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People who get paid well to speak all share one of two
traits: either they're famous, or they own "The Skills". To be able to move people who don't know you
as a celebrity of some sort, you must know how to keep your
audience focused on you and your message, and how to keep them
on the same page, on the same wavelength, every step of the way.
Keeping an audience with you is simply not possible with
the way 99% of all public speakers behave when at the front of a
group. When you speak the way most of us have been taught
to do from an early age, you engage in behaviors that send the
wrong signals to your audience - in many cases exactly the opposite
of what you would like to signal. Worse, these standard
behaviors actually reduce your cognitive capacity at the time
you most desperately need it.
If these statements seem sweeping, please understand that
we at PublicSpeakingSkills.com have been training people from
business, politics, the military and the clergy for over 12
years in The Skills. During that time, we have had the privilege to
work with over 10,000 people from all walks of life, and here is
what we have learned: 99% of speakers engage in exactly the same
behaviors, and consequently produce similar results when it
comes to the quality of their speaking.
In fact, in every one of our on-site programs, we begin
with an exercise that "benchmarks" how each student
speaks prior to training, and we are able to predict to the
second what each and every participant will do during their
initial delivery. To the second!
Good
News!
But that's the good news. It's good news because we
also know that most people speak the way they do simply because
they've never been shown the proper way. And though many
people take courses in public speaking in high school or
college, the format of those courses tends to emphasize the content
part of speaking rather than the actual physical behaviors one
needs to understand in order to acquire The
Skills. If you have ever taken a course in school, we
bet that your assignments were to create a series of different
types of speeches: The Informative, The Inspirational, The
Motivational, etc., etc.
Sound familiar? But what were you taught about the
actual delivery, other than to look at everyone in the audience
and watch your umms and ahhs? Worse,
during your speaking career you probably have been receiving
positive feedback for your behaviors no matter what you’ve
been doing by people
either too polite or simply not knowledgeable enough to tell you
otherwise.
Speaking
well: talent or training?
When people learn the proper way; when they understand what
the audience expects of them as human beings; when they embrace
the idea that it's OK to go into a presentation without having
spent hours and hours rehearsing it; when they become
comfortable with not knowing what they're going to say until
just before they say it; and when they come to accept that often
the most powerful thing they can say is nothing at all, they
never engage in the old behaviors again. They approach
every opportunity to speak to a crowd with desire and
enthusiasm, and the larger the crowd, the better. They
actually see speaking to a group as one of the most relaxing
things they can do, as it is one of the few times left in life
where they are free to do only one thing at a time. These
people have The Skills.
And we can't emphasize enough that The Skills are, indeed, a set of behaviors that you learn, and not
something that you are born with. Only a very small subset
of people is 'born' with the ability to move a group to action
with their words and actions. Those people have what the
rest of us don't: it's called "charisma".
Charismatics have been known to lead thousands to action by the
power of their spoken words, often for good, and sometimes not.
But charisma alone didn't get Bill Clinton to the top job in the
world. Bill Clinton, believe it or not, was not always a
great speaker. What he had was both charisma and the
brains to know that he did not know everything - and that
becoming a great speaker was both an essential job requirement
and something that someone could be taught.
Bill Clinton was one of only a handful of men who was
elected president of the
United States
without great personal or family wealth. He got elected on
his ability to motivate people to listen to him, work for him,
follow him and support him all the way. He was successful
because he didn’t simply speak; he spoke with a manner and a
style that caused people to not only listen to his words but
also to hear them, remember them, and to believe
them. Bill Clinton
has The Skills.
The Skills supersede genes, culture, background, heritage,
and to a large extent even education. Many clients come to
us because they want help with their accents or they feel their
voice needs correcting in some way. Although we grant that
there are some people with a speaking voice better suited to
silent films, for the vast majority an accent or unique pitch
only adds to the level of interest they can create as a speaker.
That's because, as we'll learn, these traits simply add to one's
"humanness".
It’s
about being you
People are not moved by messages delivered by speakers whom
they don't feel are "real". And yet most of us
were taught behaviors that cause us to adopt completely alien
personas when we speak to groups. We try to become "Presenterman!"
or "Presenterwoman!". Sadly, Hillary Clinton
does this. Could you imagine spending dinner across the
table from Hillary Clinton and having her speak to you the way
she does to crowds? Pretty painful thought! Yet you
could pretty much imagine that if you were sharing dinner with
Bill, or Ronald Reagan, the conversation would be not unlike how
you know them to speak in public. Alas, Hillary does not
have The Skills.
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