Last September, the malevolent toadstool you see in the picture on the left thrust its slimy head out of the familiar soil of my front yard.  It got my attention.

I have rarely had mushrooms in my garden, and never a toadstool with an orange stem and a phallic tip topped by a red pimple on its nosecone.

I remain horrified by the sight of it, and worried about the malicious conspiracy transpiring under ground.  What other alien life form is going to come out of the earth under the hydrangeas?

Sharon and I washed our hands after we touched it, but half an hour later, we still had to scratch an alarming epidemic of itches that popped up in unmentionable anatomical places.

An otherwise routine Saturday morning was made famous by this unexpected visitor.  We will talk about it for years…but for all the wrong reasons.

Some people bring toadstools into their presentations and get attention for all the wrong reasons.  They tell jokes that fall flat.  They wear clothes that make them look cheesy.  They talk about themselves too much.  They show off, pontificate, grandstand, ham it up.  They go over the time limit.  They scratch in the wrong places.  They mispronounce key technical or industry terms that they should know.  Or they use their own technical language despite the fact that the audience doesn’t know it.

It’s good to be memorable, but only for the right reasons.  Not for being outrageous, or shocking, or sensational.  Rather, be memorable for your expertise, warmth, and relevance.

Don’t bring toadstools into your talk to get attention.  You will quickly wear out your welcome.

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.

You know the saying in the telecom biz.  You can have the greatest fiber optic network in the world, but if you don’t have  the fiber running from the main pipe to every house on the block, you ain’t got nothin’.  In other words, you gotta have the last mile.

Same thing with high stakes presentations.  You can have the greatest speech or presentation you have ever been able to capture on slides or page.  You can rehearse your butt off, be familiar with the room where you will present, have a dress rehearsal in that very space, and know exactly who is in the audience — and still you can have a nightmare experience.

It happened to a client of mine — a president of a university.  We worked on his speech, pushed several drafts through his own recalcitrant communications office, rehearsed at the site of the big event, and then … and then …

On the night of the big event, someone put the pages of his speaking notes into plastic sleeves, and left them on the lectern for him.  When he arrived at the lectern, and found his text sealed in plastic, and his audience waiting for him to begin, he faced two problems.  One, he had difficulty seeing through the plastic because of the lighting, and two, the plastic was slippery, so the pages kept dropping to the bottom lip of the lectern, where he couldn’t read them.

As a result, he was unable to pick his eyes up and look at his audience.  Worse, he had to lean over the lectern and run his finger along the lines of text so that he could decipher the words.

He did a yeoman’s job.  He was good enough for the occasion.  But he was not what he could have been, not what he was in rehearsal.

He didn’t have the last mile.

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.