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.

All the world’s a stage, which means Twitter is a stage too, a stage that is new to me, and new to most of us. I’ve been told that I need to tweet for marketing purposes. That I should talk about what I’m doing in my business.

But I’m in conflict. Tweeting feels phoney to me. I have a hugely complicated relationship with what I feel is my hugely complicated job running a public speaking and presenting consultancy. I often feel overwhelmed, understaffed, and out of control.

Then I step onto the Twitter Stage, and I have 140 characters to market myself and my company, to capture a moment, and then another, and another and another, in order tell a story that makes me look good.  It feels one-sided to talk only about the good stuff.  What about the rotten stuff?  The client that postponed the big engagement.  The client who bargained me down to the nub.  The brochure that can’t seem to get itself to the printer.  

Everyone’s trying to make themselves look good.  How refreshing, I think to myself, to actually be honest and talk about the bad stuff.  But then I argue with myself that being negative is not positive.  I think maybe I should follow the advice of my marketing guru, and paint a picture of Sims Wyeth & Co. as a fabulously successful company.  Dish out little bits of information that will make the competition jealous.   

I think my conflict about Twitter comes from the medium itself.   It’s strobe-lit story-telling…in slow motion, like submitting to a publishing house every tenth page of a novel you’ve written. 

Or better, when I’m on the Twitter Stage, I feel like an actor who has been working on his lines backstage behind a curtain, and yet just beyond the curtain is a large audience waiting to catch a glimpse of me.  

When I’m ready, I signal to the stage manager.  He nods, counts down from five, and lifts the curtain.  I feel the heat of the spot light.  I sense  the audience out there in the dark.  I open my mouth to speak my lines in my most positive tone of  voice.  I make the gestures I’ve rehearsed.  I try to end with a dramatic flourish before the spotlight goes dark–careful not to go over the time limit.  And then it’s dark.  The spot light is off.  The stage manager lowers the curtain.

The audience does not respond or applaud, but I feel that I have surgically implanted an image and a thought into their minds.    I have sent them a little snapshot of myself and my business in the hope that it will be interesting or helpful. 

And then I return to my work backstage:  blogging, selling, researching, developing new products, until the thought occurs that I must step onto the Twitter Stage again, to create another strobe-lit pose that will dovetail with the narrative flow I weave for world.

I attended my high school reunion over the weekend, where the organizers had asked each returning alumnus (we were an all-boys school) to prepare a short talk on our best and worst moments as students.

I had trouble with the assignment. My life in high school was a blur of memories, and the more I tried to remember, the more trivial my recollections became.

Pressing on, I remembered the times I cried in high school, and thought to myself, “Well that’s an honest approach. I’ll lose points for being serious, but I’ll be real.”

And so that’s what I did. I watched my classmates read prepared texts and generate laughter, until they demanded I take my turn. I spoke about the times I cried in school–tears of joy and sadness– and sat down.

I’ve been re-thinking it ever since, wishing I had done something different, or devising more clever ways I might have presented the same material.

What’s the best way to respond to post-speech remorse? I suggest (to myself and others):
1. Do a quick rewrite after you fantasize about what you might have said.
2. Ask a trusted ally who was in the audience what worked and what could have been better.
3. Make a promise to yourself not to wing it when you have the slightest chance to prepare.

As far as I’m concerned, presentations are never finished, only abandoned, and every effort can be improved and re-purposed for the next talk. 

If I had rehearsed and polished my talk, I would not have apologized for it.  Instead, I would have explained that memories attach to moments of emotion, and then told my stories as vividly as possible.

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!

Back in the days before Gutenberg, it took months or years for a few dedicated scribes to create a single copy of a single book.  A literate medieval person, provided he or she was not interrupted by the Inquistion or bubonic plague, could probably read the book as fast as your typical modern high school student.  The problem was not finding time to read, but finding enough reading to fill the time.  Information was a seller’s market, and books were considered far more valuable than, say, peasants.

But now it’s difficult to imagine how we could possibly find enough attention to devote to all the information we generate.

60,000 new books in the US every year; 300,00 worldwide

18,000 magazines in the US

20 billion pages of editorial content on food and nutrition alone

400,000 scholarly journals

15 billion catalogues delivered to US homes

87.2 billion pieces of direct mail to US homes in 1998

40,000 different items (SKUs) offered by the average US grocery store

And yet, the average household only buys 150 SKUs per year

Suffice it to say: we live in the age of information.  The problem we have is not finding enough information.  Our problem is collecting it, organizing it, analyzing it, and taking action on it.

And here is Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winning economist, speaking about the relationship between information and attention:

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.  Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

When you consider that our listeners are drinking information from a fire hose,  we ought to study what the great communicators have done in the past, and what recent research says about human attention.

After all, what’s the point of talking if they’re not listening?

Let’s think of the mind of an audience as having two basic types of material–old impressions and memories of events actually experienced, and imaginative rearrangements of parts of these actual experiences which never really existed.

For instance, remembering how your uncle looked when he got angry at you as a child is real.  Dreaming that your uncle is wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in the kitchen sink is a rearrangement of reality.  Remembering a character in a novel, or movie, is a mixture of both, so maybe there are three types of materials in the mind.

These raw materials of the mind exist at different levels of consciousness, like different kinds of fish in a pond.

When you present an idea to an audience, it’s as if you cast a baited hook into the water.  The hook causes some fish to scatter, attracts others, and is ignored by the rest, but it rearranges the pool into new patterns.

Skilled presentation–like skillful fishing–requires a knowledge of what’s in the mind of your listeners, how to attract what you want, and how to reject what you don’t.

This brings us to the concept of resonance–the most powerful mechanism for transference of an idea from one person to another.

In the physical world, we tune our guitar strings until they vibrate in sympathy.  We tune our radios by adjusting the resonance of our receivers to match the signal of a specific transmitter. Tenors shatter glasses when their voices vibrate at a certain sustained note.  Bridges can be caused to vibrate and shake themselves apart.

Everything in the physical world vibrates, and can be stimulated to excess if a disturbing force is tuned to it.  Resonance in the physical world is the way to get a maximum transfer of energy. In the world of the mind, it is the way to get a maximum transfer of idea content.

This is the deeper meaning of the old saying, “Know your audience.”  It has its root in sympathy.  The word sympathy is derived from two Greek roots–syn, meaning “together”; and pathos meaning “feeling”…feeling together.

Send out messages tuned to the feelings of an audience, and they will almost quiver in response.

Let’s take it a little further.  As people respond, they send back messages to the sender, setting up a kind of feedback which amplifies the original message.

Some audiences are overt in their response: certain church congregations exort their preachers to a higher pitch of enthusiasm.

Others are more subdued, but still supply a collaborative source of energy for the performer.  Musicians and actors often comment on the power of an audience to make them “better than they know how to be.”

If you’ve ever had such an experience as a speaker, you know its power.  If you’ve ever been deeply engaged, or moved by listening to a speaker, you also are familiar with it.

Public speaking is a powerful tool requiring a good deal of training and experience to use effectively.  Just as there are rules to be mastered by architects, lawyers, and doctors, there are rules for the presentation of ideas.

Furthermore, it is not enough to know the rules.  Training teaches the rules; experience teaches the exceptions.  There is art in knowing how to select, arrange, and transmit the various elements of a presentation for the benefit of a particular audience.

In reality, learning how to present your thoughts more effectively can be a personally transformative experience, because it requires so much of us–knowledge, skill, and emotional courage.

In fact, I believe that the ability to present your thinking is the most powerful professional tool you can have in your tool box.  It is the primary tool of leaders, influencers, persuaders, and sellers–that is to say, anyone who is skilled at moving others to take action.

And you can’t develop that ability without deepening and developing yourself.

I went to a slew of parties over the holidays.  When people asked me what I do,  I found myself saying, “Consultant,” or “Speech consultant,” or if I’m feeling really insecure, “Itinerant rhetorician.”  I am essentially dodging the phrase “presentation skills” because I’m paranoid that people will think of me as the guy who tells you to look people in the eye, stand still, and wave your hands around.

In fact, I spoke to a lady the other day who differentiated between “speaker training” and “presentation skills.”  To her, “speaker training” is getting doctors to master new data; presentation skills is delivery.

I am currently working with a pre-clinical group in the pharmaceutical industry, helping them prepare presentations to an internal committee in order to win approval for promising new compounds to be tested in humans.  When I did some interviews, I found that many in the department had underlying attitudes about presenting.

Here they are in no particular order:

- Scientists must be dispassionate and objective, therefore passion in a scientific presenter is unprofessional.

- Management should leave me alone and let me do what I’m good at.

- Most good scientists are not good presenters, therefore, if you’re a good presenter, you’re probably not a good scientist.

- I should not have to care about my “image.”

- I have no interest in improving my presentation skills.

- Content is king. Presenting is a necessary evil – Presenting is a burden, not an opportunity- Publishing my data for peer review is good; presenting my data to my peers is a pain.- My data slides ARE my presentation.- Reading slides is what my mentors did.  If it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.- Rehearsing is for actors, not for a scientist like me.

My impulse was to quote Cicero in response, a snooty approach I successfully avoided.  But I wanted to tell them what he said: “If truth were self-evident, eloquence would not be necessary.”  To my mind, eloquence is, at bottom, speech that creates clarity and feeling in listeners–enough to cause them to take action.

In this case, the scientists have a tough job–to recommend that the company spend millions on a research project that, if history is any indicator, has only a tiny chance of succeeding.  They’ve got to get the audience to salivate over efficacy, safety, and marketability, despite the presence of vast uncertainty on all fronts.  If the speaker doesn’t demonstrate conviction and clarity, and strive to create the same in her audience, what are her chances of success?

Uh…slim to none, and slim is leaving town!

I keep reading about CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and companies that have created specialized call centers, known as “save centers,” to help retain customers who are ticked off and want to cancel their contracts and get their money back.

To staff up these save centers, companies tend to look for high-performing agents from the traditional call centers of their own companies. Surprisingly, however, these employees tend to under-perform in their new role, mainly because of poor listening skills.

They think the problem could be that these regular call center agents are accustomed to using scripts. They engage with the customer, but while the customer is explaining her point of view, they don’t really listen.

In a study done by McKinsey, one telecom save desk hired candidates with superior listening skills. It found that within three months these agents had save rates two to three times higher than those of more experienced people in the regular call centers.

It is tempting to consider the possibilities of extending this lesson to a broader range of communication activities, including sales, coaching, consulting skills, managing difficult conversations, and leadership training too.

Listening is persuasive because it:

• makes the other person feel respected and understood
• helps the listener understand the feelings and perceptions of the other party
• enables the listener to ask better questions
• enables the listener to understand how to relate to the other party
• and on and on…

The question is: HOW? Ah, there’s the rub.    More to come!

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.
 
 

 

I just bought the DVD course from The Teaching Company called Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning, which is taught by Professor David Zarefsky of Northwestern University. If you want to take a deep dive into presentation skills, take this one.

These lectures make you realize that human beings have been trying to figure out what makes one person more persuasive than others for at least 2000 years.

Presentation skills count the most where there is uncertainty–where there is no mathematical certainty that the speaker’s idea is the right one.

For instance, when a brand director introduces her new marketing plan, there is no guarantee that it will work.  She has to convince her audience that there is a reasonable degree of certainty that it will work.  She’s got to give reasons to do this.

When a pharmaceutical company needs to partner with another company, it will consider the presentations of the various candidates and make a decision.  There is no certainty in such a decision.  They will listen to the reasons presented and make their decision through dialogue and discussion.

Professor Zarefsky says that argumentation is the process of “giving reasons” and that the goal of argumentation is better decisions through collaborative dialogue.

And for arguments to be effective, the speaker must be open to being persuaded in addition to being eager to persuade.