Create Your Communications Experience

Audience Expectations: Time

Your audience – one or one thousand – has an expectation of how long you will speak. Too short, and they'll think they didn’t get their money’s worth. Too long, and you’ll lose them.

Here are some tips to stay on target:

1. Time each section of your presentation – introduction, body and close. If the talk is to exceed 20 minutes, break the body of the speech into your key points and allocate time for each.
2. Identify and highlight, in advance, those points you can delete if you find yourself in a time crunch.
3. Rehearse your presentation three to six times for flow of content and timing. Practice the opening and the close more frequently than the body. As noted in Morrissey’s Retention Curve (see post from 9/27), these are the parts your audience is most likely to remember.
4. Watch the time. Check yourself at designated benchmarks, either by a causal glance at a wall clock, or a watch on the lectern beside your notes. Don’t glance at your wristwatch – everybody else will follow suit and may become painfully aware of time!

Impressive speaking by Patrick Fitzgerald - Libby Indictment

Speaker in the News

Put your politics aside, and look at the behavior of those in the political/public world. We can learn.

The prosecuting attorney Patrick Fitzgerald did a great job in well over an hour of announcing the indictment of Scooter Libby. He did NOT use a teleprompter, but he talked without a non-word in detailing a lot of details! Very impressive.

I heard him first on a car radio, coming back from a speech myself, and found him compelling enough - voice only - to listen and be a few minutes late for a coffee. He changed my view - a monotone voice CAN work. He was direct, straightforward, compelling in comment and the specifics, including complex law - and he never raised his voice. But perfectly appropriate for what he was doing.

He created a COMMUNICATION EXPERIENCE that was exactly right for this situation - low key, thorough, researched, and a strong voice with no theatrics, and actually the reverse. So it worked well, whether conscious or not, to making a convicting and compelling argument.

Fitzgerald also handled the Question and Answer session brilliantly - one of the best I've seen. And used a great SHARP principle with his baseball metaphor. And some other picturesque (and monotone) voice language.

We'll see where he goes from here, but I think Patrick Fitzgerald has burst upon the national scene with an impressive impact.

Peak Performance: The Fundamental State of Leadership

Effective leaders are great communicators – here’s an application of a powerful leadership principle on being a better communicator…

In a recent edition of the Harvard Business Review, University of Michigan professor Robert E. Quinn introduced the concept of the Fundamental State of Leadership – a heightened perspective, and one that’s inherent in all of us.

“In the normal state people tend to stay within their comfort zones and allow external forces to direct their behaviors and decisions. They lose moral influence and often rely on rational argument and the exercise of authority to bring about change…the result is usually unimaginative and incremental – and largely produces what already exists. To elevate the performance of others, we must elevate ourselves into the fundamental state of leadership.”

We’ve all been there in our personal and professional lives – a time of crisis where we rise to the occasion and overcome the challenge. If we force ourselves into the fundamental state, rather than waiting for crisis to knock at our door, we’ll get better and better. And so too is the case with communications. Quinn says that getting there requires a shift along four dimensions.

So, what does this mean for communicators?

1. Don’t stick with what’s comfortable. Instead of standing in one place during a presentation, move and create energy. Actively pursue speaking engagements that push your comfort zone, where you can practice the behavioral skills of communication.
2. Master the Natural Self – that special combination of your unique personality, mind, opinions and behaviors. Don’t become someone you’re not. Harnessing the Natural Self while communicating will increase your ability to connect with others, because you’re just being you – confident and relaxed.
3. Create listener-focused messages. State early and openly the audience’s WIIFM – What’s In It For Me?, action steps and benefits.
4. Read and adjust. Practicing is good, but not if you can’t adapt to external cues. Create an experience that’s specific to your audience – whether it’s one person, or one hundred.

 

Guest Spot

Many have great insights, and I'll pass on a few in these periodic "Guest Spots." This one is from Dave Yewman.

Dead fish, or how to fail at communicating without opening your mouth!

It amazes me how many people – some of them senior executives earning fat salaries at big companies and responsible for 1,000s of employees – send a bad signal when they first meet people because of bad handshake mechanics. Yes, the dreaded "dead fish" shake. We’ve all been there. Instead of a firm, confident grip you get a limp, lame handshake that’s like grabbing onto a dead fish. Compounding the error a lot of dead fish shakers also neglect eye contact. The overall impression: negative. The impact on potential business: huge.

The fix: easy.

Just remember FES:

Firm – don’t crush anyone’s hand. But a firm grip from a dry hand works wonders.

Eye contact – look at the other person for 3-6 seconds, this is long enough to communicate that you’re friendly and confident, but not long enough to be mistaken for a "death stare."

Smile – smiling also shows confidence and encourages eye contact (ever smiled at someone’s chin? Probably not).

I read somewhere that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein used to deliberately hold his shaking hand low, at mid thigh, so visiting dignitaries had to look down to find his hand. At that moment his photographer would take a picture so the resulting image looked like the visitor was bowing. A sneaky trick, if true. In business – unlike politics – a handshake can be a powerful moment, but at least it’s not some national symbolism exercise. So remember: lose the dead fish and focus on FES - that way you don't lose the power to communicate before you even open your mouth.

Dave Yewman

www.dashconsultinginc.com

www.elevatorspeech.com

Your Best Critic

In the continuous improvement process, how do we walk the tightrope of self-criticism without losing our balance and falling into negativism and self doubt? Here are three keys to being an effective self-critic:

1. Wait! Don’t Self Critique While Communicating!

It’s not over until it’s over. This was clear in Saturday’s near-upset of Notre Dame over USC. With less than two minutes in the fourth quarter, it looked as though the Fightin’ Irish would triumph over the reigning national champs. In a thrilling turn of events, quarterback Matt Leinart vaulted over the defensive line to score a touchdown and win the game, in the last three seconds.

Use video (at the very least, audio) feedback to review your presentation only AFTER you have completed it.

2. Set Realistic Expectations

Our audience only gets what we give them. They can’t measure our remarks against our intentions – they don’t know what they are! What we rearrange or omit may loom large in our minds, but it is inconsequential to our listeners.

Audiences don’t expect perfection. In fact, during her daytime television show Ellen Degeneres often evokes a greater audience response when she recovers from a bad joke than when she tells a good one. Audiences are often more concerned how we handle imperfection than with how closely we approach perfection.

3. Balance The Strengths With The Weaknesses

Criticism is not a process of fault-finding. We’re too quick to spot the weaknesses in our performance. When our Decker trainers work with clients in private coaching, they make each client focus on what they LIKE about their presentation first, and then move on to the areas for improvement. You’ll grow by reinforcing your strengths and minimizing the weaknesses.

First Impressions: Blink – and the power of Thin Slicing

Watch what you wear, how you dress or are made up, your expression and posture, and about a dozen other things. People seeing us for the first time will make these small parts to be the whole person, whether they like it or not.

With over 20 years in the speaking field, and tens of thousands of people observed and coached in communications, I have come up with the three second rule of immediate comprehension – showing the power of the unconscious First Brain.

People experience us immediately. Of course that experience will be modified over time – but the change is much less and much slower than we think.

When someone meets us, or sees us for the first time, their senses (mostly the eye) take in so many cues at the unconscious level in the first three seconds that it is difficult to dislodge them. The impression is so vivid, even before we open our mouth and start talking, that it takes 30 seconds to add 50% more to that first impression. Then it takes 3 minutes to add 50% to that, and then 30 minutes to add 50% to that 3 minute impression, and so on - to 3 hours and 3 days.

In his outstanding book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

reinforces the power of the unconscious in our communications, describing some powerful research. He calls it

Thin Slicing

Thin Slicing is where we take a few cues and make it the whole, all at the unconscious level, and all very fast. He uses the time frame of two seconds, and calls the First Brain the adaptive unconscious, but who’s to quibble – his book is selling more than mine.

Here’s an excerpt:

“How long did it take you, when you were in college, to decide how good a teacher your professor was? A class? Two classes? A semester? The psychologist Nalini Ambady once gave students three ten-second videotapes - with the sound turned off – and found they had no difficulty at all coming up with a rating of the teacher’s effectiveness. Then Ambady cut the clips back to five seconds, and the ratings were the same. They were remarkably consistent even when she showed the students just two seconds. Then Ambady compared those snap judgments of teacher effectiveness with evaluations of those same professors made by their students after a full semester of classes, and she found that they were also essentially the same. A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher’s class for an entire semester. That’s the power of the adaptive unconscious.”

Building Confidence

Here's a lesson from a golf pro on confidence.

Colin Montgomerie has been leading the PGA American Express Championship held at my local Harding Park Golf Course in San Francisco. What a thrill it has been to see Tiger Woods, John Daly, Colin and others on this public course - which has been getting raves. But I digress.

Today Colin talked of how his confidence has been building with a victory in Europe last week - and then he picked up where he left off by leading the first two rounds here. "If you're confident of anything in life, you're halfway there to achieving it."

So true, and just as true in communicating effectively, and overcoming the fear of speaking to go to the next level and be confidently good at it. Cicero said, "The skill to do comes from the doing." And another wise sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain."

In the hundreds of thousands of people we have trained over the years to 'create their communication experience' I would say close to 100% have gained tremendously in confidence - because they did it. Not only in our training program, but they were motivated to have a forward lean, and to seek opportunities to put themselves out there - not only in speaking and communicating - but in life.

As Colin said in his interview, "Confidence comes from playing." Whether in golf, or in communicating, or in life. Look at Tiger and you can see it all.

The Sound of your Words

Sound.

It’s the SOUND of the words, as well as the sound of the voice that makes more impact than you might think. It’s one of the things that separates the great speakers from the rest of the pack. Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr. realized the power that the sound of their words carried. You aren’t’ limited to listening to their speeches to feel that power – you get a good dose of it by just reading their remarks.

Great speakers use poetic and literary devices to create powerful aural effects with their words. They are really very simple to incorporate – try them yourself:

• Repetition. Echo phrases or sentences throughout an address. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” is a perfect example of this device.
• Assonance. Repeat stressed vowel sounds, such as in “Four score and seven years ago…”
• Parallelism. Pattern words to create rhythm. The “Rule of Three” fits this category: “Friends, Romans, Countrymen…”
• Onomatopoeia. Use words that sounds like what they denote. “Bang” sounds like a bang. “Splash” sounds like a splash.
• Alliteration. Repeat of consonant sounds – “Peter Piper picked a peck…” Of course, not every word in a series needs to begin with the same consonant, but it must be “visible” enough to carry an emotional context along with it. A good example is a speech Churchill gave during World War II: “The battle of Britain is about to begin…Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear…”

President Bush Press Conference

A brief review - he did well.

President Bush often speaks haltingly, in starts and stops, with a nervous little shoulder twitch. In today’s press conference he spoke with confidence. He had good eye communication with each reporter, then moved to look at and address the whole press audience after starting the answer with the questioner. He  had a light touch, using humor to disarm. But above all he spoke with authority. He was strong, in conviction (vocal tone) and manner, and with his words and statements. He took blame for Katrina, and on Social Security, Harriet Miers nomination and many other issues he stated forcefully what a leader should do to lead. You knew he was president.

Make Contact!

If you’ve been to a Decker course, you know that communicating effectively means making contact. Our SHARP principles allow you to hit a chord with your audience – driving your point of view home, and making your communication experience memorable.

SHARP: Stories, Humor, Analogies, References, Pictures

Zig Ziglar’s success as a motivational speaker and author can largely be attributed to his use of SHARP principles – in one speech he used verbal pictures to make some pretty boring statistics come alive.

A key point in Ziglar’s message was that success requires a solid foundation. To illustrate this, he told of a recent visit to the Calgary Tower and his recount of the structure’s history. “It is 626 feet tall,” Ziglar said. “That’s two football fields plus 26 feet. And of its 12,000 tons, 7,000 of them are underground. With a solid foundation, you too can rise to great heights.”

He painted another vivid word picture when he told the audience that the average twenty-year-old has seen one million TV commercials. That huge statistic was made to seem even more enormous when he continued, “…that’s 50,000 per year…1,000 per week.”

All of Ziglar’s analogies, examples and statistic supported his point of view. They were easy to absorb because he made them understandable. He used analogies that the audience could easily “identify” with.

Make sure that make contact with your audience – use SHARP principles to create a communications experience!