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Born to
Speak?
It's
common to believe, when you listen to great speakers at work,
that certain people are simply born with the talent to speak
well, and therefore no amount of training or practicing is going
to transform you into a great speaker, no matter how hard you
try. And while it's
true that both John Kennedy and Bill Clinton have what most
people don't - charisma - their ability to speak as they do was
not part of what they were born with.
Bill
Clinton was not always a great speaker.
He was guilty of several bad practices, one being common
to the political class:
Clinton
actually thought people wanted to hear elected officials go on
at the mouth for one, two, or even three hours. The truth is you
rarely hear someone say, "That was a great presentation - I
only wished he would have droned on for another hour or
so". And FDR is
famous for his advice to public speakers: Be sincere; be brief;
be seated!
Brevity
is the soul of wit, but it's also the heart of a great talk.
President Ronald Reagan, the person for whom the name
"The Great Communicator" was coined, had a strict
limit of 45 minutes, but preferred to stay under 25 whenever
possible.
Another
annoying practice of
Clinton
's was the repeated use of his forefinger to point at the
audience when he spoke. People
tend to feel uncomfortable when pointed at, and we know how
important it is for audience members to feel comfortable.
His handlers never could break him of the general motion,
but they were able to train him to crank that finger back into
his hand and then lock it down with his thumb.
You
can probably easily picture Bill Clinton with his fist moving up
and down, thumb pointed outward as it held a firm grip on his
finger, declaring to the assembled press, "I did not have
relations with that woman, that Monica Lewinsky..."
Finally,
like most people, and by far the majority of politicians, he
would rarely stop the word flow once he started.
As charming and charismatic as he was with individuals,
when speaking in public, he did not understand the essence of
the pause. But his
handlers knew the respect he had for his "mentor", and
so they sat him down and had him watch videotapes of JFK over
and over again until he got it.
A
New Style
Clinton
's speaking
style is really a modernized version of Kennedy's.
But JFK was one of the most influential speakers of the
2oth century, in that he really introduced the
"humanistic" style of public speaking.
Prior to Kennedy's showing the world the power of an
authoritarian's speaking to his "subjects" on equal
terms, we had the "oratory" style, best exemplified by
Winston Churchill.
Churchill
spoke to us from on high - Kennedy brought speech down to the
level of the common man, and people loved him for it.
We
are not suggesting that every time you give a speech or deliver
a presentation you should speak as if you were the president of
your country. We use
these two men as examples because they learned just how powerful
the pause can be when needing to persuade others to see things
as you do. The
reality is that few people will ever use as many pauses when
they present as these and other Masters of The Skills, but then
most people don't average 10,000 or so people in their
audiences.
But
we want you, from this point forward, to be constantly hearing
these cadences in your head when you speak, with the
understanding that you'll be gaining more and more message
uptake the more you strive to hit their stride.
Right now, we would wager that you probably average no
less than 25 words between pauses, and that many of you don't
pause at all. If you
want to be a speaker who can truly lay claim to having The
Skills, you must work to incorporate the pause at least at the
end of every thought.
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