SmartMouth Talks!

Humor?

by Beth Levine | Apr 16, 2014

When in doubt, leave it out. If you have to ask, you probably already know the answer.

Those are the answers.

What then, you might ask, is the question? The question, and I get this one often, is “What do you think about using humor?”

Humor is tricky, and there’s a difference between using humor and entertaining your audience. I would suggest that entertaining your audience is the preferred objective.

Usually when people ask about using humor, they’re referring to telling a joke or a funny story. What they are implying, though, is something that’s funny to them. The audience’s definition of funny is a big unknown, and that’s the problem.

Jokes and funny stories are risky, they involve people’s own personal lens’s and tastes. It’s way too easy to offend with humor. I often tell people that the only safe humor is self-deprecating; you can bust on yourself but not on others.

Entertaining your audience can be accomplished in a variety of ways – e.g. using photos or other media as visuals, digressing and telling stories, asking for volunteers and doing demonstrations. The most basic definition of the verb “to entertain” is to provide someone with amusement or enjoyment.

So, think about ways of entertaining versus using humor. Your audience doesn’t need to be rolling on the floor laughing … unless you’re a stand-up comic, and then you know the risks all too well!

Messaging Shortcut

by Beth Levine | Apr 2, 2014

Looking for your message or big idea? Here’s an easy shortcut that works 99.9% of the time:

Go to the end of the document or page of notes you’ve written to prepare for your talk, and it’s probably sitting right there in the last paragraph or last sentence. We tend to save our best thoughts for the end, and so our conclusion usually nails it.

Go ahead and take that thought or statement and move it up front, it’s your message! (For more on how to construct a talk or presentation, and where to put your messages, refer to your SmartMouth Public Speaking Toolkit.)

Heavy Lifting

by Beth Levine | Mar 19, 2014

“If you can’t write your message in a sentence, you can’t say it in an hour.”

Dianna Booher, Communications Consultant

There may be a few different ways to interpret Booher’s quote, but to me it says … do the heavy lifting so your audience doesn’t have to!

In other words, when you sit down to prepare for a talk or presentation, take a few moments to do some critical thinking about what you want your messages – or your main points – to be. If you don’t, you could end up talking and talking, as Booher suggests, and never getting anywhere.

The heavy lifting is simply a matter of preparing and packaging ahead of time. To find your message, ask yourself what your capture or summary points are. What are the statements that capture and convey the importance, significance or value of what you’re talking about? They should be one sentence each.

By writing your message in a sentence, you will be more efficient with time – yours and your audience’s – and you will have a much better chance of getting your point across to your audience.

Tip of the Month: Audiences!

by Beth Levine | Mar 6, 2014

Talk to or with your audience, not at them. Make it a two-way street. Ask questions, invite interruptions, solicit pertinent stories and anecdotes. Make your audience part of your presentation rather than relegating them to spectator. Size of the audience shouldn’t matter, you can still reach out and they can still respond.

What Would George and Abe Do?

by Beth Levine | Feb 20, 2014

President’s Day is more than a day off from work or school. It’s when we remember the February birthdays of two of our early Presidents, both of whom were known for their honesty.

If honesty was part of what earned George and Abe their places in history, then we should probably take a page from their playbook for our own communications, right? But how do we do that? What would it mean to be “honest” in our communications beyond the obvious of telling the truth?

Here are 3 types of honesty you can apply to your communications – speeches, presentations, interviews with the media, or ordinary business conversations – that I bet would be endorsed by George and Abe:

Transparency. Audiences are very discerning and can smell a phony within seconds. Be real; let people see you, let people see what’s happening. If you have good news, call it good news. If you have bad news, call it out as bad news. Spin (a self-interested selection of the facts) only goes so far. Be as open and forthright as possible.
Self-Awareness. Is there an elephant in the room? Your situation might require an apology or an admission of wrong-doing before you can get an audience’s attention, let alone win its trust. Or perhaps you’ve being criticized and need to respond. In that case, you’ll want to be prepared to own the “criticisms” that also happen to be true. Very often, criticism is true and with good reason. Don’t automatically get hot under the collar when attacked. Reflect on yourself and then own it with confidence if it’s you and it’s true.
Fairness. Intellectual honesty is a credibility win-win. If you have an opponent or a competitor, and you can be objective and fair about what you share in common as well as what differentiates you, then you will score big points with your audiences. Likewise, being willing and able to call out your friends and also applaud your enemies is a credibility-winner and reputation-booster.

These 3 tips are more nuanced versions of honesty than confessing to chopping down a cherry tree or walking miles at night to return pennies to a customer who overpaid, but they’re just as appealing. Give them a whirl!

Err on the Side of Brevity

by Beth Levine | Feb 5, 2014

“No one ever complains about a speech being too short!” – Ira Hayes

There are lots of quotes that convey the same sentiment – e.g. “always leave them wanting more” – and for good reason. You can never really be too brief, but you surely can be too long-winded.

So the tip of the month is to err on the side of brevity. Even the best speakers can lose their audiences when they overstay their welcome.

You’ll never be criticized for being brief; you’ll probably be thanked for allowing the audience time to ask for the detail they’re interested in hearing!

It is, after all, all about them!

What to Do When Your Topic is You

by Beth Levine | Jan 15, 2014

Unless you’re a motivational speaker or a celebrity, it’s not often that you’ll be invited to address a large audience to talk about yourself – your career, your experiences and your path to where you are now. But it could happen, you never know. It recently happened to me, and I will admit, it stopped me dead in my tracks.

Whether you are asked to introduce yourself at an event (as in, “tell us a little bit about yourself,” or the dreaded, “let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves”), or you are asked to share a little bit about your background and experience in a meeting or capabilities presentation, you may have been stopped dead in your tracks too.

I’m about to give you some ideas, because, for those of you who have been SmartMouth followers for even a little bit of time, you know that my Rule #1, the ultimate speaker guideline, the holy grail of an effective talk is … drumroll, please … “it’s all about them, it’s not about you!” So, what to do when the topic is you yet it needs to be all about them?

Here are 3 tips:

1. Start with something valuable you want to leave with them.

Don’t begin with life data points; i.e. don’t start with your birthplace, and avoid chronology whenever possible. Try and begin with today and work backwards. Or try and start with your biggest accomplishment or most important lesson learned, where and how you it happened, and then you can weave in bits of chronology that way.

Here’s an example of what that would look like as an opening statement: You’ve asked me to share a little bit about myself and my career, so I’d like to do that by talking about my biggest career mistake – what the situation was, how I’ve learned from it and where I am today because of it.

2 2. Have a message about yourself or your work. An interesting one-sentence message.

If you have an elevator pitch for yourself, that’s great, but even just one quick message point about yourself is helpful.

I’ll give you an example: I have a friend named Janet. Janet is bright and curious and always the first to try something new. Case in point: she was one of the first adults I knew to go on Facebook when it was just venturing out of the college-student-only arena. Janet’s message about herself is, “I’m an explorer.” As marketing director for a large organization, “explorer” is obviously not on her business card, but it’s her message. It’s a quick statement that distinguishes her, it’s a grabber and gets people to pay attention.

3 3. Really think about your audience and decide what it is about you that will be most relevant or valuable for them to hear.

If you do have to be the topic, then be sure to pick what it is about your topic that might benefit your audience, and leave the rest out! We all have talents, accomplishments, and lessons that could benefit others, so identify those and see which might be most useful to your particular audience. Any other info or detail then becomes cutting room floor material. Less is always more anyway!

Even if it’s about you, it’s still all about them!

Ain’t that the truth!?

by Beth Levine | Dec 18, 2013

“There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.”

– Dale Carnegie

At the End of the Day …

by Beth Levine | Dec 4, 2013

At the end of the day, you want people to like you. If you’re in sales, you know the likeability factor is huge in making the sale. If you’re in management, the same is true for motivating staff. If you’re a keynote speaker, delivering an address to hundreds, you are still hoping they’ll like you and be moved by your message.

When communicating to others, whether in a formal or informal presentation, we’re striving to connect, to reach people, to engage, and to propel them into action of some kind.

But first they have to like us. It’s that basic, that simple.

I turned to an old classic for guidance on the likeability issue. Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends & Influence People” has been in print for more than 75 years. In it, he identifies “Six Ways to Make People Like You” and here they are:

1.     Become genuinely interested in other people.
2.     Smile.
3.     Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4.     Be a good listener.
5.     Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
6.     Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.Rocket science? Nope. Basic, good common sense? Yup.

If I were to get scientific, though, and look for some trending patterns in his list, two items stand out:

First, it’s all about them, it’s not about you! This is SmartMouth’s Rule #1. And I’m pleased (and relieved!) to see that I’m in total alignment on that with Dale Carnegie. People, audiences full of people, an audience of one, all want to know that you have thought about them, that you have considered their interests, that you care about them. They want to be noticed, appreciated, understood.

So even when you are invited to speak because you’re a subject matter expert, or even when you’re at the front of the room because you’re the boss, or even when you’re making a sales call and you’re selling exactly what the customer wants or needs, it’s still all about them. Your challenge is to present your material and incorporate acknowledgements of them, their background, accomplishments, interests, and needs. It’s always all about them.

Second, be real about it. I love how he uses the words “genuinely” and “sincerely” – and he gives “smile” it’s own stand-alone billing. There’s a lot to be said for warmth and sincerity.

For sure, people are able to sniff out a phony in seconds (and I guess they’ve been able to do that for 75 years!). More important, though, people are drawn to warmth and sincerity. It’s just human nature.

It was so interesting to revisit these basics. And actually kind of inspiring. I plan to take these 6 principles to heart and look for ways to be more actively conscious of them in my work with 1:1 clients and with groups.

I hope you too will look at the list again and identify a few principles that will help step up your likeability … and, in turn, step up your effectiveness as a communicator!

Recipe: Message Sandwich

by Beth Levine | Nov 20, 2013

One of the most frequently asked questions I get at the beginning of a Presentation Skills Training workshop is “how can I make my point?”

I like to turn that around and suggest that we explore the question “how can I make my audience remember my point?” (Yes, I’m always suggesting a subtle mindset shift from egocentric thinking and communicating to audience-centric thinking and communicating.)

Enter the Message Sandwich!

First ingredient: the message. For every major idea you need to get across – it may be a section of your presentation or the material you’re sharing at a meeting – there’s an important statement to be made. That statement is a message.

And here’s how to find it …

If you are engaged in some form of persuasion (selling, motivating, influencing), the message will convey the significance or benefit or value of what you’re putting out there. If you are engaged in some form of education (informing, reviewing, updating), the message will be more of a capture statement that summarizes the material.

A shortcut to finding the message is by going straight to your conclusion. Ask yourself, how would I conclude? What would I say to wrap up? What is it about this chunk of material that I would want them to take away? Interestingly, we usually save the best for last.

Yet I’m saying, use the best for first and last.

Your message then becomes the top and the bottom slice of bread – i.e. the statement you use to open and close your point.

What’s in the middle of your sandwich? Information. Background, detail, supporting data and statistics, stories and anecdotes.

All too often we lead with information, tons of it. We build a case and then conclude with the message. So forget about evidence first, conclusion last. Go for the sandwich: conclusion-evidence–conclusion; message–info–message.

Reinforcement of your message is the only hope for your audience’s retention of it. Good luck!