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.

Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President of the United States, was called “Silent Cal” because he was a true “man of few words.”

His predecessor in the White House, Warren Harding, was an expansive orator, who described his own style of speaking as “bloviating,” by which he meant “speaking a lot and saying nothing.”

Coolidge was a refreshing contrast. Once, after the president had attended church, a reporter had this conversation with Coolidge.

“What was the sermon about, Mr. President?”

“Sin,” answered Coolidge.

“What did he say about it?”

“He was against it.”

There’s another story about Coolidge’s brevity.

A woman in a receiving line at the White House once gushed to him, “Mr. President, I bet my husband that I could get you to say more than two words.”

“You lose,” was Coolidge’s reply.

While this is not an entertaining way of speaking, and actually conceals a contempt for the power of speech to enchant an audience, it is concise, matter of fact, and reveals a bone dry sense of humor.

Most of us talk too much. I know I do. I just got feedback from one of my clients, letting me know in no uncertain terms that they wanted to do more of the talking at any seminars I might have the privilege of running for them in the future.

My goal is to say what I want as efficiently as possible so that people actually are pleased when I open my mouth to talk.

Talk is cheap. There’s an over-supply and little demand.

Silent Cal was onto 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 back from a trip to the West Coast, where I was working with people at the top of the food chain in terms of their cognitive intelligence.  Yale, Stanford, Notre Dame–brainiacs.  My assignment?  Help them get presence!

I skirted that word by simply saying that presence is hard to define, but we know it when we see it.  So we did not spend any time trying to define it.  Instead, we spent time trying to display it.

So far, having dismissed the foggier aspects of the topic as too obscure for our purposes, we are working on vehemence as a behavior that could lead to presence.

We’re not saying that being more expressive is the only way to have presence, but it’s a start.  To speak with vehemence makes people pay attention, which makes the speaker more of a presence in the consciousness of the listener.

I am aware of the argument that to speak with vehemence is to assert one’s truth by increasing the violence of the assertion.  But I am also aware of the unfortunate fact: if truth were self-evident, eloquence would not be necessary.

We are working on vehemence of purpose, vehemence of structure, vehemence of word choice, and vehemence of speech and gesture.  The before and after contrast was astounding.

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.