As a speaker, the larger the number of audience members in front of you, the better, in terms of potential sales, impressions, and messages delivered.
But not always.
If your goal is to really and truly get people to understand your message, then the smaller the audience, the better. Here’s why:
In large audiences, often people are afraid to ask questions. If there are 70 or 700 other people in the room, most people are too bashful or nervous to stop the presenter and ask a question. But if there are only one or two other people in the room, then almost anyone feels comfortable asking a question or letting someone know, “hey I don’t get it.”
Furthermore, as a presenter, you can easily tell if an audience member is following you if you have only a few people to look at. This is why schools often boost about their low student/teacher ratios.
For those of us in the business world, here is the lesson. When communicating truly important messages to critical audiences, try to speak to groups as small as possible. Rather than giving a company wide speech to 400 people, try speaking to different divisions within your company in increments of 10 people or fewer. Yes, it may take longer to do it this way, but the communication will be much more powerful and you will give your employees a more comfortable environment in which to give you feedback.
For those of us who train people, smaller is also better. For example, I am often asked to do a half day of presentation training for 8 executives. Each executive only wants to spend a maximum of half a day, hence the request for a half-day training. Here’s what I do: I recommend that 4 be trained in the morning and 4 trained in the afternoon. It’s twice as much work for me but the training is twice as powerful for each trainee and the net time out of the schedule for each executive remains just 4 hours.
Of course there are times when bigger is better, like when you are running for president. But never discount the ability to make a huge impact on people by keeping your audience small and intimate.
Many people like to fool themselves into thinking that they can’t give formal presentation or that they can “give a speech.” But what is a speech? In my book, it’s anytime you open your mouth to communicate a message to one or more people.
So giving a “speech” is not just a politician advocating a tax cut or a tax increase in a 30-minute appeal to congress. A speech can be as simple as a baby screaming for “mama!” or “bottle.”
The simplest form of speech is asking for milk, attention, an allowance, a job, a raise, a vote, or a marriage contract. What we ask for may change; the price or value of what we ask for may vary, but the fundamental act of communicating through speech by asking one or more people to do something really doesn’t change.
What is the biggest difference between a minimum wage laborer and a star real estate broker who makes $4 million a year in commissions? The real estate broker mastered the art of asking people to do things he or she wants them to do. The minimum laborer didn’t master that art. This doesn’t mean the laborer is a bad person or morally inferior, but this inability to develop the skill of asking has stifled a career.
Too often people get caught up in the idea that giving presentations or grand public speeches is about being born with Charisma (whatever that is), or knowing advanced technical skills (like creating slick video PowerPoints), or having a huge vocabulary like William F. Buckley. No, these things are not the essence of speaking.
Asking is the essence of speaking. If you can ask one person for something and convince him or her to give it to you, then you can be a successful speaker. If you can persuade one person, then you can persuade 100 or 1000.
The most successful people in the world are constantly improving their ability to ask. They do this by refining their messages and techniques for asking and by improving the numbers of people they ask. So a homeless person who begs for money on the street one at a time usually doesn’t raise much money. But a televangelist who asks for money from 2 million viewers might bring in $10 million in one week.
Speaking is asking and asking is speaking. We all have to ask people to do things for us everyday, even billionaires have to ask their servants to carry out tasks. So, don’t think of a speech as something you do once a year at the annual board meeting. If you work on your speaking skills or your asking skills everyday, it can only lead to more success in every aspect of your professional life and your personal life.
I was called by a reporter from a major national trade publication who was doing a story on media training and sound bites. The day he called was a national holiday, but I happened to be taping some video training segments when the call came in. I told the reporter that it wasn’t a good time and he said, “TJ, no problem, just call me back anytime in the next week.”
My response was, “I’ll call you today. How late will you be there?”
Why was I so insistent on calling him back that day, when it was a national holiday? Because I reasoned that this was the best way to get quoted in the story, to perhaps get more quotes than anyone else, to potentially squeeze other competitors out of the story, and to prevent the chance of not being interviewed at all.
I called the reporter back one hour later on the day of the holiday and he conducted an extensive 30 minute interview with me. I made darn sure he had dozens and dozens of greet sound bites from me on the relevant subject before we got off of the phone.
Here was my strategy:
- By calling back ASAP, I gave the reporter no time to forget me or his interest in the subject of interviewing me.
- By calling right away, I was his first interview for this story. It’s always best to be able to communicate any message first because that is when it is most memorable.
- By giving the interview first and by trying to make it a long and thorough interview, I am trying to subtly convince the reporter that he doesn’t need to interview anyone else on the subject, or at least not nearly as many people as he originally thought he might need.
- By getting my interview in the can, I am protected in case the reporter gets side tracked with other, more important stories. This way, even if the reporter had planned on interviewing 10 other experts, if I am the only one he got to and his deadline is in one hour, then chances are I will be the only one quoted.
- By being so prompt to call back, especially on a holiday, I generate more goodwill with the reporter. So it’s only human nature that if my quotes are comparable to another expert’s quotes who took a week to return a call, then the reporter may be more inclined to use mine.
- Long term reputation as a source. I always want reporters to feel like they can count on me for a quick turn around in their time of need. It just so happens that this story was not time sensitive. But my quick actions sent a message to this reporter that I am someone he can count on if he needed a quick comment on a breaking news story.
Always take enough time to prepare your message points and sound bites before calling back a reporter for an interview. But don’t take any more time than you need to do those bare essentials. In most cases, the early bird does get the bigger and juicier sound bite.
You have the best of intentions. You give speech after speech using strong visuals, compelling examples and riveting stories to make your points come alive. But then, slowly, your speaking skills start to dissolve. The next thing you know, you’ve become a boring hack, just like everyone else.
How did it happen?
Here is the usual suspect. You are supposed to speak at a conference in 3 weeks. The conference coordinator calls your office urgently and says “Can you email your presentation today? We promised all of the attendees that we would send them in advance!”
But you are on the road, or busy. So you ask a staffer to put together a rough draft PowerPoint slide. Since the assistant isn’t a mind reader, all he/she can do is list bullet points of concepts that you have discussed before on this subject, or take out facts and numbers from your website and previous presentations. So far, no harm, because this is just a draft.
But now the speech is tomorrow and you haven’t had time to think about it. And all you have is the “draft” prepared by your assistant. There’s still time to prepare a great speech on the plane. But things come up, as they always do, and you are preoccupied.
Now you have to give the speech in five minutes. And you are left with one option: you will kinda, sorta read the bullet points on the PowerPoint slide to your audience. You know it was awful, compared to your normal way of speaking. But nobody came up to complain afterwards. In fact, several people still complemented you, though they were vendors looking to do business with you.
The next thing you know, you’ve gone six months and a dozen speeches using this technique of reading bullet points off of a screen. You have a new habit.
Stop! You are destroying your reputation! And no one has the guts to tell you!
Throw away your slides and start from scratch. For your next speech, you need to come up with five major points, and then an example and a story for each point. Then, come up with a visual slide for each point that contains no words. Finally, prepare a one-page outline that reminds you of your key points, examples, stories and slides. Finally, rehearse.
Now you are ready to re-enter the society of interesting speakers and presenters. Welcome back.
Acclaimed management guru and professional speaker Tom Peters believes that it is essential for a speaker to use every ounce of strength giving a presentation. Peters claims he is so physically exhausted after a keynote address that he can barely walk. He likens the process to a great running back or basketball player—the athlete should spend all their energy during the game and not leave any extra for after the game. Peters believes that a speaker who has leftover energy after a speech has somehow cheated his or her audience—the speaker has held back.
Peters has a point, but I’m not sure his style works for most business presenters. When Peters speaks, he is paid huge fortunes to appear in front of thousands of people at conventions. There are BIG expectations for a BIG performance. Peters delivers. He yells and whispers, bobs and weaves around the stage. He is working in a way that is engaging—he creates an experience.
But Peters is absolutely correct in his assertion that energy plays a key role in how a presenter is received and the presenter’s ideas are received as well. Too many speakers say to themselves “I’m no Tom Peters, I’m just an account executive,” or “I’m no Tom Peters, I’m just a candidate for city council,” therefore I’ll just get up and speak in a low key manner.
Not everyone has to be drenched in sweat and ready to collapse at the conclusion of a speech as Peters is, but 99% of the speakers I encounter are too low in energy. They seem comatose. The reason is we get nervous and we tighten up our bodies, vocal cords and mouth without realizing it. Our volume goes down and we seem timid, scared and smaller than life. And a presentation, especially a big presentation in front of a large group, is exactly the time when we want to seem larger than life.
So pump up your volume, your energy, and your movements before your next speech.
The easiest way to spot an insecure public speaker is to look for someone who is dumping an endless supply of facts and details, but without the context of real examples and stories. Insecure speakers are afraid of looking stupid, so they always overcompensate by larding excessive facts into their presentation.
The insecure speaker uses the sea of facts as a protective covering to mask his or her insecurities. Only it doesn’t work.
The insecure speaker is so deathly afraid that his boss will say “hurry up and get to the point” that the speaker is afraid to stop to give examples or stories to flesh out the key points. The other biggest fear of the insecure speaker is that he or she will be asked a question that can’t be answered. So the speaker reasons that if he can just dump out the answer to every question in the speech and before the question can be asked, he can save himself from embarrassment.
This is dubious logic, but it is one that I find dominates most large corporations. The trouble is that this is an entirely defensive and negative mentality. This mindset views as speech purely as a potential landmine, never as a positive opportunity.
Speakers with this attitude are always trying to merely escape from a speech; this is pessimism to an extreme. The goal for any speech should be to communicate and spotlight a handful of key messages. Period.
So if you are nervous and you are tempted to data dump, remember, you aren’t fooling anyone.
Very few people actually think of themselves a as a crashing bore, but a very high percentage of people temporarily become huge bores when they give a speech.
And everyone always has a good reason.
“But it’s a lot of technical information I have to get out.”
“For legal reasons I have to say things in a straightforward way.”
“My boss wants me to stick to the script.”
“My audience is highly sophisticated and they really want me to drill deep into the details and all the numbers.”
“I’d like to show my personality, but the PowerPoint scripts have me handcuffed.”
What’s the one thing all of these excuses have in common? Your audience doesn’t buy any of them and will tune you out!
A lot of speakers waste hours and hours fretting over color schemes on their PowerPoint slides and what tie to wear. Those details have some minor importance, but they are almost entirely irrelevant if what you are trying to say is boring. There are thousands of little details that go into the style and substance of every speech that can have a minor impact and that, collectively, have a big impact. But there are just a handful of things that can have a deciding impact on your speech’s reception by your audience.
And one of those is whether or not your speech is boring. If you are boring, you can have great eye contact, a perfect suit and flawless slides—none of this will matter. No one will remember what you said.
If you actually say something interesting to the audience and you do it in an engaging manner, then you can break most other rules on saying “um,” using lousy PowerPoint slides and having your shirt tail sticking out—you will still be seen as a great speaker.
So it’s OK to make mistakes as a speaker, just make sure that being boring isn’t one of them.
We, the audiences for business speakers everywhere, demand the following rights.
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The right NOT to be treated like a dumping ground for hundreds of bits of data.
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The right NOT to be bored to death.
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The right NOT to be read to. Ever.
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The right to be addressed directly by the speaker (and not have to stare at the speaker’s back while he or she stares at a PowerPoint slide).
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The right to know exactly what the speaker is talking about within the first minute (and not be left wondering for five minutes what the speaker is talking about).
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The right to look at PowerPoint slides that are understandable.
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The right NOT to have to read PowerPoint slides that have so many words they are better suited for handouts or books.
8.We demand that every Speaker should be fully prepared for every aspect of the technical and substantive delivery of their message and will NEVER make excuses.
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We demand that Speakers start on time.
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We demand that Speakers end on time.
We the audience, hold these truths to be self evident so that we will never bored out of our minds again.
This is my first posting to the Communitelligence blog and so I’ll begin with the topic that I find the most amusing and the most maddening. We see it every year at PowerPoint Live, and just about every time I head into a company to train on PowerPoint or on presentation building in general.
- “PowerPoint is easy, I don’t need any help with it.”
- “How long have you been using it?” I respond.
- “I’ve been using it for almost 10 years, and I learned everything I needed to know in the first 15 minutes.”
Fifteen minutes. You can do a lot in 15 minutes, granted — Jerry Seinfeld can weave three stories into one sit-com in about 15 minutes, the Space Shuttle can reach orbit and return in about 15 minutes, and President Bush can probably mispronounce 15 words in 15 minutes. But can you learn how to create a presentation in 15 minutes?
It’s the biggest disconnect I know in corporate image management. Companies today spend tens of millions of dollars on their branding. They hire prestigious design firms to help them craft print advertisements that appear in the most visible publications.
And these same companies often send a sales rep with, you guessed it, 15 minutes of PowerPoint training out to make what is arguably the most important first impression of all: actual face-to-face contact.
How ironic that the curse that Microsoft’s engineers bestowed upon us is that they made their presentation software too easy to learn. There’s nothing inherently wrong with software whose basics can be learned in 15 minutes…unless you never go beyond those basics. And therein lies the rub:
Does the ability to create a few bullet slides make you a proficient PowerPoint user? And the more ominous question: Does this same ability imply that you are a competent presenter?
Laugh if you must at the folly of these notions, but they are played out thousands of times daily in companies across the world. And before long, you will find yourself in the audience witnessing the effect of 15-Minute Syndrome first-hand.
What can we do about it? My answer sounds like a commercial — send them to PowerPoint Live — so I’m more interested in your answers.
So many presentations are boring because their pace is exactly the same throughout. Whether the speaker reads a script, follows a PowerPoint or just works from an outline, the word flow is coming out at roughly the same speed and same volume. The result?
Boredom. The audience falls asleep.
Practically anything you can do to alter or change the pace of your speech is a good thing because it will make you stand out from all of the other speakers who never change their pace. This is why when a speaker makes a seemingly spontaneous remark, the audience responds favorably. When uttering a spontaneous remark, whether louder than usual or under the breath as an aside, the speed and volume change. This variety makes the speaker more interesting.
Since most speakers are nervous, they don’t pause long enough when tossing out rhetorical questions to the audience to allow the audience to think of an answer. Great speakers pause longer and that results in a favorable change of pace.
Telling funny stories, even telling jokes can change the pace (but I’m not recommending that you try to be a joke teller). When you get your audience to laugh, you are, in effect, changing the pace of the presentation. Because now you are pausing and you are giving your audience a chance to communicate back to you in the form of laughter.
Occasionally getting excited and speaking quickly is OK, as long as you balance that with longer pauses and moments where you speak slower than normal. Walking around in front of your audience and moving at a different pace can also create more variety in your presentation.
When it comes to a presenter’s speaking pace, consistency isn’t just the hobgoblin of little minds, it is the bane of bored audiences everywhere.
Al Gore has taken enough heat about his flat and wooden speaking style over the years to raise the Earth’s temperature several degrees (some of it from me), but you have to give him credit for one thing he does well: the man knows how to use his PowerPoint slides.
Long before Al Gore was turned into a movie star (“an Inconvenient Truth”), he toured the country giving a PowerPoint presentation on the dangers of global warming. I’ll let others debate the merits of the science or Al Gore, but I will critique his style. I saw Gore give his presentation in 2004 here in Manhattan (his critics took great comfort that Gore spoke on global warming on the coldest day in decades in New York).
But the thing I still remember years later about his presentation was this: no text. Gore used NO TEXT in his PowerPoint presentation. Gore correctly used slides that contained images of the earth, glaciers, ice caps, and the sea to make his points. His visuals enhanced his presentation; they didn’t detract and they didn’t bore.
So if even Al Gore can use PowerPoint in a non-boring manner, what’s your excuse? If you are going to use PowerPoint slides, don’t fill them up with text. Instead, use images, photos and graphs, whether you are trying to save the planet or your number one aluminum siding account.
Many speakers can’t resist the temptation to use big words while giving a speech. Sometimes it is a conscious effort to appear to be smart, sometimes it is an unconscious impulse because that’s what a speaker thinks he or she is supposed to do in a so-called “formal” speech.
Either way, it’s a bad idea.
Using big, long, or fancy words in a speech can damage you with your audience, not enhance your credibility. If you use a word that some or most members of your audience doesn’t understand, you are creating a distance between you and the audience. At some level, audience members are thinking, “Hey, this guy thinks he’s smarter than I am. Well, we’ll see about that!”
Another danger of using big words is that you will seem insecure—it’s as if you were trying to hard. A part of what made both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton master communicators is that they were always quick to edit out big words that a speech writer put into draft remarks. Both Presidents understood the power of simple words.
Yes, throwing big words around has helped some media figures like William F. Buckley Jr. But if your primary goal is to communicate a message (and not creating an aristocratic image for yourself), then you should stick to smaller, shorter, and simpler words.
Remember, it’s not about dumbing down your ideas, it’s about clarity.
Why use “mitigate” when “lessen” will do fine?
Why use “jejune” when “ordinary” does the trick?
Also keep this in mind,: there are many big words that people are used to reading, but aren’t used to hearing. So if you say them out loud, it will take people a second to remember what they mean because they hear the word so infrequently. Better to use words that most people use in every day language.
This lesson is especially important for politicians. Winston Churchill prided himself in being able to give speeches on complicated foreign policy matters while never using words with more than two syllables. He understood that the ears process information differently than the eye does, and that the shorter the word the better for all speaking situations.
So if it’s good enough for Churchill, then it’s good enough for you too.
The “nicer” you are perceived by your audience, the more likely you will succeed as a speaker. If you are viewed as “nice,” those listening to you are more inclined to believe you, pay attention to you, accept you and buy into you and your ideas.
So how can you seem more likeable as a speaker?
1. Meet, greet, and shake hands with as many audience members before you begin your speech. A grad, dramatic entrance at the beginning of your speech only works if you are a well-known celebrity who is already beloved.
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Smile, as much as possible, as long as it is not inappropriate. Smile before you speak your first word and after your have finished your speech.
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Occasionally speak from a position of empathy. Don’t simply lecture from a position of authority. Occasionally change your point of view to surface concerns of your audience.
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Don’t dash off the second your speech is over. Instead, stay in the room, shake every hand, ask people what their thoughts are, answer questions. Generally, don’t act like a prima donna and you will make a likeable impression.
Finally, covey a sense of fun when you are speaking. Act like you are having fun and that you are fun—this is a big ingredient in being likable. A wink here, a smile there, an occasional laugh (especially at yourself) will go a long way toward making you likeable and therefore more believable and effective.
What keeps a lot of very good speakers from every becoming GREAT speakers? It is this belief: “I’m just not comfortable being dramatic the way professional speakers are.” The irony is that these good speakers are quite emotional and, well, dramatic, when then are telling me how much they don’t want to be dramatic in their speeches.
I don’t think that most speakers should strive to be dramatic or theatrical when giving a speech. The real goal should be to come across as “real.” If you are telling an anecdote about a corporate blunder, then your voice, facial expressions and tone should suggest how ridiculous you felt the blunder was.
Most good speakers are quite emphatic when they are having a conversation one-on-one with a friend when discussing issues of importance. They might laugh, frown, or use sarcasm or humor. But the second they give a so-called formal speech, the laugh, the surprise, the shock, the amusement they find towards issues and events is drained away. Instead, the speaker presents information in a straight forward, clam, and steady pace. Sure, the speaker may look comfortable, have good hand gestures and even solid eye contact. But the presentation is too homogeneous and is too consistent.
The solution isn’t for the speaker to go to acting school and become more dramatic. The answer is to be more natural, more real. The speaker needs to relive the moment he or she first told a friend or colleague about an idea. Relive the fun or shock or surprise and then just talk in a conversational manner.
That’s what great speakers do. They usually don’t have acting backgrounds, instead, they just relive real moments in their life when they had interesting conversations with real people. And that’s a lot easier than going to Stella Adler or studying “The Method” for decades.
So what is the real secret to being a confident speaker? It is knowing this little secret: You have little competition! Most speakers are horrible! And most speeches are awful!
Think about this for very long and you will become filled with confidence for your next speech. When is the last time you heard a colleague or someone in your industry give a fantastic and memorable speech? Chances are, you can’t remember one.
Why are most speeches bad? Because the speaker didn’t practice AND he or she never received any formal training on how to give a speech. How would this translate into other areas in your life?
Imagine you are an average weekend hack golfer with a 20 handicap. Someone enters you in a golf tournament with a $5000 entry fee and a $100,000 prize to the winner. All of a sudden, you are getting very nervous, right?
But what if you found out that every other player in the tournament had never played golf before, never had a lesson, and in fact, didn’t know which end of the club to hold? All of a sudden you would be brimming with confidence.
What if you had to enter an English writing contest, and all of your competitors didn’t read or write English and had never taken an English class. All of a sudden you are William Shakespeare in comparison!
I belief these analogies are fair when it comes to public speaking. Most presentations in the world consist of someone standing up and then nervously giving a boring data dump. When that is your primary completion, it is incredibly easy to make a great speech, in relative terms.
For most people in most organizations, simply being able to get up and look at people (rather than stare at notes or screens) and explain a few points with a couple of examples and stories will automatically make you the best speaker of the day if not the week.
So if you find yourself getting nervous before you give your next speech, think about your competition. If that doesn’t make you relax, then nothing will.
TV Evangelist Joel Osteen has signed a $10 million book deal with Simon & Schuster imprint The Free Press to write his next book. Is Osteen a world renowned theologian? No. Does he have credentials as a Biblical scholar? No. Does he have a degree from a seminary? No. Does he even have an undergraduate degree in anything remotely close to divinity studies?
Again, no.
Osteen studied video production and communication in what time he did spend attending college.
I don’t point these issues out to attack Osteen, but merely to point out the secret of his success. Osteen is now one of the top handful of “writers” in the world and yet he doesn’t really write or have any training to write.
Indeed, here is the quote from Osteen’s publisher when the news of the book deal was released:
“We have long admired Joel for his unparalleled ability to touch people and communicate with them,” said Dominick V. Anfuso, V.P., editorial director of Free Press. “We are thrilled and honored to be working with him on his next book.”
Please note that Anfuso praised Osteen for his abilities to “touch people” and to “communicate,” but not to “write.”
If you are a big Osteen fan, please don’t get angry with me. I’m not attacking him, really. But I do think that it is important to realize why he is getting more money to “write” a book than most small nations earn as GDP in a year.
Osteen’s secret? He is a speaker. He’s a fantastic speaker. In fact, as much as I try, I can’t fault Osteen for any of his public speaking skills. If you haven’t seen Osteen delivering a sermon, you likely don’t have a TV. His church buys time on seemingly half of the TV networks and broadcast stations around the US and many around the Globe.
Even if you have seen Osteen preach on TV before, I urge you to take another look. No, I’m not trying to convert you to Osteen’s brand of religion. In fact, I urge all of my clients to watch Osteen, regardless if they are Jewish, Atheist or Muslim, to learn from his speaking example.
Why is Osteen successful? Because he employs the perfect public speaking techniques in every sermon. He is positive, upbeat, conversational, fluid, never abstract and always accessible. He doesn’t lecture. He doesn’t deliver sermons. Instead, he tells stories to make points. He never hides behind a lectern; instead he walks around on stage comfortably. He looks like he is having the time of his life when he is speaking.
And those are skills that will serve you well, regardless of whether you want to be a preacher, a best selling author, a CEO billionaire, or a winning politician.
Yes, the technology for podcasting has never been easier. Microphones, editing equipment, mixers, the equipment keeps getting cheaper AND higher in quality. But the most important part of any podcast is the human quality. Namely, are the people talking saying anything interesting, and is their style tolerable?
More major corporations are starting to use podcasting technology to communicate with their most important customers and prospects around the globe. But once you start a podcast, there are a lot of tough questions to answer.
1. Do we try to write out an entire script for our executives to follow?
2. What is the best structure to use?
3. Do we have one person talking? Two? A group?
4. What is the best format?
5. Do we edit the show to make it sound more professional?
6. What is the best length of time for a podcast?
Here is how I advise my clients on these questions:
1.Never use a full-text script. Reading into a microphone is impossible to do well for the non-professional. If you give business execs a script to read they will be monotone and boring.
2.A simple one or ½ page piece of paper with an outline is the best thing for your executives to use as guidance through out the show.
3.It’s extremely difficult to have one person do a podcast effectively. Likewise, a group of people can be confusing and unwieldy. I recommend 2 people having a conversation.
4.The best format is to have two people talking together in a real conversation. Don’t have one person talk for five minutes going through a laundry list of topics and then switching to the other person talking for five minutes—that’s boring and sounds like a dry college lecture. Instead, have one person talk about one point for under a minute. Then, have the other person ask a follow up question on that subject. Then, the second person introduces his or her first point. The first person asks a follow up question and then the back and forth pattern can continue for the whole podcast, with no one person ever talking for more than a 40-50 second period without being interrupted by the other.
5.I don’t recommend editing the podcasts. If you let executives know the show will be edited, they will be less focused and prepared and will slip into bad habits. It will take less time for everyone if you record it live-to-tape (now digital).
The best length of time is whatever length it takes to cover your topics. It could be 90 seconds or it could be 25 minutes. Since you aren’t doing commercial radio with hard time breaks, your topics and content should dictate the length, not some artificial, pre-determined limit. Talk as long or short as you need to in order to communicate your messages.
Excerpts from the February 7, 2006 New York Times coverage of the Coretta Scott King funeral :
Of the four presidents, Mr. Clinton was the obvious favorite of the crowd. A huge cheer went up as he reached the open area near Mrs. King’s coffin, and the crowd gave him a thunderous standing ovation when he approached the microphone with his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
He (Clinton) delivered the longest speech of the four presidents, apparently without notes. After former President George Bush lost some of his prepared remarks, he told the crowd, “It may be your lucky day, I’ve lost a page.” As they cheered, cameras caught the current President Bush laughing heartily in the background.
We can debate all day on whether there is a left-wing or a right-wing bias in the mainstream media (just kidding, please don’t send me your opinions on this tiresome issue), but one thing is beyond debate: the news media has a definite bias in favor of speakers who don’t read speeches and a pronounced bias against speakers who work from fully prepared texts.
The clear-cut implication of this article is that Bill Clinton is loved by the audience, in part, because he comes across as sincere and likeable because he can simply talk from the heart. Former President George Bush, on the other hand, is out of his element and awkward, as demonstrated by his losing a page of his speech. Granted, the
New York Times still showed Bush in a positive light — he was able to make fun of himself. Still, one former president was able to communicate messages of profound emotional importance, while another former President was cast as an amiable nerd who has to be content with making fun of his own failings as a communicator.
Which message would you rather convey?
Note that the New York Times wrote that Clinton spoke “apparently without notes.” As I teach all of my clients, it is very easy to use notes while speaking in a way that is undetectable to an audience, as long as you keep your notes to one page and never have to pick it up.
Bush blundered on several accounts:
1. He should have personally double checked his speech right before going on to make sure every page was in order.
2. He should have condensed his notes to a single sheet of paper so as to avoid the problem of missing or mixed up pages.
3. He should have been familiar enough with the messages he wanted to convey at the funeral so that he could have adlibbed though the missing page without ever calling attention to his missing page.
Former President Bush does not have a reputation as a vain, self-aggrandizing politician, but in this case, he took the spotlight off of the dead and the mourning process and put it on himself. And that’s the last thing you want to do if you have been invited to speak at a funeral.
Sure, the news media can be negative and even nasty on a regular basis. But every so often a favored politician, entertainer or sports figure is subjected to the “puff piece” where the rules are different. In a puff piece, the subject is puffed up with nothing put positive facts, quotes and examples on his or her brilliance, creativity, and humanity.
The February 5, 2006 New York Times Magazine ran a puff piece bordering on idolatry on Duke University head basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, who now also charges between $50k-100k per speech he gives. I happen to think that Coach K deserves the praise because I find him devoid of all of the sanctimonious platitudes that take over most successful basketball and football coaches (and I thank him for the entertainment he gave me for four years when I sat just a few seats behind him in the student section of Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium).
But here is what struck me about the New York Times article:
“Rather than standing behind a lectern, he (Kryzewski) paced at the front of the stage. He used no notes. The house lights were up because he likes to find a few faces to focus on, ‘to make eye contact,’ he says. He always looks for a few women because ‘they’re more emotional, and when I talk about those things, they get it. They’re right there with me.’”
The author had just spent several paragraphs making the case that Coach K is more authentic, more sincere, and more honest than other people. How did the author make this point? By pointing out that Coach K doesn’t read his speech and that he faces his audience directly without hiding behind a lectern.
The implication is that Coach K is braver than others, because he risks exposure directly with his audience. He is authentic and therefore not the typical insincere phony that reads other people’s words off of a PowerPoint screen.
We can’t all be wildly successful basketball coaches, but we can all learn how to give a speech without reading a script, staring at PowerPoint or hiding behind a lectern. If you want to give reporters (and others) a nice hook for writing and saying nice things about you, then you should follow Coach K’s example—not on the basketball court, but on the speaker’s platform.
Public figures get in trouble all of the time and are then forced to apologize. Whether it is TV preachers who claim to know why God strikes some people down or Olympic athletes who brag about skiing while drunk, big shots are often forced into the role of the contrite. Few pull it off well, because they don’t seem to be sincere and they don’t seem to grasp why what they said or did it offended anyone.
Oprah Winfrey, once again, is in a class by herself. Not only is she only the world’s greatest talk show host, but she is a world class apologizer too. Winfrey suffered a rare ding to her public image when she promoted James Frey’s phony memoir “A Million Little Pieces.” She made matters much worse for herself when she defended Frey after he was exposed as a fraud. Winfrey called to defend him on the Larry King Show, saying the controversy was “much ado about nothing.”
What happened next was not the usual treatment for media darling Oprah. She was roundly denounced by columnists, pundits, editors and talk show hosts around the globe for essentially saying that “the truth doesn’t matter anymore.”
Oprah countered several days later on her show when she brought back disgraced author Frey and his publisher Nan Talese. Regarding Oprah’s call to King defending Frey, she said “I regret that phone call. I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter and I am deeply sorry about that. That is not what I believe.”
Additionally, Winfrey said that she felt “duped” by Frey and she used the platform of her own TV show to rake Fry and his editor over the coals repeatedly.
So why was Oprah’s apology effective whereas as most politicians and public officials fail in their own apologies?
1. She said she was sorry and that she made a mistake. She didn’t sugar coat things or claim that she had “misspoken.” She didn’t apologize just for having offended people. She apologized because she had made a serious mistake.
2. Oprah didn’t try to minimize her sins. She showed she really understood why people were upset. She spelled out that her mistake was giving people the impression she didn’t care about the truth.
3. She seemed sincere. By spending so much time on her blunder and by giving airtime to her critics, Oprah seemed genuinely troubled by the course of events and sincerely sorry.
4. Oprah tried to take actions to correct the problems. She practically chopped off the fingers of Frey and his editor in order to keep them from writing and publishing again. This shows she takes the issue seriously and isn’t just doing a quick PR spin.
5. By apologizing to her viewers, admitting that her critics were right, and offering no defense for her actions, Oprah revealed herself emotionally to her fans and the world. She also left no other rational reason for anyone to be angry with her or to criticize her. Thus, the only logical reaction left from her audience was to give Oprah forgiveness.
That is a successful apology and that is yet another reason why Oprah is the queen of all media.
