Archive for September, 2005

DON’T waste your opening. You have the highest interest at the beginning and the end of your presentation. (See the Morrissey Retention Curve.) So open strong by using these six sure-fire methods:   

1.      Start with a bang.  You want to grab people’s attention – and you are only limited by your creativity. Be unusual. Use silence, then a quote. Bring out a prop. Use a talent. Dr. Dean Ornish is a noted heart/health author and speaker whom I coached before he was going to give a major speech before 7,000 people at the Million Dollar Round Table. They expected him to talk  heart and health from his recent best seller, which he did – later. What they didn’t expect was how he grabbed their hearts in his opening by strolling out center stage with his guitar and starting in song – a funny and relevant one.

2.      Tell a story. The easiest, best and most useful speaking tool is story telling, and we don’t use it enough. It is the S of our SHARP principles to keep people involved and interested as you speak, and it is the MOST USEFUL at the opening. Tell a story of yourself, or an appropriate anecdotal story that your audience can identify with. Stories are easy to tell, will help ease the pressure you feel from the opening, and will connect to your audience. Remember that as kids we always heard stories read or told to us – they are easy to hear. And they make a point.

3.      Pause – Look – Move.  Come out to center stage, or your laptop table with your notes on it. Pause for a few seconds (2 or 3). Look at one person, then move with your eye communication towards another – and THAT’S when you begin speaking. Dramatic – a little. It will feel a lot more dramatic to you than it will to the audience. (There is a phenomenon called disparity that makes us feel much more uncomfortable than we look with new habits.) To the audience, it will just be effective. You’ll have their attention, since you began with a certainty and a confidence that is often not shown at the start. Too often we start with LBOW’s (see #5.)

4.      Be short and sweet.   Most presenters spend too much time in their openings, and run short at the close. This is another common phenomenon of thinking we might not be able to fill our time so we start slow. Then we run out at the end, when we should be rising to our climatic crescendo! Our studies have shown that rehearsal time is about 75% of the actual presentation time. Don’t waste time at the opening – or you’ll take away from your close.

5.      Be focused – be net.  Too often we open with LBOW’s that are too long, boring and don’t take us anywhere but do use up time. (LBOW is an acronym we use at Decker Communications for Lovely Bunch Of Words – sounds like they should mean something but they are really bland nothings, going nowhere.) Be brief in your openings. Get right into it. Remember your retention curve is highest at the beginning, so you want to use it well. Move your listeners right into a main point – or a surprising benefit.

6.      Think intrigue and interest.   Then use it. There are hundreds, actually thousands, of creative ways to open your talks, speeches and presentations. Usually I will start my presentation by doing the absolutely wrong thing – reading a speech. I walk out on stage with what looks like a written text, plop it on the lectern, grab on to the sides, look down and begin reading in a monotone. And here is a supposed speech expert who is immediately boring with monotone voice and no eye contact – bad! For only about 30 seconds though, as the energy plummets so quickly I then raise my voice, step out behind the lectern, look at people with good eye contact and rip up the speech. Usually I get a round of applause, as people are so relieved to get a speaker, not a reader. Now I’ve used this opening many times as I know it makes several points that are relevant to my speech, and it works. But I’ll never forget the first time I tried it when I was scared to death – at a speech years ago for Equitec in the Berkeley Marina Hotel. But if I hadn’t thought intrigue and interest – it wouldn’t have happened. As Emerson said, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”

You worked very hard preparing that important speech. It would be a shame to put it in your “Past Speeches” file and forget about it once you’ve delivered it. Your audience was impressed by your presentation, and so might hundreds and hundreds of others be. You can get a lot more mileage out of that speech simply by committing it to paper and revising it for publication.

For example, let’s say you spoke to the International Widget Manufacturers Association about the serious shortage of widgets and what can be done to solve the problem. Chances are several industry publications would be interested in running an article by you. And if you think a formal publication is too daunting for your debut – blog it! Create your own blog, or take a guest spot on an existing blog.

Getting published not only boosts your visibility and credibility within your company and industry-at-large, it can also get you more speaking engagements – and often more editorial assignments. Who knows, maybe you’ll even write a best seller!

This post originally appeared as a Guest Blog in Thom Singer’s http://thomsinger.blogspot.com/ so I thought it only appropriate to feature it here. It is over 20 years experience of key principles compressed into a single "post":

Five Key Principles to Great Communicating

1. The Spoken Word is More Powerful than the Written Word.

            To all you writers (and readers) out there, this might seem heresy – but hold on. The written word is GREAT for information. People can read five times faster than they you can speak. The written word is great for reference. And we are taught the written word, and how to write. But it isn’t the most powerful medium if you want to create action.

            The power is in the spoken word – in our voice and eyes and movement. We involve all the senses, and our very powerful unconscious brain in our messages. We are the message. In speaking you can reach the emotions more immediately and more forcefully. You can reach The First Brain in speaking, not as easily in reading. (See “Blink” and “You’ve Got To Be Believed To Be Heard.”

            Imagine being moved and inspired by Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Got A Dream” speech, or John F. Kennedy’s “We’ll put a man on the moon” speech. Being filled with the sounds and words and energy. Then imagine reading the words by themselves. Their words alone would not vibrate in our memories.

2. Always Have a Point Of View. Always.

            No more rambling data dumps if you want impact in your business presentations. I’ve seen and heard thousands of speeches, messages and presentations, and I’d guess about 80% of them do not have a focus. It should be the first thing.

            Anytime you are speaking, including on the phone or even sending an email, ask yourself, “What’s the point?” What’s The Big Idea. Why is it important for someone to listen to you. If anyone can be listening to you and say, “So what?” – you do not have a strong Point Of View.

            We have a preparation “triangle” we teach people who want to be influential, and it sets three keys:

• What’s my point!
• What action do I want people to take!
• What’s the benefit in it for them!

If you will just set those points even before you start creating your arguments and telling your stories, you will have the great benefit of always being on target.

3. Communication Rides Energy

            When you are speaking, think of yourself as a horse, and your message is riding to the destination of influence. Or if you want another metaphor – you are the computer, and your message is the software that delivers those folders and files. If you have a clunky old computer with weak chips, it doesn’t matter how great your files are – they won’t get there very fast.

            There are what I call the Behavioral Big Six – habits of our voice and body that have nothing to do with the content we speak, but everything to do with the impact that we have. There are subtleties and nuances of each, and it is worth finding out your ‘energy’ habits through feedback in these areas:

• Eye Communication – the most important, at least five (5) seconds
• Posture and Movement – move, don’t stand behind lecterns
• Dress and Appearance – “thin slicing” or the first three seconds
• Gestures and the Smile – animation reflects our enthusiasm and passion
• Voice and Vocal Variety – beware the monotone voice
• Pausing – rid of non-words and the Power of the Pause

4. Visual Impact Dominates Personal Impact

            We often give inconsistent messages. When we do, the visual is what is believed, not the sound of the voice, or even the content. Professor Albert Mehrabian’s classic study showed this in what people trusted in these three areas when there were inconstancies:

            Verbal:              7%

            Vocal:             38%

            Visual:            55%

            And why not. We are overwhelmingly visually dominant. The nerve pathways from the eyes to the brain are 25 times larger than the next biggest – the auditory. There’s much more here – suffice it to say this is why video feedback is so dramatically powerful. Observed behavior changes.

5. Authenticity Is the Core of Communicating

            Speaking effectively is a learned skill, it is not a born talent. We are all born with certain capabilities, just like some athletes are born faster, taller, stronger, etc. But the great athletes are those that are coached and practice. They learn – by getting out of their own way.

Speaking and communicating well is not a slick thing. But it is learned. The process is much like peeling the onion. All we have to do is get out of our own way – remove barriers between ourselves and our audiences.

            The problem is fear often blocks us. Or thinking that speaking is just a different form of writing, and that if I say the words people will ‘get’ them. Not so. Speaking is as much a behavioral process as an intellectual process. We need to be enthused and passionate about our subject. We need to be authentic.

For more details and information, see www.DeckerCommunications.com

In today’s market controlled by employers, it’s critical to be efficient and effective in our hiring process. With an abundance of resumes filling our inboxes, many companies begin the hiring process with a telephone screening. Certainly we probe for content – the verbal – but we must also carefully tune in to the vocal. So, what do you look for?

Look for the Big Five Voice Giveaways:

1. Articulation and Enunciation – can you understand him?

2. Pitch – is she comfortable to listen to?

3. Conceptualization – can he express concepts rather than information only?

4. Use of Language – does she select the appropriate words and phrases (specific to your industry, the customers you serve and the open position)?

5. Involvement – can he build rapport and connect on a personal level?

You should also listen for energy, appropriate enthusiasm and an ability to follow and guide the conversation. Do they listen well? Are they believable and persuasive?

If all goes well, you’ll likely meet them in person…where the visual evaluation begins! Then, shift your focus to assess eye communication, posture, gestures and expression. More on that later…

Jot these simple concepts down in your memory storehouse, to energize your next presentation:

You want your audience to be:

1. Curious      

2. Convinced

3. Committed

• Step one, get them curious with your opening.  Use a story, a quote, or a metaphor. Ask them a question.
• Step two, convince them in the body of your talk with lots of examples, facts and figures, case histories. Be visual.
• Step three, involve them in emotional commitment for your conclusion. Be sure to include an action step in your conclusion. (People tend to let people off the hook in giving a presentation – we don’t tend to ‘close’ them. Remember that your presentation is a selling proposition – to get people to buy into your ideas.) Get them to understand the need for a specific action on their emotional level and then tell them how to take action.

Do the Three C’s, and you will have a confidence and certainty in how you speak, and closure when you are finished!