Confessions of a Public Speaker
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Read between June 21 - June 30, 2018
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"The best speakers know enough to be scared…the only difference between the pros and the novices is that the pros have trained the butterflies to fly in formation.” — — Edward R. Murrow
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The Book of Lists says a team of market researchers asked 3,000 Americans the simple question, “What are you most afraid of?”, but they allowed them to write down as many answers as they wanted. Since there was no list to pick from, the survey data is far from scientific. Worse, no information is provided about who these people were.[6] We have no way of knowing whether these people were representative of the rest of us.
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When you do look at the list, it’s easy to see that people fear heights (#2), deep water (#5), sickness (#6), and flying (#8) because of the likelihood of dying from those things. Add them up, and death easily comes in first place, restoring the Grim Reaper’s fearsome reputation.
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Taking responsibility for the crowd means showing up to the room early enough to at least hear the previous speaker.
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If the speaker was awesome but only got cold stares from the crowd, you know something is up that’s larger than you or the other speaker. But if he does well and gets great energy and strong applause, yet you go down in flames, you know it’s not the audience — it’s you.
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if you arrive early, take the initiative to talk to people in the crowd and find some supporters. Ask them to move up front. Alternatively, you might discover the one person who has a really good reason to hate you and make sure not to let him ask the first question during Q&
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Sometimes the tough crowd is entirely imagined and then created by the speaker, who, realizing the audience is hostile, blames them. What kind of idiot does this sort of thing? My kind of idiot.
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In the act of protecting myself from what I thought would be a hostile, critical, skeptical audience, I set about on the one course most likely to create the thing I was trying to avoid. I’m sure this happens often: being paranoid has strikingly good odds of creating what we’re afraid of, perpetuating the paranoia.
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Now I know I have to embody what I want the audience to be. If I want them to have fun, I have to have fun. If I want them to laugh, I have to laugh. But it has to be done in a way they can connect with, which is hard to do.
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One unusual way to think about tough crowds is that a crowd has to be interested in you to hate you. A hostile crowd gives you more energy to work with than an indifferent one.
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But if people are angry or rowdy, it means they care about something. They have some energy they are willing to contribute, for better or for worse.
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After watching and giving hundreds of lectures, I’ve learned that by far the thing people seem angriest about is dishonesty. Show some integrity by speaking the truth on the very thing that angers them, or even acknowledging it in a heartfelt way, and you will score points.
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If you’re truly afraid you will be on hostile turf, some extra legwork can relieve your fears. Ask your host how large the crowd tends to be and what common questions might get asked. Request the names of three people to interview who are representative of the crowd you will speak to.
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There are many things that get in the way of good thinking, but the legend that Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope is especially notorious for doing so. The story is often told to suggest Lincoln’s brilliance — that he could just scribble one of the greatest speeches of all time in a few spare moments while riding on a train. It’s a story that inspires many to forgo preparing in favor of getting up on stage and winging it, as if that’s what great leaders and thinkers do.
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Making a point, teaching a lesson, or conveying a feeling to others first requires thinking, lots and lots of thinking, before the speaking ever happens. But we don’t see the thinking; after all, it’s not very interesting to watch. We only see the speaking, which makes it seem as though the thinking magically happened all by itself.
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If speakers are as smart and talented as their resumes claim, we should expect them to take seriously the reasons people are in the room listening to them. But since they’re presenting, and they have the microphone, they allow themselves to become the center of attention, forgetting where their priorities should be.
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If you can’t spend 5 or 10 hours preparing for them, thinking about them, and refining your points to best suit their needs, what does that say about your respect for your audience’s time? It says that your 5 hours are more important than 100 of theirs, which requires an ego larger than the entire solar system.
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If you don’t know why you’re on the stage, the audience cannot help you. In the speaking trade, this is known as eating the microphone. It’s the moment when the audience’s confidence in having its needs met is lost. Everyone stops listening. This never happens because of typos, bad slides, or even a momentarily confused speaker. It happens when the speaker wanders far away from anything the audience cares about.
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With a weak position, your talk may become, “Here is everything I know I could cram into the time I have, but since I have no idea if you care, or what I would say if I had less time to talk, you get a half-baked, hard to follow, hard to present, pile of trash.”
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If you don’t have time to study your subject, at least study your audience. It may turn out that as little as you know about a subject, you know more about it than your audience.
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Every point should be compressed into a single, tight, interesting sentence. The arguments might be long, but no one should ever be confused as to what your point is while you are arguing it.
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Know the likely counterarguments from an intelligent, expert audience.
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Good lectures are never comprehensive because it’s the wrong format to do so. I might as well read the dictionary to someone for six hours — it would be just as ineffective. People really want insight. They want an angle. A good speaker or teacher finds it for them.
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Consider a talk titled, “Risk management 101.” For those who remember college, 101 courses were boring. They’re often designed to put people to sleep rather than excite them. And worse, intro college courses are generally taken because they are required, not desired. Naming a talk “<Insert thing here> 101” in the hopes of making it attractive, denies how boring most 101 courses in the history of the universe have been for students.
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With a title and list in hand, you now have a strawman: a rough sketch of what your talk might cover and the points it might make. Show it to coworkers, friends, or even potential audience members, and ask them how to make the list better.
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Some people resist outlines because in our modern age they seem rigid, low-tech, and old-school, restricting ideas to the tyranny of two-dimensional hierarchy.
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They think it’s cooler to use less constrained forms of organization like mindmaps or storyboards. Good books like Garr Reynolds’s Presentation Zen (New Riders) and Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology (O’Reilly) advocate such things. Try different ones to figure out which creative process works best for you.
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An outline like the previous example is the simplest narrative structure to work from. It’s easy to remember. You can even use that outline in your slides, showing your audience your plan as you go.
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If I’m fluent in my research, I can offer those anecdotes naturally. In effect, by working hard on a clear, strong, well-reasoned outline, I’ve already built three versions of the talk: an elevator pitch (the title), a five-minute version (saying each point and a brief summary), and the full version (with slides, movies, and whatever else strengthens each point).
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Twain, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt all used a short outline of five or six points — often with just a few words per point — to help them recall their hour-long speeches while giving them.
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Unless you’re famous enough to expect people to come because of your name or distinctive hatware, get to work. The more effort you put into the clarity of your points, the easier everything else about public speaking becomes.
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Travel, however, is excellent for finding new questions to ask, so I write often while on trips.
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Sadly, we’ll always have long lectures for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual lectures at all. It’s an artifact of culture, the logistics of putting together events, and the reluctance to change that ensures most people, until the end of time, will lecture longer than their audience can tolerate.
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Uneven distribution of power is necessary to get things done efficiently, which is exactly what you need when trying to give a lecture. If you think things are bad in America now, in a true democracy of 300 million people, they would be much worse.
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If the aliens landed during the TED Conference, they’d obviously assume the guy standing on stage holding the microphone was supreme overlord of the planet.
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People love rhythm. We love to feel in sync. But the only person who can ever set that rhythm is the person with power at the front of the room.
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I can say, “I have 30 minutes to talk to you, and five points to make. I will spend five minutes on each point and save the remaining time for any questions.” That takes about 10 seconds to say, but for that small price I continue to own the attention of the room because they know the plan.
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The best way to direct attention is to talk about situations (another word for a story) that the audience cares about. Then they have two reasons to be interested: the situation and who it’s happening to.
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Even a topic as mind-numbingly dull as tax forms becomes interesting if the speaker cares both about the problem and the people affected by it.
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When an audience is curious about the story you’re telling, they’ll follow your lead almost anywhere.
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You can entice, inspire, cajole, stimulate, or fascinate but you cannot make anyone listen to anything. Embracing this fact up-front lets us focus on what we can do. We want to create curiosity. We want to catch and hold someone’s attention…. Influence is a function of grabbing someone’s attention, connecting to what they already feel is important, and linking that feeling to whatever you want them to see, do, or feel. It is easier if you let your story land first, and then draw the circle of meaning/connection around it using what you see and hear in the responses of your listeners.
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Know what the point is and what insight the audience will gain from what you are directing their attention to.
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It’s better to keep the attention of the room for 10 solid minutes and then open for questions than to stumble through an hour in a stupor of mediocrity.
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If you fumble with the remote for your laptop, get confused by your own slides, or apologize for not being more prepared for the presentation, you are making it clear that you are not worthy of their attention. You are not playing the role they expect — that of a confident, clear, motivated, and possibly entertaining expert on something. You do not have to be perfect, but you do need to play the part.
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In other words, be bigger than you are. Speak louder, take stronger positions, and behave
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more aggressively than you would in an ordina...
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A common mistake people make is to shrink onstage. They become overly polite and cautious. They speak softly, don’t tell stories, and never smile. They become completely, devastatingly neutral. As safe as this seems, it is an attention graveyard.
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Instead, be a passionate, interested, fully present version of
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The biggest advantage I have over every crowd, no matter how smart they are, is that I know what will happen next.
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I’m convinced I could know half as much on a subject as my audience, yet still amaze, surprise, and entertain them by how I weave my stories together.
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