of Barack Obama’s public speaking skills to show others how they can enhance their own on-stage performance.  Sims Wyeth is a noted resource in the world of high stakes presenting, providing training and coaching to some of businesses top executives for almost 20 years. 

According to Wyeth, “Obama is a master at grabbing and keeping his audience’s attention, which is the number one goal of any public speaker. “  In a recent article published by Sims Wyeth, Wyeth offers public speakers five key lessons from Obama’s rhetorical playbook, and tips to master his style. 

The article was posted on Bnet.com

Sims Wyeth helps individuals and companies succeed by providing tools and training on the principles and practices of effective, persuasive communication – those approaches that have been proven to work across history and cultures.  His work is not only a collection of do’s and don’ts; his knowledge and teaching is based on the science and psychology of how audiences absorb information.

Sims Wyeth & Co. offers customized presentation skills and public speaking seminars, as well as executive speech coaching. Sims assists high stakes presenters with speech writing, effective use of PowerPoint, presenting data, increasing sales, relating to diverse or difficult audiences, improving personal style, confidence, and image.

 ”The greats all learn from other greats,” says Wyeth, “so don’t hesitate to study Obama’s repertoire, and use what you can to improve your own public speaking.”

Read the full article online at http://www.bnet.com/2403-13074_23-290100.html?tag=homeCar

Ford Harding has lifted his pen to engage with me on a subject of profound importance to sales professionals, leaders, and anyone who seeks to influence others. That subject is the emotional sea on which all decisions float.

FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is one current in that sea. It drives most of us away from the shoals of risk, hardship, pain and loss.

GOG (greed, opportunity, and glory) is another current in the sea. Its siren song calls us to risk our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor in pursuit of objectives that may or may not work out.

I will address Ford’s recent comments in this posting, but first I must clarify my position and then I must make the case for the role of emotion in business decision making. I think Ford and I are using a kind of shorthand in discussing this topic, and some readers might be concerned about the difference between logical persuasion and emotional persuasion.

My position: I am not the champion of FUD and the enemy of GOG. I strive to be the wise master of both. However, I am of the opinion that mankind is more motivated by the fear of loss than the hope of gain. What gets our attention, on a daily basis, are problems. Most people and organizations will not change until the pain of change becomes less than the pain of the status quo. Alcoholics don’t stop drinking until they hit rock bottom. They do not get sober because they suddenly decide to be good little boys and girls. They get sober because they are avoiding the dire consequences of their drinking.

In his book, Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert writes the following:

“One of the most annoying songs in the often annoying history of popular music begins with this line: “Feelings, nothing more than feelings.” I wince when I hear it because it always strikes me as roughly equivalent to starting a hymn with “Jesus, nothing more than Jesus.” Nothing more than feelings? What could be more important than feelings? Sure, war and peace may come to mind, but are war and peace important for any reason other than the feelings they produce? If war didn’t cause pain and anguish, if peace didn’t provide for delights both transcendental and carnal, would either of them matter to us at all? War, peace, art, money, marriage, birth, death, disease, religion—these are just a few of the Really Big topics over which oceans of blood and ink have been spilled, but they are really big topics for one reason alone: Each is a powerful source of human emotion. If they didn’t make us feel uplifted, desperate, thankful, and hopeless, we would keep all that ink and blood to ourselves. As Plato asked, “Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?” Indeed, feelings don’t just matter—they are what mattering means. We would expect any creature that feels pain when burned and pleasure when fed to call burning and eating bad and good respectively, just as we would expect an asbestos creature with no digestive tract to find such designations arbitrary. Moral philosophers have tried for centuries to find some other way to define good and bad, but none has ever convinced the rest (or me). We cannot say that something is good unless we can say what it is good for, and if we examine all the many objects and experiences that our species calls good and ask what they are good for, the answer is clear: By and large, they are good for making us feel happy.”

_____

Ford, I take this to mean that our careful reasoning and efforts to be logical about any important decision –from making an investment, to building a bridge, to figuring out how to land a new client–is ultimately floating on a sea of feelings and emotions, and that we are constantly striving to minimize our FUD (negative emotions) and maximize our GOG (feelings of pleasure.)

If we are sales professionals, leaders, or public speakers, we need to consider all the tools of persuasion at our disposal. This consideration of tools and techniques makes us rhetoricians practicing the art of rhetoric. We are obliged to use the tools of rhetoric when considering a decision for which there is no clear answer–a decision about which reasonable men can disagree.

FUD and GOG are rhetorical tactics which we can use to persuade an audience. You write that fear tactics are despicable, and then wisely mention that GOG tactics can be equally deceptive. Let me remind you that the techniques of persuasion, like many other technologies, are neither inherently good nor evil. They can be used to advance noble or pernicious purposes. “What makes a man a sophist is not his faculty but his moral purpose.”

As for your Venn diagram example, in which you describe the two overlapping circles of FUD and GOG, and argue that where downside risk is high, the use of only FUD is appropriate, and where the upside is larger, it is only appropriate to use GOG, and only in the middle, where they both overlap, is it appropriate to use both, I have to disagree. All upsides have risk, and all downsides have solutions.

It seems to me that Plato, quoted above, is saying that we undertake projects in our lives to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. In other words, to get rid of FUD and grab hold of GOG.

Furthermore, if we are successful business leaders, as soon as we make a decision to pursue GOG (greed, opportunity and glory), we have a whole new set of FUD calculations to make, such as, “What if I’m wrong? What if the future is not like the past? What if, what if, what if?”

It is up to the speaker, the salesman, and the leader to explore these what ifs, and thereby help his audience to the best decision for them. Reasoning and logic will play their parts in the drama, but FUD and GOG will always be the co-stars.

I just returned from an engagement during which I was asked to give partners in a professional service firm 10 minutes to pitch the firm to a brand new prospect, played by another partner sitting across the table.

Most partner/presenters were tentative at the start. They began by asking the prospects what they wanted to get out of the meeting. Since the exercise was only ten minutes long, the prospects gave a 30-second overview of their needs and asked the sales person to, “Give us your pitch,” or said, “We use a lot of firms like yours. What makes you different.”

And that’s when the difficulty began. Few presenters were prepared with a brief, interesting headline focused on customer benefits. Most of them hemmed and hawed, drilled down into one particular feature of their services, or provided a summary statement that was fact-based and feature-based, not emotionally strong and benefit-driven.

For instance, the firm is proud of their process, their results, and their willingness to measure and publish those results. But all of those are internal and ambiguous to the prospect. Clients care most about results, and are more than likely indifferent to the process, as long as it gets the job done without too much disruption to their own work flow.

Furthermore, in this case, while my client firm could report their own success metrics, they could not report those of their competitors, so the information was meaningless.

And when they did mention their success metrics, they often quoted a number–”82% of our engagements are successfully completed,”–leaving the prospect to wonder if that number is good or bad, what happens with the other 18% of engagements, what does success mean, and what is the likelihood that I will be one of the 18% who get screwed?

The best guy in the whole exercise opened with three crisp points: we have a transparent process, we complete more assignments than our competitors, and we complete them faster. But he failed to stick to that outline during the subsequent role-play.

I liked what he was trying to do. He made three bold points, or claims, at the start, and he was going to describe how and why those claims were true. But he got derailed by the back and forth, and lost control of the meeting.

He would have done better if his points had been benefit statements–if they had been about what the client gets, rather than about his firm’s attributes. His message was seller-centric (all about him!) instead of customer-centric (all about them!)

Moving to a listener-centric message would have required that he understand why his clients buy services such as his, what they like about such services, and what they dislike.

I asked the group if they had any market research, or any well-founded opinions, that could guide us in the exercise. They did, and we were able to suggest another set of headlines that, if used broadly throughout the firm’s selling efforts, could provide new language, and a greater return on new client interactions.

The bottom line is this: language shapes reality! Some cognitive scientists say that language creates reality for us–that it is generative. Effective presentation of intangible professional services depends on a highly-skilled use of language capable of inducing clarity and trust in the prospect.

It’s worth the time to find the right combination of words that resonate with the target audience.

In a political revolution, insurgents quickly target the media outlets. Their reasoning? He who controls the language controls the thinking.

Now comes another study to suggest that insurgents may have it right. In this experiment, one group of volunteers was shown a shade of yellow on a strip of white paper for a few seconds. The group was then shown another strip of paper with several shades of yellow (including the first) and asked to identify the original color. In this group, 73% were able to identify the original shade of yellow.

A second group was shown the same shade of yellow, told to describe the color aloud, and then were asked to identify the original color from a strip containing multiple shades. Only 33% of the “describers” were able to accurately identify the original color.

How do we account for this difference between the two groups? Scientists think that the language we use to describe our experience overwrites or distorts our actual experience. In the case of the “describers” mentioned above, they ended up remembering not what they had experienced but what they had said about what they experienced. And what they had said about what they experienced was not clear and precise enough to help them recognize it when they saw it again thirty seconds later.

Our own political parties fight over language. Should it be “global warming” or “climate change”? The “estate tax” or the “death tax”? “Starvation” or “calorie deficiency”? These word choices soften or sharpen the impact of what they describe, and thus have a profound impact on how we think about the underlying phenomena.

One of the functions of language is to help us extract and remember the important features of our experiences so that we can analyze and communicate them later. The New York Times online film archive stores critical synopses of films rather than the films themselves, which would take up far too much space and be far too difficult to search. Experiences are even more complex than movies, and were our brains to store the full-length movie of our lives, our skulls would have to expand.

So words have power, and savvy presenters use them carefully. For instance, avoid business jargon unless you want to be seen as talking much and saying little. Because we hear business jargon all the time (visions, missions, strategic objectives) it sounds to many of us like verbal oatmeal–its meaning is not clear–so the words have no snap, crackle or pop.

We should be careful to make concrete that which is abstract. Instead of saying, “We need to occasion customer loyalty to avoid competitive intrusion,” we should say, “Let’s get ‘em hooked on our cookies before the other guys start cooking theirs.”

The take away? Stick your thoughts into the minds of your audience with vivid language, as Martin Luther did when he nailed his theses to the door of the church.

If you don’t assert your story well, another story will prevail.

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.

Science, like the rest of us, advances through trial and error, better known as dumb luck.

One summer day in 1991, neuroscientists in a lab at Parma University wired up a monkey’s brain for a simple experiment. They wanted to see which neruons fired during the series of movements involved in the everyday act of drinking from a cup.

But on that day the monkey was more interested in a student eating an ice cream cone. The monkey watched intently as the student moved the cone to his mouth and, as it watched, the motor neurons in its brain began to fire, indicating that the animal was moving its arms and hands. In fact, the monkey was perfectly still.

This suggests (they say) that our brains mimic, or mirror, the movements we observe, even though we don’t actually make the gestures. We are “moved” when observing the movements of others. In fact, scientists tell us that our brains have “mirror neurons” responsible for replicating the brain maps of gestures made by others.

While it’s nice to have science confirm this, didn’t we know it already? When we watch someone hit his thumb with a hammer, and he winces in pain, we make the same gesture.

When we see someone cover his face with his hands and shake with sobs, we can’t help but be moved, even though we don’t replicate the gesture.

And when we watch a speaker step out from behind the lectern, and we see that his or her body is free of tension, and even more importantly, full of intention, our brains recognize the speaker is confident in what she’s saying, and certain parts of our brains light up, and more importantly, she is more likely to exert influence over us.

As a great Roman said, “Unless the delivery stands guard over the material, the material will evaporate, no matter how precious it was in itself.”

There is no right way to “deliver” your thoughts: there is only your own best way. If you restrain yourself from gesturing, your audience feels your restraint. If you make exaggerated, unfelt gestures (because you’ve read and misinterpreted this blog) your audience feels that you are artificial. But when you allow your voice and body to express what your message means to you, they feel the meaning of your message.

And so I have a renewed interest in the body language and micro-movements of my clients. It doesn’t have to be elegant, but it does have to be full of intention.

I am still looking for a unified field theory of presentation skills, and when I find it, I will check to make sure that the mind-body connection is a significant part of it. The brain is in the skull, but the mind is in every cell.