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. 

Most large corporations have a budget for executive education, and the question becomes, “Where do we spend the money?”

If the choice is between the intellectual/cognitive vs. the emotional/affective, choose the latter.

Reasons Why

Information metastasizes every day. New books, magazines, journals, websites, documentaries, and research are published every day of the year in every country around the globe. Information is a commodity, and too much of it is a brain killer. A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Executives already have too much information.

Executives need better judgment, not more information. They need to make decisions and predictions based on information brought to them by trusted employees. They need to make better decisions and better predictions based on a limited amount of information. Sending them to acquire more information in an educational program is quite possibly not only a waste of time and money, but could also be damaging to the quality of the decisions the executive makes.

Information is conflicting. Consult with company A and you get one thing. Choose B and you get another. Their methods of gathering information varies, and their methods for analyzing it differs. You might as well choose either one and get to work improving your judgment.

Judgment comes from thinking about thinking. It comes from meta-cognition. The Buddhist tradition might call it mindfulness, the ability to be aware of your awareness. Executives who are not aware of their awareness, or who don’t know themselves, are dangerous to themselves and their enterprises.

Logic does not rule. Psychology rules. Those who are aware of their own awareness, mindful of their own minds, know just how illogical we are. The amount of crazy flotsam that washes up into consciousness from the seething sea of the subconscious is truly astounding. It’s a surreal cinema, and we are both director and audience. To think that the power of this reality does not rule the bulk of our lives is naïve. Most of the conversation in the world is intra-personal and goes on between our awareness and the savage, terrified imagination.

Good judgment about human psychology is powerful.

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. 

In the idyllic vision of the uninitiated, a scientific presentation tells a story, starting with a clear description of a problem, then outlining a series of steps taken to address that problem, and ending with a special reward: a glistening kernel of new knowledge.

The speaker tells the story using a vocabulary accessible to anyone with a similar breadth, though not necessarily depth, of scientific knowledge so that all in attendance can bask in the final, glorious revelation.

This is an attractive fiction.  The ugly truth is that few scientists take the time to describe the situation from which the project emerges, or the particular social or technical problem that remains to be solved, and the consequences of that problem remaining unsolved.

Because of this, many scientific presentations lack drama, and drama is, after all, one of the main reasons why we gather together. 

The talks lack drama because they begin with something procedural, e.g., “I am going to talk a little bit about the following nine things.”  Or they begin with the protocol, the study design, or the objectives of the study. 

This approach is traditional and widely accepted, even expected.  Unfortunately, it gives science a bad name, and turns the average person comatose.  All drama is about the solution of problems, and to forget this fact, especially in science, is a terrible injury to the most important endeavor of the modern era.

Finally, to grasp what most scientists are speaking about, one must learn a new language.  Few speakers that I have heard cease speaking their own language when addressing those who are not familiar with it.  There are multiple reasons for this, some of them quite understandable, but again, the habit of doing so harms the enterprise.

I am a communications consultant.  I learned a long time ago, and I have to learn it over and over again, that if we want to be heard, understood, and remembered, we must speak to our audience in the language of the audience about what the audience cares about.

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.  Sign up for our presentation tips and learn more about us at http://www.simswyeth.com/.