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CHAPTER 2

What to Do? The Audience-Centered Presentation Process

WE ENDED CHAPTER 1 WITH A call for an audience-centered rhetoric for the twenty-first century, one that would respect the audience’s need to come to a decision in real time. We’ll begin at the most important place: the content.

How do you shape the content of an audience-centered speech? Much that is useful has been lost in our evolution to casual, conversational speakers. Public speaking must be more than merely conversation on your hind legs. Have you ever listened hard to a real conversation between two other people? If you’re not looking directly at both parties, it can be almost impossible to follow. Conversations are full of stops and starts, incomplete thoughts and utterances, and references to body language such as gestures, facial expressions, and what the nonverbal communications researchers call emblems, or gestures that have specific coded meaning in particular cultures. It’s a messy business.

Public speaking is structured conversation.

Content must be given to the audience in a way that recognizes the audience’s need to absorb information through an aural genre with limited opportunities for feedback of the kind that conversation provides. That is not to say that there is no feedback in public speaking—there’s actually plenty. But because most public speaking is more or less scripted, the speaker is limited in the amount of attention he can give to feedback, and limited in the ways in which he can respond.

Think of a presentation as a train journey. It’s linear—on a particular track—unlike conversation. You don’t get the opportunity to stop the train very often. If you get off the train, you quickly get left behind. So you don’t get the next idea, because you’re floundering around trying to get back on the train.

Thus, the content needs to proceed logically, in complete thoughts, with stops along the way for the audience to check its comprehension.

Listening is exhausting work, and people don’t retain much of what they hear. How can you improve on the low retention rate? First, it’s a matter of structuring the content so that it is organized and delivered the way the audience needs to hear it.

Second, it’s a matter of ruthless focus. Think in terms of getting one idea across to the audience; if your audience will only remember one thing, what would you tell them? Throw everything else away.

Third, what is your emotional content? You should give just as much thought to preparing an emotional story line as an intellectual one.

Take your audience on a journey from why to how.

We’ll get into more detail later, but for now, imagine that your speech will take the audience on a journey. The audience comes into a talk wanting to have a key question answered: Why? Why am I here? Why is this topic important? Why should I pay attention to the speaker for the next hour or so?

This is a key difference between conversation and public speaking. People engage in conversation by and large for mutual pleasure, the exchange of information, or storytelling—or some mix of the three. You don’t need to answer the “Why?” question, typically, for your friend to talk with you.

But public speaking is different. You need to orient the audience and prepare the way for the information you have to give them. To do that, you need to set them at ease and give them a context for your presentation. Sometimes a good introduction can do some of that work, but most of it still must be done by the speaker.

Once you’ve answered the “Why?” question, you take your audience on the journey that reveals your answer. If you’ve done your job well, the audience will be asking “How?” by the end of the talk. How do I implement this idea? How do I take this vision and make it my own? And perhaps the most important one, as we’ll see: How do I get started right now?

Move the audience from why to how. That’s your goal. That’s a successful speech, whether to five people, or fifty, or five thousand.

Don’t tell them all you know.

The audience provisionally grants you authority by becoming an audience—sitting down and preparing to listen to you. The audience bestows a mantle of trust and credibility upon you at the beginning of a speech. It’s up to you to wear it successfully. Don’t betray that trust. Stick to the point, and make it possible for your audience to continue to allow you to be its expert.

The essence of successful public speaking is focus—focusing on the emotional content, focusing on the one key idea you want to get across, and focusing on the audience.

Connect with your audience by telling them stories.

Recent research into the workings of the brain suggests something that we all know intuitively: We make sense of our world by piecing together stories. In fact, from the cradle on up, we deduce cause and effect by creating primitive stories about what we see around us. Sitting in a high chair, we push over the cup of milk and watch in delight and fascination as the white liquid runs over the tray and down to the floor. Then the adults around us make a lot of noise and rush around cleaning things up. What a story!

From there, we develop increasingly sophisticated stories to explain how the world around us works. And we learn the stories our society tells us as a way of further understanding the apparent chaos of modern life.

Good public speaking connects with each individual audience member’s need to understand what’s being said in terms of stories. Think of the journey you’re going to take your audience on (the one from why to how) as a kind of story. Your audience will understand it better if it has all the parts of a good story—a strong protagonist, a clear dilemma for him or her to work on, and a happy ending.

In Western society, we have some basic stories that all of us learn at a very early age and that are reinforced by virtually endless repetition throughout our lives. The most fundamental is the Quest, but there are four others that we also have woven into our deepest cultural understandings. If you can weave some of the elements of a good Quest story, or one of the other fundamental ones, into your presentation, your audience will “get” the idea you’re trying to get across much more quickly and much more powerfully. In addition, the likelihood that they’ll remember what you have to say will go up enormously. I’ll say more about these stories in chapter 6.

Give your speech to the members of the audience by allowing them to become active.

Audiences are filled by and large with people who like to be active. They think of themselves as decision makers. For a good deal of your presentation, you’re asking these active decision makers to be passive. A good speech therefore describes a journey not only from why to how, but also from passive to active.

This is especially true of smaller audiences and more casual occasions—the typical business fare of ten or twenty people listening to a leader bring them up to date or exhort them to sell more widgets. Larger audiences in more formal occasions probably expect to be entertained (well or badly) rather than moved to action.

Far too many speakers, in a misguided desire to maintain control of what often seems like a potentially chaotic situation, refuse to “give” the speech to the audience. Instead, they hold on to it, keeping it for themselves. The result is at best an informative lecture. It is not a speech that moves people to action; it cannot therefore be a persuasive speech, except in the very limited sense that it could persuade the audience that the speaker is a learned person.

If you want to move your audience, you must learn to “give” the speech to them. Allow them full participation. Let them act upon your ideas. Move them from passive to active.

The single most important thing you can do to prepare a speech is to rehearse.

First of all, let me say that no matter how much I preach the virtues of rehearsal, some of those reading this book will nonetheless not do it. Why? On the face of it, it seems inconceivable that an executive could approach something as potentially important as a public presentation—even an “everyday” one—without extensive rehearsal. And yet many do. In my seventeen years of preparing, teaching, and coaching presentations and public speeches ranging from client sales pitches to campaign kick-offs and State of the Union addresses, I have seen more speeches fail from lack of rehearsal than any other single problem.

Do you think an internal speech to your staff doesn’t “count”? Then you’ve just lost an opportunity to change the world in the way that is most important to you. You have the most effect on the world closest to home, after all.

I’ve heard all the excuses, from “it’s just a little throwaway” to “if I rehearse I lose my spontaneity.” If a presentation is worth giving, it’s worth rehearsing at least once. If it’s not, then why would you be giving it?

Fundamentally, people avoid rehearsal because speech making is fraught with anxiety, and executives, politicians, and educational leaders feel about anxiety the way just about everyone else does: They try to avoid it. So, believe it or not, they put off the anxiety, greatly compounding the risk that the actual performance will be less than optimal, rather than face the worst of it during rehearsal.

Don’t do it. Please. Rehearse. It’s the single most important step you can take to become a better speaker. If you rehearse, you’ll be able to give the speech to the audience. If you don’t, you’ll still be getting to know it yourself. The difference is enormous in terms of what the audience can get out of your presentation.

Second, let’s agree that you won’t rehearse in front of a mirror alone. That trick fails to mimic adequately what public speaking is actually like. But more than that, it actually can create a problem for some: greater self-consciousness.

Self-forgetfulness is the secret to great speech making.

Successful public speaking comes ultimately from focusing less on yourself and more on the audience. For now, take it as the big Zen insight of this book. If you can forget about yourself—and even your speech—in the moment of giving it and instead focus on what the audience is getting from you, your presentations will be transformed into joyous performances.

The point of rehearsal is to take the first steps toward that optimal state by working through all the self-conscious moments and potentially awkward transitions that otherwise will trip you up during the presentation itself.

Rehearsal, in the first instance, is where you find out what your story is, as you put the whole thing together for the first time orally. It’s not enough to do it in your head. Only in speaking aloud will you discover where the gaps are, the pieces that you thought connected but in fact do not.

Stage actors typically rehearse for up to six weeks before they begin to perform. They leave absolutely nothing to chance. And yet a CEO of a Fortune 500 company will stand up in front of his stockholders with literally billions at stake (not to mention his job) and “wing it.”

And you will too, despite having read these words. So let me urge you once again: Rehearse, even for those “little” presentations. You can either change the world a little bit at a time, or you can leave no trace that you were ever here.

The speaker’s focus should be on the audience; the audience’s should be on the content.

Let’s be optimistic and imagine that you have rehearsed your content, and you’ve found the kinesthetic moments that will allow you to connect powerfully with your audience during the performance itself. And now, suddenly, it’s time to present.

My fifth-grade math teacher loved multicolored chalk. He’d stand in front of us, holding the chalk in his hands, more or less at parade rest at his sides. As he stood there, a multicolored sheen would develop on the sides of his trousers.

Naturally, we, his students, made fun of this addition to his garments. But the real fun began when we asked him questions and he thought about the answers. Then, his hands would creep up to his face. It’s a common gesture connected with thinking or other kinds of preoccupation—you bring your hands to your chin, your cheeks, your hair. Anywhere around your face.

Thus, the multicolored sheen would begin to develop on his face. Well, that was pretty great. But if we asked him a question that really gave him pause, gradually, his hand would steal over to his nose, and he would stick the piece of chalk right up it.

We loved it! Our whole aim in math class became asking questions that would cause the teacher to stick chalk up his nose. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn much fifth-grade math as a result. But I did learn something very telling about public speaking.

Visual distractions (indeed, any kind of distraction) can easily prevent an audience from getting even the little they can get under optimal conditions from a speech.

Or to put it another, more positive, way: As you speak, you send out a host of nonverbal communications with your face, your body, your posture, your gestures, the tone of your voice, and above all the way you move in relation to your audience. If those communications are consistent with and support your primary message—the content of your presentation—you can give a powerful speech. If, on the other hand, there is an inconsistency, or a competing message, the nonverbal one will win every time.

Every one of us can recall a teacher or speaker we’ve watched whose intellectual message was lost because the hapless performer’s fly was unzipped, or he paced back and forth in oblivion until we thought we would go mad, or, more subtly, the presenter’s monotonous voice merged with the white noise from the slide projector until all we could hear was an undifferentiated roar. The next thing we know, we’re snapping back to alertness and realizing we haven’t been truly present in the room for some uncertain length of time and we’ve lost the thread of the talk.

The goal in performance, then, is to support the core message you’ve crafted with voice and expression and gesture and motion so that both verbal and nonverbal unite in a powerful expression of your ideas. That is what making a kinesthetic connection is all about.

Great public speakers listen to their audiences.

In reality, your job as a public speaker is to listen. Does that sound odd? How can I listen, you say, when I have to do most of the talking? But the opportunities for listening abound throughout a presentation. Remember the two CEOs I described in the introduction? Which one do you most closely resemble? When you first begin to speak, saying something along the lines of “hello,” do you wait for a response, or do you plunge on regardless of what the audience says back to you? If you wait, and genuinely look for some kind of response from the audience, even in that little moment, you will begin to create a real bond with the audience. The people in front of you will say to themselves, “Oh, she really cares about this audience or this talk.” If, on the other hand, you utter your opening phrases and instantly launch into your talk, the message the audience receives is, “This person is too nervous to connect with me, or too indifferent, or too programmed. He just wants to get done.”

A successful connection with the audience comes from countless little moments like this. You don’t have to be a Patrick Henry or a Daniel Webster or a Ronald Reagan to become a charismatic speaker. You do have to connect with the audience. And you do have to express your passion to them. Oddly enough, openness to the audience fosters both impressions.

Think about it from the audience’s point of view. You’re the expert. The audience has granted you the power, for now, of informing and persuading it, and that audience is very curious about what kind of experience the next hour is going to be. An audience expects you to be a little nervous at first—everyone in that audience has some idea about just how hard it is to do what you’re doing. Imagine if you seem genuinely interested right from the start in whether or not the listeners are getting the message. You must really care; this speech must be important to you. That’s the real beginning of charisma: caring. The word itself comes from the Greek (naturally), meaning favor or grace, as in someone divinely infused with passion. And how do we detect passion? When it can’t stay contained within one individual. When it overflows and threatens to engulf us, too. When it causes someone to grab us and not let go.

That person cares, we think. That person has passion. That person is charismatic. And unless those impressions are undercut by nonverbal communications during the course of a presentation, they will be what people take away from the event.

Ultimately, great public speaking comes from passion.

Later on, we’ll talk about some technical details of voice, face, gesture, posture, and motion during delivery. We’ll talk about the notorious Mehrabian study that many speech coaches use incorrectly to suggest that “93 percent of communication is visual.” Thus, they argue, the content hardly matters. It’s all about looking good. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Mehrabian study assumed that content was the most important element of communication. But we’ll look at the range of modern communications research for what it can tell us about how to communicate consistently and powerfully, with your verbal and nonverbal messages coherent and strong. We’ll also look at what the Greeks had to say about delivery and audience—how to think about them, woo them, trick them, move them. And how to avoid being wooed, tricked, or moved—about which the Greeks, as cynical and practical as we are today, also had much to say.

In addition, we’ll learn how to “read” an audience so that you can listen and watch the people in front of you as you’re presenting, to ensure you and your audience both become and stay powerfully connected. We’ll study the five continua of audience connection I’ve developed for use in special situations such as sales presentations, as well as generally for persuasive speeches. And we’ll look at Q&A sessions and other kinds of audience involvement in some detail.

The key to remember is that all of the technical details are only worth paying attention to if they allow you to focus better on the audience and to eliminate the contradictions that too many speakers portray between verbal and nonverbal communications. To enable you, in short, to give an audience-centered speech.

All too often the focus is somewhere else, and the result is boring. The presenter’s content speaks of how vital this marketing plan is to the future of the company, for example, but the voice is a monotone, so that the stronger, nonverbal message is, “I say this is important but I don’t really mean it. I’m bored with it, too. If I really cared, my voice would be rising in excitement as I talked about it.”

Or again, the content says this is the essence of how we’re going to turn this company around and become profitable again, but the speaker is backing away as she says it, visibly signaling a lack of real commitment to the turnaround.

I once saw a consultant give a speech to a meeting of a client’s board. He had some hard truths to present about the ability of the company to cope with the conflict and the difficulty that lay ahead. His message, essentially, was that the company was not facing up to its situation, but that the consultant and his team would help the client really wrestle, for the first time, with the core issues. As he said this, he moved backward until he was leaning comfortably against the wall of the conference room! The nonverbal message, that the consultant wasn’t really keen to grapple with the tough issues, was the one that the board retained. It quickly moved to terminate the contract and hire someone else.

Great public speakers communicate enthusiasm at some level to their audiences. Even if the topic is serious, underneath that emotion lies a real enthusiasm in having the chance to talk about it. To put it simply, if you’re having a good time, the audience will, too.

To get to that point, we have a lot of work to do. You will need to develop great audience-centered content. You will need to rehearse that content. And you will need to learn how to rise above self-absorption to deliver a speech that is truly “given” to the audience. But the good news is that it begins with you and your passion for the subject you want to talk about it. If you have that, all the rest will follow. You can be compelling, you can achieve a powerful connection with your audience, you can be memorable. You can even be charismatic, by being most resolutely and honestly yourself. Successful public speaking is not, in the end, trickery or technique. It is passion.

Remember

 Public speaking is structured conversation.

 Audiences come into a presentation asking, “Why am I here?”

 If you’re successful, they will leave asking, “How do I implement these ideas?”

 Focus your speech on one key message.

 Connect with your audience by telling them stories.

 Give your speech to the members of the audience by allowing them to become active.

 The single most important thing you can do to prepare a speech is to rehearse.

 The speaker’s focus should be on the audience; the audience’s should be on the content.

 Great public speakers listen to their audiences.

 Ultimately, great public speaking comes from passion.