I attended a family wedding last weekend, and the sister of the bride gave a great toast.

I heard her round up her brothers as the cake was being served, saying, “Now is the time. Somebody has to say something.” They looked glum and stricken, and left their wine glasses on the table as they followed her to the center of the tent.

I thought to myself, “This is going to be hard. There are a hundred people yammering and drinking. Music is playing. Some people are dancing.” But I was wrong.

Lizzy tapped a wine glass with a fork. The crowd came to a hush. Somebody turned the music off, and Lizzy said what was on her mind.

It wasn’t fancy, clever, prepared, or eloquent. Just real. Sincere. Simple. Felt. She was happy for her sister and happy that so many family members had come to witness and support the marriage.

She stood still. She projected her voice. She was able to think while she was speaking, and she seemed completely comfortable.

The brothers didn’t need to say a thing. Any more would have been overkill. We clapped. The music returned, and I went back to work on my piece of cake, impressed with Lizzie’s grace, her sentiment, and the fact that her remarks were brief and unadorned.

It pays to have friends in high places.

Eric Schurenberg, a neighbor and friend of long-standing, has seen fit to cast me as a poster child for the road less taken to riches. Since I am not rich, and hardly a good example of anything, except perhaps for my prowess in some unmentionable activities, I allow him a poet’s license to use me as he sees fit.

Eric is the Managing Editor of Money Magazine, and I suppose he knows that most of his readers are thinking about how to acquire ungodly sums of money. After all, anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with human nature knows that most of us are fantasizing about our future wealth at least 50% of the time.

The rest of the time, of course, we’re fantasizing about unmentionable activities.

On page 16 of the July edition of Money Magazine, Eric writes the following:

“I watched with a mixture of concern and awe as a friend, Sims Wyeth, walked out of a perfectly good vice president’s post at a consulting firm, in large part because he thought he could make more money on his own as a public speaking coach for executives. It took him six nail-biting months to land his first customer. But now that his business is thriving–with clients like KPMG, McKinsey & Co. and Pfizer–Wyeth can be philosophical about why he took the risk. ‘If you asked me to choose between being bored and being terrified,’ he says, ‘I’d rather be terrified.’”

Let me say that Eric was right to be concerned, while his awe was probably similar to the feelings most people have when watching Evil Knievel jump his motorcycle over three-dozen parked school buses.

I can say in my own defense, however, that I have managed to be born with–well, a pewter spoon in my mouth–spit it out with disgust, enjoy a career as an actor, teach several graduate and undergraduate courses in theater and communication, raise a child and send her to Yale, and remain happily married to a woman who has been called by the New York Times “mercurial.”

And all while sailing through the air straddling a rocket with a landscape dotted with school buses far below.

It’s the only way I could keep up with my friends in high places.

They are mostly women.

I have now spent 20 years in the speech trade, and most of the people I run into who speak too fast are women.  I have no idea why.  I can only speculate.

1. they are more ambivalent than men about being the center of attention,
2. meaning they simultaneously want to be present and disappear
3. so they speak fast in the hope of being heard and ignored at the same time
4. or they have turned the old saying, “children are to be seen and not heard” on themselves and think that “women are to be seen and not heard.”
5. or because they are more verbally skilled than us men, and have bigger verbal centers in their brains, they are bored chunking through the analog process of speech and instead zip through the verbiage on their way to other thoughts.

I have explored these issues in a more responsible and scientific manner in a new High Stakes Presentation newsletter called The Price of Speaking too Fast.

I hope you will visit the site and read it or download it.  It’s available as a PDF or as HTML.

Speaking above the speed limit is a very common problem, and a dumb thing to do, because it can get your career arrested.

In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Stanley Fish, a professor at Florida International University, grabbed readers by the collar with the importance of first sentences.

Here’s the situation he posits.  You’re at the mystery section of an airport bookstore.  You hear last call for your flight.  You have about five minutes to choose a book.  How do you make a choice?

Look at the back cover?  No, because it’s hype, written by an advertising guy paid to sell the book.

How about the blurbs?  No, because famous authors often praise other books in publisher’s lists to do the publisher a favor and increase the likelihood of getting their next book published.

The only thing left is to read the first sentence.

Professor Fish quotes a few doozies.  “He cut through the morning rush-hour crowd like a shark fin through water.”  No thanks.

“Brianne Parker didn’t look like a bank robber or a murderer–her pleasantly plump baby face fooled everyone.”   Too cliche!

“Some stories wait to be told.”  Too pretentious!

Time is running out.  You open another book.  “Stromose was in high school when he met the boy who would someday murder his wife and son.”  Pretty good, but too self-conscious–especially that name.

And then Professor Fish finds the real thing.  “Joel Campbell, eleven years old at the time, began his descent into murder with a bus ride.”  The name isn’t too fictional.  “Eleven years old at the time” takes away the seriousness.  And “with a bus ride” is not self-consciously clever, but matter of fact.  It deepens the mystery.

How do you begin your presentations?  Do you work on your opening to create drama, tension, or mystery?  Or do you play it safe, and tell them what you’re going to tell them?

How many yawning executives snap to attention when you utter your first sentence?  How many people look forward to hearing you speak?

We are all rushing to catch a plane.  Our ability to catch attention is key to our success.

Titles are important.  My Dad was an editor and sometime in the 1950s a manuscript crossed his desk entitled, “Big Yeller Dog.”  He liked the book and decided to publish it, but he asked the author if he could change the title to “Old Yeller.”  The author agreed, and the name has lodged itself in our collective psyches.

Titles sell.  “Gone with the Wind.”  “From Here to Eternity.”  “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.”  These are all great titles for presentations too.

“The Budget Surplus and the Bush Administration:  or Gone with the Wind.”

“Occasioning Customer Loyalty: From Here to Eternity.”

“On-line Dating ROI: or The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.”

Can we use good titles to set a tone for our presentations, without losing our buttoned-up professionalism?  I think so.

I gave a talk once called “How to Get Brand Teams to Get Down on their Knees and Beg for More.”  I used the excuse that the meeting was in Nashville, and my talk needed to sound like a country and western song.

We can afford to jazz our titles up a bit.  A good title sets the audience abuzz as they anticipate being entertained, or intrigued. And the speaker can come back to the title throughout the talk if it serves as a theme.  People may not leave humming the melody, but they might leave remembering the theme–which is quite an accomplishment for a speaker.

And at the start, I like it when the speaker leaves the title slide up and delivers her opening so there’s no new visual to distract me from my enjoyment of her beginning–that is, if she’s done her homework and crafted a beginning designed to capture the attention of an audience.

The title of your talk should make people want to come hear it.  If someone stops you in the proverbial elevator and asks you, “What is your talk about?” you could say, “It’s about competition in the pest control industry and it’s called Rat Finks on the Rise.  I hope to see you there.”

And then, as you leave the elevator, you should turn and wink just as the door closes.

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.