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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.

In the Jobs section of the New York Times, on Sunday March 30th, Phyllis Korkki has written an article entitled The Adroit Speaker Doesn’t Wing It.

That’s true and not true. I believe wholeheartedly in preparing, rehearsing, getting feedback, even scripting a speech or presentation. But then, once I have internalized the content, I boil my talk down into bullets and let myself wing it.

Rehearsal enables spontaneity. Jazz musicians work on their riffs, (their chops) in rehearsal so that they can improvise in performance. But much of that improvisation has been grooved into their muscles during hours of practice.

I don’t want to be married to a script, and I don’t think audiences want us to be married to scripts. They appreciate the fact that scripts can keep us on point, but they do not like the fact that scripts force us to read to them.

Ms. Korkki quotes Linda Blackman, founder of Executive Image in Chicago on the causes of stage fright. She says we get stage fright because:

1. We’re afraid we will look foolish
2. We’ll make a mistake (?)
3. We will disappoint the boss
4. Our expertise will be questioned
5. We may not have prepared properly

There are other reasons as well. We may have had a traumatic experience in childhood associated with humiliation, such as answering a question in class and hearing the entire room erupt in derisive laughter. Such an experience opens a pathway in the brain that makes it more likely we will experience the flight or fight syndrome.

The ancient Greeks called this dreadful sensation glossophobia. Glossa is Greek for tongue, and phobos means fear.

The Greeks also had another word that could describe stage fright: agoraphobia, which is the fear of crowds. Agora is the Greek word for marketplace.

According to some surveys, public speaking is the number one fear in America, followed by the fear of illness, heights, deep water, snakes and bugs, financial problems, and death.

Death is number seven, which means that most people would rather die than give a talk. Seinfeld once quoted this fact on his show and quipped, “That’s why, when you go to a funeral, you’d rather be in the box than deliver the eulogy.”

It has been shown that the blood chemistry of a soldier about to go into battle is the same as that of a speaker about to go on stage.

Overcoming stage fright is a multi-channel enterprise. Ms. Korkki’s article stresses the importance of preparing your script, but there are tens of thousands of well-prepared speakers who are terrified and ineffective.

Preparing your script is a brain function, but good speaking is not entirely cognitive. It also requires the heart and the body–in other words, your emotions and your spirit.

Dr. Charles Strobel of Yale University offered a more wholistic approach. His research indicated that there are two ways to alter a distressing inner state. One is to include positive self-talk and mental imagery as you prepare. The other is to use your body to impact your inner feelings.

For instance, Strobel proved that smiling blocks the enzyme in the brain that causes us to experience fear. He encouraged deep breathing, which can have the same effect, and showed that the best way to get a deep breath is to yawn–although not in front of the audience.

He also demonstrated that by simply manipulating your posture–by standing up straight and acting as if you were feeling comfortable, you change your blood chemistry.

The power of visualizing the results you hope to achieve is an established psychological technique. The power of using gesture and movement to alter inner states is less widely known, but it is another example of how emotion influences the body, and how the body can influence our emotions.

Glossophobia is the fear of public speaking. It comes, like all the other phobias, from the ancient Greeks, more specifically the Athenians, who spent time thinking about speech communication.

The word itself comes from the Greek word for tongue (glossa) combined, of course, with the more familiar root word for fear (phobos.)

For those of you who are Jackie Gleason/Ralph Cramden fans, it means, “Hummina, hummina, hummina,” accompanied by an urgent finger inserted between neck and shirt collar, with an audible “Gulp,” at the end.

Glossophobia is a disease to which all of us are susceptible, and is associated with several co-morbidities.

Hyper-Infoitis: The swelling of information in the body of a talk, usually caused by an insecure speaker trying to impress her audience with her expertise.

PowerPointitis: The proliferation of PowerPoint slides, caused by the mistaken belief that a presentation is what the speaker says, and not what the audience can take away.

Oldnewsatoid Syndrome: An illness that causes the speaker to tell the audience what it already knows (common in Medical Education.)

Laser Pointer Obsessive Disorder: The need to clutch, fondle, and wiggle a small, thin, pointed object with a magical little hole in the end from which comes a beam of intense light

Hyper Logorrhea: The tendency for speakers to speak so rapidly that the audience has to conclude that the speaker is brilliant but completely unintelligible.

Uhmatosis: The swelling and swarming of inarticulate groans and pre-verbal utterances that get stuck in the cracks between words and stink up the flow and impact of human speech.

Repetitive Uptalk Illness: Occurring primarily in young females, debilitating to their professionalism and credibility, it corrupts the intonation patterns of their speech so as to make them appear needy of approval, paradoxically earning them disdain.

These are just the first seven co-morbidities associated with glossophobia. Our speech scientists are hard at work diagnosing other illnesses that cascade from this terrible human scourge.

Stay tuned.

Recently, a client of mine, who is also a childhood friend, left me a voice mail saying that he did not think my short article on the power of gesture to create emotion was appropriate for the market I serve. Essentially, the short piece tried to make the point that speakers can alter their inner emotional state by finding a gesture to do (in private) that can move them out of fear and anxiety and into calmness and confidence.

He said that the suggestion seemed too “pop” and “retail” and inappropriate for sophisticated people. To him, it seemed like something he would find in an airline magazine.

I am grateful for his honesty, and for his trust that I would take his comment in the right way. I know he is watching out for my best interests.

I would like to try to make the point again (and here in public) in a way that makes it more palatable to him and those who might think as he does.

We all agree that just as feelings create physical gestures (happiness puts a spring in your step), gestures can stimulate feelings (raising your hands above your head and punching the air in triumph tends to lift a sagging mood.)

As speakers, we want to present ourselves as enthusiastic upbeat people who are excited about our material. If we happen to be nervous, a few fist pumps, or jumping jacks, or whatever, done out of sight of the audience, will serve to prime our emotional pumps.

Also, while sophisticated people may reject the idea that they could benefit from using creative gestures as an offstage tool to create more positive inner states (even though they admire dancers, actors and singers who use just those techniques to bring their material to life) they themselves might more effectively bring their own complex messages to life with a bit more expressiveness.

I taught acting for many years under the tutelage of Michael Chekhov and his disciples, and I now serve on the board of MICHA–the Michael Chekhov Association. Michael Chekhov was the nephew of Anton Chekhov, and he was considered the greatest actor of the 20th century in Russia.

Michael Chekhov disagreed with Stanislavsky about how actors should create the inner life of their characters. Stanislavsky suggested, for instance, that when called upon to cry, the actor should recall his “dying grandfather” or some other sad event, a technique he called sense memory. Michael Chekhov, on the other hand, suggested that creative gesture can stimulate sensation, and that sensation is the vessel into which we can pour our creative feelings.

I think both can work, but I tend to lean toward Chekhov. The technique of sense memory removes us from the immediate circumstances, and asks us to visualize something that occurred, or will occur, at another time and place.

Gesture, on the other hand, gives me an immediate physical and psychological jolt that arouses my vitality and sense of play. I can walk out on stage with an inner feeling that I have the energy and will to do my best.

The body can speak to the inner life, and when necessary, we can use gesture as a tool to create a more appealing and effective presence.

A friend of mine, who is a very successful consultant, told me that she has lost her confidence as a speaker. For twenty years she has been speaking to large groups of clients and potential clients with success.  Now she feels very unsure of herself.

She reports to me that she’s terrified of going blank.  While she used to trust herself to speak without slides, and instead drew pictures on a flipchart or whiteboard, now she prepares a script and a set of detailed slides.  She says that her voice shakes, her hands tremble, and her eyes dart from side to side as she speaks.

I respect this person, and feel honored to be trusted with her struggle.  She told me that she has gotten a medication to help her, and it works.  She’s feeling better.

But that solution is not appropriate for everyone.  It’s expensive, might cause side effects, and some of us are opposed to pharmaceutical assistance when it comes to our “valor under fire.”  Plus, it could take the edge off–the edge that makes great musicians play dramatically better when under pressure to connect with a live audience.

What can you do if you lose your nerve, and feel your performance skills deteriorating?

Refuse to speak?  Few of us have that option.

Confess to the client or the meeting host that you are having a crisis of confidence and ask to be relieved of the duty to address the room?  Not a good idea–not unless the client or host is a long-time friend who will keep your secret and cover for you.

Lie, and say you’re not feeling well?    That’ll work.  Once.

Pray?  That could work for some.  After preparing like a maniac, throw yourself on the mercy of your God.  Trust your fate to His/Her guidance.  Give it everything you’ve got and hope that Someone is watching.

Rehearse more than usual?  Prepare so thoroughly that even if you pass out with anxiety you can still get your point across?   Yes!   The knowledge that you did everything within your power to ensure your success will strengthen you.  Anticipate everything that could possibly go wrong and develop a strategy for dealing with each potential disaster.  The performance will probably seem easy compared to the rehearsals.

Act as if you’re confident?  Absolutely!  We know instinctively that confidence is the essential ingredient for our success, and we constantly make every effort to demonstrate confidence to others.  A speaker without confidence does not inspire others to have confidence in her.

As a matter of fact, you can use posture and gesture to alter your inner state.  Just as emotions tend to shape our bodies, our bodies can also influence our emotions.  In private, find a gesture that gives you a good feeling (like Tiger Woods pumping his fist) and do it over and over.  Try it at different tempos.  Then, simply imagine you’re doing it while standing still.  The image of the gesture will inform your behaviors and stimulate a sensation that can help you overcome your negative feeling.

Smile?  Yes, if you can manage to do so.  Anxious speakers tighten the muscles of the face which makes a mask that listeners recognize.  Work hard to smile.  Charles Strobel of Yale University demontrated that a smile literally changes your brain chemistry and diminishes your experience of fear.

Lift your eyebrows?  Believe it or not, yes!  Lifting the eyebrows is a universal gesture that indicates surprise and delight.  It will help you feel those emotions, and it will make the audience respond positively to you.  By the way, raising the eyebrows also brings the voice forward and helps you be more expressive.

Remember to breathe?  Yup, that works too.  As you prepare for the event, and you feel anxiety rising, sit quietly and become mindful of your breathing.  Watch it come in and out.  Try counting your breaths while saying to yourself, “I’m breathing in ONE; I’m breathing out ONE.  I’m breathing in TWO; I’m breathing out TWO,” all the way to TEN.  Then start again.

While you’re doing this, send your mind on an inspection of your body.  Check out your legs, your lower back, your shoulders, your neck, your forehead.  See if any area is experiencing tension.  If so, tell it to relax.  Or imagine that you’re breathing in and out through the tense spot.

Here’s another technique.  Count your breaths from 100 to zero.  The effort to concentrate on your breath while counting backwards takes the mind away from your pre-occupation with your anxiety.

Finally, envision yourself succeeding–over and over again.  Picture it in detail.  What do you look like when you’re succeeding during the speech?  What do you sound like?  What are you doing?  What’s the audience doing?  How do you feel while you’re succeeding in your vision?

Confidence can be defined as the expectation of positive outcomes.  Talk to yourself in a positive manner, so that your subconscious mind absorbs positive messages.  Do that long enough, and your self-image changes.  You begin to think of yourself as, “The kind of person who speaks well in public.”

And that can make a huge difference in your performance.

Trying to master a mental task?

Acting it out can help.  In a study reported in Cognition, when kids were told to use gestures as they learned to do a type of math problem, the lesson stuck.  Embodiment gives you–literally–another way to grasp an idea.

Actors use gesture in a similar way–to grasp the feeling and intention of the character they’re playing.  When trying to discover the best way to speak a line, some actors will say the line using different gestures–even random and counter-intuitive gestures–to expand the range of possible interpretations of the text.

Gesturing also helps us find the right word in conversation.  It’s almost as if we use gesture to “reach” into our own minds to find the word we need.

As reported in another posting, speakers with their hands in their pockets are more hesitant and awkward as speakers.  Speakers who gesture say fewer “ers and uhms.”

Lesson to be learned?  Let your body talk!

With the average sales call in the pharmaceutical industry now shrunk to less than 30 seconds, medical liaisons have an important opportunity to engage the interest of key physicians at advisory board meetings.

However, there are several common problems.

First, facilitating ad boards is not presenting. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of presenting. Presenters give information, while facilitators pull information out of the audience.

That said, facilitating borrows from the skills of presenting and public speaking because it requires the leader to project confidence and authority, focus the meeting, energize the participants, and connect with the people in the seats.

Here are some tips for facilitating ad boards gathered from some of the most successful liaisons in the industry.

1. Have a battle plan. Most battles are won and lost before the fighting starts. Same with ad boards.
2. Plan the room, the sound system, the air-conditioning, the lighting, the seating, the food, the A/V equipment, etc.
3. Plan your goals, your questions, your wingman (in case you get into trouble), your scribe, your parking lot, your opening, your ground rules, and just who will be the final decision maker in the room should things get hairy. In other words, “Who is the quarterback?”
4. Plan to rehearse the night before with your colleagues.
5. Tell your colleagues to stay engaged. When physicians see industry professionals BlackBerrying, or doing other tasks in the back of the room, it sets a very bad example. Don’t let them do it, and don’t you do it when your colleague is in front of the room.
6. Choose your questions wisely and put each on its own PowerPoint slide. They should flow in a logical order.
7. Have enough energy and assertiveness to be the locomotive that pulls the train of thought in the room.
8. Enjoy yourself. You are much more engaging when you are having fun.
9. Listen to what people say. Repeat it back to them to make sure you’ve understood. Ask follow-up questions.
10. Listen to what people say. Don’t pretend to listen while you’re thinking about what you’re going to say next (this is a big one!)
11. Follow your battle plan and be prepared to switch on the fly. No battle plan survives the first encounter with the enemy.
12. Be a lion-tamer. Don’t let big cheeses stink up the place by holding forth (I’m mixing metaphors.) Say, “Doctor Lyons, thanks for your input. I want to hear from some of the others.” And then call on a mouse.
13. A mouse is a participant who doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up in a large group. Mice have good things to say. Call on them by name and encourage them to give their opinion.
14. Stifle the snakes. A snake is a doctor who is negative, who poisons the room. You should not engage in argument with such a person. Call on another doctor who has another point of view to neutralize him. Perhaps your wing man will step in and move the conversation in a different direction. Or you can simply bring up a question about other information that contradicts the negative perspective. E.g, “What does the group think of the new xyz study as it pertains to Dr. Rattler’s remarks?”
15. Demand respectful and attentive behavior. Blackberrying, newspaper reading, side conversations, and other forms of rudeness should not be tolerated.
16. It’s best to get everyone’s agreement at the beginning. Lay down the ground rules and get them to say, “Okay!”
17. Call them on it. First, ask a Blackberrying snake a question. Say, “Dr. Copperhead, what’s your response to Dr. Python’s approach?” That might do the trick.
18. If it doesn’t, try the direct approach. “Dr. Copperhead, may I please have your full attention? We need your input.”
19. If that fails, call a break and speak to Dr. Copperhead privately. Ask him if there’s some other topic that would engage him more fully. If it suits your larger purpose, then weave it in later, but still insist that he give his attention to the meeting.

The list could go on. The real trick is getting comfortable using these techniques when you’re under pressure. A good way to develop your skill is by watching others, borrowing what you like, and adding the borrowed techniques to your own style.

And of course, a good experiential training program will help you up the learning curve as well.

A good facilitator is a gift to the universe–a rare blend of expertise, assertiveness, and genuine interest in others. We are all on that journey, and I urge you to fare forward through all obstacles within you and without you.

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.

One of my consulting firm clients came to me with a problem that surprised me.  Although they hire the most accomplished students from the most competitive colleges and B-schools, the firm is concerned about their unwillingness to speak up at meetings during their first two years.

I recognize that it’s human nature to sit back in a new setting to observe how people behave and learn how to calibrate your style to be most effective.  In fact, the film Tweleve Angry Men is a perfect example of this.  The character played by Henry Fonda is inconspicuous in the beginning, and only asks questions as he begins to participate in the deliberations of the jury on which he is serving.

I further recognize that when one is surrounded by bright, confident, assertive people, each one older and more experienced than the next, (some of whom are your bosses) it is only natural to be cautious in what you say.

Nevertheless, if you are being paid for your ability to think and communicate your thinking, you’re not doing your job if you remain silent throughout the meeting.  This client of mine told me that one of the senior executives at his client company asked, “Who was that guy you had at the meeting?  He never said anything?  Why was he there?”

This kind of overly-cautious behavior can slow down the development of good client relations because it can undermine the trust the client has placed in the consulting firm.

What can we do to help younger people feel comfortable enough to speak up in meetings with more senior colleagues, and with clients who have vastly more experience?

Here are a few ideas beyond telling the shy and the silent that if they don’t talk they’re in big trouble.

1. Become a better listener
2. Become a better questioner
3. Trust your mind.
4. Refrain from thinking while others are talking.  Just listen.  Thoughts will come.
5. Fear is misplaced attention.  Focus on what’s being said.
6. Don’t try to be the smartest person in the room.  State the obvious.
7. Dare to be dull.  Get out of the “Impressing” business.
8. Recognize that what seems obvious to you may be a revelation for others.
9. Agree and add.  You don’t have to find something to disagree with.
10. Ask questions if you don’t understand or you need clarification.
11. Enter the fray.  Get grass stains on your knees.  Have an experience.

According to people who study these things, charisma is a set of behaviors and has nothing to do with physical beauty.  Apparently, there are many average looking people with charisma.

Here are the elements of charisma in no particular order.

Kinesthetic responsiveness: Think Kramer of Seinfeld fame (before his public meltdown) when he slides through the door of Jerry’s apartment and discovers something surprising.  Or think of a cat the instant she sticks her paw into an electric socket.

Contagious laugh: I know a certain VP of sales within the wealth management industry who has inherited a laugh that, once you hear it, will stay with you forever.  He was gifted by the gods.

Vocal expression of emotion: Isn’t it nice when you call someone and they communicate pleasure and excitement when they hear your name?  Even if it’s subtle, it makes you feel appreciated.

Social touching: This does not mean Clintonesque feel-copping.  It means appropriate social touching on the upper arm, shoulder, or hand.  Waiters who are skilled at this make better tips.  Bush went overboard when he came up behind the Chancellor of Germany and rubbed her shoulders.  She was horrified.

Pleasure being the center of attention: While most of us are ambivalent about being the center of attention, some of us come to life and are at our best in the limelight.  Many great actors are not particularly good company, but give them a crowd and their wattage burns brighter.

Expressive face: Ronald Reagan was called “The Great Communicator” in part because of his expressive face. Our faces attract most of the eye contact given us by our listeners, and the more information they can read there, the more they pay attention and comprehend not only the content, but the emotional meaning of our speech as well.

Outgoing with strangers: In a survey that Sims Wyeth & Co. conducted a few years ago, those who self-identified as introverts preferred the company of extraverts.  Extroverts felt the same way.  Let’s face it, it’s fun to be in the company of someone who can easily break down the barriers between strangers and create an experience of closeness.

Capable of a seductive glance: A seductive glance is hard to define, but we know it when we see it.  I’ve seen it on babies.  I’ve certainly seen it on my wife (she’s very skilled at this).  And I have to confess that as a teenager, I practiced my seductive glance for hours in front of the mirror.  It was sort of a hazy, hooded-eye cock of the head.

William Blake, the great English poet (and water-colorist) wrote: