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Commanding Presence

by R. L. Howser on October 23, 2010 · 0 comments

There is a young man I know, an entrepreneur with his own importing business, who has been working on his speaking skill. He is a large, powerfully built guy, with a strong voice, but he has always come across in his speaking as a bit shifty.

I have no doubts about his personal or business integrity, but that never came through in his demeanor. As he spoke, he shifted his weight from side to side, shuffling his feet, rocking his shoulders and fidgeting with his hands. It was hard to even focus on what he was saying because my attention was always drawn to his restless movement.

We spoke briefly about it a couple of times, but I have never worked with him directly. And as any fidgeter can attest, such habits are hard to break

Then a few weeks ago, I saw him speak again, and the change was remarkable. He stood front and center, his feet firmly planted under his large frame, his body erect, still and calm, his shoulders squared, and he absolutely commanded the room. He was confident, authoritative and very persuasive.

Of course, in a perfect world, his physical demeanor would have no real bearing on the validity of his persuasive argument. I’ve often heard academic and technical speakers lament that their presentation style is irrelevant. It is the quality of the data and the logic of the argument that matters.

Yet, I can’t for the life of me remember what it was my friend was talking about in the earlier speeches. His fidgeting and shuffling so overwhelmed his argument.

I’m not sure what he did to change so dramatically, but this latest speech came from a place of power, confidence and authority. And it came through loud and clear.

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Speaking of Teaching

by R. L. Howser on October 11, 2010 · 0 comments

By the time I started speaking professionally, I already had more than twenty thousand hours of teaching experience under my belt. Yet for as much as my experience teaching has made me a better speaker, being a speaker has made me a better teacher too.

In many ways, my time in the classroom was great preparation for my speaking career. I became comfortable standing in front of a group of strangers. Talking over noisy teenagers for hours every day strengthened my voice. Creating lesson plans has taught me how to structure information for clarity and recall. So I was already ahead of the game in many ways.

But speaking is also very different from teaching. When I teach, I am focused on the information. I move about the room, interacting with my students as I gauge whether they have absorbed the point I am trying to get across and are ready to move on, or if they need me to go back and review the material, or even come at it from a completely different angle.

I never used to think about how I used my voice or gestures, or my specific word choices. I just said and did what came naturally.

As I’ve progressed as a speaker, though, I’ve come to see that there is a place for speaking techniques in the classroom, too. There are times when I need to make sure my students hear, understand and remember one specific idea.

So I structure the idea in a short, pithy sound bite that will stick in their brains. I pause, letting the silence hang until they are leaning forward in anticipation. I stand stock still and lock eyes with one student. I change my delivery, raising or lowering the pitch or volume of my voice, becoming the voice of doom or gentle reason.

I use every technique I know to focus their attention on that one idea, planting it deep into their minds.

Some would call it brainwashing or mind control, but that’s what teaching is. It is more than just presenting information. Teaching is shaping the thought processes of your students in a way that gives them the skills and mental habits they need to solve problems on their own.

That’s what learning to speak effectively has done for me, and can do for you too.

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Rock the House

by R. L. Howser on October 4, 2010 · 0 comments

I recently saw the philosopher, Chris Rock, interviewed by James Lipton on Inside the Actor’s Studio, and something he said struck me as powerfully relevant to what we do as speakers.

Rock is a stand-up comedian, of course, among other things. Stand-up comedy is not so much different from a business presentation or a motivational speech, except that the purpose is explicitly to entertain. Some comedians, such as Rock, also use the form to deliver messages through the laughs, in his case often about racism, sexism and tolerance.

Like any other performer, Rock has good nights and bad nights. Sometimes he is off his game and sometimes the audience, for whatever reason or reasons, just isn’t responsive to his act. But it’s his responsibility as a professional, Rock said, to rock the house. No excuses.

As speakers we are often in the same position. We’re booked into ill-suited, poorly set up venues. We are scheduled to speak just before lunch or after the cocktail party. We’re sent before people that don’t want to be there and resent us for the imposition. Our one-hour slot is suddenly cut to 20 minutes, because the previous speaker went too long. It doesn’t matter. It’s still our responsibility to rock the house.

So we get there early to get a feel for the room, check the sound system and rearrange the seating. We adjust our content or delivery, sometimes on the fly, to suit the circumstances. We use every tactic and technique we know to show our audience that even if they are not there by choice, we’re on their side; we’re there to give them something of real value.

It’s our responsibility as professional speakers to rock the house, no matter what. No excuses.

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Being George Clooney

by R. L. Howser on September 20, 2010 · 2 comments

In preparing for the recent Toastmasters International Championship of Public Speaking, I had a problem. Through feedback from friends and fellow members, and the evidence on the videotape, I was forced to confront an issue that has bedeviled me since I began as a speaker, and even before.

I am German-Irish, and I have the face that comes with such a lineage. I have a large, square head and heavy eyebrows, and I tend to frown when I am thinking or concentrating, taking on a rather serious, and some would say angry, look at times. One of my students calls it “Scary Face”.

When I looked at the video of my speaking performances, I could see that they were right. I wouldn’t call my face scary, but it was definitely not the friendly, likable demeanor that helps to build rapport with an audience. In a speech contest, in business and I suspect in life in general, friendliness and likeability are vitally important to connecting with an audience of strangers.

So I started working on smiling more, relaxing my mouth and eyes, showing more emotion and expression on my face, keeping my shoulders relaxed, leaning forward a bit towards the audience and trying in half a dozen other ways to present a softer, friendlier image when I speak. But it was just too much.

I found it next to impossible to keep all that in mind, and still remember my speech, my stage movements and my voice accents. The resulting performance seemed as artificial and unnatural as you would imagine, and if anything, made it more difficult to connect with the audience.

But then, the night before the big contest, I saw an advertisement for George Clooney’s new movie, The American. It looked interesting and it got me thinking about George’s performance in Ocean’s Eleven.  I wished that I could present such an effortless charm, when I spoke the next day. That would solve all my problems.

And then I had an epiphany. Why not? That was exactly the image I wanted to present. All I had to do was be George Clooney.

So the next day, as I was waiting in the wings for the Contest Chairman to announce my name, I closed my eyes and imagined George Clooney giving my speech. I imagined how he would walk on to the stage, with a loose, relaxed stride, a sexy smile and a twinkle in his eye. I imagined him pausing for a moment, with an amused smirk on his face, and then delivering my opening line and the entire audience hanging on his every word.

And when I heard my name announced, I stepped inside his body and walked out there as George Clooney.

It’s difficult to assess my own performance, especially as I haven’t seen the video yet, but my wife, Yasuko, who is a very astute observer of such things, wrote one word on the sample judge’s scorecard in the section for “Physical appearance and body language” . She wrote, “Yatta”, which in her native Japanese means, “He did it!!!”

George Clooney might not be the best model for a speaker giving a eulogy, but he is my new muse. I’m not deluded enough to think I look like him, but that doesn’t mean I can’t speak like him.

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A Small Investment

by R. L. Howser on September 7, 2010 · 0 comments

I recently met a potential client at a networking party. He was a Human Resources Director for the Japanese branch of a multinational corporation and he was concerned about the rudimentary presentation skills of his local staff.

He had seen me speak before, and wanted to know how long it had taken me to become a good speaker and presenter. My answer was that it had taken me 20,000 hours of teaching, hundreds of hours of reading, writing and rewriting scripts and practicing my delivery, many more hours of watching speeches and presentations, both live and on the internet, and the delivery of more than a hundred speeches to get to my current level of skill.

My answered clearly discouraged him a bit. He was toying with the idea of bringing me in to do some seminars on effective presentation, but he was looking for a quick and cost effective fix for his problem.

We had earlier been discussing his fanatical love of golf, so before he wiggled off the hook, I asked him how many hours he had spent working on his golf game. He grinned and said, “Probably about as many hours as you’ve worked on speaking”.

“So is it pointless,” I asked, “for a hacker like me to work on my game, if I’m not willing to commit as much time you have?”

“Not at all,” he said. “Most people can make huge improvements, if they just learn to keep their head still, shift their weight as they swing and follow through.”

“Well, that’s what I can do for your staff,” I told him, “Teach them the fundamentals that will make a huge difference in how effectively they present.”

In fact, it doesn’t take that much to take people from cringe-inducing to competent. If we can just get people to talk to their audiences, instead of presenting at them, we’re halfway there. Teach them to slow down, look people in the eye and think about what they are saying and they’re already better than the majority of speakers in the business world, especially in Japan.

Obviously, a few hours of instruction isn’t going to send anyone to the PGA tour, but it can give them the skills they need to enjoy a round of golf without embarrassing themselves.

A few hours of training in presentation skills isn’t going to create the next Steve Jobs either, but it can be the difference between a corporate or personal embarrassment and a competent professional performance.

That seems well worth the small investment.

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Theory and Practice

by R. L. Howser on August 29, 2010 · 1 comment

“In theory, theory is the same as practice. In practice, it isn’t the same.“
-Yogi Berra, New York Yankees manager and catcher

I have read a lot of books on speeches and presentation, and other related areas, such as leadership, hypnosis, magic, acting technique and NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming). I keep tabs on dozens of blogs, watch famous speeches and TED talks on YouTube and go to a lot of presentations, and I learn a lot in the process.

I get ideas of how to structure speeches and presentations and on techniques for presenting different kinds of data. I observe the effects of different speaking styles. I see different kinds of openings and closings, some successful, and some not. I pay attention to what kinds of questions, jokes and antics serve to drive the message forward and which are pointless digressions.

And yet I generally learn more in ten minutes on stage than I do in a month of reading and research. Speaking is a skill and we don’t learn skills by reading about them or watching others perform them. We learn them by doing them.

Sure, just as a golfer can pick up useful tips from a golf magazine or instructional video and try them the next time he or she plays, we can get speaking ideas or learn presentation techniques. But knowing them isn’t the same as using them.

If you want to be a better golfer, you need to get out there and play. You need to go to the range and practice. You need to hit the ball again and again and again. You need to burn it into your brain and your muscles until it becomes as natural and intuitive as breathing.

If you want to be a better speaker, you need to stand up in front of a crowd and speak.

You need to play with your voice, learning its auditory and emotional range and how to use it to seize and hold the attention of your audience.

You need to feel how you stand, how your body moves and how you can most effectively create the image of calm, competence and authority that your audience craves in a speaker.

You need to train yourself to make and hold eye contact, to nurture that intimate rapport that a great speaker can forge with every single person in the audience. Those are things you can’t learn from a book or from watching other speakers.

In theory, you need to practice. In practice, if you want to get better, you absolutely need to practice.

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The Simple Truth

by R. L. Howser on August 19, 2010 · 1 comment

I’m back from the 2010 Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking in Palm Desert, California, and it turns out that I didn’t need that extra bag I took to carry home my trophy. I gave the best speech I have ever given, the culmination of months of thought, preparation, practice and sweat, and it wasn’t good enough. I didn’t even finish in the top three of my semi-final contest.

While I’ve had more than a few moments of depression and self-doubt since, on the whole it was a remarkably positive experience. I know I’m a far better speaker and writer than I was six months ago when I began this process.

The sheer volume of practice that I went through has made me more comfortable, confident and deliberate on stage. As former World Champion of Public Speaking, Darren LaCroix, always says, there’s no substitute for stage time.

The formal, and informal, feedback that I received has been invaluable in helping me to see myself, my strengths and my weaknesses more clearly. Dozens of people, some the unlikeliest sources, have given me clues to how I could express what I needed to say and mitigate my faults of style, logic and meaning.

The continuous process of tearing apart and rebuilding the same speech has also taught me more about structure, rhythm and pacing. A speech is a delicate thing. A single line can tie two ideas together in a seamless whole, or snap the audience out of their trance altogether. As with any other creative act, there is no right way to do it. There is only what is more or less effective in the circumstance at hand.

I learned an incredibly valuable lesson from my competitors. In my semi-final contest, the outcome was in doubt up until the last of the nine speakers, Ian Humphries, strode onto the stage.

Ian is a very soft-spoken, unassuming man, and not who I would have pegged as the favorite, but thirty seconds into his speech I knew, and I think the other competitors did too, that we were all fighting for second place. There was a quiet authenticity to his voice and message, about putting his life together after a stint in prison as a young man, which made the rest of us look like tap dancing monkeys. In fact, the speeches I heard last week that had the most impact were not the one that were technically the best. They were the ones that told simple, deep, honest truths.

That was something I had forgotten in my preparations. My speech was about a very bad day I had on the river when I was a whitewater rafting guide. It was an experience that taught me a lot about fear; how to overcome it and how to use it to focus under pressure and perform better. In trying to make the speech dynamic and powerful, I used every technique I could think of with my voice, body and gestures. I wrote and rewrote the speech to make the story intriguing, exciting and dramatic. And I think I was successful.

But somewhere in that process, I forgot to tell the simple truth of how that day had really affected me and my life. I tried to make it more than it was and lost the thread of authenticity that I began with. That’s what separated me from the top speakers. There was something deeply personal and honest in their words. Of course, that’s easy to say, but hard to do. Our deepest feelings are often the hardest to find and the most difficult to share. But they are what make an inspirational speech unforgettable and make a speaker a champion.

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Heading for California

by R. L. Howser on August 7, 2010 · 0 comments

I’m heading for California, in a day or two, to compete in the Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking. The two speeches I’ve prepared are the best I have ever written (and rewritten and rewritten). Toastmasters District 76 (Japan) recently asked me to write a few words for their website about the matter, so this seems a perfect time to share those thoughts with you.

The process of writing a speech that accomplishes your goals is the same whether you are writing for a Toastmasters speech contest, a business presentation or any other situation.  Beneath all of the entertainment and drama of humor, voice and stage presence, you need to clearly communicate something of value to your audience.

Clear speaking comes from clear writing and clear writing comes from clear thinking, so the first and most important thing you need to do is sit down and THINK about what you want your audience to hear, understand and remember.

Think of lessons you have learned in your life, successes or failures that have taught you something important, surprising or contrary ideas that you believe or events that have changed your perspective on the world. You don’t necessarily need to tell your audience what to do. That’s one approach, but I think it is often more powerful, if they draw their own conclusions about what your words mean to them.

Once you’ve found a simple, clear message that you think will benefit your audience, connect it to a story or stories that demonstrate that message in concrete, specific ways. Tie that universal message to real experiences that demonstrates the truth of what you are saying. Take your audience along on the journey of what life has taught you.

Those two elements, message and story, are the backbone, the core, of your speech. You must remember that. It’s so easy to wander off course into other somewhat related stories, or interesting side thoughts. You have to constantly cut and refocus.

Writers call this “killing your babies”, because it seems that your most interesting, funny and beautiful lines are always the ones you have to cut. It’s painful to do, but it’s vital to writing a tightly focused speech. If it’s not driving your message, cut it out.

So you write, cut, refocus and write again, expanding on your core message. Do it again and again, until you have a tight, lean script that leads your audience towards the idea you want them to remember.

Then you practice and practice until your speech becomes so much a part of you that it comes spilling out as naturally and smoothly as if you were telling the story to your best friend; until you don’t even have to think about what comes next. All you have to do, when you walk out on to the stage, is look into their eyes, smile and use your voice, your face and your gestures to tell them the story.

Then you can sit down and start thinking about where you are going to display your trophy.

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The Eyes Have It

by R. L. Howser on August 1, 2010 · 0 comments

This famous cover of National Geographic Magazine featured a photo by Steve McCurry. It shows a young Afghan girl staring directly in to the camera lens. She is pretty, with remarkable gray eyes, but that’s not what makes the photo so extraordinarily powerful. Rather it is the guileless intensity of her gaze that has made it probably the best-remembered cover in the magazine’s history.

In fact, if you flip through the pages of almost any issue, that’s what makes so many of the magazine’s photos so good; direct eye contact. Most photographers are either unwilling or unable to engage their subjects so directly, but when they do, it makes a photo far more compelling.

Of course, it’s nothing new to say that a good speaker needs to make eye contact with his audience, but little thought seems to be given to the eye contact of others. If you have assistants helping you with your presentation, are they engaging the audience with their eyes? Do your presentation slides feature characters looking directly at the audience? Both will draw attention away from you, the speaker. Eyes are just too powerful to compete with, so don’t. Give your audience only one set of eyes to captivate them; yours.

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Trust your Eyes

by R. L. Howser on July 25, 2010 · 1 comment

Dealing with photo editors is the bane of every photojournalist. Not the good editors, the ones who understand images, but every photojournalist has had to deal with editors who came from the editorial (writing) side of publishing. Many of them were very good writers and researchers and they had good journalistic instincts – that’s how they got promoted to editor – but they weren’t as literate visually as they were verbally. They didn’t understand that what sounds right doesn’t always look right.

I once worked with an editor who wanted to illustrate the idea of stupid tourists with an image of a tourist who has had a map wadded up and thrust back in his face by an irritated local. The concept, of course, being that one too many tourists had asked the locals for directions. It’s a bit heavy handed as a literary concept, but I’ve heard worse.

As a visual image though, it was impossible to shoot. Good images are like good jokes. They only work if you don’t have to explain them. Yet the only way to make the scenario clear would be to load the poor sap up with tourist clichés and write, “Map” in big letters on the paper. Even then, I doubt many would have gotten the joke.

In a presentation, the point of every image you project on the screen is to reinforce what you are saying, not to say it for you. It needs to get the concept across at a glance, without the need for explanation or extended study, so the audience can immediately turn its attention back to you. What sounds like a good visual illustration of a concept doesn’t always get the point across visually.

Step back and take a fresh look at your slides. Trust your eyes, not your mental descriptions, when you evaluate the meaning of your images.

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