It is telling that the greatest presidential speech in American history begins with a sentence that summarizes 87 years of our national story.  It is a sentence above the fray, in fact 30,000 feet above the fray.  It describes, from the perspective of outer space, the journey of our fathers from Europe to North America, and how they carried with them, like the Israelites carried their sacred scrolls out of Egypt, the ideas of liberty and equality.  (In case you’ve not identified the sentence to which I am referring, it begins, “Four score and seven years ago…”)

But the sentence I describe above, while it has epic scope, communicates common knowledge. Everyone at Gettysburg knew this.   What American didn’t know that her fathers and mothers brought forth on this continent a new nation? Abe was stating the obvious.  Why did he do that?  Why did he waste his time telling the audience the obvious?

It’s  also a positive and reassuring sentence. There is no threat in it.  No tension.  No drama.  Or rather, no overt drama.  No reference to the American Revolution.  He skips over the fact that people had to fight and die to bring forth the new nation.  It’s quite a serene and stately sentence.  “Bringing forth” feels sort of effortless.  But the sentence also feels like a set up.

And indeed it is.  It is a set up. It establishes the setting for the story about to be told.  Because the next sentence is the sucker punch.   It’s the sentence that basically tells the American people that it is highly likely that the country that our fathers brought forth with such “serene ease” will not survive, that the experiment of self-government may not be successful, and that life as we know it may soon be over.  Essentially, the president is telling his audience to prepare for the possibility of national collapse—chaos,  confusion, extinction.

This second sentence is dramatic.  It tickles our anxieties (or rather their anxieties, our ancestors who were lucky enough to have been there, or be alive at the time to read the speech in the newspapers.)  It makes the muscles beneath the skin tighten.  It causes us tension.  And tension is the stuff of drama.

But the real point here is that we need both sentences, the first and the second.  We need the setting to establish location and, in this case, character—who the story is about.   And we also discover in the first sentence that the main character (our tribe, our nation) has a dream of establishing a country based on personal liberty and equality.  The second sentence creates the drama because it interrupts that dream, and in so doing  makes us anxious.  We begin to look for answers in our minds, to restore ourselves to the path of stability, and the president helps us do that in the rest of the speech.  But the first two sentences are doozies.

We can all go to school on the Gettysburg Address.

 

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills andpublic 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.

Albert Camus famously said, “Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.”

Okay, very funny, Albert. But given the research coming out of universities demonstrating that students generally have poor retention of information delivered by the 600 year old tradition of the lecture, Mr. Camus may have been on to something.

Go to www.harvardmagazine.com  to read the article entitled Twilight of the Lecture.

600 years ago, during the Renaissance, the primary source of information was the university, and since books were rare and expensive, one went to university to listen to the great men speak. And, while you listened, you took notes.

(There’s a quip in the article that says lectures are a way of transferring the professor’s lecture notes to students’ notebooks without passing through the brains of either. That rings true for me. I remember scribbling notes and then not being able to read my own handwriting.)

Now we don’t rely on universities to give us information: it comes at us from everywhere. We can sit in a taxicab and listen to people lecture. We can read wikis at Walden Pond. We don’t have to go to class to get information.

So what are universities for? Well, it turns out they are still good places to discover information, but they’re also good places to assimilate and make sense of information, especially if you have a chance to match your ideas against the ideas of your peers, which is where real learning begins, for two reasons. 1.) Students are better at influencing students than are professors because they (students) are closer to the way their friends think, and thus quicker to diagnose common student-like errors of reasoning, and 2.) When one student has the right answer and the other doesn’t, the first one is more likely to convince the second because it’s hard to talk someone into the wrong answer when they have the right one.

Around the country, some professors are trying to transfer information before class, and use class time to assimilate and make sense of the information. To do this, they record their lectures so that students can watch them on video in the privacy of their own dorm rooms. Then the students are asked to post questions to the course website, and then when they arrive at class, a student-sourced question is displayed, and the students are given time to think about the question and commit to an answer.

Once they’ve decided, they select their answers with their cell phones. Responses are compiled by a central computer that does not display the total tally.

If between 30% to 70% get it right, one professor in the article moves on to peer instruction: students find a neighbor with a different answer and make a case for their own response. Each tries to convince the other. Meanwhile the teacher eavesdrops, listening for incorrect reasoning so that he can sensitize himself to the difficulties that beginners face.

All very interesting to me, whose job it is to help people learn how to build a highly effective, persuasive message AND acquire the stage presence necessary to deliver it well.

What is the relevance for presentation skills training and corporate training in general? A few thoughts:

1. First, training is all about assimilating and making sense of information, making it work in a particular business setting. And most presentation training is highly interactive, experiential, and peer-oriented. We are constantly going off into breakouts and debating with one another.

2. Asking business people to read the information before the training program is a good idea. Not sure if it’s possible to get them to do it. They’re busy, but nevertheless, I think we could do a better job of that.

3. Posting questions to the instructor before the training session sounds good too. Many of us already do that in the form of pre-training questionnaires. The big issue is whether trainees will read the material (or watch the video) with enough curiosity and passion to generate questions.

4. Starting the training program, not with a presentation from the instructor but with a series of questions sourced from the participants, assumes that everyone has been exposed to the information. Not sure that assumption will always be accurate. Nevertheless, why lecture people on stuff they’ve already read, or do not find relevant. Why not speak to them about what is foremost on their minds concerning the given topic?

5. I love the idea of answering questions through my cell phone and then defending my answer against someone with another answer. That, I think, is where real learning happens, and where good persuasive speaking begins (and good listening too). You realize that if you feel in your gut that you have the right answer, you are far more persuasive than someone who is not so certain.

I still think there is a runway for lectures and presentations, especially good ones. Even the Harvard prof in the article is giving lectures about the twilight of lectures. (The writer includes this irony without even hinting that he might be aware that it is an irony.)

Here’s the deal about lectures, according to my wife, who did go to Harvard. Their impact depends to a large extent on the quality of the lecturer. A good lecturer does more than give information. He is a priest, a proselytizer, a sermonizer whose mission must be to ignite the intellectual passions of his students. His enthusiasm must be contagious. He must sell his topic and make his information exciting and alluring. He can best do that face-to-face with a live body of students.

Furthermore, what ever happened to the precept, or the tutorial at Harvard? Don’t the students go to big lectures, and then break up into smaller groups to discuss and debate what the professor said, and what the reading has brought to their attention?

In some way, I think the business world is ahead of academia. We in business know how hard it is to get people to change, to learn new ways of thinking, to assimilate new information about the market, our workflow, and our own new products. And we know also that such change and growth is not entirely an intellectual process, and not entirely occasioned by “information.”

Computers transfer information. People—peers, lecturers, and presenters–get through to other people, and that can be decisive.

 

 

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills andpublic 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.

One morning many years ago, when my wife and I were living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I got up late and was rushing to get to work on time, but I could not find my watch.

Sharon suggested the strap might have broken the night before when I was scraping the dinner dishes. I ran down five flights of stairs to rummage through the garbage, and while I was upside down in the stink and gunk, I heard a guy say aloud, “Look at that idiot with his head in the garbage.”

I lifted my head, “Why don’t you leave me alone and be quiet,” I said. He said, “Why don’t you make me?”

I looked at him, realized I was in over my head, made a gesture of dismissal, as if to say “You’re an idiot,” and stuck my head back in the garbage can. He grabbed me by the neck, shoved me against the front of the building, and put a knife against my throat.

It occurred to me I was getting mugged.

I am writing this many years after the fact, and it now occurs to me that I have been intellectually and emotionally mugged by an audience several times in my life, and for reasons that are similar to those in the Brooklyn incident.

What are the reasons?

1. Not being in the zone of peak performance - I was in a rush, frustrated, and anxious because I’d lost my favorite watch and I was late to work. Not at my best.
2.  Shooting my mouth off  - Getting annoyed and saying something I could not back up is not the best way to win hearts and minds.
3. Not holding my ground - He challenged me and I showed weakness. I backed down—retreated. His street savvy knew in an instant he could dominate me.

According to police research, people get mugged the same ways that wildebeests get eaten by lions: they’re slower than the rest of the herd, and they appear to be weak or timid.

I told my mugger to get lost, he challenged me, and I showed that I was not willing to fight. I was easy prey.

As a speaker, I have made very similar mistakes. I have made some bold statement, been challenged by a member of the audience, and have hemmed and hawed, unable to back up my claim.

The mugging I got at the hands of my audience was silent, subtle, and cerebral, but believe me, it was a mugging.

 

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.