New York Executive Speech Coach

Public Speaking: Two sentences at Gettysburg

SimsBeth — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:54:14 +0000

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.

The twilight of presentations?

SimsBeth — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:43:51 +0000

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.

Presenter mugged by audience

SimsBeth — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:09:37 +0000

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?

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.
Shooting my mouth off - Getting annoyed and saying something I could not back up is not the best way to win hearts and minds.
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.

Public Speaking: From the State of the Union to the Campaign Trail

SimsBeth — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:09:25 +0000

Should you choose to take it, the road to success, high office, and power leads us all to the frightening slopes of public speaking—the number one fear in America.

Since the last election, we’ve seen an increased respect for the power of rhetoric, thanks to the reputation our current President earned on the campaign trail. Even his enemies concede his power as a speaker. Last night he took off the gloves, and got to his “make-my-day” moment: the upcoming election is going to be a doozy.

The president, as all of us would be, seemed a little short on saliva last night. He had dry mouth syndrome, which means his nerves were acting up. There were, after all, hundreds of people within shouting distance who hate his guts.

But he got some things off his chest. He has tried to gain the respect and cooperation of his own party, and that of his opponents, but so far, it’s been a rough road, and it’s not likely to get smoother.

The process by which public speech moves people to action is complex and mysterious, but it has something to do with lighting up neurons in our brains that want to be lit up. Public speaking is as old as our species, fresh as wet ink on newsprint, and as personal as your private business.

Public speech is personal because while it trumpets big ideas and values, it comes from the mouth of one person and goes deep into your own private intellectual and emotional synapses. You can reject it, or you can open yourself to it, but when it comes from someone you believe in, someone you trust, it’s going to take root in you, and swim in your blood stream.

So let the war of words begin. Game on! Let those who cheer for one leader enjoy their champion landing blows on the ideas and values dear to others. And let all of us, rich and poor, give thanks that it will be a war of words, and not a war of bullets.

And then, after giving thanks for our democracy, let’s hope and pray that it’s a war of reasoned, thoughtful words and not a war of slogans, clichés, and bullet-points.

Sims Wyeth & Co. offers Training the Speaking Voice

SimsBeth — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:58:04 +0000

Client facing skills are the skills of a dynamic and purposeful conversationalist. The medium of conversation is the voice, and as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message, or at least a large part of it.

A speaking voice that lacks clarity and expression can undermine the success of an otherwise bright and talented individual. And when there is a regional or foreign accent present, the challenge can be even greater.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides voice and speech training for executives and professionals of all stripes who need to have their voice and speech do justice to their knowledge and professional abilities.

The process begins with a diagnosis of the clients’ needs. A curriculum is then developed to address those needs, light homework is provided, and teacher and student meet regularly to address those speech habits that require improvement.

The method emphasizes “the whole voice.” In private and group instruction, clients learn that the voice is a wind instrument. They learn to strengthen the breath stream, open the back of the throat, release the jaw, and expand their verbal expressiveness, so that the speakers’ logic is more evident, and their personal presence more appealing.

The method also helps speakers improve their diction. Physical exercises requiring the student to increase the mobility of the tongue and lips can change the speech and vocal habits of a lifetime. Drills and cold readings challenge the speaker to use greater range in pitch, volume and speed, which can lead to greater confidence and the ability to be more assertive. The physical change can give birth to a psychological change.

Course materials include written exercises, and digital sound files for student practice.

About the instructor

Sharon Wyeth is a veteran voice and speech coach to executives in high tech, pharmaceuticals, professional services, theater and other industries. She is the former head of the Voice Department at Actors and Director’s Lab, then part of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“My goal is to bring out the best in my clients,” says Sharon, “which means insisting that they speak with confidence, conviction, and clarity without sacrificing what makes them unique.”

She holds a B.A. degree with honors from Harvard University and an M.F.A. with distinction, from Hunter College, City University of New York.

General areas of study:

1. Breath control

2. Clarity of articulation and accent reduction

3. Expressiveness, i.e. pitch, volume, speed, inflection

4. Alignment: an area where qualities of vocal expression are aligned with intention. For example, clients often need to sound “enthusiastic” or communicate “confidence” in their products.

Training the speaking voice

SimsBeth — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:28:07 +0000

In her work with clients, our voice and speech coach Sharon Wyeth often works with people who are soft-spoken.

As she introduces her voice and speech students to breathing techniques that strengthen the voice, she finds it necessary to differentiate between volume, projection, and intensity—three words that at first glance appear to be synonymous—but upon closer scrutiny have useful and distinct shades of meaning.

Volume implies loudness, or number of decibels. However, we’ve all encountered deranged people on the streets who have loud voices. And any sane person who is consistently loud, no matter the social circumstance, will have difficulty building a trusting relationship with an audience of any size. So loudness is sometimes necessary for an effective vocal presence, but certainly not sufficient.

Good presentation skills require adequate decibels, but they also need the voice to project to its intended listeners. This means it must carry the intention to connect with those it seeks to influence. It must be suitable for the environment, appropriate for the audience, and couched in a discriminating awareness of the occasion. It is volume moderated by calibrated intention.

Finally, in addition to volume and projection, a highly effective voice has intensity. Sharon defines intensity as the expression of emotion, or conviction. Intensity implies belief, confidence, and intellectual certainty. Intensity has energy, a sense of urgency and excitement.

The words we use to describe a good speaking voice, one suitable for highly effective presentations and speeches, are similar to those we use to describe music. As we train the speaking voice to be stronger, we increase its musicality, and thus expand its capacity to hold attention and influence the thoughts and feelings of others.

The Ultimate Presentation Skill

SimsBeth — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:11:19 +0000

All human societies need leadership. A company is a micro human society, therefore all companies need leadership.

Good leaders make good companies, and good leaders are, among other things, good at communicating who they are, what they believe, and who the employees should believe they are. In the end, the final challenge, the ultimate task of leadership is to confer an identity on those the leader leads.

For instance, did Steve Jobs do this? Did he confer an identity on a large number of people? I would say that he did. If you worked for him and his company, I suspect you carried a little voice inside your head that constantly reminded you that you were an Apple person—an Apple-onian; a little voice that made you feel good about yourself. And in your social life, at parties, when you met people, you might sweetly keep your place of work a secret, but when asked, you might feel a little flash of triumph as you revealed, “I work for Apple.” It’s like dropping the H Bomb (the Harvard thing.) It confers an identity on you, for good or ill.

Shakespeare’s Henry V strives for this result in his St. Crispian’s Day speech, when promising his men that they will forever be remembered and honored if they survive the about-to-happen battle of Agincourt.

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

I am very interested in giving our clients a process for creating, designing, and delivering presentations that ascend the step-ladder of value-creation, moving from the bottom rung of knowledge to the highest rung of identity—which includes the ability to convey values, principles, behaviors, expectations, and all those soft intangibles that shepherd us to excellence.

Knowledge and intelligence are necessary, but not sufficient for leadership. We need people who are capable of conferring on us an identity that will help us become our best selves.

Some of us can create such an identity for ourselves, but not for others. Some can do it for others, but not themselves. And some of us create destructive identities for ourselves and others. None of us is perfect, which is why we need laws, and leadership, and cultures. We need shaping to be at our best, and for that, we need people who are more than knowledgeable, more than intelligent. We need them to tell us stories—about who we really are, and who we can become.

Presentation Skill #43: Begin with the backstory

SimsBeth — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:21:30 +0000

When you send an e-mail to a friend and ask a question such as, “Are you coming to get the bikes?” and then two days later you get his email in response saying, “Yes,” and your original email is not visible, then you probably have no idea what your friend is talking about. You’ve forgotten that you sent the email. You need to be reminded.

The simple old-fashioned way to do this is to write, “To answer your question: Yes, I am coming to get the bikes,” or something to that effect. You have to remind the sender of the previous exchange.

Same thing when you’re updating senior execs on how things are going. If you don’t remind them about what you said last time they will have no idea what you’re talking about – they’re busy, and have too much to think about. They need to know the backstory.

So presentation skill #43 is begin with the backstory. It’s old news to you, but the senior people have been busy since they last saw you. Take them back to the material they’ve heard before. They will appreciate the update, and your news of progress will make more sense: you’ll be putting the content into context!

Presentation skill #65: Getting attention for the right reasons

SimsBeth — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:00:14 +0000

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.

Public Speaking: The story about Obama’s lack of storytelling

SimsBeth — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:48:53 +0000

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.

Public Speaking: Tips and tricks, or spelunking?

SimsBeth — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:10:52 +0000

Is developing yourself as a highly effective public speaker a journey into your inner recesses and resources, (what I call spelunking, which is technically the exploration of caves), or are presentation skills basically a set of techniques, tips, and tricks that anyone can master, bolt on to their exterior, and remain unchanged?

Let me think aloud. If you bolt the public speaking techniques onto your exterior, aren’t you automatically deepened by the process of using them, or at least changed in some way by the effort?

Or, if you approach presenting as a spelunker, someone who sees the task as a process of personal growth and development, do you eventually arrive at the tips and tricks, buried like treasures in the center of your being, only this time they’re growing from the inside, out?

This idea presupposes that the public speaking tips and tricks are somehow fundamental universal principles that are present in all of us, lying dormant deep inside us.

Maybe if you approach the discipline of public speaking as a set of mechanical techniques they remain just that – tools you use – due, perhaps, to your willingness and ability to see them as tools that you put down once the job is done.

But then you are changed by the knowledge that you have a new ability, a greater power to influence others through your persuasive speaking, which could very well be a self-fulfilling prophecy, since your increased sense of power will give you greater confidence, which could speed you up the steep and thorny path to career success.

However, you may use your new-found confidence to speak lies, half-truths, and ideological blather to your audiences, in which case you have improved yourself as a speaker, but not as a person.

So it all comes down to intention. You can become a better public speaker or presenter through acquiring tips and tricks, or by approaching it with the intention of using your skills for the greater good, but what will determine your personal growth is not your technique, but your purpose.

Which reminds me of this line from T.S. Eliot:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Public speaking error # 17

SimsBeth — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 19:43:46 +0000

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.

Public Speaking: The professorial Approach

SimsBeth — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 17:10:09 +0000

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.

The last mile in high stakes presentations

SimsBeth — Wed, 25 May 2011 15:48:50 +0000

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.

Presenting is seducing

SimsBeth — Tue, 17 May 2011 20:02:57 +0000

Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation.

Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. Why do humans bother knowing those extra fifty-six thousand words?

So they can more effectively sort through and impress potential mates, says Miller. He calculates that if a couple speaks for two hours a day, and utters on average three words a second, and has sex for three months before conceiving a child (which would have been the norm on the prehistoric savanna), then a couple will have exchanged about a million words before conceiving a child.

That’s a lot of words, and plenty of opportunity for one of them to get offended, bored, or annoyed by the other. It’s also ample enough time to fight, make up, explore and reform. And it is long enough for them to stay together to raise a child, which is crucial since a single woman in a prehistoric environment could not gather enough calories to support herself and her offspring.

The logic of this is astonishing. Basically, Miller is saying that we are creatures biologically wired to:

1. Use language to impress potential mates.

2. Use the language of potential mates to eliminate them as contenders.

3. Use language to entertain so that men and women stay together during vulnerable pregnancies and birth.

4. Use language, therefore, to ensure the survival of the species.

The implications of this are even more astounding. If language is designed to help us pick partners, exclude those who are unsuitable, and then serve as the glue to create the future, I venture to say that our use of language, in all its forms, is the most important skill we can ever have.

We get jobs based on how we talk–how well we use words to make fine distinctions. We keep jobs the same way. And the business cultures we build, and the products and services we create, are generated by words…by the awesome, generative power of language.

Our careers depend on it. Apparently, our marriages depend on it. Our children will depend on it. And the survival of the human race depends on it.

I am language. My hands are on the wheel. My foot is on the gas. There are no brakes. Where do you want to go?

The champion of brevity: A man of few words

admin — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 21:01:17 +0000

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.

The wonders of vehemence

admin — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:42:36 +0000

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.

Executive Education

admin — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:48:20 +0000

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.

Good presenters can overcome bad PowerPoints. Can good PowerPoints overcome bad presenters?

admin — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 22:52:06 +0000

The Craft of Scientific Presentations

Michael Alley has taught at Virginia Tech, the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Barcelona. His book, The Craft of Scientific Presentations, is a significant contribution to the scientific community. While Michael Alley’s experiments have demonstrated that using sentence headlines and pictures on PowerPoint slides (instead of phrase headlines and bullet points) improves knowledge transfer, other researchers have not been able to duplicate those results.

Perhaps this is because Alley’s experiments are conducted with live speakers in front of live audiences. Blokzijl and Andeweg have examined the effect of various slide designs in an e-learning environment on both the students’ perceptions of PowerPoint presentations and the degree to which those designs support knowledge transfer.

Not surprisingly, their findings are different. The authors found that while students in an e-learning environment have a distinct preference for slides with visual support, the text only slides resulted in higher test scores.

The authors go on to express their doubts that the results of any controlled e-learning experiments can be directly applied to live presentations due to a number of real-life complicating factors, such as the speaker’s oral delivery, eye contact, and the presence of an audience.

I suspect that our comrades, Blokzijl and Andeweg, are trying to design a perfect PowerPoint presentation that does not require a presenter. Not sure that’s possible. It’s kind of like writing a piece of music that doesn’t require a musician.

I have seen a good presenter overcome bad slides many times. By being highly directive, telling the audience what to look at and what not to look at; by introducing the next slide before leaving the current one, so that the audience is prepared for the next chunk of information; and by engaging the audience in discussion about the items on the screen, I have seen speakers turn a pig pen of PowerPoint into a silky smooth presentation.

The question is, can good slides overcome a bad presenter? I don’t know, but I’ve got my doubts.

How science presentations should work, but don’t

admin — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 18:21:02 +0000

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.

How to stop speaking too fast during your high stakes presentation

admin — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:19:29 +0000

We all know speaking too fast during our high stakes moments is not good, for us or our listeners. It makes us sound nervous, disorganized and hard to understand.

So what can we do in private to teach ourselves to slow down?

Here’s a presentation tip, practice the following voice and speech training techniques every day:

Break your speech into breath-groups

A breath-group / is basically a phrase. / For instance, / if I were to recite / the Gettysburg Address, / I would take a breath / at each of the following marks./

Four score and seven years ago / our fathers / brought forth / on this continent / a new nation, / conceived in liberty / and dedicated to the proposition / that all men / are created equal./

Start by whispering each phrase, and use up all your air on each phrase. Take your time, (count at least to 3) when breathing in at the breath marks.

Don’t grab with the muscles of your throat when whispering. Keep an open, relaxed throat so the air can stream out without any tension.

Honor every consonant

When whispering in short phrases, pronounce every syllable (every letter!) with care and love. Lavish your attention on each little letter. Hold the “n”s and the “m”s longer than you normally would. If you whisper the word, “lavish,” you can stretch out the “L” the “V” and the “SH.”

Paying attention to each of the building blocks of speech will help you slow down, and will teach your tongue and lips to shape each and every element of the words you speak.

There are other voice and speech training techniques, but this is a good place to start. Ten minutes a day is a good regimen and the beginning of your own public speaking course boot camp. Mark a newspaper or magazine article into short phrases and whisper it, breathing at all the breath marks.

Let me know when you make progress, share the results of your next high stakes presentation, or call if you have any questions.

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public 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.

Storyboarding your presentation

admin — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 20:39:11 +0000

I recently came across Lillipip, a company that creates animated videos about your product, service, or concept. Check them out.

They have a simple storyboarding template of four blank squares. In the first, you draw or paste a picture of your client in pain, along with the exclamation that’s coming out of your customer’s mouth. Nice and simple.

Then, you draw or paste a picture of the visual metaphor for your product, service, or concept. For example, a health club might visualize itself as being able to turn a couch potato into an Adonis.

In the third panel, you draw or paste a picture of your client– happy after you’ve removed the pain. Again, you also draw the exclamation that comes out of the client’s mouth.

Finally, in the fourth panel, you draw or paste a picture of you, your logo, or your product, and write one thing you want the client to do or remember.

This is good stuff for presenters too. It helps us think visually. It keeps our presentations focused on our listeners’ problems, and forces us to present solutions. It makes us think about emotions in addition to information. It encourages us to use metaphor, which is the ability to link what is new to something familiar. And finally, it demands that we have a call to action at the end of our presentation.

Plus, it helps those of us who are word people speak the language of picture people, which gives us stereophonic input into the brains of both tribes.

Counting the words that count in high stakes presentations

admin — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:13:21 +0000

Harvard and Google got married (NY Times article, Fri Dec 17) and have given birth to a database containing all the words in all the books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Russian.

You—yes you—can find this database on line and search for a single word or particular phrase up to five words long and track its birth, life, decline, ascent or long-term flat-line existence. You will see, in graphic terms, how frequently your word or phrase appears from year to year.

This is very cool for language historians: they will be able to track the evolution of words and phrases. The question is what will the rest of us use it for?

We can use it to recognize this truth: key words repeated throughout a speech or presentation will live a long life in the minds of our listeners, and as a result, can have considerable influence over them.

For instance, if you use words such as “slow,” “patient,”, and “easy” when speaking to a group, and then ask them to go stand on a line to wait for something, they are more likely to wait placidly and politely than another group that did not hear those words spoken prior to waiting.

Speech has power to change behavior. Using a word repeatedly has power too. Choose your key words strategically and speak them often to create the behaviors you’re looking for.

Movie Review: The King’s Speech

admin — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 15:13:38 +0000

It begins with an agonizing silence–The Duke of York standing at a microphone in Wembley Stadium trying to bring the world’s greatest exposition to a dignified conclusion for the entire British Empire listening on the radio. His stammering and stage fright make him unable to speak.

In the historical moment, when the new medium of radio is the new global technology for the dissemination of the English language, this is a crisis both personal and institutional.

The institution of the monarchy is shaken by the death of George V, the Duke’s father, and the abdication of Edward VII, the Duke’s brother, leaving the stammering Duke (and future king) to be regent of the Empire as Hitler sets war in motion.

The country needs a king it can stand behind in its darkest hour. The Duke and his wife search for a speech teacher, and after engaging a few quacks, find a keeper in Geoffrey Rush playing Lionel Logue, the Australian son of a brewer smitten by Shakespeare yet lacking in the peculiar talents required for the thespian art.

Nevertheless, Lionel is a fine teacher, and pulls the King out of his tailspin to stir the nation with his radio addresses to the Empire.

If you’ve ever had stage fright; if you’ve ever stuttered; if you like anything English; if you like eavesdropping on Royals; if you are fascinated by history; if you love Shakespeare and “sad tales of the death of kings”; and if you want to see two or three extraordinary performances in one movie, go see this film.

I particularly liked it because it casts a speech teacher in a heroic light. There is in the film acknowledgement that through his speech, the King confers an identity on his people, that through his personal courage in overcoming his affliction, he communicates courage to the nation.

As the new King is left alone and ill-equipped to lead by the death of his father and the abdication of his brother, so is England left alone in Europe to confront the German war machine. The king rises to his challenge, and in so doing, embodies the story of his people.

Over-pursuit of goals

admin — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 17:15:15 +0000

Suppose you went to a workshop and the leader threw a balled-up sock on the floor about eight feet in front of you.

“Visualize the path to the sock, then close your eyes, walk to the sock and put your hand on it,” you are told.

Your fellow work-shoppers watch in silence as you move toward the sock, and miss it completely. You hear them laughing and open your eyes. It’s there by your left foot. And then it’s their turn, while you watch them.

At the end, only two people out of ten succeed in doing it.

The instructor asks, “Who really wanted to touch the sock?” Six hands go up. “Pathetic,” says the instructor.

“When you’re too goal-oriented, focused on succeeding, you’re preoccupied with being perfect. Perfect is boring,” says the instructor.

He goes on. “There’s no story in perfect. ‘She walked across the floor and touched the sock. The end.’”

“But if you walk right past it and bump into the wall, then turn back and search the carpet with your feet, give up and get down on your hands and knees to sweep your arms in front of you, or roll across the floor to maximize your sensory exposure to the bump of the sock against your skin, that would be a story we’d all be telling when we get home tonight.”

Actors do this for each other. They change their reading of their lines depending on how their scene partners deliver theirs.

Cabaret singers look for accidents so they can humanize themselves, and break through the imaginary wall that exists between performer and audience. For instance, a man spills a drink during one of her songs, and she pulls her handkerchief out of her bra and mops up the martini with it.

Performers are always looking for happy accidents like that. Your listeners will remember how you responded to the accident better than they’ll remember all your well-rehearsed and well-chosen words.

I just saw a client giving a live demonstration of web-based software to about 100 people when she lost her internet connection. She called up the technical people to the stage and kept right on going, even while we could see all the screens the techies were trying to fix the problem.

She got credit, not just for the content, but for the qualities of character she displayed in coping with the technical failure.

The lesson? Don’t be so afraid of problems or accidents on the presentation platform. Problems can bring out the best in you.

As Al Gore said, “…defeat might serve as well as victory to shape the soul and let the glory out.”

Ideas for better Investigator Meetings

admin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 19:21:26 +0000

You may be aware that I’ve been going to investigator meetings and finding them kind of out-of-date.

We’ve got to get away from what’s easy for the sponsor, and instead move toward what is effective for the investigators and their associates.

What is easy for the sponsor is to have the usual cast of characters give PowerPoint presentations—all day, if need be.

What is effective for investigators and their associates is engagement with the information being presented.

When adults engage with new information, they assimilate it more easily into their already crowded store house of information.

Engagement with the information includes, but is not limited to:

- Spot quizzes

- Small group problem solving

- Case studies

- Competitive games for small groups or teams

- Live enactments with faux-patients and product

- Small group role plays in which investigators and associates play themselves, the patient, and individuals from the sponsor company who will be interacting with them during the course of the study.

- Hands-on experience with data systems

- Social time with sponsor personnel

Not only would investigators and their associates retain more of the information. They would enjoy the experience, and that enjoyment would attach to their perception of the sponsoring organization.

A win-win, right?

3 Ways to Avoid Communication Failure

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 20:03:05 +0000

Within less than a second, using your facial expressions, people make what are called spontaneous trait inferences about you. Warmth and competence are the two critical variables that other people use to assess your character and intentions.

According to Amy Cuddy, a Professor and researcher at the Harvard Business School, these two categories account for 80% of our overall evaluations of people, and shape our emotions and behaviors toward them.

Warmth is not only perceived first, according to Cuddy’s work, but accounts for more of someone’s overall evaluation than does their perception of competence.

If you happen to be a really serious, competent person (as I know you are since you are reading this), and you are also someone whose temperament, face , and voice do not readily communicate gladness, delight, and enthusiasm, you might be wondering what you can do to warm it up some.

Here are a few behaviors that can help you light up the room.

Appropriate self-disclosure, such as telling a story that reveals a relevant aspect of yourself that isn’t immediately apparent. For instance, I often speak about a recurring dream I had as a child, in which I stand atop a dam in Katonah, New York, wearing long white robes, looking like Lawrence of Arabia or Jesus of Nazareth, saying beautiful, powerful, and eloquent things to little tiny people standing way down below in the valley.

Then, to alleviate their concern that their speaker may be half-nuts, I go on to explain how the dream has played a significant role in my professional life, and may have some relevance for them.

Displaying a sense of humor is inherently persuasive. Getting people to smile or laugh literally changes their neurochemistry. This does not mean that you should tell jokes, but it does mean that you should visibly enjoy the company of others—visibly being the operative word.

For instance, I worked with a physician who was born in India. He gave many talks on HIV/Aids, and would open with, “As you can tell from my accent,…I am from Cleveland.” Audiences were delighted that he poked fun at himself (the best kind of humor) and no doubt paid closer attention to his serious talk about a deadly epidemic because of his energetic and engaging personality.

Smile for real—a natural smile –not the one you manufacture for the photographer. A real smile signals warmth, and amazingly, makes you and your listeners feel better. Many people find it hard to smile at the beginning of a talk because they’re nervous, which causes the muscles of the face to tense. But that’s even more reason to lift the corners of the mouth—and raise the eyebrows–to help yourself and to create that all important first impression.

A word of caution: too much warmth can make you appear to be a lightweight. People can think that if you were really competent, you wouldn’t need to be so nice. Or, conversely, they might assume that competent people don’t need to be nice. Nevertheless, the fact remains, competent people are more effective when they are perceived to be warm.

The work being done by social scientists such as Amy Cuddy continues to support the need for business communicators and leaders to master not only their content and the needs of their customers, but to master the signals they send when they speak.

Snap judgments and first impressions get no respect from serious people who want logic to rule the world. But the human tendency to leap quickly to judgments about others is a fact of life. We ignore it at our peril.

Presenting for Results^SM Update:

We have scheduled our 2nd public seminar called Presenting for Results^SM.If you are so inclined, please join us on Nov 18 & 19, 2010, at the Upper Montclair Country Club in Clifton, NJ, which is on Rte. 3 East, just east of the Garden State Parkway. The program is fun, eye-opening, highly experiential and beneficial to your confidence and career, and thus good for your company as well. Or let somebody who could benefit know about the program. There is very limited enrollment to keep it practical and interactive. Click here to learn more.

What’s the point you’re trying to prove?

admin — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 19:01:32 +0000

Right now I’m sitting in the back of a hotel meeting room near Washington, DC, where two dozen physicians are rehearsing for a presentation to the regulatory authorities. They are debating what point they are trying to prove.

The question has to do with the use of a certain methodology to measure, in clinical trials, the efficacy of a class of drugs.

There is no agreement amongst those currently engaged in the discussion as to what the point is. Does the proposed methodology relate to clinical outcomes? Will it yield usable data? Should it be used only in high risk patients? Should it be mentioned in the label?

These people have been working on this issue for months, and yet here they are, not quite clear on what point they are arguing.

Because the key point in this situation is difficult to understand, and even more difficult to explain, they are instead discussing the relative value of certain pieces of evidence.

Evidence of what they are not sure, but they have evidence, so they are determined to use it. And maybe the debate will lead them to what they can and cannot claim.

It is interesting to consider whether, in situations like this, we determine our point by wrestling with our evidence and beating it into a clear point, or whether we decide what point we think we want to make and then test it against the evidence we have in our possession.

It seems to be me that rehearsal, or debate, is the forum in which we test our hypotheses against our evidence. It is the trial by fire, the stress test, by which we learn if we ourselves, and others, hear the ring of truth in our talk. If we have trouble making our evidence support our point, we must change our point, not our evidence.

Although if we want, and if we have time, we can look for more evidence to support our point, except in this case—in this room, at this moment—we don’t have time, and we’re still trying to agree on the claim that we want to make.

I think the key point is buried in our pile of data, like a needle in a haystack, and while we can see it glistening through the stalks, we can’t quite reach it with our mental tweezers, or find the right words that would pull it, like a magnet, out of the confusion.

Presenting for Results^SM Update:

Presenting for Results is Reborn

admin — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:55:36 +0000

I am excited about the rebranding of our public program, an executive education experience called Presenting for Results^SM.

This is not like other executive education programs. It is creative rather than analytical. It calls on the imagination more than the intellect. It asks that you work from the neck down as well as from the neck up. It demands presence more than subject matter expertise. And it attempts to get you to care more about audience outcomes than you do about how you look.

Presenting for Results^SM is designed to serve our client base in New Jersey and the larger metropolitan area, where so many large organizations must attract and retain executive talent. Talent is considered the scarcest commodity in business, and perhaps the key differentiator.

While I agree with the premise, (that talent is important), I think the statement is missing a qualifier. It would be more accurate to say that “developed talent is the scarcest commodity.” Everyone has talent lying dormant in the cells of their body. It requires effort to wake it up and get it in shape.

Presenting for Results^SM is designed to develop the most valuable talent that a person or a business can have—the ability to communicate well. Most of our careers depend largely on how we speak, write, and think, in that order. But nobody knows or cares what we think until we speak or write, and these days, no one has time to read. (Geez, why am I writing this?)

So speaking is crucial to those of us who aspire to leadership and influence. And speaking not so much about information that we’ve mastered, because information can be gotten in any number of ways, but speaking in order to make people feel something.

Feelings create actions, and that’s what good speaking is about, and what Presenting for Results^SM is about too.

To register, or to download the brochure, go to http://www.simswyeth.com/services/pfr/ And if you know people who could benefit from an invigorating educational experience, would you please forward them this post?

The New is hard

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:21:38 +0000

On the first day of a workshop, an accomplished client delivered an effective presentation with verve and style. On the second day, I asked him to reorganize his talk to make it more customer-centric, a challenge he embraced with enthusiasm. However, when he delivered it, he was tentative and less effective. Why?

The simple answer is that the new is hard. Learning to play a musical instrument is hard, as is hitting a golf ball, or hitting a golf ball with a new grip, or getting used to being alone when you’ve been accustomed to being with people, or being with people when you’ve been flying solo for a while.

This is odd when you consider all the recent neuroscience demonstrating the plasticity of the brain. The research suggests that our gray matter can rearrange itself quite readily. Patients with damaged areas of the brain can, in some cases, recover lost abilities because another part of the brain steps in to lend a hand.

I assume the brain responds to demands placed on it. Maybe not right away. You have to keep knocking on the brain’s door before it will wake up and pay attention. But when it does, it gets busy figuring out how to meet your request, and puts together the infrastructure that will allow you to do what you’re trying to do.

The same is true of muscles. You put consistent demands on them, and they get stronger, more efficient. It’s not easy, but if you push yourself through your own resistance, they respond to the challenge.

I had to leave my client while he was still in a state of uncertainty, frustration, and diminished capacity. He was calling on other parts of his brain, and it wasn’t leaping out of bed and rushing to his rescue. He was in pain.

Here’s the $64,000 question: will he continue to try the new approach to his presentation, which I am certain will raise the level of his game? Or will he give up, and drop back to his default operating system?

The new is hard. If he’s like most of us, he will take the path of least resistance and stick with the tried and true. If he’s got an engine in him, he will drive himself into his pain and frustration, and come out on the other side with a sense of self-mastery and a new skill. He will have made the new familiar, and with the awareness that he is able to persist, he will continue to grow.

At least that’s my hope. I’m going to send him this post to light a fire in him.

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public 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.

Fierce Conversations

admin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:32:21 +0000

I read the following in The Alternative Board’s newsletter today and want to pass this on to presenters and persuasive speakers.

What conversations are you avoiding? Maybe it’s with a good friend you don’t want to hurt. Maybe it’s with a difficult person and you are concerned about their response. Or maybe it’s with a family member in your business.

Susan Scott, the author of the book “Fierce Conversations,” tells us that people want to hear the truth, even if it is unpalatable. There is something within us that responds deeply to people who level with us.

The Seven Principles of Fierce Conversations:

Interrogate reality: Get everything out in the open. Identify the issue, check for understanding and agreement.
Make it real: What are you pretending not to know? Authenticity is not something you have; it is something you choose.
Be in the moment: Simply paying attention to someone, really asking, really listening can evoke a wholehearted response.
Tackle your toughest challenge today: Go directly to the source and confront the person, one-to-one, privately.
Find a way to say the things that can’t be said: Bring some of your private thoughts into the conversation without labeling them as truth, only conjecture to be explored together.
Take responsibility for your emotional wake: Deliver your message without the emotional load – blaming, sarcasm, exaggerating, labeling. Leave every conversation with the other person feeling better than before.
Use silence: Fierce conversations require silence. Ask a question that expands possibilities, then, wait.

The Three Steps in a Fierce Conversation

Make a clear, concise opening statement: Name the issue; give examples; describe your emotions; clarify what’s at stake; identify your own contribution to the problem; indicate clearly your wish to resolve the issue; invite the other person to respond.

Inquire into the other person’s view: Really try to understand their perspective, but don’t be satisfied with defensiveness or surface explanations. Ask for more, saying “I see things quite differently.”

Resolution: What have we learned? Where are we now? Make an agreement and determine how you will hold each other accountable.

What fierce conversations are you avoiding? Or what fierce presentation are you avoiding?

Maybe it’s time for a fierce conversation. Maybe it’s time for a fierce presentation! Thank you Susan.

The autobiography of a speech coach

simswny — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:43:21 +0000

It is Sunday afternoon. My wife is away for a week at a poetry summit in California. No food in the fridge, dishes in the sink, bed unmade. Too much TV.

My daughter is engrossed in the music scene of Brooklyn, hard at work on her new CD. My parents are unhappy in their new retirement home. My sister and I are powerless to make them happier. My Blackberry doesn’t work. I can’t send emails from my home computer. My car had a flat tire last Monday. My lawn is brown. I never know how much money I’ll make. Should I continue?

Nevertheless, I am excited about my work. I have the chance to work with scientists on their scientific presentations, with CEOs on their leadership communication, with consultants on how to move the mountain of client opinion, and with all kinds of people who want to grow and expand their personal and professional horizons.

I have plans for a public seminar, a new book, and I love my office almost as much as I like my home. My assistant is fabulous. All this is good.

I just need to learn how to walk the tight rope between things as they are and things as I’d like them to be. I need to keep my eye on the prize and not look down at the terrifying things I imagine will happen if I misstep.

I am told that I should live in the present moment, and I try. But I find myself lost in thought a good deal of time.

Maybe that’s a start. To find myself lost is to begin to figure out where I am—which is somewhere in thought, somewhere in my head.

I want to be in other people’s heads, not my own. Which means I have to get busy and do stuff that’s interesting.

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public 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.

Scientific research on communication

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:41:51 +0000

I was steered to a web video the other day by an e-mail from a friend, and found myself in a garden of presentation skills coaches (also on video), many of whom quoted research done by Dr. Albert Mehrabian of Stanford University.

You may be familiar with the data, which suggests that voice and body language carry much of the message spoken by a presenter, while the actual words used carry much less meaning.

I have spoken to Dr. Mehrabian, who is now retired and dealing in antique musical instruments. He is powerless to do anything about this misunderstanding of the findings of his research.

As a professor at Stanford, his research investigated how human beings communicate emotion. His data do not suggest that the fine distinctions needed for strategic plans, legal arguments or scientific presentations are communicated predominately by voice tone and body language.

His data do suggest that humans communicate emotion primarily through tone of voice and body language, which confirms intuition and/or common sense. They do not suggest that the entire meaning of your careful and thoroughly prepared presentation is carried by your voice and body.

How you feel about your content is important, but it’s not the whole story. Of course your delivery is important, but it is in service to ideas made of words that delivery earns its value.

Your speechwriter: How to get the most out of him

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:18:53 +0000

A good speech has a voice. It sounds like an individual—specifically, the individual who is delivering the speech. It should not sound like the speechwriter.

And yet us speechwriters are often given only a brief time with the speaker to determine what she wants to say. From that brief meeting, we are expected to extract the message she wants to impart, and the sound, tone, texture, and rhythm of her verbal personality.

So, if you are a speaker, and you are working with a speechwriter in New Jersey or New York, (or anywhere else for that matter) how can you maximize the few minutes you have with your speechwriter?

Be prepared for the meeting with the speechwriter. Know the DNA of what you want to say. You can come up with this DNA by imagining that an audience member is considering coming to hear you, and asks, “What’s your speech about?” You’ve got less than 30 seconds to tell her. What do you say? Your answer should be one sentence long, and should contain the benefit that the listener will derive. For instance, President Obama might have said about his speech on race relations, “ My speech urges every American to have the difficult conversations about race so that our country can move beyond the historical divisions that have plagued our nation.”

Next, in order to help your speechwriter (and yourself), figure out the question to which your information is the answer. At the heart of what you will say is the information that you have mastered and your own interpretation of its meaning. But you can’t just dump the info on your listeners. You’ve got to figure out what emotional concern drives their interest in your topic. What question would the audience have to have in mind in order to make that information a fascinating, provocative question? Believe it or not, you have to spend about a third of your speech asking the question—even more if they are not that familiar with the topic or the issues. For instance, when trying to raise new rounds of venture capital, a biotech president might have to answer the question, “Why do we have to spend millions of dollars creating a new formulation for the molecule when it already demonstrates efficacy in its current formulation?”

Finally, give your speechwriter plenty of time to ask questions. Encourage him/her to get to know you. Take her out to lunch. Have a glass of wine with him. He or she needs to soak up who you are, what you care about, how you think, what you like and dislike, and your personal verbal style.

Only by inviting your speechwriter into your inner circle will you get what you want and need—a speech that captures not only what you want to say, but how you want to say it.

Creative Public Speaking and Presenting

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 15:43:53 +0000

Frank Kern is senior vice-president of IBM Global Business Services. On May 19, 2010, he released a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value. Are you ready for this? According to that survey, today’s CEOs identify “creativity” as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.

“That’s creativity—not operational effectiveness, influence, or even dedication. Coming out of the worst economic downturn in their professional lifetimes, when managerial discipline and rigor ruled the day, this indicates a remarkable shift in attitude.”

Creativity is also important in public speaking and presenting, and in the training and coaching of speakers too.

Many years ago, I heard Kathleen Hall Jamieson speak about the future of public speeches. She predicted that politicians and business leaders would be using music in their presentations—not just as preludes and postludes, but as integral parts of content, just as movies use scores.

We haven’t seen that yet.

And in the realm of training, the standard approach to developing people as speakers is a small group seminar that lasts a day or two in which people give presentations, see themselves on videotape, get feedback, and try to make adjustments.

This is fine, but it needs to be re-invented. Too much training is prescriptive and not creative. Most students are told how to organize their talks, how to design their PowerPoints, and how to stand still and use their hands.

We need to create highly effective speakers and presenters who will become creative speechwriters and presentation developers. And to do that we must create highly effective training and coaching programs in speechwriting and delivery skills.

However, I must admit that when I contemplate doing something new and creative with clients, I get scared. The new and unknown is hard to sell. People resist it. I don’t feel as confident as I would delivering the tried and true.

I feel the truth in what Ghandi said:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

I want to know how long til the “win” part.

Facts Make the Speech Writer

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:32:44 +0000

The famed defense attorney, F. Lee Bailey, was once asked what the key was to a successful case. People expected him to say a spellbinding closing statement or a good jury selection process or an impressive cross-examination of a crucial witness.

Instead his answer was “investigation”—knowing the facts of your case up and down, forward and backward.

The same holds true for a successful speech or presentation. The key is research: knowing everything about your audience, about the place where the remarks will be delivered, about everything that has led up to the planning of the event, and then tailoring a speech to those facts.

In his new book Speech*Less, Matt Latimer, a presidential speechwriter, tells the story of how he prepared a speech for President Bush to deliver on National Adoption Day.

The first thing I did [as a speech writer] was consider the audience. I pictured the president standing before a large group of adoptive parents and their kids. I thought about the portraits of presidents that people would see just outside the East Room, including a portrait of an adopted son named Gerald R. Ford and another of an adoptive father named Ronald Reagan.

And then I thought of the large pictures of George Washington that would be just to the president’s left as he spoke. George Washington had been an adoptive father too, raising two children who weren’t his by birth. (They were the children of his wife, Martha.)

Searching the internet, I found a letter that Washington wrote to his stepson while he was in college, complaining about his lack of attention to his studies. (I had our researchers verify its existence.) This led to a perfect joke for President Bush. After reading the excerpt to the audience, the president said, “Come to think of it, my dad once said the same thing to me.”

I noted that Thanksgiving was approaching and so many new adoptive parents and children, including those in that room, would have the blessing of celebrating it together as a family for the first time. That thought made people cry. The president teared up. Even Mrs. Bush, who usually stood motionless while the president delivered his speeches, took an interest. She leaned forward and stole glances at the president’s note card, as if to see how this was happening.

When writing a speech, or in working with a speech writer, spend plenty of time thinking about the occasion, the audience, the location, and anything else that might give you an “in” with the audience.

Do plenty of research, on line or in a library. Ask your speech writer to do the same. Knowing the facts makes your speech more original and gives you confidence. And that feeling can make your delivery livelier, and your audience more engaged.

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

How to work with a speech writer

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:38:50 +0000

Senator Howard Baker said that he and his speech writers had a great relationship. “They write what they want me to say, and I say what I think.”

They got along just fine.

The remark points to the essential challenge of speech writing: it needs to be done in the voice of the speaker.

This is important because the speaker will be more effective if the text of the speech is aligned, in style and substance, with the way he thinks and talks.

There are great speakers who can read anything from a page or a teleprompter and make it sound like them. President Obama is good at this, as was President Reagan.

In fact, anyone continuously in front of crowds develops a knack for reading text.

But most of us are not up at the lectern every day, and so we need a speech writer who has the ability to collaborate with us—who has a good ear for our speech patterns, and can get our thoughts into the right words.

A collaboration with a speech writer should begin with your thoughts about what you want to say and what you want your audience to think, feel, and do after hearing your speech.

Your speech writer should also explore with you the problem that you are trying to solve for your audience. Audiences like it when your speech is all about how they can solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity.

Audiences like speeches that are short, humorous, and generously sprinkled with stories. But make sure that the humor is your own, not offensive, and takes a back seat to the point you want to make.

Similarly, the stories in the speech should be your own. A good speech writer should spend time with you talking about your life experience and pull some stories out of your memory. Of course, if your speech writer offers you a story that you can make your own, use it. Just make sure you practice enough so that it feels natural.

For some of us, the chance to speak is rare, and so it leads us to want to say everything. Your speech writer should be firm. You can only say a few things to an audience before they get dazed and confused.

Make sure your speech writer doesn’t use any big words that are undeliverable. Undeliverable is one such word. So is indomitable, which can come out as “indominabubble.”

William Safire, the great speech writer for President Nixon and columnist for the New York Times, was once asked for a synonym for indomitable and gave indefatigable. He was fired on the spot when someone nearby suggested steadfast. Safire says in retrospect that he now sees he was intransigent.

In plain language, your speaking style should never be fancier than you are.

Above all, when you deliver your speech that someone has helped you prepare, you must feel comfortable with it and sound natural. The pleasure of listening to a good speech depends on the connections that can exist between the elements of the occasion.

First, there is the speaker and the speech. They need to connect.

Then, there is the speaker and the audience. The speech should help the speaker create that connection, and not get in the way.

And within the speech, your own thought should connect with the writer’s language deployed to express it.

Finally, the speaker needs to connect with his own feelings, and rehearse enough so he can bring to the occasion, with his voice, gestures, and the vivid words of his speech writer, a full-throated belief in what he is saying.

Defining Presence

admin — Fri, 07 May 2010 19:02:46 +0000

Presence is like pornography: it’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it, or in the case of speech, see and hear it.

Presence is a powerful commodity, one that leaders, entertainers, and influencers of all types would like to have. In fact, anyone who wants to be persuasive on the job or in social settings covets it.

Three questions. First, admitting that it’s hard to define, can we sketch in its elements? Second, can we cultivate it? And if so, how?

What are the elements of presence?

Let’s start with what it’s not. It’s not beauty or physical attractiveness. There are lots of Barbies and Kens who look perfect and lack presence.

It’s not intelligence. The socially inept genius is a cliché.

It’s not talent, because some creative people are dull in person but vivid and electric in their work.

So what is it? Here’s my attempt to describe it. Presence is confidence, composure, and responsiveness. It is the capacity to communicate with others in an emotional, intellectual, and expressive manner.

Can presence be cultivated?

I believe it can be developed through deliberate practice, which is a term that has emerged over the last few years to describe how average people achieve extraordinary results.

Actors, singers, dancers, figure skaters and speakers all try to cultivate it. It’s part of their job. For some, it’s a performance, for others it comes naturally.

Presence could include posture and a self-possessed quality of movement. It could include an appealing voice, a sense of humor, the capacity for intimacy, and the ability to respond to the signals you pick up from others.

Presence can also derive from the perception that you don’t care whether people like you or not. Since we are deeply social creatures, a person willing to walk away from the herd tends to get attention.

How can we cultivate presence?

Be curious. Endlessly curious. Be a good listener. Ask a lot of questions. Sit up straight. Be expressive when listening. Acknowledge what the other person has said so that they feel heard and recognized.

Dress in order to dignify your encounters with others. Have convictions and express them with care for the views of others. Develop your voice so that it is resonant and musical.

Explain your point of view knowing what history and science have to say about organizing your thoughts for maximum persuasiveness. Take such an interest in your audience that you care more about their understanding than you do about the outcomes.

This is an important point. If you have an objective you want to achieve, others sense it, and feel that you are talking at them, not with them or to them. You have to start where they are, and lead them from that spot toward the spot on which you would like them to stand.

In other words, you must be highly empathetic, highly assertive and highly expressive. None of us bats 1000 on all three, but presence is a journey not a destination.

It will come and go depending on the circumstances. For some of us who are shy, or young, and surrounded by those with more power and experience, we will have to fake it ‘til we make it.

But the best way to change behavior is to practice changing behavior. We can behave in a manner that is outside our comfort zone for short periods of time, and when we repeat those short periods for lengthier periods, we begin to find a new way of being.

And that can serve us well.

UPMs: The Filler Word Debate

admin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:00:10 +0000

Twice last week I encountered speakers with a high number of UPMs: Uhms Per Minute.

I was willing to forgive one of them. His UPMs were around 16. I wasn’t so easy on the other guy. His UPMs were around 12, but they were more disruptive.

I’m not sure why. Let me blog out loud.

The guy with the higher UPM rate was older, and the Chairman of a company. He spoke with quiet confidence at a thoughtful pace, taking his time to choose his words carefully. It was during his thoughtful moments that his UPMs came out. They were quick and discreet UPMs, like tiny bubbles of sound.

The guy whose UPM rate was about 12 was much younger, in his late 20s, and he spoke quickly. It could be that his youthful appearance and the rapidity of his speech combined to create an impression of insecurity, which was made worse by the presence of his uhms.

His UPMs seemed to be signals of anxiety, whereas the Chairman’s UPMs seemed to be quirks or eccentricities. No one could argue that the Chairman had not had a successful career. He is at the top of his industry, and at the top of his game.

I could say no such thing about the younger guy. He looked nervous, sounded nervous, and made me nervous about his ability to do the job being asked of him.

Could it be that the Chairman’s credibility could withstand the presence of 16 UPMs, while the younger guy’s relative youth and inexperience made his credibility vulnerable to the presence of a mere 12?

I think so. The Chairman would be a better speaker, and a shorter one, if he cleaned up his act. But the younger guy is going to have to find a sense of ease in front of a crowd, and that will take a whole different set of muscles.

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

The purpose of an LP Meeting

admin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:15:10 +0000

What is the purpose of an LP Meeting?

Is it to inform the limited partners about the performance of their investments? I don’t think so.

The LPs already know the numbers. They don’t come to the meeting to hear the numbers. They come to hear what the manager thinks about the numbers.

There’s a big difference.

Numbers are, we hope, facts about the past. They are commodities—everybody has them, and their value is depressed.

What we think about the numbers are opinions. They have the potential for being unique and differentiated, and their value can be considerable.

When a manager expresses a clear, compelling and fact-based opinion at an LP meeting, he has a chance of differentiating himself and his firm from the pack.

LP meetings have more to do with opinions than with facts. If performance is down, a manager’s opinions about why are important, as are his opinions about the future.

And investors arrive with opinions about the numbers, and with a desire to hear the opinions of the manager.

Not only that. Investors arrive with opinions about the manager and his team, and the manager seeks to use the meeting as a branding opportunity to reaffirm positive opinions about his operation, and alter the less-than-favorable opinions of the fence sitters.

Facts and opinions have to work together of course. Facts are the bricks, opinions the building.

LP meetings are based on facts, but they’re about opinions.

Public speaking as empathetic assertiveness

admin — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 16:31:07 +0000

When she was a year old, I held my daughter Georgia at the closed window of our 30th floor New York City apartment so we could look out over Times Square.

Across the street, stretching the full length of a 40-floor building, was a painting of Dwight Gooden, the ace Met’s pitcher, coiled in his wind-up with his eyes staring straight at us from under his cap.

I had the habit of asking Georgia, “Is it a cloudy day or a sunny day?” Soon enough, however, it got more complicated, and our conversation evolved. In other words, sometimes it was not all cloudy or all sunny. Sometimes, it was both.

So it is with effective communication. Not in terms of sun and clouds, but in terms of assertiveness and empathy. We need both—the will to assert and the sensibility to speak into the listeners’ capacity to hear.

We do the audience a service to be assertive because we give them something to push against, to poke holes in, and thus create a dialogue between our experience and theirs.

And we do ourselves a service to understand their capacity to listen—to see the world as they see it—so that we can clothe our assertions in terms that will help them see more clearly the validity of our view.

Some of us lack empathy and find it hard to comprehend what the audience is able to hear.

And some of us lack assertiveness and find it hard to engage constructively in intellectual combat.

But those who can do both earn the respect and trust of followers and opponents alike. We call these people leaders, movers and shakers, high potentials, charismatics, persuaders, influencers, top guns, visionaries, sales stars.

My daughter and I thought Dwight Gooden was staring at us, but in reality he was staring at the catcher’s mitt, trying to hurl his pitch where the catcher could catch it.

Presentation Skills for Pharma Sales Reps: 2

simswny — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:08:34 +0000

One of the golden rules of presenting is:

“Speak to the audience, in the language of the audience, about what is most important to the audience.”

Your audience is a doctor. Doctors are busy and stressed. They have a limited capacity to absorb information. They have the attention span of a gnat.

Know about the patients who are on your product. Ask questions out of your concern for them, not because I’m telling you to do so. Phoniness will not work in your favor. Ask out of genuine concern.

Keep it simple. Make only one point. Make it several times. In communication math, 1 X 3 = 1, meaning that if you make one point and you make it three times, your doc will remember your one point.

However, if you have three points and you make each three times, the equation looks like this: 3 X 3 = 0.

Go figure! If you say three things, you say nothing.

Presentation Training: Should a presenter ever reveal a weakness in her argument?

simswny — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:47:37 +0000

I was brought up in the full-spin generation. I was taught to make the strongest possible argument in the strongest possible way for my idea, product, or service, and let the buyer beware.

Under no circumstances, they told me, should I reveal any weakness in the product. To do so was to open a door through which the audience or the prospect could drive a truckload of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD).

Suppose you’re writing a letter of recommendation. Is it more persuasive to sing the praises of the candidate to the Nth degree, or is it better to sing her praises but also provide an insight into her shortcomings?

It turns out that the latter is more persuasive. It has more credibility. Nobody walks on water. If you want to get the girl a job, it’s better to be fair and balanced. It’s also ethical to practice full disclosure for the next employer.

This does not mean that you bash the candidate. It simply means that you describe your experience, good and bad, in a way that does the greatest good.

Think of the current Direct to Consumer (DTC) ads for pharmaceutical products on TV. We watch the images of couples sitting in separate lion-paw bathtubs gazing at the sun set, while we listen to the sound track whizzing by at almost inaudible speed mentioning horrors such as sterility, madness, seizures, and cardio-myopathy syndrome, which we don’t know anything about (I made it up) but it sounds scary.

Of course, the fine print makes us think twice about taking the drug, but what would we think if we took the drug without being told about side effects?

I’ll tell you how I’d feel. I’d feel like unleashing the wrath of hell on the manufacturers.

So even if you’re selling consulting services, or elective surgery, you gotta be honest about your shortcomings—about what you can and cannot do or promise. You may lose the business this time, but you will definitely earn their respect for being honest, and that means you live to fight another day. If you take the job and screw it up, the client is unlikely to hire you again.

Even worse, when you screw it up they’re likely to tell a whole bunch of other people, and slowly but surely your karma circles in on you, like a pride of lions 0n a wounded wart hog.

Pulic Speaking Training: The power of smiling

simswny — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:08:01 +0000

Robert Zajonc (pronounced ZYE-unts) was an American social scientist who explored the interplay between feeling and thought—between emotion and cognition.

He was interested in determining which influenced the other more strongly. On balance, he came down on the side of emotion.

In one widely reported study, he found that smiling or frowning can alter blood flow to the brain as facial muscles relax or contract.

This in turn affects the parts of the brain that regulate feelings, helping induce happy or sad emotional states.

Could smiling help speakers with stage fright? I think so.

The Buddha is depicted most often with a slight smile on his face—and he had true inner peace. Little Orphan Annie knew that, “You’re never fully dressed without a smile,” and now we have the work of a renowned scientist to confirm the fact—on balance, it’s better for us when we smile.

It’s never not also the person – or how you communicate is what you communicate

simswny — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:44:33 +0000

I spend a lot of time in pharma and financial services, where content is king. Smart people with expertise in narrow areas of vast importance spend weeks preparing presentations for MBAs, Ph.Ds, MDs and Pharm.Ds (to name only a few distinguished members of the alphabet glitterati they speak to.)

It is important to have no misspellings on the slides, no inconsistencies between the data displayed and the data verbalized; important to make tenable claims, and demonstrate the sterling methods by which the data were generated; important to argue logically, rationally, objectively, and demonstrate a clear understanding of the difference between fact and opinion.

My brilliant clients do all this. They work long hours to make sure the content is thorough, precise, and accurate. They make no turn without stoning any assertion to test its strength and weakness.

Yet they often disregard themselves and how they come across. By education, training, temperament and culture they dwell on the facts. They know that expertise is necessary for success, and they often act as if it were also sufficient.

It is not sufficient. It is necessary, but not sufficient. Audiences also need the facts shaped into a narrative that holds their attention—one that is clear and meaningful, and flows in a manner that appeals to the mind.

And always, under its breath, the audience is muttering, “Do I trust this guy? Can she make this happen? Does he have what it takes? Would I like to have a drink with her?”

It’s never not also the person.

Effective Communication: The unexpected gets attention

simswny — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:41:58 +0000

Look at this ad from Microsoft. It appeared in a newspaper exactly as it looks, I have not done anything to it.

At first glance, it looks like a mistake. It doesn’t belong in a newspaper or a magazine. It’s imperfect and unfinished. It even says, “Draft,” in red at the top.

I read it because I was curious. I thought I might read something secret and personal. And for a while, I believed that I was.

Then I just sat back in amazement.

They put backstage behavior on stage. They made the rehearsal process the show. They confessed that they are human, that messages and products are created through trial and error.

They used form to imply content. They used art and craft to create authenticity. They made something artificial look real.

Not only that, they linked the marketing message to both the image and the text. They even say that their product can’t make a great company—only that it can help to make that happen.

That’s true and honest. They are not making exaggerated claims.

Makes me think about spoken communication. Makes me think that our messy eccentricities may be our greatest strengths as speakers. That our pretense of polish and perfection may be our greatest weakness.

And if not, at the very least, it points us to the fact that if we want to get attention and arouse curiosity in our audience, we must say, do, or show something that is in contrast to what is expected.

Personalizing is a presentation skill

simswny — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:53:30 +0000

People are more likely to like your ideas if they like you. And one way to get them to like you is to be open and honest about who you are.

This does not mean you have to hold your dirty laundry under their noses. It simply means that you must give your listeners a glimpse of your private self.

A man came to me selling Long-Term Care Insurance. He was older—in his 70s—and very easy-going. He sat across from me as I sat at my desk, and outlined what he would like to cover in our meeting.

He began with the story of how he came to be selling LTCI. His mother, a single divorced woman at the time, was hit by a car in New York City when she was in her late 50’s. His older brother was alientated from the family, and so it fell to him to take care of his injured mother.

Years of operations, home care, and financial struggle ensued. At the time of the accident, he had been a successful insurance agent for Blue Cross Blue Shield. But soon he saw the need for a new type of insurance—one that could have helped his mother in her difficult circumstances.

And so he left BCBS and joined one of the few insurance companies at that time to be offering LTCI.

I asked questions about his mother and his brother as he told me this story, and learned even more about his life. And when he asked me about my life, and how I came to my work, I was primed to divulge the deeper instincts that drove me to it. Simple to say, I felt connected to him, enough to entrust him with the details of my life.

Did I buy insurance? Well, no…but not because I didn’t want to. He suggested I buy in the future when it would be more appropriate.

It is important to reveal your personal back story with a sense of proportion, lest your presentation become all about you. But a few short personal details can help the audience engage with you and your material. And when you relate your personal details to the larger issue you’re there to discuss, you will be a more effective speaker.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public 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.

Persuasive communication and the Geico gecko

simswny — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:53:22 +0000

The Geico gecko, the AFLAC duck, and Jared the Subway sandwich guy all have the same job. They are likeable characters who appear in very short stories (ads) on TV.

The gecko is low-key and sensible while his boss, the CEO of Geico, is driven by his irrational exuberance to come up with dumb ideas. The gecko fights corporate silliness and keeps it simple and quantifiable (“you can save up to 15%.”)

The AFLAC duck is also surrounded by idiots who don’t have the common sense to see that the only solution to their problems is AFLAC. His outrage (and his limited vocabulary) are comedic and charming. We want to do business with him.

And Jared is all of us who are concerned about our weight. He has found the simple solution to the problem, and is now living the good life in the company of celebrities and star athletes.

Gecko, duck and Jared are personifications of a brand. They demonstrate the benefits of their brands by successfully struggling to overcome obstacles.

You can use the same technique to make your presentations more persuasive. Your ideas, products, and companies can also be seen as solutions to problems.

You may not have the creative license or budget to create a mascot and an endless series of ads, but you can think about what obstacles your idea or product must overcome, and then describe how your idea, product, or company struggles to conquer those obstacles.

In this way, you are emulating the best professional persuaders in the world.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public 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.

Rationality and Emotion: How we Make Decisions

simswny — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:34:08 +0000

The Wise Presenter would do well to study how people make decisions (and how you yourself make decisions.)

Jonathan Lehrer is a Rhodes Scholar out of Columbia University, an editor at large for the science-focused Seed Magazine and the author of Proust was a Neuroscientist. He has written for numerous publications, including his blogs at The Frontal Cortex and at his own website. His new book is How we Decide.

Lehrer says he is pathologically indecisive. “It’s not uncommon for me to spend 20 minutes in the in the cereal aisle deciding between Honey Nut Cheerios and Apple Cinnamon Cheerios.”

He speaks about the assumption that human beings are rational creatures and that the “bad guys” in decision-making are the emotions.

Apparently, when the decision is a complex one, it’s best to absorb as much information as possible and then let it seep into your unconscious for a period of time. Your intuition may be your best bet in a complicated situation.

Lehrer references case studies of people with damage to the emotional centers of their brains who become unable to make even trivial decisions.

“Rationality without emotion is a disease,” he says.

As speakers who seek to win the assent of our audiences, whether we’re in sales or leadership, research or product management, Lehrer provides further proof that the ancient Greeks were right: we need both intellectual and emotional appeal when trying to persuade our listeners.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public 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.

Speech Training: How to Give a Speech of Introduction

simswny — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:28:30 +0000

1. Get the proper information from the person you will introduce

2. Extract the information from the resume and write a short speech of introduction. Do not READ the resume.

3. Show the speech to the speaker for editing and approval

4. Structure the speech of introduction in this way.

- Why this topic?

- Why this topic before this audience?

- Why this topic before this audience at this time?

- Why this topic before this audience at this time by this speaker?

5. That’s when you supply a few TELLING details about the speaker that give him or her the credibility to speak on the topic.

6. You can be forgiven if you bring notes and read the information about the speaker, although it would be good if you could do the first three bullets points (above) without reading.

7. Pronounce the speaker’s name properly. If you’re not sure, ask.

8. Do not end by saying, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Sam White to the podium,” (at which point Sam rises to his feet), “a man who not only is an expert on horticulture, but also knows a thing or two about marketing in the garment business,” (Sam hesitates at the edge of the stage), “and also has an eight handicap. Why, I remember the time Sam hit a hole in one over at Silver Lake,” (Sam sits down), “He was hitting a 5-iron off the 10^th tee…” (Sam waits patiently for you to stop, while the audience suspects that you would rather be the speaker and are jealous of the attention that Sam will be getting.)

9. In other words, begin, be brief, be seated, and end your speech of introduction by saying the speaker’s name loud and clear.

Wait for him to arrive at the lectern. Shake his hand. Smile. Then go and sit down.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public 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.