by Beth Levine | Aug 16, 2016 | public speaking
The Olympic Games are upon us and not only is the USA winning in the medals race, but many of our athletes are setting some great communications examples. Naturally, there are so many terrific examples coming out of Rio right now and, while most of them are stellar and memorable in their own ways, some are not Olympic quality. Let’s take a look at one winning and one losing example in today’s post.
In the winner’s circle: I found Kayla Harrison’s post-win interview with NBC particularly noteworthy. Kayla won gold for the US in Judo (78KG division) for the second time in a row and thus making her the most decorated American Judoka of all time and of any gender.
When Liam McHugh of NBC asked her about her experience of being booed by the crowd in Brazil, Kayla embraced the Jock Talk principle of #graciousness. She could have taken the low road and been critical of the Brazilian crowd, but instead she turned it around. She took the high road and turned a negative into a positive. She said she actually enjoyed being booed, because it made her feel like “the bad girl,” which was something she found refreshing and different.
This should be no surprise coming from Kayla as taking the high road, being positive and helping others is her brand. Kayla is someone who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a coach when she was in her teens, but has overcome that to become a history-making world-class champion. Additionally, she is using her star power to found a non-profit to help victims of abuse. Kayla does not back down from tough questions or the hard truth, and she manages to find the positive even in bad situations.
Not every American athlete, however, has followed Kayla’s lead.
In the loser’s circle: After getting knocked out of Olympic soccer tournament medal-less by Sweden, USA’s Hope Solo kept up her streak of controversial comments by calling the Swedish team “a bunch of cowards.” (Whoa! Was that really necessary, Hope?) This kind of negative language immediately makes her into the bad guy and the Swedes into the good guys. No one likes a sore loser, especially at the Olympic Games. Even if she had had a legitimate point, that point would have been lost to the uproar over the negativity of her reaction. (Sportsmanship, Hope!) A lack of #audience-centricity and #graciousness with a little too much #transparency predictably leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths.
When the world comes together in the spirit of peace and athletic competition, there’s no room for anything but #audience-centricity and #graciousness. And really, this provides a good lesson and model for the rest of us – even if we’re not Olympians – which is to embrace #audience-centricity and #graciousness no matter what, at all times. It’s a winning combo!
by Beth Levine | Aug 3, 2016 | preparing for a presentation, public speaking
During our recent webinar, “Getting Your Point Across,” we polled participants to find out what they were most concerned or fearful about when giving a presentation. We asked the question two different ways and both sets of answers yielded the same result. By far, the most pervasive concern of the participants was that they might appear or sound “stupid.” I found this so interesting!
So interesting for two reasons:
- The reality is that most audience members don’t go into a presentation preparing to judge whether or not a speaker is smart. They go in hoping to get something good or new or useful out of it. In fact, if anything, audience members assume that the person at the front of the room is intelligent.
- Worrying about whether you’ll sound stupid, while understandable, is a misplaced concern for a speaker. Worrying about connecting with and engaging the audience is a far more worthwhile concern. If you don’t connect and engage, it won’t matter how intelligent you sound.
If this concern resonates with you – and you are inclined to feel the way our webinar attendees did – here are some quick fixes to help you connect and engage:
- First, get to know as much about your audience as you can beforehand. That way, you will have some “entry ramps” to use in order to build connection.
- Prepare some relevant questions ahead of time – thoughtful, thought-provoking questions that might help engage your audience, build suspense, or get a dialogue going (if the group is a manageable size). One small caveat is that you’ll need to have answers to these questions at the ready in case your audience goes radio silent on you.
- Keep your points succinct and limit the amount of detail you share. Plan your time so that you can open it up for a quick Q&A after each major point or section of your talk. That way, if your audience wants more detail, they’ll ask for it, but you won’t have killed them with TMI unnecessarily!
- Tell stories. Be self-deprecating. Be open and vulnerable. And always, always be relevant – to your audience and to your topic.
- Prepare ahead so that you are familiar enough with your material that you can forget about your notes – and focus on your audience – once you start talking. (Winging it is one of the best ways to appear or sound stupid. Don’t take that risk.)
- And finally, look at your audience. Really look at them. Yes, I’m talking about eye contact. But I’m also talking about how you look at them – look at them as potential friends you want to make, not as adversaries or a firing squad. Your attitude and energy will rub off on your audience, so keep it positive!
All of this is to say, focus on your audience and the experience you want to give them rather than on how you sound. You’ll survive the event either way, so put your attention on them!
by Beth Levine | Jun 29, 2016 | public speaking
Recently I listened to NPR’s Doug Fabrizio of “Radio West” as he interviewed British linguist David Crystal about his new book, “The Gift of the Gab: How Eloquence Works.” It was a fascinating and validating piece on what it takes and means to be a persuasive and impactful speaker. He and I agree on many important points.
For starters, Crystal has an interesting theory that really everyone is eloquent. And I would have to agree there is a lot of truth to this. All of us have had impassioned personal conversations and convincing one-to-one conversations. However, we often assume this is not a skill transferable to the podium and to a larger audience. The larger an audience gets, the more nerve-wracking it feels to the speaker, but the reality is that the fundamental skills you use to be eloquent or persuasive when speaking one-to-one are the same for a larger audience.
Crystal notes that preparation and rehearsal are keys to eloquence. Very few people can step up on a stage unprepared and then be eloquent. Preparation not only helps you be more fluent, but it also boosts your confidence. Yet a lot of speakers are so full of dread that they avoid preparation (denial!) and then at the last minute wing it. In the end, though, this makes everything worse. It affects the speaker’s ability to genuinely project confidence as well as the ability to be truly connected to the audience – as the speaker will be more focused on trying to remember what he or she was supposed to say next. The only cautionary warning about preparation is that there is a fine line between being prepared and being over-prepared. Audiences recognize and dislike speakers who feel forced or fake. You have to prepare just enough to be fluent with your material and be natural.
Another good point that David Crystal brings up, and one that I always tell my clients, is that the most annoying thing for an audience is when a speaker does not keep to time. That is an instant speech killer. If you are scheduled to talk for 20 minutes, talk for 20 minutes, not 30 minutes and not even for 22. The longer your speech is, even if the time expectations have been set for the audience, the greater the chance you have of losing your audience. With long speeches or presentations, you have to build in moments that bring the attention of your audience back and make sure to add pauses and little breaks so the audience has time to process what you are saying. But no matter what, to go over your allotted time is just about the most audience-unfriendly thing you can do.
In the same vein, it is very easy to overload an audience even in a short speech or presentation. Often, speakers become excited about their material and offer too much or speak too quickly and thus the audience does not have time to understand or comprehend what they are saying. Even in the best of speeches, the audience won’t remember everything, but as David Crystal says, “in a good speech you remember fragments, in a bad speech you remember nothing.”
David Crystal must have been reading my mind, because we agree on another important fact: people can comprehend three points, but after that comprehension takes a nosedive. It is usually best to divide a speech into no more than three important points or messages if you want to be impactful. Otherwise, if you decide you cannot pare it down to, let’s say, less than six points, you are likely to end up with an audience that remembers nothing.
by Beth Levine | Jun 14, 2016 | preparing for a presentation, public speaking
There’s a lot of good advice out there about public speaking. Much of it is geared toward aiding the speaker. I want to throw some advice into the mix that’s helpful to the speaker
and the audience: Keep your sentences short and crisp!
Speakers do best when they prepare a talk in bullet points rather than prose. Preparing by writing a long beautiful document is problematic for a couple of reasons. For starters, speakers tend to get attached to the beautiful words, phrases and sentences they’ve composed. This is dangerous! It means the speaker is likely to feel compelled to read at the podium – which is bad for obvious reasons – or to memorize, which runs the risk of producing robotic delivery. Being conversational and staying connected with your audience, even if your delivery is imperfect, are still preferred.
On the other side of the podium, audiences need pace and rhythm and patter. For audiences, long, fancy sentences become a maze for the ears, something to get lost in. Preparing by writing a long, lovely piece of prose produces something that
readers, not listeners, would be willing and able to digest. Listeners need things to keep moving along at a clip. They need the speaker to start and finish a thought quickly in order to hang in there and actually get it.
Move from script to bullet points. You can always begin your preparation for a presentation by writing out a full-text script. It can help you establish order, organization and some of your key phrases. But then you would be wise to use that script only as a practice tool. As soon as you can, switch over to bullet points and then rehearse your talk from those.
Finally, when it’s showtime, watch yourself … keep a lid on those long-winded run-on, multi-clause sentences. Set a standard and a pace for yourself that requires you to make your sentences short, crisp, distinct units.
Good luck, your audiences will thank you!
by Beth Levine | Jun 1, 2016 | preparing for a presentation, public speaking
Hey everyone, I need to ask a favor!
If you are lucky enough to be offered training or a professional development opportunity by your organization, can you please 1) accept, and 2) go with the mindset that you want to move the needle and grow, rather than attend just to check the box and say you went?
Awesome, thanks!
Putting some of your own skin in the game – that is, committing to yourself that you will try and learn something new, try and take something away that you will employ – can make all the difference. And that would be all the difference to YOU! Your employer hopefully benefits too, but it’s really all about you. Your time is precious, so if you’re being asked to spend a chunk of it learning something, be sure to make it worth your while and mine the session for the valuable nuggets that will enhance your performance and up your game. That’s your responsibility to yourself.
Then there’s the session leader’s responsibility to you. Clearly, it’s one thing for you to sit and hear about new ideas or best practices, and it’s yet an entirely different thing to try and employ them. If you attend a training or work with a coach, it’s the trainer’s or coach’s job to ensure that you leave with some skill-building practice already under your belt, or at the very least some actionable tips and follow-on activities that will help reinforce the learning. It doesn’t always happen that way, but it should, so feel free to ask for it.
So why am I raising this issue? Well, this is the exact issue that keeps me up at night. It’s my mission as a trainer and coach to not just deliver the workshop or coaching session but to ensure that the recipients get something they feel confident they can and will try to use or do differently. The best sessions are constructed with multiple opportunities for participants to test-drive the learning and with follow-on activities that are designed to keep the concepts and best practices on participants’ radar screens for as long as possible. By definition, training and coaching are intended to encourage change (for the better), and in order to achieve change (arguably, one of the most difficult challenges out there!), there needs to be repetition, reminders, and reinforcement.
To that specific end, SmartMouth Communications will now be offering its
SmartMouth OnDemand “Presentations” course to reinforce our presentation skills trainings. While “Presentations” is also a great stand-alone training tool, it will no doubt serve as the ultimate reinforcement tool for anyone who attends a training of ours.
If you or your organization wants to be able to deliver more influential and impactful presentations, give us a shout! We’d love to bundle a live training with an e-learning experience to maximize the benefit for you!
by Beth Levine | May 17, 2016 | preparing for a presentation, public speaking
How good are you at delivering the party line?
Most organizations create the party line in the form of
talking points. Talking points might be about the organization generally or about a specific piece of news. They typically are handed down from the top for “messengers” to deliver. These messengers, whether they are managers communicating to an internal audience or spokespeople facing an external audience, are expected to deliver the party line. It’s an age-old practice – but with varying results.
The intention behind talking points is solid, which is to help an organization present a unified front, deliver a consistent message, and be sure that everyone is singing from the same song book, so to speak. However, talking points are more often than not
other people’s words. And other people’s words can be problematic – hence, the varying results.
The problem with other people’s words is that it’s just not realistic to expect people to deliver them the way they were written. Some real-life challenges with talking points are as follows (see if any of these sound familiar!):
- They are often long, wordy documents – even when they’re broken up into bullet points or paragraphs – that are written more for a reader to read than for a speaker to speak. This makes them difficult for people to digest and actually use.
- Most spokespeople aren’t sure what they’re supposed to do with talking points – memorize or paraphrase? And there’s typically no guidance provided.
- Pre-scripted talking points often feel stilted or inauthentic to the person who is supposed to deliver them. They are other people’s words, and so the messengers read them and think, “but this doesn’t sound like me, I would never say this.”
- In the end, a lot of people who are supposed to be messengers or spokespeople simply avoid and then ignore talking points – which, of course, defeats the original purpose of trying to get everyone on the same page.
So, what can be done to help protect and promote the party line?
Well, if you’re responsible for creating and distributing talking points, here are some tips:
- Give guidance to your troops, let them know how closely to the script they need to stay and what they can and cannot paraphrase.
- Give them permission to use their own words – with the caveat that, if there are some critical words or phrases within the talking points, those are “must-air” words.
- Be realistic and keep the talking points document as brief and succinct as possible.
If you have to deliver talking points, here are some tips for you:
- Go through the document a few times and then put it away and practice making as many of the points as you can. Test yourself to see how well you at least covered the spirit of the talking points, if not the words.
- Highlight the words and phrases that mean the most to you and that you do not want to leave out, and then rehearse yourself through a version that hits on those.
- Ask, if it hasn’t been granted already, for permission to paraphrase, making the case that you will do a better – more authentic and credible – job of delivering the party line if you can hit the points you’re most passionate about in a way that works for you.
A little effort – and a little give – from both sides will be worth it, good luck!
