New York Executive Speech Coach » speech coach

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.

Hamlet is a Speech Coach

simswny — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:18:17 +0000

Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark in Shakespeare’s play called Hamlet, written around 1603. He hires a bunch of actors to put on a play that he’s written, and he gives them coaching on how to speak their lines.

Four-hundred and six years later, what he says remains good advice for presenters too.

So here’s what happening in the scene. After he’s told them not to wave their arms around too much, he tells them to loosen up, but also make sure that their gestures relate to what they’re saying.

“Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your

tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this

special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature”

To be most effective, and to look natural, gestures should come before the key word you’re emphasizing, or in the middle of the word.

Jimmy Carter had trouble with this on one occasion. He was speaking from the Oval Office to the American people, saying that the economy was “heading up.” Only after he finished the phrase did he move his arm to point skyward. It looked as if his mind was not connected to his body. Or that he had rehearsed a gesture, but forgot to do it, and tacked it on at the end when he remembered.

Finally, Hamlet says to his actors, “Don’t overstep modesty,” or words to that effect. What does that mean?

It means that when in front of an audience it’s best to express passion artfully with your voice, rather than with large, emphatic gestures.

President Obama is highly effective at this. He communicates passion with his voice, even though his body is relaxed and still. The combination communicates power and control.

To read more about Hamlet as a speech coach, go to executivespeechcoachnj.com.

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.

Presentation Training: Presence of Mind

simswny — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:00:11 +0000

I spent last Thursday with Patricia Fripp, a great speech coach and friend of mine. We were at the National Speakers Association, New Jersey Chapter. I can’t get her out of my mind. She is a presence!

Someone with presence makes you pay attention. You don’t have to work hard to listen to them or watch them. In fact, you can’t help being engaged by them. Fripp is one of these people.

She does it in at least two ways: intellectual and emotional.

Fripp says interesting things in interesting ways, such as, “The enemy of the speaker is sameness.”

Then she tells you why she phrased it the way she did. She will say that the last word in your spoken sentence should pack the punch.

That’s a powerful thought, one that will change the way I talk.

To be a presence in someone else’s mind on a substantive level is a good thing. It means you have made them think, aroused their curiosity, and stimulated further dialogue.

Great conversationalists, (I am thinking of Barbara Walters, Leonard Lopate, and Dick Cavett) can carry on a dialogue on a wide range of topics. In other words, they can be present in almost any discussion.

There is more to presence than animal magnetism. We take for granted intellectual presence, yet it is the currency of success for many of our most accomplished colleagues.

Read the first blog in this series: Presentation Skills: Stay Tuned for a Month of Presence.

Public Speaking Excellence: Creating an Experience

simswny — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:42:31 +0000

At a recent meeting with a potential client, we discussed his desire to transform himself from a reader of scripts to a creator of experiences.

He said that in the old days, one gave a speech at a business symposium in order to have the text of the speech distributed to the media after the event.

Now, the speech is a video, and it goes on Youtube. If you’re lucky, it’s interesting enough to get people to watch. And if it’s really good, you get invited to deliver the talk at many other meetings.

A speech is always an experience for an audience. After all, they live through it.

But an experience that is not surprising, or unexpected, or emotionally moving, is soon forgotten. It is a plain vanilla experience, and settles to the bottom of the mind.

An experience for the audience that is novel, exciting, and memorable is what he’s after. He reminded me that we are all in the experience business.

So true. So simple. And so “not easy.”

Voice and Speech: The Sound of Obama

simswny — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:08:40 +0000

Whether you agree with his policies or not, you have to admit that our current President won the office in large part because of his ability to speak well.

A lot goes into speaking well. It’s a big topic. But one of the key ingredients is an appealing speaking voice.

Now, I’m NOT saying that President Obama has a PERFECT speaking voice. I’m sure most of us have a quibble here and there.

But compared to John McCain and Sarah Palin, Obama was a Caruso to their PeeWee Herman.

His sound is open and resonant, whereas both McCain and Palin have high-pitched nasal sounds.

Candidate Obama’s enunciation, for the most part, was crisp and professional. I say for the most part because he occasionally lapses into slangy sounds that, I suppose, are meant to make him sound folksy.

McCain and Palin, both impressive people, projected vocal images that were less Presidential. McCain sounded young, his squeaky tenor voice seeming less authoritative than Obama’s.

And Palin’s voice was a serious liability. Her resonance was squarely in the bones of her face and in her nose, and those sounds, coming from a strong-willed woman, are not likely to win the hearts and minds of men.

Vocal Presence is an interesting concept. It suggests that sound itself, independent from substance, can have a decisive effect on a voter’s decision to say, “Yes,” to a candidacy.

I would be interested to learn if in our history the candidate with the deeper, more masculine speaking voice was more likely to be elected.

I know it’s true about the taller candidate. If it were also true about the voice, than we would have known early in the primaries that Barack Obama was the favored candidate.

His voice speaks so loudly that it almost doesn’t matter what he says.

Training the Speaking Voice

simswny — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:16:56 +0000

When I was in acting school in New York, I was sent to a famous voice and speech teacher named Marian Rich. She lived in an apartment on East 16th Street, and taught her group and private sessions in her living room. As a group student, I sat in a circle of folding chairs and got to know the other students rather quickly.

Marian had taught many of the luminaries of Hollywood and the Broadway stage, including Marlon Brando, Geraldine Page, and Al Pacino, to name a few. She was a demanding teacher, and did not tolerate bad attitudes or behaviors.

She taught us that the voice is a wind instrument, and that to use it well, we must start by learning how to breathe. This we did, lying on the floor, observing our lower abdomens, floating ribs, lower backs,and upper torsos as we inhaled and exhaled with care and precision.

We learned to find the energy of the voice in the breath stream rather than in squeezing the throat or lifting and dropping the sternum.

We learned to speak with an open throat, to find our optimal pitch and resonance, and to expand our range of expressiveness. I recall Marian saying that in well-spoken English, there is a change of pitch on every stressed syllable.

Most of us don’t like hearing our own voices. One reason is that we normally experience our own sounds through the conduction of bone, whereas a recording is made through air–the way others hear us–two very different media.

The sound of your voice is a huge part of your presence in this world. If you have an attractive voice, people give you the benefit of the doubt.

If you have a deep, powerful, authoritative voice, people are more likely to agree with you.

If you have a tentative, whiney voice that goes up at the ends of sentences, you are more likely to be dismissed as a lightweight.

The great thing is, your voice can be developed, expanded, strengthened. It is there for you to mold into a thing of beauty and power.

If you don’t like the sound of your own voice, you can change it.

I know this, because I did it. And it’s not a phoney, cosmetic change. It’s basically knowing how to use the equipment you were born with.

Public Speaking Skills: President Obama is a Good Public Speaker

simswny — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:39:17 +0000

I have written an article called 5 Ways to Speak Like Obama on Bnet.com about President Obama’s abilities as a public speaker–saying that he is skilled at connecting with audiences, making the complex clear, and using his voice and body language to project confidence and authority.

The article has brought out opposing views. Some of them seem to be opposed to Obama’s policies rather than his speaking skills, but others make good points.

They accuse him of simply being good at reading scripts on a TelePrompter. I admire the President’s comfort with the TelePrompter, but some have said that this is no indication of oratorical skill or leadership ability. Perhaps we could train a chimpanzee to use a TelePrompter, but we couldn’t train one to write Candidate Obama’s speech on race, or deliver it with such restrained passion.

Whatever you think of TelePrompters, they are tools that speakers must learn to use. The President is not an actor who is given 4 weeks to learn his lines. He gives dozens of talks a day and must use the tools at his disposal.

On another front, many of the comments on the article on Bnet make the point that when President Obama goes off script, he says “er” and “uhm” a whole lot, and that does not inspire confidence. At the same time, one or two commenters mention that his speaking skills are tools of deception, and that I am advocating that business speakers develop their ability to “seem” authentic, or “appear” confident and authoritative.

(Interesting that they fault the President for saying “er” and “uhm” while at the same time fault him for being slick.)

While I agree that authenticity and genuineness are attractive traits, and that there is a thin line between “polished” and “slippery,” I also know that nobody follows a weak trumpet.

In a job that requires non-stop public speaking, a good man with bad speaking skills will be less effective than a bad man with good speaking skills.

We as Americans want a leader who is ethical, smart enough to figure out how to solve our problems, and tough enough to get the job done.

And by the way, he better be a good speaker, too.