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In Good Hands

by R. L. Howser on July 17, 2010 · 0 comments

There is an insurance company that has for years assured its customers that they’re “in good hands.” Your audience wants no less from you. They want to know that you have everything under control. If something unexpected happens, they want to know that you can handle it.

Of course, they want more than that. They want to know that they can trust you, that your information is valid and useful and that you have their interests, at least partially, at heart. But before all that, they need to know that they can relax and give you their full attention. It’s somewhat like riding with a novice driver. It’s tough to relax and enjoy the passing scenery, if you are constantly fighting the urge to grab the wheel.

If the speaker is fretting with a balky presentation remote, struggling to find the right words or fighting to keep the crowd’s attention, we feel the natural urge either to jump in and help or to avert our eyes from the embarrassing spectacle. Neither is conducive to absorbing the speaker’s message. And that’s assuming that the speaker hasn’t completely lost the thread of his message during his troubles, as all too often happens.

Preparation and composure are the keys to maintaining that aura of control that your audience needs. Thorough preparation will prevent many of the surprises that come from not knowing your material, your equipment and your environment. But when the completely unanticipated events intrude, such as fire alarms or obnoxious drunks in the audience, it’s the composure to calmly weather the storm in good humor and to quickly get back on track that will carry you through.

Show them that they are in good hands, and they’ll sit back and enjoy the scenery you present.

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Presence

by R. L. Howser on July 9, 2010 · 2 comments

What makes great speakers so rare?

The world is full of intelligent, personable, articulate people with something of value to share, yet few of them have the ability to seize and hold the absolute attention and imagination of an audience.

Almost anyone can learn to be a good speaker. You can learn to create a sound presentation structure, deliver it in a clear and comfortable manner and present yourself with confidence and authority, but great speakers go beyond that. They bring a presence to the stage or the boardroom that makes them mesmerizing.

Naming it “Presence”, however, does us no good, any more than calling what Michael Jordan had, “Talent” or naming Einstein’s gift, “Genius”. Both are true, but that’s hardly illuminating or useful.

The seed of understanding, however, is in the word itself. To have presence is to be present, to be in the present, to be fully engaged in the present moment.

When we speak, our minds are often so busy frantically multitasking to process past events, future fears and the six other things we need to get done today, that we fail to pay full attention to what we are doing right now.

This is especially true if we are working from a script or presentation slide bullet points. When we let the script or the slides drive the speech, it frees our minds for those other important tasks, such wallowing in our nervousness, searching for an escape route or speculating on lunch options. It can reduce us to a meat robots, spewing empty words at the audience. After all, the words are already set. There’s no need to think about them.

To be fully present when we speak is to be completely focused on the meaning of the words coming out of our mouths, on the implications and intentions behind the words and on the people before us and their reactions to our words. It is the literal presence of mind to engage interactively with our audience, while retaining complete control of our message and purpose. It is the purest distillation of the true communication of meaning between people.

In that moment, when your absolute focus draws their absolute attention, you can teach, motivate, inspire and influence at the deepest and most profound level. You too can achieve greatness as a speaker.

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The logic of love

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

“The most moving thing in a speech is always the logic”
-Peggy Noonan

They say that we don’t fall in love with another when we are together. But rather, it’s when we are apart, but can’t get the other out of our minds, that love grows. I suspect that persuasive speeches and presentations are much the same.

We can certainly make a splash that has a temporary impact. Most impulse sales pros, such as TV shopping announcers, entertainment touts or sidewalk barkers, know that they have to make the sale while the prospect is hot, because the impulse goes away quickly. Once the pitch fades from the ear, and the mind starts chewing over the logic of it, an emotional appeal loses its power.

Motivational speakers also sometimes rely on the heat of the moment to fire up their prospects, but enthusiasm and emotion tends to last about as long as the echo of the speaker’s call to action. The next morning, or a week later, the audience is left only with vague memories of having heard an exciting presentation, but to little or no lasting effect.

But the underlying value of your proposition and the benefit it offers to your listeners, if presented in a clear, compelling and memorable way, builds in the listeners’ minds as they think back over what they remember. That’s what presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan was referring to in the quote above from her book, On Speaking Well.

While there is certainly a time and place to go for the white-hot, emotional appeal, we make the strongest and deepest impact on the thinking of others, when our words or ideas later spring back to mind unbidden; when the appeal of the logic can be mentally chewed over.

That’s when the audience takes the message to heart.

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Stop wasting opportunities

by R. L. Howser on June 29, 2010 · 0 comments

If you asked the average business professional to take several hours, or even days, off from their job, during the middle of the work week, to prepare, rehearse and perform a musical revue of Broadway show tunes, they would think you were crazy.

They don’t have time for things like that. They are busy people. Their days are tightly scheduled, their calendars full and their lunch breaks, evenings and weekends booked weeks in advance. They are under constant pressure to produce results.

Yet these same business people seem to be willing to waste hours or days preparing, rehearsing and performing a presentation that accomplishes nothing, that is every bit as much of a waste of time, in business terms, as a Broadway musical revue.

It amazes me. Their professional colleagues or potential clients are voluntarily giving them a large chunk of their time and attention for the presentation, and they squander it.

If you call them on it, they will tell you that they are building the brand, getting their name out there, or informing potential customers about their products or services. It’s as if Research and Development said their goal was to make some cool stuff or Marketing said their plan was to tell people about the company.

In either case, management would demand that they come up with specific, concrete, actionable plans, or heads would roll. So why don’t they demand the same from the executives that represent the company, when they speak. The time and attention of others is a valuable resource, and vague, half-baked plans are no way to take maximum advantage of such a resource.

Take the time to figure out what, specifically, you want to happen as a result of this presentation or speech. Come up with a concrete, viable plan for how you are going to use the speaking opportunity to make that happen.

If there is no clear purpose behind the presentation, create one. If a major airline offered you free, first-class tickets to anywhere in the world, with the stipulation that they be used within the next month, would you turn them down because you had no plans to travel? Or would you quickly think of someplace you wanted to go?

Do the same with your speaking. Figure out a way to take full advantage of the opportunity you have been given.

If you can’t be bothered, then stick with the Broadway show tunes. At least that would be more entertaining.

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A crisis like that sure can sharpen the mind

by R. L. Howser on June 22, 2010 · 0 comments

Just a few hours after I put up my last post, Fear is just a feeling, about how harnessing your fear can make you perform better, I was reading Jonah Lehrer’s fascinating book, How We Decide, and came across a story of United Airlines Flight 232.

The middle engine of the DC-10, mounted on the tail, had exploded and the shrapnel had cut all of the hydraulic lines. This was considered to be such a rare and unforeseeable event that there were no procedures for it in the pilot’s manual. There was no way to fly the plane without hydraulics, as they controlled all of the flight control surfaces on the plane. The flight, and everyone on it, was doomed.

With his plane out of control, and threatening to go into a death spiral, the pilot, Captain Al Haynes, didn’t panic. He knew that they were in an impossible situation, something his training had never prepared him for, but even under tremendous pressure, he had the presence of mind to review his limited options.

The only controls on the plane that were working were the thrust levers that adjusted the power to the two remaining engines. He quickly devised a plan to regain a measure of control over the plane just by manipulating the engine thrust. Over the course of the next forty minutes, he not only kept the plane in the air, he also devised completely novel procedures, on the fly, for steering the plane and adjusting its altitude. By doing so, he was able to direct the plane to a nearby airport and crash land it.

The plane broke apart on impact and 112 passengers died, but another 184 survived solely because of the pilot’s brilliant maneuvers.

The conditions he faced were later programmed into a flight simulator, and several very experienced pilots, the best the airline had to offer, tried to replicate Captain Haynes incredible flying, but in 57 attempts, none of them was even able to get the plane back to the airport and onto the runway. Captain Haynes is clearly an excellent pilot, but is he a genius? Well he answered that question himself.

“I’m no genius,” he said later in an interview, “but a crisis like that sure can sharpen the mind.”

I believe he made my point better than I can.

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Fear is just a feeling

by R. L. Howser on June 12, 2010 · 2 comments

As a young man, on the first weekend of March, I found myself standing next to the icy Skykomish River in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State, shivering in nothing but a thin wetsuit, preparing to run a massive, class 5, whitewater rapid called, Boulder Drop. As is often the case when young men do foolish things, it was because of a woman.

My new girlfriend had signed up to train as a whitewater river rafting guide. Facing the prospect of her spending every weekend camping in the mountains with a bunch of drunken, and surely depraved, yahoos, I decided that I too would sign up for guide training. Yet what began as a hormone-fueled impulse turned into one of the most profound experiences of my life; one that taught me far more about myself, and incidentally about public speaking, than it did about the sport of rafting.

There is nothing quite like standing at the top of an enormous, seething, churning rapid to strip you down to the barest elements of primal fear and pride. Your brain, your entire body, is screaming, “WE’RE GONNA DIE.”  Yet to give in to the fear, to walk around the rapid under the withering gaze of the other guides, your friends and peers, is equally unthinkable. So you climb in the boat and push off.

After more than a few spectacular mishaps that always seem to end with you (me) curled around a rock at the side of the river, gasping for air, you learn not only the skills you need to safely navigate rapids with your crew, most of the time, you also learn something far more important. You learn that fear is just a feeling. It’s not real.

What we fear the most rarely happens. It usually wasn’t even very likely in the first place.

Standing in the wings of the auditorium, waiting for the announcer to call your name, or sitting in the conference room, waiting for the CEO to ask you to give your presentation, it may seem certain that you are going to fail in the most dramatic and horrifying way possible; that you’ll be laughed out of the room with your career, your reputation and your future in tatters. But that’s just a feeling. It’s not real.

But that doesn’t mean it’s useless. Instead of letting it wash over you and take control of your mind and body, you can push the fear down, squeeze it into a white-hot ball of energy deep in your gut and use it to sharpen your focus, heighten your senses and quicken your mental reflexes, as you focus entirely on what you need to do.

Whether you’re facing certain death or the Board of Directors, fear can be an ally and a friend. It can make you better than you’ve ever been.

And for that lesson, I thank you, Kimberly.

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There are no tires on a football field

by R. L. Howser on May 25, 2010 · 5 comments

I’ve just returned from competing in the Toastmasters All-Japan Speech Contest championship this past weekend in Tokushima, Shikoku, and it was a good weekend. After several past attempts fell just short, I finally brought home the gold medal.

Winning qualifies me to advance to the International Speech Contest in Palm Desert, California, this summer, where the level of competition is going to take a quantum leap up. It’s rather like winning your local Country Club golf championship and advancing from there to the Masters at Augusta National. I’m not feeling all that cocky about winning the World Championship Trophy, but it should be exciting to try, and stranger things have happened.

But beyond tooting my own horn, it occurred to me, while watching the other speakers, that a Toastmasters Speech has its own unique style. It is part performance art, part motivational appeal and part moralistic sermon. There’s no rule saying it has to be that way, but winning speeches generally contain a moral lesson or message of some sort and tend to be physically demonstrative and emotional in tone.

Some new Toastmasters I have met, mostly those coming in to learn business or sales presentation, question the value of learning such a style. It’s not directly applicable to what they need to do in business, they say.

I always counter that by pointing out that there are no tires on an American football field. Yet football players often train by running through rows of tires. It would seem a pointless exercise, training for something that will never happen in a game situation, but of course, that’s not why they do it.

They run through the tires because it trains them to stay balanced, to place their feet precisely and to lift their feet when they run. It trains them in the type of skills that ARE directly applicable to successfully running through the jumble of flying limbs and falling bodies that litter the field during the average play.

That’s what Toastmasters does too. It trains speakers to speak with power, flexibility and precision. It trains them to use their faces and bodies to reinforce their spoken message. It trains them to control or eliminate nervous mannerisms that undercut their authority. It trains them to think about what, specifically, they are trying to communicate and how they can most clearly and effectively structure the words and ideas. It trains them to be disciplined, to stay on message and not go on pointless, unproductive tangents. It trains them to stand in front of a crowd, of any size, with composure and confidence.

It trains them in precisely the skills that are directly applicable to delivering a disciplined response to a media inquiry, to presenting a scripted sales demonstration with an air of spontaneity, to explaining a complex technical problem to the suits in management or to rallying the troops in times of uncertainty.

Those are the skills that will make you stand out from the pack and put you on the fast track to the top.

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Sell me a story

by R. L. Howser on May 15, 2010 · 2 comments

“Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.”
-Margaret Thatcher

There are a lot of theories about why stories are such an effective way of communicating ideas; that they sidestep the mental critical facilities or that they trigger memories of our earliest experiences in life. Whatever the reasons, they work. Politicians, salesmen and religious leaders throughout history have used stories to effectively convey experiences, concepts, ideologies and attitudes.

But knowing that isn’t enough, if you don’t know how to tell a good story. Some people are naturally gifted storytellers, but most of us aren’t. We can, however, look to Hollywood for some clues. Most Hollywood movies are at their hearts, extremely simple stories.

Virtually every Hollywood movie begins with a problem, whether it’s “boy meets girl” or “aliens attack Earth”. The rest of the movie is simply the hero of the story trying to solve the problem of “What should I do about this?” In the end, of course, the problem is solved and everyone, except the villain, lives happily ever after.

It is the, “What should I do about this?”, that gives stories their incredible power to entertain, teach, persuade and inspire. By analogy, or direct example, we can use stories to show the audience what they should do, think, believe or feel in any given situation. And yet, because the idea is delivered in the form of a story, it isn’t examined in the same critical way it would be if we just said, “Here’s what you should do”.

A story is simply something that happened. Assuming it’s true, not an assumption we can always make, of course, the listeners then draw the implications of how that applies to their own lives out of the story. And nothing is as persuasive, compelling or inspirational as a conclusion we’ve drawn on our own.

That’s why effective politicians, salesmen and leaders of all kinds use stories to teach and persuade. It’s not just about entertaining your audience, though that is a nice side benefit. It’s about giving them a vivid experience of the solution or the path forward.

It’s about showing them the way, rather than telling them about it.

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When your visual support is TOO good

by R. L. Howser on May 9, 2010 · 0 comments

I recently saw a presentation about how culture shock affects foreign students, both on their arrival in their host country and upon their return home. The presentation was very well done. The speaker had prepared thoroughly and had clearly put a lot of effort into creating her visual aids.

Rather than using PowerPoint, she had a large paper chart of the most common pattern that many foreign students or immigrants go through. From the idyllic honeymoon phase, when everything is new and wonderful, to hating everything about the place to, finally, an acceptance of both the good and the bad of the host country, or their own.  And as a nearly twenty-year resident of Japan, a very alien culture to my own, I can say she was right on the money.

She also had lists of the symptoms of cultural dislocation and ways to mitigate the most negative aspects, also on paper. Each was well printed, in a large legible font and presented with flair and professionalism. And yet, I was disappointed.

I couldn’t help but feel that, in presenting and explaining her visual aids so well, she had missed an opportunity to really connect with her audience. Not only did the charts and their data dominate the structure of her talk, they also often pulled her attention away from the audience, as she turned to point to an item on a list or chart.

But beyond that, letting the charts and lists drive the presentation took her focus away from what should have been its heart; stories. For this was a presentation about people, about the ebb and flow of emotion. Abstract nouns, like integration and disintegration, simply couldn’t convey the feeling of being adrift in an alien land, without the touchstones and comforts of home.

How much more powerful could it have been, if she had presented naked, with no charts or lists, if she had brought nothing to the audience but stories of people, once lost and alone in a strange land, who had found their way to a rich and rewarding experience.

At the very least, stories could have been dropped into her talk to illustrate each of the points she was making far better than a chart could, without even changing the structure or content of the rest of her presentation.

For as good as her presentation was, that’s the presentation I would rather have heard. That’s the presentation that would have really hit home.

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Building an arc

by R. L. Howser on April 28, 2010 · 0 comments

In the last two posts, “Kind of Blue” and “The problems with PREP”, we talked about structuring an impromptu speech, or even a promptu speech, if there is such a thing. In either case, the arc of change is what will make your speaking efforts more powerful and compelling.

It could be a change of time, from the beginning of the company to its present circumstances, or from its current troubles to future success. It could be a change of circumstance, such as from going it alone to partnering with another firm. It could be a change of opinion, a change of policy or a change of fortune, but something has got to change.

Ideally, even in an unexpected speaking situation, you have thought through the issues beforehand. But even if you haven’t, all is not lost. There’s a quick and easy technique for structuring your thoughts that you can use when you find yourself in a tight spot. All you really need to do is throw a conjunction between two ideas, or use conjunctions to string together a chain of ideas. The most commonly useful conjunctions would be “but”, “because”, “and” and especially “so”.

If you need to give a damage assessment after a factory fire, it is simply (What happened) so (Current production status).

If the boss asks you to say a few words about the proposal you are working on, you say, “(Current situation) so (Proposal) so (Expected outcome)”, or “(Current situation) because (Cause) so (Proposal)”.

There are dozens of ways you could structure such a response, and you can put it together in your mind in just a few seconds. It’s easy to remember and flexible enough to use in almost any situation.

Whether you have weeks to organize your speech, or just a few seconds, what matters is that you are taking your audience along with you on the journey of your thoughts. They will understand not only what you said, but how you arrived at the message you are delivering; your reasons and your reservations.

This technique won’t make a bad idea better or convince someone to do something that is against their own interests, but it will give you a fighting chance to get your ideas across in a clear and logical form.

And even if you don’t convince them, not babbling like an idiot in front of your boss, your clients or your colleagues is, at the very least, a moral victory.

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