Public Speaking and your personal bottom line

This is a portion of an email that went to the Night Speech class following the last class on Thursday night. This is just sort of a reminder of some of the many things discussed during the class over the past eight weeks, and 15 two and half hour classes:

-- Self evaluations remain important so everyone who spoke on Thursday night with a persuasive speech is due to give me a self evaluation either by email or dropped off in the office.

-- While the exam you have is the last "exam" in this course, you will find that in public speaking you are getting regular assessments, even if they are not called exams. You will be evaluated on your presentations and your presentations will reflect on your overall performance so you owe it to yourself to know what your audience needs from your message and prepare thoroughly to provide them the critical information. That is how you will continue to enhance your personal bottom line.

-- In your classes at Coker that are not called "Public Speaking" you will find that public speaking still counts. When you have a class presentation your instructor will expect you to be prepared. Your professor will expect your presentation to be well organized. Your audience will engage with you if you make a good connection by looking at them, by using vocal variety to show your own interest in your subject matter. You will feel accomplished after a good presentation. And, it is a good bet that a good presentation will enhance your grade.

If you have found that you might not totally hate public speaking but that you do want to continue improving keep looking for opportunities. Every time you say yes to an opportunity you are getting much needed practice. Remember, even Tiger Woods continues to practice on the golf course. To keep up your speaking skills you need continual practice or you will get rusty. Toastmasters, after you have finished your Coker degree work, is a great organization for keeping sharp in public speaking.

Those of you who are still nervous when you speak -- Good. Remember, it is positive nervousness that helps us prepare for our best presentations.

7 -- Those of you who say there is nothing positive about my nervousness need to keep in mind that a presentation is not about YOU. The presentation is about the MESSAGE you are sharing with the AUDIENCE.

Glickstein on Leadership Listening - We can HOPE

Lee Glickstein has a method of public speaking that he shares with people that he calls Relational Presence. I think of relational presence of understanding the importance of speaking so much from the need to get a message to listeners that you overcome the reluctance many of us feel about making "presentations." Don't take my idea. Check out his web site, which is included in the comments he makes in this observation about Leadership Listening. Since he and I both support this particular candidate for president, I thought I would share what seem to be on-target observations about the leadership style:

From a RELATIONAL PRESENCE newsletter on 10-31-08

Leadership Listening

by Lee Glickstein, founder, Speaking Circles International

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson in "Self-Reliance," an essay on Barack Obama's favorite reading list.

Chances are that in a few days we will elect a president whose most striking leadership quality appears to be the capacity to listen from a place of independent solitude during times of crisis. When I picture him coming up to a moment of truth when a critical decision needs to be made, a road to take or not take, a button to push or not push, a declaration or commitment to make, it's easy for me to imagine him breathing and listening in expanded neutrality even while surrounded by a whirlwind of details and opinions flying at him.

In these moments of chaos, the enlightened leader drops into a deep stillness at the eye of the storm, to an egoless state of no agenda and often, at first, no clue. A capacity for this expanded state of listening is critical for clear thinking and effective decision-making, and is in rare supply at any level of leadership--from leading a family to leading a nation.

The capacity for expanded listening is of course also crucial in leading one's own life. How do we maintain perspective and stillness at eye of the storm while chaos swirls around us and often within us?

In my life, desperation to conquer severe stage fright provided me a natural arena to work out this challenge. Speaking to a group, or even imagining such scenario, choked me with anxiety and dread. Decades of avoidance, humiliation, and not giving up led me to stumble upon a leadership principle that has allowed me to stand tall and still in the eye of the storm in front of any group: Listen first.

I don't speak until I first listen to my listeners. This takes at least one full breath. I listen while I speak. I listen to my words landing. I listen to the space between sentences, the longer space between paragraphs. I listen with my eyes, with one person at a time. My intention is to always be with one person at any time. This is the practice and priority of Relational Presence that is the basis of my life work.

Stillness is the underlying connective tissue of the group's soul. It's where we all meet. Shared presence becomes more interesting than the anxiety, more powerful than the fear.

Truth, grace, and inspired leadership emerge eloquently from shared presence and expanded listening. I'm looking forward to these qualities playing out on the national and global stage through our new president, should "that one" prevail on Tuesday.

Here are some relevant addresses for Lee: email: inquiry@speakingcircles.com
web: http://www.speakingcircles.com

Basics do matter

When you go to a major lecture or a major talk it doesn't take you long to notice that the basics do matter:

1 -- Even speakers with small roles on the program make a significant difference for the audience when they make consistent and sustained eye contact and add excitement to their vocal projection.

2 -- Audiences are important and audience conduct is important. Personal conversations, text messages (sending and receiving), inappropriate response all take away from the experience for other members of the audience. How rude is it to be paying more attention to a text message than to the situation in which you presently find yourself?

3 -- Speakers do a service to themselves and to their audience if they preview the body of the speech and let the audience know the direction you are heading.

4 -- Examples, especially those with people in them, help explain abstract concepts for an audience and most big ideas should have some pretty solid examples. Audiences appreciate short stories that make the point.

5 -- Audiences really do appreciate that "human" touch that lets them know you are speaking to there, where they are, and not just to the next group on your to-do list. On Wednesday night at Coker College, Dr. Gus Speth did a good job of relating to his audience at Coker College and the nearly packed auditorium knew he was talking to them at Coker. They appreciated that.

Resources and Research

Decided this was a good place to make a couple of dot connections in the book world. Today I finished PLANET GOOGLE. The connection that hit me was with a book I read earlier in the year, PLANET INDIA. We would not be talking about the rising middle class in India if it were not for the information explosion and the vision of some Indian entrepreneurs in industries ranging from information services to medicine. That brings me to the idea of PLANET GOOGLE. The author of that book continues to get back to the crux of the Google business plan -- to organize and store ALL of the world's information. If there were not for online information storage places in what is now being called the "Cloud" those people in India who are enjoying the new middle class life style would not be where they are. Heck, none of us would be where we are, including me writing this blog. My hope is that those people in my Coker College public speaking classes realize they should not stop with the first piece of information they find when they hit the google search button. I hope they take into account the deeper web and find they can significantly strengthen the content of their talks.

Political Rhetoric as Predictable as an Episode of 'Law & Order'
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=78&aid=149447
Political oratory in America has become as predictable as an episode of "Law & Order."

The writer at Poynter who penned the above observation is being more than a little critical of the formulaic convention speeches. My guess is the criticism is well deserved. At the same time, if you take a perspective of the need for getting your message out, for meeting the needs of the audience for both style and content and you accept that generally Americans find rhetoric or speeches or speechifying boring, maybe the speech creators and makers could do a lot worse than follow the Law and Order formula. Law and Order has been running on American television a lot of years. Maybe it is the predictability of the story line that keeps the viewers coming back. And, one thing most of our politicians require is that potential voters keep coming back so they will ultimately make take the major action -- pressing the button in the voting booth. Remember, voting is something that far too many Americans also find aggravating, annoying and ..................................

So, I am thinking that if the audience finds the formula working for their understanding I may continue to point out to public speaking students because they ultimate goal is to get and keep the voting audience involved.

One other time I have mentioned the blog, Presentation Zen, and tonight I was reading over the latest post and thought it would be good to recommend again. He is discussing a documentary called "Comedian" and there are thoughts this documentary demonstrates the creative process, the artistic process and, in so doing, the speaking process. If you are thinking about getting some out-of-th-box thoughts about public speaking, I am going to suggest you watch the Comedian and tell if you thought it was useful in demonstrating some of the key areas of preparing for a presentation.

Fun Toastmaster Meeting

The Hartsville Toastmasters had a fun and interesting meeting this past Monday. There was a ceremony for the installation of officers and then the new president, getting into the next level of communication challenges, presented a roast of Dr.Andrew Jackson, the club's first president.

Toastmasters is a fantastic opportunity for members to help each become better at public speaking very quickly and to become more effective small-group leaders. Anyone wanting to improve their speaking, listening and leading can find no better value than Toastmasters. The fun and fellowship is free.

Public Speaking, a real-world skill

One of my former students, Whitney Watts, forwarded the following link to me about the worst things to say in a job interview. We try to discuss the job interview process and the job hunt process in several classes I teach in the communication major. One place we spend a lot of time on the subject of finding a job being one of the hardest jobs you will ever have is the Senior Seminar. Whitney just graduate and remembers some of those discussion. This CNN link is pretty on target:

Powered by * Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified. Hi Professor Puffer! I thought this might interest you. -Whitney Watts Click the following to access the sent link: 8 worst things to say in an interview - CNN.com* Get your EMAIL THIS Browser Button and use it to email content from any Web site. Click here for more information. *This article can also be accessed if you copy and paste the entire address below into your web browser. http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/06/23/cb.interview.tips/index.html

Persuasion is something we do all the time

We get into public speaking courses (and I team a lot of them) and people begin to think that the assignments required are complicated classroom things when in reality they are assignments aimed at helping us become more effective communications in the real world.

Persuasion is one case in point. There are all kinds of courses that teach about persuasion from persuasion in public speaking to persuasion in psychology to advertising. And the thing all have in common are courses to help the student become either more fluent with the skill or more able to resist the persuasion aimed in her/his direction.

Persuasion is taking a point of view and trying to either get others to share that view and often take action on that view or, at a minimum, become more open to the idea that this different point of view exists and may even have some merit. In practical terms, you want to see "Get Smart" your friend wants to city "Sex in the City". The negotiation that results in the movie that you see involves persuasion. For many of us, persuasion is a skill we want to be even better at. For those who are already good, becoming better might allow those persuasion skills to reach more people, maybe to donate to the education of displaced children in Uganda money for some important cause in your community. www.displacedcommunities.org

Almost everything you would want to read

A friend of mine provided this link, which aggregates a great deal of discussion about public speaking. You will find it useful!
They have a new Speaking page (http://speaking.alltop.com/). I was reading somewhere else that Guy Kawasuki(sp) is the person responsible for the Alltop aggregate sites. And, another one that I like is http://www. presentationzen.com

Importance of research skills in real world

When I teach the public speaking classes at Coker College, I nearly always start out with telling the students the class will be one of the most important they will take in their college career. I make immediate connection to their personal bottom line and how it will be enhanced if they will allow themselves to become comfortable speakers and then work themselves to become competent speakers.

A major element of speaking is your message. A good message comes in several layers and generally those layers are not accessible to the speaker without some pretty in-depth research. It was Cicero who gave us the five arts that compose the great art of Rhetoric and we hear a lot about the layers of speaking in those five arts. A more recent writer and business guru writes a lot about how people develop and use influence. I just read a short article by Mr. Dilenschneider in the quarterly publication of the Public Relations Society of America – THE STRATEGIST. His observation, I think, adds some weight to the argument for developing good public speaking skills, which include excellent message-development skills. If felt like a good idea to share his thoughts.

Here are some words from a man named Robert Dilenschneider, a major figure in the public relations business. He wrote a book recently called "Power and Influence: The Rules Have Changed." In an article in THE STRATEGIST, a public relations publication, he says:

"Specifically, anyone who wishes to be a power player must build certain strengths. One of them is the ability to do exhaustive research. Thanks to search engines, the tools are there to do what used to take days in minutes. It's truly remarkable. But, one should always remember that information, however massive and deep, does not necessarily equate to knowledge. You need to know what to do with the data you glean." Page 25, The Strategist, Spring 2008I shared this with my current public speaking class so they can see that the classroom skills are really life-journey skills. Dilenshcneider’s corporate sited is http://www.dilenschneider.com/ .