I love being a professional speaker.
Onstage, in front of hundreds or thousands of people, I experience what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes as flow. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing. Time disappears, and I experience a sense of effortlessness, joy, and oneness with the audience. (Even though time disappears, I still monitor the clock because it’s always important to start and finish on schedule.)
Growing up in a highly verbal Jewish Italian family, where it seemed that everyone was always speaking at the same time, I learned to put my views forward assertively. The Passaic High School senior class of 1970 voted me Class Arguer. And in 1972 my younger brother Ken received the same recognition.
Being a professional speaker has always seemed almost too good to be true. People applaud when I’m introduced. They listen intently. They applaud again, and sometimes they stand and cheer, when I take the final bow. They usually ask polite and thoughtful questions, and then they give me a big check!
I’ve delivered thousands of paid presentations. The shortest was an eight-minute keynote at a huge corporate product launch (that was the most money I ever made per minute), and the longest was a three-week residential leadership retreat for investment bankers. I’ve presented to diverse audiences in more than thirty countries to groups as large as ten thousand. I love groups of all sizes. Smaller audiences allow for more direct interpersonal connection, while bigger ones generate higher energy.
Over the years, I’ve experienced many of the vicissitudes of the profession. My presentations have been interrupted by power failures, fire alarms, and heart attacks (not mine). I’ve presented within a week of major knee surgery and once with a fever of 102. I’ve never missed a paid engagement or been late. Once, after a delay caused by a flight cancellation, I flew all night from London to Cape Town, South Africa, arriving at 9:00 AM for an 11:00 AM keynote to eight hundred biochemists, and then I caught a 3:00 PM flight to Athens for a presentation to company presidents the next day. I’ve arrived to give a keynote on the same day that my client’s companies announced unprecedented massive layoffs and plant closures. I’ve had my allotted time reduced by more than half, with less than five minutes’ notice, on many occasions because of one client emergency or another. And I regularly address people who have been sent by their bosses and who are often unhappy about being ordered to attend.
Through all the ups and downs I continue to study how to connect with and provide maximum value for every group by communicating the ideas and methods that I believe will help them be more creative, innovative, and effective.
The focus here is to help you learn, in a natural, authentic, and enjoyable way, how to be clear and present when you’re in front of a group or addressing them online. In the process you’ll learn how to be more creative, innovative, and effective in all your communication, formal and informal, professional and personal.
Let’s begin by considering a transformational secret of master public speakers. What do the pros know that most people don’t?
What’s your job title?
When I posed that question to randomly selected participants in a recent seminar for the marketing and sales department of a technology company, one person answered, “Customer information liaison” and another said, “Director of marketing and retail strategy,” and a third person responded, “Vice president of marketing and sales.”
Here’s what I said next:
From now on, when someone asks you your job title, I want you to think, “I’m the customer information liaison and a professional presenter,” or “I’m the director of marketing and retail strategy and a professional presenter,” or “I’m vice president of marketing and sales and a professional presenter.”
Now, I don’t recommend that you say this out loud, but I do want you to make being a speaker part of your professional identity, because your ability to be effective in any of these jobs is influenced significantly by your public-speaking skills. When you begin to think of yourself as a professional presenter, you’ll start to do what professional presenters do, which is to continually study how to improve rather than just focusing on how to survive.
This secret comes first because it makes it possible to apply everything else in the book. As you adopt the mindset and then the methodology of a professional, you’ll discover that your confidence, skill, and effectiveness all begin to develop together. Your expectation for yourself will create a positive self-fulfilling prophecy.
Poor speakers think of themselves as being poor speakers, so they don’t prepare. They don’t look for opportunities to improve or practice. They aren’t mentally set to discover stories, reports, jokes, news items, and other information that could make their presentations more interesting and enjoyable. Conversely, professionals pride themselves on their public-speaking skill. They take every opportunity to practice and improve. With their minds set on success, they are always researching, generating, incubating, and evaluating ideas to enrich their presentations. Instead of running away or freezing in response to the fear of public speaking, professionals accept and embrace the butterflies.
Here are a few other simple but transformational secrets of the professional mindset.
Instead of worrying too much about themselves, professionals focus on empathy for the audience, understanding that they are often nervous as well.
A few years ago I was invited to give a keynote speech at a convention of eight thousand insurance salespeople. The directors of the insurance organization presented an interesting challenge: they wanted me to script my remarks and read them from a teleprompter. I explained that this wouldn’t work for a presentation about innovation, which needed to be spontaneously creative. Empathizing with their need for control and reassurance, I provided a detailed outline for the presentation.
I was scheduled to be the penultimate speaker, to be followed by former First Lady Barbara Bush. The atmosphere backstage was tense, with secret service agents hovering and an expectant crowd waiting, but I was fine, practicing my centering exercises (which you will learn in chapter 7), as I always do before any significant event. Then, just as I was about to take the stage, the senior director of the insurance group approached me and, with a grim look and in a serious tone, he whispered in my ear, “Don’t f **k up!” I smiled at him and reflected silently, “Gee, thanks for that timely and inspiring advice. I was planning to f **k up, but you, with that cogent and wise pointer, saved me.” But then I realized that these were insurance people who are biased to control risk. I thought, “They really do need to learn how to think creatively, so let me do all I can to help them.”
Professional presenters know a secret about transforming fear. In most situations, whether at a PTA meeting or a corporate conference, the audience is nervous. Why do you think people hide in the back row, leaving the front seats empty? Perhaps they remember the humiliation of being called on by the teacher when they were unprepared. Whatever the reason, group situations magnify the potential for embarrassment. As the speaker, you are in a position of power and control. Take care of your audience. Help them relax and enjoy your message. Direct your attention to their needs. If you focus on fulfilling the objectives you set for them, you will transform your anxiety into enthusiasm to connect with and be of service to your audience.
This attitude improves communication and encourages leadership. Paradoxically, the focus on giving great presentations becomes the key to transforming the fear that leads people to focus on just surviving.
Professionals understand that establishing and maintaining rapport with their audience allows them to get their message across and makes the whole process more enjoyable for everyone.
The professional public speaker is guided by the motto “Connect before speaking” (Conjungere ad orationem). Connection, also known as rapport, is primarily a function of instinctive response. Our brains are hardwired to ask, “Is this person friend or foe?” whenever we meet someone new. As you deliver the first few minutes of your presentation, most of your audience already has unconsciously decided whether you are likable and if they are willing to be influenced by you.
Your credibility may be enhanced by the list of qualifications recited by the person who introduces you, but it is determined much more by how much the audience perceives that you are authentically interested in connecting with them and communicating something of value.
Professionals view every presentation as an opportunity to create an experience of connection with the audience. One-toone or one-to-ten-thousand: it’s all about connection. A sense of connection is the foundation of successful one-to-one communication, and it’s also the foundation of successful presentations to groups of all sizes.
Many people are comfortable, and effective, speaking to one or two others, but put them in front of a group of twenty or thirty listeners, and things change dramatically. Although large groups can provide a sense of anonymity, it is a mistake to imagine that you are addressing an impersonal mass.
However large your audience, it is always individuals who receive and process your message. The greatest presenters are distinguished by their ability to make everyone in the audience feel that the presentation is being delivered personally to them.
So what does change as we shift from one-to-one to progressively larger groups? The main difference is how much you project your voice and body language to reach your audience. The larger your audience, the more you must magnify your natural movements, gestures, and vocal projection.
John Medina, author of Brain Rules, explains, “The brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things.” Most presentations in business and academia are boring, handicapped by an overemphasis on data, analytics, graphs, and charts. Managers, academics, and other professionals often assemble facts and then present them in a detailed, exhaustive fashion. After a perfunctory greeting, they make little effort to establish rapport, and the only food for imagination is provided by the audience themselves through daydreaming and doodling.
Of course, your message must be convincing to the rational mind (unless you are a politician or a cult leader). A great presentation is clear, concise, and compellingly logical. But logic is not enough. A great presentation captures the audience’s imagination and appeals to them emotionally. As you learn to make facts come to life with stories, imagery, and humor, you’ll discover that your message becomes more potent and that the process of presenting becomes less nerve-racking and much more fun.
Here are a few comforting thoughts about your audiences to help you align your butterflies.
Most audiences want you to succeed. Inexperienced speakers often imagine that audiences are composed of rejects from The Gong Show, desperately yearning to wreak their revenge. In reality, most audiences are supportive. People generally attend presentations with the hope of gaining something from the time they invest. They have a stake in your success. And people tend to identify with the challenges of speaking and usually are quite tolerant of your imperfections.
Unless you are getting paid to speak, the good news is that most audiences don’t expect much in terms of presentation skill because they are used to boring and poorly delivered, unclear messages. A basic truth of life is that satisfaction is a function of expectation. And expectation is usually a function of experience. If a friend is accustomed to eating at Denny’s, she will be impressed if you take her to Sizzler. If you apply the simple tools shared in this book, you will easily exceed most audience’s expectations.
More good news: you usually look much better than you feel. Although you may feel nervous, the audience generally won’t know it. Adrenaline causes you to exaggerate your perceptions, making you imagine that a grammatical error or an awkward movement is a massive gaffe. The audience probably never notices. Even if you are feeling shaky, you probably look fine.
So do what pros do, and monitor your self-talk. Learn to translate your anxiety-driven, negative inner dialogue into positive, confidence-building affirmations. When you notice the butterflies swarming, instead of thinking, “I’m so nervous about this presentation,” rename the sensation “excitement.” And say to yourself, “I’m so excited to present!”
In The Sense of Style, linguist Steven Pinker notes that many people feel as if “learning to write is like negotiating an obstacle course in boot camp, with a sergeant barking at you for every errant footfall.” The advice he offers for aspiring writers is equally relevant for public speakers. He asks, “Why not think of it instead as a form of pleasurable mastery, like cooking or photography? Perfecting the craft is a lifelong calling, and mistakes are part of the game.”
Like professional public speakers, you can begin to view every presentation as a wonderful opportunity to perfect your craft, learn from mistakes, and take pleasure in the journey to mastery.
Yet another secret will transform your understanding and ultimately your skill: professionals are practicing and preparing in everyday life. Every conversation, every interaction with others, whether one-to-one or in a group, represents an opportunity to refine your ability to express yourself, to elevate your use of language, to become a better listener and a better storyteller, to cultivate the alignment of your words and your body language, and to study how your communication affects others.
For pros, this process isn’t burdensome; it’s fun! The truth is, there’s a metadimension of learning and investigation that you can enjoy in any interaction. And even boring presentations become more endurable because as you learn these secrets you’ll begin to know exactly why someone was boring and what they could have done differently.
In the next chapter you’ll learn a simple, specific, immediately applicable professional secret that will not only transform your fear but also help you supercharge the power of your message and your effectiveness with any type of audience.