The Articulate CEO

How To Find Your Confidence - Tips From Toastmasters International

Feeling some nervousness before giving a speech is natural and even beneficial, but too much nervousness can be detrimental. Here are some proven tips from Toastmasters International on how to control your butterflies and give better presentations:

1. Know your material. Pick a topic you are interested in. Know more about it than you include in your speech. Use humor, personal stories and conversational language – that way you won’t easily forget what to say.
   
   
2. Practice. Practice. Practice! Rehearse out loud with all equipment you plan on using. Revise as necessary. Work to control filler words; Practice, pause and breathe. Practice with a timer and allow time for the unexpected.
   
   
3. Know the audience. Greet some of the audience members as they arrive. It’s easier to speak to a group of friends than to strangers.
   
   
4. Know the room. Arrive early, walk around the speaking area and practice using the microphone and any visual aids.
   
   
5. Relax. Begin by addressing the audience. It buys you time and calms your nerves. Pause, smile and count to three before saying anything. ("One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand. Pause. Begin.) Transform nervous energy into enthusiasm.
   
   
6. Visualize yourself giving your speech. Imagine yourself speaking, your voice loud, clear and confident. Visualize the audience clapping – it will boost your confidence.
   
   
7. Realize that people want you to succeed. Audiences want you to be interesting, stimulating, informative and entertaining. They’re rooting for you.
   
   
8. Don’t apologize for any nervousness or problem – the audience probably never noticed it.
   
   
9. Concentrate on the message – not the medium. Focus your attention away from your own anxieties and concentrate on your message and your audience.
   
   
10. Gain experience. Mainly, your speech should represent you — as an authority and as a person. Experience builds confidence, which is the key to effective speaking. A Toastmasters club can provide the experience you need in a safe and friendly environment.

Visit a Toastmasters meeting!
Toastmasters groups meet in the morning, at noon, or in the evening in communities and corporations all over the world. No matter where you live, work or travel, you’ll likely find a group nearby.

Intuitive or Intelligent - Which is More Valuable?

In sports, there are two types of players: intuitive and intelligent. Intuitive players are naturally brilliant. Such athletes can do things on the field that make others stare in awe, all while hardly appearing to break a sweat. They’re fantastic to watch – people flock to sporting contests just to see the expression of this natural talent. They make it look so easy – because it is for them. But they can’t show you how to play like them, because they often don’t know how they do it. It’s instinctive.

The style of the intuitive player is largely based on confidence. They can’t play any other way – break down their confidence and you go a long way towards shutting them down.

The intelligent player, on the other hand, may not be as naturally gifted as the intuitive player, but they have the advantage of being able to adjust their game as the conditions or situation demand.

So it is with many other activities, public speaking included. Intuitive skill will get you a long way, but if you can’t adapt to different conditions – a range of audiences, lack of a lectern or a variety of presentation topics, just to name a few – you greatly reduce your chances of being effective.

It would be great to be blessed with natural talent, but most people will have to make do with the talents they’ve been given. Far better to be an intelligent player – someone who has developed the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. That is the challenge for anyone wanting to seriously improve their public speaking or anything else for matter.

How do you develop the ability to adapt? By learning as much as you can about the basic principles of the subject you wish to master. The deeper your undertsanding, the more likely you are to be able to recognise when something isn't working and a change is required. That is why I teach people the principles of communication rather than the mechanics of public speaking. The mechanics of public speaking is all about giving you confidence which is great... but will only ever take you so far.

Smart Writing is Simple Writing

At the C-suite level presentation skills are almost always at least adequate. In other words the CEO is confident enough to get up in front of a group of people, speak clearly and string a sentence together. Presentation skills are practically never the reason that their communication fails to be effective - the communication fails because they cannot write.

It’s hard to be effective when people can’t understand what you’re trying to say. Clear and simple writing ensures that your message never gets lost between you and your audience.

Unfortunately, many CEO's think they need to “look smart” by using big words and complex sentence structures. The reality is that the simpler you write, the more intelligent you seem to others. A study done at Princeton University manipulated the complexity of the vocabulary and writing style of documents and gave them to students. Over and over again, the simpler versions were rated as coming from a more intelligent writer than the more complex drafts.

Smart writing is simple writing.

Clear and simple writing is actually quite difficult to do. It requires you to think hard about your topic, get at its core, and then put that core in terms that your audience can understand. Here are a few tips on writing and speaking with greater clarity:

• Write or speak so a 12 year old can understand. If a 12 year old can understand your speech or article, then chances are an adult of average education can too. If you ever get stuck with what to say to, grab a 12 year old and talk the issue through with them face to face. It’s amazing what keeping this rule in mind can do to help make you a clearer communicator.

• Use strong verbs. Avoid is, are, was, were, be, being, been. So instead of saying “Diane was killed by Jim,” say, “Jim killed Diane.” Shorter, clearer, and punchier.

• Keep average sentence length to about 20 words. Sentence length is one of the biggest factors in determining how easy it is to understand what you’re saying or writing. Ideas can get lost in long sentences. While you should avoid really long sentences as much as possible, you don’t want all your sentences to be just five words each either. That makes your writing and speaking sound choppy and rushed. Shoot for an average of about 20 words a sentence. And mix sentences of varying lengths together.

• Keep paragraphs short. Ideally, each paragraph should contain just one idea. This ensures that your reader doesn’t get lost in a jumble of different points. When you write long paragraphs, it’s easy for more than one idea to sneak in. Avoid this by keeping paragraphs short - say 5 or 6 sentences a paragraph.

• Don’t use a five dollar word when a fifty cent word would work just as well. If you have a choice between a fancy word and a plain word, go with the plain word.

'The Great Dictator' Delivers A Great Speech

'The Great Dictator' was Charlie Chaplin's most successful film and his first true talking picture. Released in October, 1940 it was the first film to bitterly satirize Naziism and Adolf Hitler at a time when the United States was still at peace with Germany.

At the very end of the film comes one of the great cinematic speeches - one that perfectly encapsulates Chaplin's disgust with greed, bloodshed and division. It is remarkable that Chaplin's speech of more than 70 years ago still retains so much relevance in the modern world and, perhaps, more than just a little sad. Here then, is the great master at work... Charlie Chaplin seeing the world for what it was and, in many ways, still is.

 

How To Deliver A Great Introduction

Introductions are so important that professional speakers usually provide their own. They know what it is like to be on the receiving end of a bad introduction - they spend the first ten minutes of their speech desperately trying to win their audience back.

The worst experiences are when you have provided an introduction but the MC (normally some bumbling employee because the organisation are yet to learn the value of a real MC) decides not to use it and instead provide their own moment of genius. It's a bit like watching a car crash - you know it isn't going to be pretty but you can't turn away so you have to resign yourself to the carnage ahead.

The problem of course is that people don't know how to introduce someone. So here are some quick tips on how to put together a great introduction.

If you’re writing an introduction, there are basically three questions that you need to answer for your audience:

• What is the speech about?
• Why are we discussing this topic?
• Why is this the person to talk about it?

Let's deal with the first question - what is the speech about? The key here is not to give away too much - you are providing the introduction, not the speech. Make sure you explain the subject matter succinctly and in a context that your audience can relate to.

In fact, that context is really what the second question is all about; why are we discussing this topic? Essentially we are answering the questions why here and why now. It is important to convey why this topic is of particular importance at this moment in time.

Thirdly, of course, why is this the person to talk about it? What are the credentials, experience or expertise this speaker has that gives him or her the authority to address this particular subject? Not all of their experience and credentials - just the ones that relate to this particular audience.

Your role in all of this is to set the tone for what is to come so don't oversell it and don't undersell it either. Keep it simple, get to the point and, above all, remain relevant to your audience.

Oh... and, by the way, the very last words out of your mouth should be the name of the speaker - that's who we are all here for!

Tell Them What You're Going To Tell Them, Tell Them... Oh Spare Me!

It's the holy grail of presentations training:

"Tell them what you are going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you have told them"

It's also quite possibly the biggest load of nonsense I have ever come across and the one piece of advice that, if followed, is guaranteed to make your next presentation a boring one. The simple format outlined above is great if you are a six-year-old doing show and tell at your school. It gives the little tike some basic structure to bolster their confidence and help get them through the dreaded five minutes they have to fill. If you are an adult, however, you require something more.

Repeating something three times does not make it interesting or engaging. Nor does it make it memorable (particularly when your audience has nodded off in the first ten minutes). If you want an audience engaged and interested in what you have to say then you need themes and stories rather than mindless repetition.

The ability to articulate your story or that of your company is crucial in almost every phase of business management. It works all along the business food chain: A great salesperson knows how to tell a story in which the product is the hero. A successful line manager can rally the team to extraordinary efforts through a story that shows how short-term sacrifice leads to long-term success. An effective CEO uses an emotional narrative about the company’s mission to attract investors and partners, to set lofty goals, and to inspire employees.

The "tell them what you are going to tell them" approach is a poor substitute for great storytelling. It's also a poor substitute for mediocre storytelling. Every presentation should be built on good stories and a common theme that binds them altogether. Only then are you interesting and engaging.

Sizzle or Steak? A Lesson From The World of Advertising

One of the biggest battles I face when dealing with CEO's is convincing them that their communication issues are not the result of what they think they don't do well but rather what they think they already have a handle on. In other words, when it comes to communication, it isn't the presentation skills or surface displays that are letting them down but the message.

It is an attitude that is the corporate equivalent of "sell the sizzle not the steak" but you can only do that if you are dealing with quality steak in the first place. Sadly, in the corporate world the "steak" or message is often quite awful. The fact is that if your message is overly complicated, irrelevant, discredited, boring and predictable then no amount of dressing it up is going to help and the proof of this is all around us - it's called advertising.

Think about it... the vast majority of advertisements you see on T.V. are slickly produced and beautifully made. They are well lit and cleverly filmed. They employ quality actors who know how to deliver a tag line and how to look good doing it. They are even scheduled for maximum impact in a timeslot specifically tailored to their target audience and they are repeated ad nauseum in case you missed it the first time. There is hardly a criticism to be made from a "sizzle" point of view but many miss the mark and fail to influence those that they were aimed at. Why? Because the "steak" is crap.

Just because an ad agency knows how to make an ad does not mean they know how to communicate a message. Seriously, how many times have you sat in front of your T.V. wondering what "creative" idiot thought that ad was a good idea and, more to the point, what kind of idiot executive agreed with them? As a counterpoint, stop and think for a moment how many porrly produced ads out there have actually done a realy good job of getting their message across. In fact, some of the most memorable ads are those that weren't slickly produced or employed acting talent - they just had a simple, credible, relevant message delivered with some heart in a way that left you pleasantly surprised.

In communication it ain't the sizzle... it's the steak!

 

The Curse of Confidence

Is there anything more common than a nervous public speaker? Actually there is - a confident public speaker.

It's not the nervous-nellie making a complete hash of things as they stumble over their words that is the bane of the business speaking world. Rather it is the complete opposite that I see most often. That is a confident, secure public speaker making a complete hash of things as they insist on ploughing through their ill-conceived presentation.

The fact is that most business people (certainly senior business people) are quite happy to get up in front of a group of people and talk. If not happy they at least don't fall apart at the thought of it. Confidence is not their problem nor, for the most part, are presentation skills themselves. That isn't to say that presentation skills couldn't be improved it's just that they wouldn't make that much of a difference. The truth is that we teach presentation skills primarily to give people confidence rather than to make them a more effective presenter. For most people presentation skills aren't designed to make you better - they are designed to make you feel better about being very average. Ultimately, even if mastered, presentation skills are simply the icing on the cake not the cake itself. Things like gestures, vocal variety and stagecarft may appear desirable but the world is full of people who communicate brilliantly without them. Stephen Hawking, for example, speaks in a monotone provided by a machine while unable to move and yet remains compelling. The key is in what he has to say more than how he happens to say it.

Content matters more than delivery and therein lies the problem with our business leaders. Their delivery is polished to the point of being robotic but their content is awful. What is often perceived as a presentation skills issue by those who don't know any better is actually an inability to formulate an argument, identify a simple message, articulate the core issues and structure a presentation so it makes sense.

The scary thing is if they can't do that with their communication then how the hell do they effectively run a business? I suspect the answer is they don't.

 

 

 

If I knew you were presenting, I’d have baked a cake…

If ever a client of mine is concerned about their lacklustre presentation style, I ask a logical question: “Can you make a cake?”

If they haven’t already started backing slowly away from me, most will say yes.

I delve further: “Can you make a cake that’s as pretty as someone who makes cakes for a living?” Most admit they probably couldn’t. (But there’s always one.)

“But,” I ask them, “is it still a cake – even if it’s not the prettiest or tastiest?” Of course it is.

“Can people still enjoy your cake?” Most certainly.

The self-appointed communication ‘experts’ would have you believe there’s only one way to make a cake. It must look and taste exactly like the specific, restaurant-quality recipes they teach… or it’s no good.

That’s the problem with rules, which are proscriptive statements demanding a specific action regardless of the circumstances: they wrongly assume there’s one ‘best’ cake recipe. But communication is a nimble beast; activities need to be structured on a case-by-case (or is that cake-by-cake?) basis.

If the ‘experts’ had their way, we’d have two things: a very limited array of presentation styles (and patisseries) to choose from; and a lot of train-wreck presentations conducted by people without the necessary skill or understanding of the communication process to apply the rules effectively.

But we all know there’s more than one way to make a cake. There are many styles to choose from, each with hundreds of recipes ranging from home made to Michelin star. You can then mess with the ingredients and the process.

So it is with public speaking – you don’t need to stick to the limited, rigid presentation styles most training advocates. It’s far more important to find the style that suits the circumstances, and your talents.