Clients often come to me with specific issues around speaking in public. Whether you want to own the room like Oprah or be calmer like Michelle Obama, I’ve included some key issues that come up time and time again, such as being interrupted and learning to give feedback. Remember, these skills aren’t just for work situations, they are key in your personal life too.
This advice will show you how to make maximum impact with what you’re saying and how to communicate clearly and gracefully.
It’s rude to interrupt, right? That’s what was drummed into us from an early age. And although it can be rude, it may also, at times, be necessary.
If you’re concerned you won’t get your chance to speak, or if you’re aware that what the speaker is saying isn’t as valuable as what you have to say, chip in when the speaker pauses to take a breath. Don’t qualify what you’re saying with ‘sorry’, ‘maybe’, ‘just’ or ‘I could be wrong but’. This language will project an image of self-doubt and you don’t want that. You might find it useful to start what you say with one of these phrases:
No one will ever forget the moment Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech was interrupted by Kanye West at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. He even took her microphone out of her hands. Would he have done that if she was male? The science backs up what many women report: people interrupt women more than they do other men.1
Kieran Snyder, an empirical linguist, conducted an observational study in her workplace at a tech company.2 She observed 900 minutes of meetings and found men were three times more likely to interrupt women than they were other men. Even women were more likely to interrupt women than men, accounting for 85 per cent of their interruptions. The results may in part be due to the fact that people with more power are more likely to interrupt (and men tend to hold more positions of power). The fact remains, being stopped mid-flow is more likely if you’re a woman, and it can be confidence crushing. It can also be frustrating, especially when you have something important to say or you’re trying to make your mark.
You do have options for avoiding being interrupted. You can just carry on speaking over the interrupter, possibly getting louder. You can say to them ‘I’d like to finish what I was saying’ or ‘one moment’ (perhaps while holding up a finger) before finishing your point. The feminist journalist Helen Lewis, author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 9 Fights, told me: ‘[Sometimes it’s about] just plowing on and refusing the interruption. Or stating what you want to say again. If you are being interrupted a lot in an aggressive way there is a great power in noticing it and saying, “Can I just get to the end of this sentence please?”.’
In 2016, the Washington Post reported that female staff working in the dog-eat-dog atmosphere of the White House had come up with a strategy called ‘amplification’ to support each other in meetings.3 This involved women repeating each other’s points, each time giving the original speaker the credit for their idea. This is something we can all do too; support the key points other women make, making sure everyone is aware of where the good ideas have come from.
You can send a signal to others using confident body language that you’re not to be interrupted. Stand or sit up straight, turn your body towards the person who’s speaking, keep your arms open instead of crossed and make eye contact. Make sure your hands are visible as hiding them under the table or behind your back can make you look nervous or uncomfortable. You can either gesture or rest them on the table. Evidence also suggests that both smiling and leaning back when at a boardroom table could increase your chances of being interrupted.4 So be sure to lean in.
Those of us who grew up with a lot of Sweet Valley High and Home and Away – or any American or Aussie TV series – may have adopted this habit of raising the pitch of our voices at the end of a sentence. But did you know that it undermines the confidence others have in us? ‘Upspeak’ aka ‘Going up? At the end of a sentence?’ makes every sentence you say sound like a question and can, therefore, make you sound less credible, as if you’re second-guessing yourself. And it’s a speaking tic that’s most commonly heard amongst young women. While I’m not suggesting you should change your voice or put on a fake voice, it’s good to be aware if you tend to upspeak, so that in important situations you can speak with more assurance.
Or ‘Kardashian-speak’, as I like to call it. You’ll know it when you hear it; it’s when we drop our voices very low and the words sound drawn-out and creaky, as though they’re coming from the back of the throat. A study of young women found that vocal fry made them appear less competent and hirable.5 Yes, you might have caught vocal fry from OD’ing on KUWTK (no judgement here!) but you can change. If you suspect you’re doing it, record a clip of yourself speaking and listen back to it. And if you are, Allison Shapira, CEO of Global Public Speaking LLC, says here’s how to stop: take a deep breath, then speak on the out breath, letting the breath carry your voice.6 So, the next time you introduce yourself, do as Allison says: ‘Imagine speaking on the breath so that you support the words and don’t let them drop into your throat.’ The result will be a louder, more resonant and more self-assured and powerful sound.
Giving feedback can be incredibly tough. We don’t want to offend people, we want them to like us. We may be afraid of their reaction if they don’t take our criticism well. It may feel more comfortable to keep quiet and put up with whatever is going on.
However, have you considered that keeping quiet could actually be doing the other person a disservice? If they’re unaware of what they’re doing wrong, how can they improve? If you end up breaking up with a friend because there’s something they keep doing but you don’t have the courage to tell them about, you’ll leave them wondering what happened, perhaps going on to repeat it in the future. It’s easy to get into the habit of speaking badly about people behind their backs, instead of telling them the truth to their face. But you don’t have to risk your relationship by speaking out.
Examples might be:
There are kind, constructive ways to give feedback that will meet your needs and give the other person the opportunity to learn and grow.
Coaching is all about asking the right questions and, in doing so, promoting the other person’s awareness and sense of responsibility so they want to make the change needed. This sort of feedback works best in the workplace, when you are managing someone else.
In the classic coaching book Coaching for Performance, Sir John Whitmore suggests questions that will promote awareness and responsibility in the other person. Examples might be:
If you get stuck, remember you can ask for help and advice from someone higher up than you at work, or ask to go on a training course.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
So you made a mistake or you didn’t do the right thing? As human beings, we have a tendency to generalize and catastrophize, but just because you did one thing wrong, it doesn’t mean you as a person are a complete disaster (although if you’re anything like me, I know your mind has been there). One mistake doesn’t define you. Neither does the fact you may not have picked up a skill you need at work, or there’s one you need to improve.
Tara Mohr, author and coach, says, ‘Look at praise and criticism as information about the people giving it.’ It’s about their likes and dislikes, their preferences and their experience of the world. And as I said before, it’s OK not to be liked by everyone. If it’s at work, the purpose is to get better. If it’s a personal relationship, the purpose should be to improve that relationship. Either way, there’s a good reason behind it.
Receiving a lot of criticism as a child can lead to shame or to the child growing up being overly self-critical because we didn’t have the ability to rationalize it then. This is true for Kayla, twenty-eight. ‘My dad was extremely critical of me growing up, about everything from my school performance, my choice in friends, my preferences and opinions to the way I walked. So as an adult, I’m super sensitive to criticism and, unless it’s delivered in an obviously gentle way, I am easily hurt and upset. But I’m working on this.’
What Kayla is learning as an adult, and you can too, is that when criticism is constructive, it can be useful.
Any criticism can be painful and hard to hear but the good news is, the more you receive, the easier it gets. You grow a thicker skin. And as you learn you can handle it, your resilience increases.
Allow yourself to really hear what the other person is saying. Author and teacher Byron Katie asks us to question ourselves: ‘Can I go there?’ What she means is, can you go to the place where that criticism is true and see where the other person is coming from? Can you go to the place where you are lazy, disorganized or selfish, and see it from their perspective? Being able to see the other person’s point of view and having acceptance of ourselves for our faults, allows us to relax into the criticism more easily. It may still hurt, but if we find that we can hold on, hear the other person out without getting defensive, we give ourselves the best chance of being able to use the information constructively.
When we feel under attack, it’s a natural human response to go into defensive mode. When we react emotionally or when we’re afraid, blood flow goes towards the emotional, fear centre of the brain, the amygdala, and away from the frontal cortex, the rational part. We can’t think clearly. That’s when you find yourself scrambling for an excuse, shutting down or going into counter-attack. At this point, it’s important to breathe deeply and wait for as long as it takes to get calm, before you respond. When a critical email hits your inbox, wait an hour before replying, to give yourself some time to think things through. Remember, you are not perfect. No one is. You’re human. Every human being makes mistakes or needs to improve in some way.
Before you accept a criticism or dismiss it, ask yourself, ‘How is this helpful?’ Think: what is the useful information here? A negative comment on what you’re wearing at work might mean you do need to smarten up your act. But when someone makes the same comment on your Instagram, you can likely ignore it. If a comment does contain helpful information, ask yourself: how can I use this to up my game? It might even be worth asking the other person for more specifics of what and how you could do better.
Remember it may have been a challenge and an act of courage for the other person to offer their feedback. So ‘thank you’ is almost always the best response. Feedback can be a gift. Be grateful for criticism if its intention is to help you. Think of it as a brilliant resource to help you to get better. If you want to become great at something, you won’t get there without feedback.
Even if the criticism comes from some illogical person trolling you online and you intend to ignore the ‘feedback’, thanking them is still the best way to go (nothing will irritate them more).
This can also be part of doing the work to own your shadow, like we did in Chapter 22 ‘Owning your shit’. When you do this, negative feedback won’t surprise you, because you’ll already have explored and accepted those parts of yourself.
Yes, it may hurt. But the feedback (if it’s constructive) is about what you did, not who you are as a person. You are multifaceted and complex, and you cannot be judged or defined by someone else. Be gentle with yourself.
It’s easy to walk out of a meeting feeling crestfallen at negative feedback, even if it was only 5 per cent of the total feedback, and the rest was encouraging. Because of ‘negativity bias’, our natural tendency as humans is to remember the criticism and discard the praise (it’s all about survival, remember). So make a conscious effort to note down and reinforce any positive feedback. Create a ‘praise list’ of your good points and review it often to reinforce the fact that any criticism doesn’t define you. Write down all the compliments you’ve received, good feedback, successes, things you’re proud of and challenges you have overcome, and add to it every week, reviewing it each time.
★ If you get interrupted, saying ‘one moment’ or just continuing to speak can help you to finish what you were saying.
★ Going down, instead of up, at the end of a sentence can help you to sound more credible.
★ Saying ‘thank you’ to criticism is always the way to go. Ask yourself how you can use criticism to help you.