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Passion

Although developing proper eye-contact technique and learning how and when to pause are absolutely essential to acquiring “The Skills” - you’re not finished yet. The last element involves adding the emotional to the mechanical. What we’re referring to here is the element that works to lock in your audience once you’ve successfully engaged them with your eye-contact and person-to-person approach. What we’re talking about is passion.

The truth is, you can break almost all the ‘rules’ about proper delivery if, in the end, you deliver your message with true passion. There are even some great speakers out there whom you’ll notice will occasionally break some of the rules, but they get away it because they wrap you up so tightly in their passion that you don’t notice.

With the easy availability of information today, there are many people who know a great deal. But knowledge matters very little if you can’t convey what you know with a level of passion that drives people to sit up and listen.

After all, it’s not likely that anybody in the audience is going to care more about your topic than you do, so to ensure that audiences come away interested and motivated to learn more, it’s incumbent upon you, the speaker, to stretch to the point of almost going over the top with passion and enthusiasm for their topic.

So how exactly do you convey passion?

Gestures

One way to let your audience know how you feel is to demonstrate it physically. In our on-site classes we have a lot of fun with the gestures module. What you need to know about gestures is that in keeping with Rule #2, when you incorporate meaningful body movement into your presentation, it provides a win-win for all.

The presenter wins, because every time you move the muscles in your upper body it burns some of the excess energy running through your body. In a modern world one-against-many environment, it’s not healthy for your career or your freedom if you choose to either fight your audience or flee the scene. So what do you do with that excess energy? You move your arms and hands in concert with the words coming out your mouth. You paint pictures of the words or the action you’re describing. We say in concert because, unfortunately, most of the body motions we see presenters use tend to distract from the message rather than add to it:

If you’re not guilty of any of the above, you probably err on the other side - in fact, most people don’t gesture at all. Or their gestures are so reserved that they fail to either burn off energy or signal enthusiasm. What you want to do is put enough energy into your gestures that you both burn calories and let the audiences know that you care enough about your topic to actually get physical about it.

So far, we’ve talked a lot about what not to do. Now its time to examine (and practice) the type of physical skills that will project your professionalism. As easy as it is to define distracting gestures and nuances, it is also fairly easy to adopt the practices that can define you as a professional presenter. In this lesson, we’ll work on the basics of maximizing your impact on the audience.

The first thing is to adopt a stance that both appears balanced and also allows you to keep from needing or wanting to rock or pace back and forth.

The Neutral Position

Then, figure out exactly what you are going to do with your hands and learn to gesture from the shoulders, not the elbows. Use your hands to describe and emphasize. Drop your hands down gently to your side (known as the neutral position) when you’re starting your speech or when you’re finished gesturing.

When you gesture from the neutral position, your gestures become more emphatic. If everything comes from the middle magnet position it looks like you are stuck in a phone booth. Dropping your hands down to your side is of course extremely difficult to do. With most people the hands immediately come back together like magnets or start grabbing things like clothing, various body parts like your face, or they jump back into your pockets.

So when you’re talking about an increase in sales, show us your hand up in the air. To demonstrate lowering costs, extend your other hand down below it. And here you might mention that the space in between represents profit, which is a good thing, because that’s where profit sharing comes from!

Studies have shown that gesturing lightens the cognitive load while speaking and actually helps you think. This may be why its not unusal to watch someone become very physically animated while talking on the phone, even though the person on the other end can’t see them.

For maximum impact, then, balance your stance, feet shoulder width apart. You want to use your hands, but you want to use them appropriately. You want to use them in a way that helps to further your message. And then you want to increase your volume, increase your inflection as much as possible to show how strongly you believe in the words you have to say.

Passion is the driver.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

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The process that sets you on your way to speaking like the best speakers in the world, speakers who possess The Skills, goes like this: You find a target in your audience and you lock eyeballs. You deliver a complete thought to that one person, and then you do the hardest part, you pause. You pause before turning to the next person, and speak to the next person with your next thought.

Here’s a tip to begin the whole process correctly: Whenever you get up to speak, before you ever get out of your chair to come to the front of the room, know which person with whom you’re going to begin speaking. Have that person picked out before you get up there. Otherwise, you’re going to start off on the wrong foot: you’re going to start scanning around for those “friendly faces”. Choose the person you’re going to deliver your opening line to ahead of time, and begin your talk by looking at that one person and letting it flow.

Let’s be clear - one thing you definitely don’t want to do is to look for and speak to only a few “friendly faces”. That might be advice that works well for the few faces, but what about all the other less than friendly mugs? How do you suppose they feel when they notice that you are engaging other people but not them? Do you suppose it might get them thinking about something other than your message? Do you want a few people buying into what you’re saying, or the whole group? Your job, remember, is to look at everyone in the audience. Everyone in the room needs to leave feeling that you took the time to personally engage them as individuals.

If you’ve been to a speech or a presentation by someone with The Skills, you have no doubt noticed that they did this. In fact, have you ever been to a large event with perhaps hundreds of people and come away feeling that throughout the program the speaker kept coming back to you? That for some reason the speaker picked you out personally for special notice, and repeatedly?

This is perhaps the most powerful advantage you will have with The Skills, but it’s also the easiest to acquire, because it happens all by itself! One great thing about The Skills is that they are infinitely scalable. That is, the larger the crowd, the better they work for you, but you don’t work any harder. You engage in exactly the same behaviors with twelve people as you do with twelve hundred!

Parallax Universe

The reason is this: thanks to the ways our eyes are built, from distances as short as ten feet, a phenomenon known as parallax kicks in, and for the very same reason we see railroad tracks converge in the distance, our eyes see the other person’s eyes converging on ours even when they might be pointed a few feet away. Speakers with The Skills are always only looking directly at one person at a time. But from a short distance, and increasingly with greater distance, people sitting around the person to whom the speaker is actually looking believe the speaker is looking directly at them.

So from, say, fifteen feet away, the four people around the one person you’re looking at will feel the benefits of your engaging them as individuals. From thirty feet, twelve people around your target will swear you’ve singled them out for attention! Your circle of influence keeps getting larger and larger, but you’re just doing the exact same thing you’d do in a small conference room. In our classes we enjoy asking the women if they’ve ever been to a concert where the singer sang directly to them, and we inevitably get at least one response of, “Yes, but how did you know?”

Rock stars know how to create and keep fans, and this skill is a big tool in their box.When you lock on one person, everything else kind of fades away. You focus all of your attention on that one person and nothing else. For the moment, your entire universe is composed of the one person to whom you are directing your one thought. And when you do that, for those three to nine seconds or so, your brain isn’t making new threat calculations all the time, trying to get you cranked up, cranked up, cranked up. Everything kind of fades away.

Advantages

Just as when you work from a nice, clean desk, or as when you’re given just one task to do, and that’s all you have to do, by talking to only one person at a time, it creates a nice, strong point of focus. All of your attention can be given just to this one moment, so that nothing else that’s going on affects your brain. Focusing on one person creates an environment that helps you focus on one thought - the thought that you’re delivering to that one person.

You’re also able to pace yourself. When you learn how to pause, when you learn how to say what you have to say and then stop talking for a moment, move on to the next person and only then begin speaking to them, it helps to create a smooth pace that the audience can follow, and also one that doesn’t foul you up.

One of the problems people have when they get up to speak is that, with adrenaline in your veins, your metabolism is elevated. Consequently, your perception of time slows down. You thus tend to speak much more quickly when you’re up in front of a group, when our juices are all flowing high. And unfortunately, with your somewhat diminished cognitive ability it’s not impossible for your mouth to overrun your brain. You know, you can push the words out so fast that your brain is not be able to replenish the queue quickly enough. And so you do end up finding yourself with nothing to say.

When you find yourself with nothing to say, that can be quite an anxiety-producing situation. It starts cranking up the whole fear juice thing again. The more you get cranked up, the more time slows down. That’s one of the reasons most people don’t pause. In your slow-motion state, you feel your pauses to be much longer than the length of the pauses your audience hears. But when you’ve been speaking on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, and then all of a sudden, you just stop, the pause then becomes very, shall we say, pregnant.

By working pauses into your speech from the very beginning, you’re able to establish a pace that seems natural to the audience, and will actually mask any moment when you might not be able to think of what to say.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

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In order to present at the top, in order to acquire The Skills, you must remember three rules that govern everything you do whilst presenting. They’re really quite simple, but sometimes it’s easy to forget the simple things, and these rules must remain in the forefront of your consciousness at all times.

Rule Number 1 states: If you’re working too hard, you’re doing it wrong!

Rule #2: When you’re doing it right, it’s always Win-Win.

The sad truth is, typical speaker behaviors more often fall into the category of Lose-Lose. Whether it be the way the speaker engages the audience with his eyes, or what she does with her hands, or the pace with which either cranks out the word stream, most things that speakers do work both against their feeling comfortable and the audience’s ability to follow and buy into what is being said.

For instance, think about what you see presenters do with their arms and hands. Instead of using the opportunity to throw off excess energy by using the full swing of their arms and hands to paint pictures of the words they are saying, your average speaker locks them up in some position that not only keeps the excess energy trapped in a re-circulating loop, but in a position that translates to a body-language signal that is off-putting to the audience.

Luckily, as is the case with the other counter-productive behaviors in which speakers engage, these can all be changed simply by engaging in other, learnable behaviors that produce positive outcomes. You don’t need talent to do it right, you simply need to know how to do it right, and then practice those physical behaviors.

When you employ the behaviors that comprise The Skills, not only are you more relaxed, authoritative and convincing, but your audience has a much easier time hearing, seeing, and ultimately agreeing with the message you are trying to impart.

One thing to remember is that audiences, as Yale’s Professor Edward Tufte likes to point out, “are lazy, and audiences are fragile”. You can’t ask audiences to work in order to get your message because they won’t. And you can’t make them feel uncomfortable because they’ll spend their small amount of energy trying to get comfortable and won’t have anything left to spend on trying to comprehend your point.

Proper eye-contact, gesturing, tone, inflection and volume all work to make for a great experience for both speaker and listeners alike. When you’re using The Skills, it’s always a Win-Win.

Rule #3: People only START listening when you STOP talking.

This is an easy concept to understand, but a very difficult one for most people to implement. If you stop to think about it, you don’t so much hear what is being said as you do to what was just said.

In fact, the left hemisphere of your brain, where speech and text are processed, is programmed to not absorb information immediately, but rather put it through a process of analysis before storing or acting on it. It’s a momentary process to be sure, but nonetheless one that is immensely aided when a moment or two of silence follows the words or phrase that the speaker wants his audience to really hear and comprehend.

Think for a moment of what happens when someone tells a joke. Jokes are structured to get the listener thinking that the action in the setup will proceed along the expected path, and the humor comes when the listener realizes that the punch-line has altered that path in an unexpected way. But you don’t laugh at the moment the punch-line is delivered. You laugh only when you realize your line of thought has been diverted, and that always takes a moment, or sometimes, if the joke is really good, two. You only hear what was actually said when the joker stops talking and your mind has the opportunity to recognize the misdirection.

Of course, what most speakers do is continue with an endless stream of verbiage from the moment they open their mouths until they discover that the talk is over and they can (Thank God!) take their seats again. Once people start talking in front of a group it is very difficult to get them to stop, as it goes against what they’ve taught themselves to believe: that as long as they continue to hear words coming out of their mouths they’re still OK. A very common fear is that somehow that stream will stop and they won’t be able to get it started again. But why is this so?

A stitch in time

Because of the physiological changes that occur in the body when you are facing an audience, your perception of time actually s-l-o-w-s d-o-w-n. The universe doesn’t change - just how you perceive it. So although the audience is listening to you in real time, you perceive even a momentary lapse in your word-stream to be much longer that it actually is. A 1-second pause for the audience might feel like 3 or 4 to you.

This is where umm’s and ahh’s are born. We hear that dreaded silence, and in a desperate need to fill it immediately, we grab for the closest thing - a non-word that we don’t have to structure into our word track.

It might be hard to believe, but time goes by quite nicely even when it’s not filled with your words.

As you develop your eye and an ear for The Skills, you will come to see that ALL great speakers not only know Rule #3, but also embrace it. They not only embrace it, it is at the forefront of their thinking whenever they are speaking. It is the Number 1 issue on their minds. And that says a lot, because Rule #1 says that we can’t be thinking about too many things at once.

Being able to resist saying the next thing on your mind immediately after you offer your last thought is the most difficult idea for participants to learn, but it is an absolutely essential.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

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People who get paid well to speak all share one of two traits: either they’re famous, or they own “The Skills”. To be able to move people who don’t know you as a celebrity of some sort, you must know how to keep your audience focused on you and your message, and how to keep them on the same page, on the same wavelength, every step of the way.

Keeping an audience with you is simply not possible with the way 99% of all public speakers behave when at the front of a group. When you speak the way most of us have been taught to do from an early age, you engage in behaviors that send the wrong signals to your audience - in many cases exactly the opposite of what you would like to signal. Worse, these standard behaviors actually reduce your cognitive capacity at the time you most desperately need it.

If these statements seem sweeping, please understand that we at PublicSpeakingSkills.com have been training people from business, politics, the military and the clergy for over 12 years in The Skills.

During that time, we have had the privilege to work with over 10,000 people from all walks of life, and here is what we have learned: 99% of speakers engage in exactly the same behaviors, and consequently produce similar results when it comes to the quality of their speaking.

In fact, in every one of our on-site programs, we begin with an exercise that “benchmarks” how each student speaks prior to training, and we are able to predict to the second what each and every participant will do during their initial delivery. To the second!

Good News!

But that’s the good news. It’s good news because we also know that most people speak the way they do simply because they’ve never been shown the proper way. And though many people take courses in public speaking in high school or college, the format of those courses tends to emphasize the content part of speaking rather than the actual physical behaviors one needs to understand in order to acquire The Skills.

If you have ever taken a course in school, we bet that your assignments were to create a series of different types of speeches: The Informative, The Inspirational, The Motivational, etc., etc. Sound familiar?

But what were you taught about the actual delivery, other than to look at everyone in the audience and watch your umms and ahhs? Worse, during your speaking career you probably have been receiving positive feedback for your behaviors no matter what you’ve been doing by people either too polite or simply not knowledgeable enough to tell you otherwise.

Speaking well: talent or training?

When people learn the proper way; when they understand what the audience expects of them as human beings; when they embrace the idea that it’s OK to go into a presentation without having spent hours and hours rehearsing it; when they become comfortable with not knowing what they’re going to say until just before they say it; and when they come to accept that often the most powerful thing they can say is nothing at all, they never engage in the old behaviors again.

They approach every opportunity to speak to a crowd with desire and enthusiasm, and the larger the crowd, the better. They actually see speaking to a group as one of the most relaxing things they can do, as it is one of the few times left in life where they are free to do only one thing at a time. These people have The Skills.

And we can’t emphasize enough that The Skills are, indeed, a set of behaviors that you learn, and not something that you are born with. Only a very small subset of people is ‘born’ with the ability to move a group to action with their words and actions. Those people have what the rest of us don’t: it’s called “charisma”. Charismatics have been known to lead thousands to action by the power of their spoken words, often for good, and sometimes not.

But charisma alone didn’t get Bill Clinton to the top job in the world. Bill Clinton, believe it or not, was not always a great speaker. What he had was both charisma and the brains to know that he did not know everything - and that becoming a great speaker was both an essential job requirement and something that someone could be taught.

Bill Clinton was one of only a handful of men who was elected president of the United States without great personal or family wealth. He got elected on his ability to motivate people to listen to him, work for him, follow him and support him all the way. He was successful because he didn’t simply speak; he spoke with a manner and a style that caused people to not only listen to his words but also to hear them, remember them, and to believe them. Bill Clinton has The Skills.

The Skills supersede genes, culture, background, heritage, and to a large extent even education. Many clients come to us because they want help with their accents or they feel their voice needs correcting in some way.

Although we grant that there are some people with a speaking voice better suited to silent films, for the vast majority an accent or unique pitch only adds to the level of interest they can create as a speaker. That’s because, as we’ll learn, these traits simply add to one’s “humanness”.

It’s about being you

People are not moved by messages delivered by speakers whom they don’t feel are “real”. And yet most of us were taught behaviors that cause us to adopt completely alien personas when we speak to groups. We try to become “Presenterman!” or “Presenterwoman!”. Sadly, Hillary Clinton does this. Could you imagine spending dinner across the table from Hillary Clinton and having her speak to you the way she does to crowds? Pretty painful thought! Yet you could pretty much imagine that if you were sharing dinner with Bill, or Ronald Reagan, the conversation would be not unlike how you know them to speak in public.

Alas, Hillary does not have The Skills.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

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An Inconvenient Speaker

We have made the claim many times that Bill Clinton is the Master of the Pause. In fact, we have said that it is exactly this mastery that causes more people in polls to name the former president as the greatest living public speaker hands down.

If you doubt Bill Clinton’s ability to embrace the pause might have been responsible for his being elected, it might be useful to look at the other side. A great example of somebody who didn’t until recently have a clue about the pause is Al Gore. Do you think of Al Gore as being a great speaker? Do you think there might be a relationship between his speaking ability and the fact that couldn’t maintain the Clinton dynasty even four more years?

Now before we are accused of being anti-Gore, understand that one of the worst places to go seeking great speakers is your local, state, or federal government. Most politicians’ egos are greater than their intellectual capacity, and many simply won’t take anybody’s advice, period. So we end up having to endure the insincere-sounding shrill of a Hilary Clinton or the mind-numbing drone of a John Kerry.

But back to Gore: When Al Gore delivered his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination at the 2000 Democratic convention, he had a 30 point Program for America that he thought was very important to get out. He had 30 points and 45 minutes in which to deliver them.

What happened was that during the first 20 minutes of his speech, people in the audience would hear things that they liked and, quite naturally, applaud. At least they tried to applaud. But instead of pausing and bathing in the glow for a moment or two, Al would hold up his hands to silence them and just kept on speaking. This went on for 25 minutes - although they would applaud, he wouldn’t stop speaking.

After a while, the audience started to become uncomfortable, because they were applauding over him. The applause then became more sporadic, and eventually stopped altogether. And so for the last 20 minutes of the speech, he continued to speak, and nobody applauded at all. He just spoke for 20 minutes straight. Not a single break.

We think if you were to have given a pop quiz to the audience and ask them how many of those 30 points for America they could remember, it probably would be no more than three, if any. Al thought it was all about the content, without consideration for the audience’s ability to take it all in.

Years later, prior to filming An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore sought and received professional presentation skills training, and he has a somewhat better grasp on the process that when he ran for president in 2000. In fact, in a May 2007 article in The New York Times Magazine, Gore was asked if he had any regrets about how he ran the campaign.

The reporter was hoping to get him to say something related to the legal process, but instead Gore replied, “If I had had the presentation skills I’ve since learned, I think I’d be in my second term as president”.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

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