I am usually allergic to buzzwords.  When storytelling became a popular metaphor for public speaking, influence, and persuasion I began to feel a little grumpy.  But I have been released temporarily from my distemper by an article in the New York Times called What Happened to Obama, by Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”

In this article, Mr.  Westen points out that Obama was elected to the presidency and given control of both houses of Congress to do the will of the people, which was to restore the rule of fair play to the American economy, and abolish the golden rule, which stipulates that he who has the gold makes the rules.

Whether you agree with the majority of the American people is not the point of the Times article, or of this post.  The point is that we humans are designed to absorb information through stories.  We tell ourselves stories about the past (history), stories about what’s going on in the present moment (news and commentary), and stories about the future (setting a course for a more perfect union).  And, according to Mr. Westen, Obama has failed so far to tell any of these stories that he was elected to tell.

Stories have heroes and villians, but due perhaps to his conciliatory disposition, our President does not like to name names and point out culpability.  He prefers a balanced approach and compromise, even though he was elected to clean up Washington.

Arthur Miller, the great American playwright, pointed out that when we elect our presidents, we are electing an archetype, a great father who will provide and protect, a hero who will create safety for us, and lead us into fights against those who mean to do us harm.  In essence, said Miller, we elect a metaphorical killer, someone who is brave enough to step onto a battlefield, whether that be in the halls of Congress, the mountains of Afghanistan, or the bully pulpit of Sunday morning TV, take out our enemies, and come back with their scalps.  Obama got bin Laden, but he has not taken the heads of those he was elected to neultralize (metaphorically!).

The present seems to be swarming with intractable problems.  The future is a frightening blankness fraught with a range of horrific possibilities.  We need and want someone to tell us a story about how we got here, how we can get out of this mess, what the future can be and how we can shape it.

I urge you to read this article.  It is relevant to any speaker who is trying to get an audience to do something.

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.

Just sat through a talk with a long and useless introduction concerning what the speaker had considered saying but decided against, how he stumbled upon his approach to the topic, and finally, the five elements of it he planned to discuss.  I still didn’t know a thing about his point of view.

Ten minutes of wasted time.  Ten minutes burning up our attention spans.  Ten minutes that predisposed us to think him an idiot.  Ten minutes of extraneous information that  had us wondering when it would end before it actually began.

There is value in going slowly, and sometimes it’s necessary.  For instance, a commencement address:  “Madame President; distinguished members of the board of overseers; magnificently robed and plumed faculty members; generous alumni gloating on the dais; bankrupt parents roasting in the sun; and last but not least, pampered and hung-over graduating seniors dressed in polyester caps and gowns:  it is indeed an honor and a privilege to be your commencement speaker.”  (By this time, if you speak slowly, you only have to write a few more paragraphs and your job is done.)

But commencement is not a hard-nosed business occasion.  It’s a ceremonial occasion, where this kind of verbosity earns you another stripe on your academic sleeve.  In the boardroom, it will earn you impatient stares, a reputation for pomposity, and a seat on the back bench of the analytics office.

It is true that we get to know the speaker as he warms up, and ad hocs his way into his subject.  But how much better for him to leap into the fray, and demonstrate who he is and how he thinks by taking a big bite out of the subject right up front.

Then, once he’s captured us, he can let up on the pedal and give us a little personal story so we don’t have to think for a while, before he takes us up another steep slope.  Everyone listens better when something unexpected happens.

The guy I saw got to the end of his rambling ten minute opening, and then told us he was going to talk for 50 minutes.  I looked at my watch.  “Holy shit,” I thought, and looked at my watch.  “The cafeteria’s gonna be closed.”  I couldn’t do anything about it, since I was in the front row squeezed between VIPs.  He went on for another 60 minutes.  I listened intermittently, waiting for the sound of his voice to cease.

There is no such thing as a speech that is too short, unless you’re a comedian on a roll and in the zone.  Our first job is to get attention, and our second job is to keep it ’til the end.  Speaking  is the opposite of life.  In speaking, you want the end to come sooner rather than later.

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.

It just so happens I have two clients who talk too much in public.  Both are extremely bright, and both strive to speak as though they were writing lapidary prose.

When in the act of public speaking, they challenge themselves to cover all the bases, approach the topic from all sides, and construct clause-laden sentences in the workshop of the mind before putting their polished utterances on the market for others to consider.

Each of them has been asked to stop it – to talk like a regular guy, get to the point, stop hemming and hawing.  None of their colleagues could quite put a finger on the problem, but the feeback flung in their general direction was, “You talk too much.  It takes you too long to say stuff, and it’s hard to follow you.”

It’s as if both of them imagine themselves back in graduate school giving their oral arguments for their terminal degrees.  The number of “whereases, howevers, neverthelesses, and consequentlys” puts them at a disadvantage in the boardrooms where they often present.  Senior executives want the executive summary, which they will probe with questions should their antennae sense something amiss.

Theirs are cases of style blocking substance.  An impulse to wordiness obscures the meaning of their words.  They both do too much public speaking and not enough private thinking.  Or, they’ve done their thinking but cling to a professorial style that puts their business colleagues on edge.

Simple arguments stated simply do not necessarily lack sophistication.  In fact, they may be the hardest to create.  You have to know what you want to say, and say it as clearly as possible, parting with all extraneous information, boiling it down, and talking in plain old English.

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.