Contributing essay by Geoffrey Hitch - Associate Professor of Acting & Business Communications at Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business.
"When a business person has difficulty communicating his or her information, it is rarely the information itself that is the problem. More commonly the problem is that he doesn’t realize that he is The Messenger of a Message. Usually, he demotes himself to being only “a speaker” -- too often intimidated by the audience or the situation. Despite his solid research & preparation, he sees his audience as a powerful panel of judges -- all smarter than him. This often results in him not knowing where he is, to whom he is really speaking, or why he is there. As a result, his information is not effectively communicated. This does not have to be the case. The speaker could choose instead to be The Messenger with an important Message with which he will Influence his Target. In other words, he could choose to be in charge of the why he is there. Business is less successful when it is without focus, when it is boring or grey, & as a result Life is less rich for everyone involved. Business communications are only tepid & deadly if they are resigned to be so. I want to suggest that since we’re all going to be dead a long time, why not find all the joy & color in Life that we can – including in business. Life is too short to settle for less. And -- in the short term – why not be the most interesting, personable, fun, compelling & accessible option among the many options from which your client can choose? By utilizing the tools of Acting, the Messenger actually can define himself, define his Target, & define how he is going to Influence that Target. The Messenger can define himself – within the parameters of the truth -- as a researched, prepared, confident Messenger who is passionate about his Message, his ideas, his product, his company. He can define his Target or Listener as people who would benefit from what he has to share. And he can determine how he is going to influence them: to Establish, Reinforce or Change his Listener’s response -- for everyone’s benefit. With the tools of Acting, the Messenger is empowered & is in charge of the room." -
Contributing essay by Geoffrey Hitch - Associate Professor of Acting & Business Communications at Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business.
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I couldn't resist posting this very interesting article. Does this speak to your speaking style?
"Donald Trump’s strange speaking style, as explained by linguistsIs Donald Trump a throwback to ancient oratory — or an undisciplined rambler? Updated by Tara Golshan Sep 26, 2016, 4:00p for VOX When Donald Trump goes off script, transcribing him can be a challenge. As someone covering him during this campaign, I can attest to this. When he’s speaking off the cuff, his rambling remarks can be full of digressions and hard-to-follow tangents. He often jumps to an entirely new thought before finishing his previous one. Consider this Trump comment on the Iran nuclear deal during a campaign rally in South Carolina on July 21, 2015. Try to follow the train of thought here: Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right — who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us. Trump’s simple message — "the Iran deal is bad for the United States" — was interrupted by musings on his uncle’s education, his own education, the power of nuclear energy, prisoners, the intelligence of women, and the negotiating prowess of Iranians, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Slate even called on the public to help diagram it. Others have noticed this as well. "His speeches are full of non sequiturs," says Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a Calvin College historian who has done a comparative study of Trump and Hillary Clinton’s speaking styles. It’s a completely different style from nearly any other politician you normally see on a big stage. So I was curious if professional linguists and historians could help us figure out what makes Trump unique. Are there any precedents for this speaking style? Is it coherent? Is there a reason it appeals to certain people? There were lots of disagreements on this front, but one thing stood out: Trump’s speeches aren’t meant to be read. Their seeming incoherence stems from the big difference between written and spoken language. Trump’s style of speaking has its roots in oral culture. He rallies people through impassioned, targeted conversation — even if it doesn’t always follow a clear arc. But is it effective? That’s a much harder question. Why Trump’s speeches are incomprehensible to some — and make perfect sense to othersOnly a few of Trump’s big speeches are scripted. At many of his rallies, by contrast, he speaks off the cuff. We get a lot of unscripted moments, with fractured, unfinished sentences, moving quickly from thought to thought. To some (or many), this style is completely incoherent. But not everyone feels this way. Many people clearly walk away from Trump rallies having seemingly understood what he said. Why is that? It’s the difference between reading Trump’s remarks and listening to them in real time. University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman has explained this in more detail: This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form the cues are gone, and we lose the thread. In other words, Trump’s digressions and rambles are much easier to follow in person thanks to subtle cues. Trump’s style of speaking is conversational, and may even stem from his New York City upbringing. As George Lakoff, a linguist at UC Berkeley, told me, "[The] thing about being a New Yorker it is polite if you finish their sentences for them. It’s a natural part of conversation." This may be why Trump’s sentences often seem, in transcript form, to trail off with no ending. "He knows his audience can finish his sentences for him," Lakoff says. Watching Trump, it’s easy to see how this plays out. He makes vague implications with a raised eyebrow or a shrug, allowing his audience to reach their own conclusions. And that conversational style can be effective. It’s more intimate than a scripted speech. People walk away from Trump feeling as though he were casually talking to them, allowing them to finish his thoughts. Yet to many linguists, Trump stands out for how often he deploys these conversational tics. "Trump's frequency of divergence is unusual," Liberman says. In other words, he goes off topic way more often than the average person in conversation. Geoffrey Pullum, a linguist at University of Edinburgh, argues that there’s more going on than just a conversational, I’ll-let-you-fill-in-the-gaps-style. Trump’s unorganized sentences and short snippets might suggest something about how his mind works. "His speech suggests a man with scattered thoughts, a short span of attention, and a lack of intellectual discipline and analytical skills," Pullum says. More sophisticated thinkers and speakers (including many past presidents), Pullum argues, are able to use "hypotaxis — that is, embedding of clauses within clauses." Trump can’t seem to do that. Pullum explains further: "When you say something like 'While Congress shows no interest in doing X, I feel that the American people believe it is essential,' the clause ‘it is essential’ is inside the clause ‘the American people believe it is essential’ which is inside the clause ‘I feel that the American people believe it is essential,’ and so on. You get no such organized thoughts from Trump. It's bursts of noun phrases, self-interruptions, sudden departures from the theme, flashes of memory, odd side remarks. ... It's the disordered language of a person with a concentration problem." Trump’s speeches can be appealing because he uses a lot of salesmen’s tricksLakoff, for his part, has an explanation for why Trump’s style of speaking is so appealing to many. Many of Trump’s most famous catchphrases are actually versions of time-tested speech mechanisms that salesmen use. They’re powerful because they help shape our unconscious. Take, for example, Trump’s frequent use of "Many people are saying..." or "Believe me" — often right after saying something that is baseless or untrue. This tends to sound more trustworthy to listeners than just outright stating the baseless claim, since Trump implies that he has direct experience with what he’s talking about. At a base level, Lakoff argues, people are more inclined to believe something that seems to have been shared. Or when Trump keeps calling Clinton "crooked," or keeps referring to terrorists as "radical Muslims," he’s strengthening the association through repetition. He also calls his supporters "folks," to show he is one of them (though many politicians employ this trick). Trump doesn’t repeat phrases and adjectives because he is stalling for time, Liberman says; for the most part, he’s providing emphasis and strengthening the association. These are normal techniques, particularly in conversational speech. "Is he reading cognitive science? No. He has 50 years of experience as a salesman who doesn’t care who he is selling to," Lakoff says. On this account, Trump uses similar methods in his QVC-style pitch of steaks and vodka as when he talks about his plan to stop ISIS. "He has been doing this for a very long time as a salesman — that’s what he is best at," Lakoff says. People understand Trump on an emotional levelTo some extent, Trump's style has been successful — Trump beat out a highly competitive field of lifelong Republicans to become the party’s nominee. He's confident enough to address large crowds conversationally and ad-lib on stage. That said, his rise can’t be attributed purely to his speaking style. It certainly has a lot to do with what he is actually saying. "If the content were different, I think it would come across as rambling and flabby and ineffective," Liberman says. In other words, when Trump’s audience finishes his sentences for him, the blanks are filled with sentiments that resonate: fears of joblessness, worries about the United States losing its status as a major world power, concerns about foreign terrorist organizations. Trump validates their insecurities and justifies their anger. He connects on an emotional level, Du Mez says. "For listeners who identify with Trump, there is little they need to do but claim what they’re entitled to," she says. "No need for sacrifice, for compromise, for complexity. He taps into fear and insecurity, but then enables his audience to express that fear through anger. And anger gives the illusion of empowerment." In style alone, however, this "emotional" appeal may not be enough to portray a strong leader. As much as the American people look for authenticity and spontaneity in a president, which Trump seems to have mastered, they are also known to value discipline in their leaders. "Leadership is hard; it needs discipline, concentration, and an ability to ignore what's irrelevant or needless or personal or silly," Pullum says. "There is no sign of it from Trump. This man talks honestly enough that you can see what he's like: He's an undisciplined narcissist who craves power but doesn't have the intellectual capacity to exercise it wisely." With November elections around the corner, I'm compelled to touch on an aspect of the general election process that people take for granted: The Audience. It doesn't take a genius to realize that speech spin tailored for audience sounds artificial and canned. Why do people fall for it?
Beyond partisan politics, an audience is by its very nature already emotional by the time they arrive to a political rally. By its very nature, rallies are organized to rouse emotion. Take for example people filing into the stadium for a ball game. Don't you feel it in the air already? It's like a mob mentality. Politicians thrive on this energy.....this feeling and they do a darn good job exploiting it, and manipulating it to serve their cause or agenda. How do they do this? By using emotive language. The same kind of emotive language used in bullying. I was poking around on the internet recently and found a book. I'd venture to say that this book probably goes into this, though on a more academic level. Check it out: A music video is worth a thousand words. What makes up a personality? It's my belief that a personality is made up of opinions and core values. That's it really. I mean I can get into more nuts and bolts like cultural influences, language, socio-economic aspects that all ultimately inform and influence our personalities. But at our basic core, at our purest state, our personalities are made up of our mental projections and what we choose to place value on.
Here's the thing though, our core values define our experience and community. They influence commerce, business and products. They have direct impact on consumer habits. So why is it that when I hear a demo or pitch, these brilliant innovative minds who are introducing their products suffer from "core value amnesia?" They become instead a talking robot regurgitating research problems and technical solutions in a clinical manner. Where did their personality go? The article below is from the Washington Post, published on September 26, 2015. It was written by Edward Klein. It's a brilliant article on persona and how one is perceived when selling a product or pitching an idea. In this case, the product was the face to a political campaign. I would venture to say that there are aspects to the article that is relatable to anyone doing a pitch or presenting an idea. Have you ever felt like the words coming out of your mouth sounded fake or pretentious? Or just didn't resonate with your audience? Or yourself for that matter? Every startup entrepreneur, CEO should read the article: "Recently......In his new book, “Unlikeable,” journalist Edward Klein unveils the lengths Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign will go to avoid the mistakes of the 2008 race — when Obama famously said, “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” In an exclusive excerpt to The Post, Klein reveals how Bill Clinton reached out to a famous friend for help.
Hillary was taking lessons on how to be more likeable. She was doing it for Bill, not for herself. It was all his idea. One evening while they were having drinks with friends, he turned to Hillary and said, “Let’s ask Steven for help.” Their old Hollywood buddy Steven Spielberg could supply Hillary with acting coaches to help her when she had to give a speech. Hillary didn’t think she needed help. “I get $250,000 to give a speech,” she said, according to one of her friends, “and these Hollywood jackasses are going to tell me how to do it!” But Bill insisted. “Your policies and talking points are solid,” he told her. “You can use Charlotte [Chelsea’s baby daughter] to emphasize how you’re all about women and children. Now the challenge is to repackage you in 2016 as a strong but loveable older woman — more Golda than Maggie.” Hillary didn’t see the resemblance to Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher, and she said, “I’m not going to pretend to be somebody I’m not.” But she carried on with the likeability lessons anyway. Partly to please Bill. But mostly to shut him up. She hired an assistant to run a video camera in the den of Whitehaven, her home in the fashionable Observatory Circle neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. It was just the two of them, her and the camera guy, who had to sign a confidentiality agreement so he couldn’t blab to the press. Later, after the recording session was over, she watched herself on the TV set. She sat in the dark, dressed in a blue muumuu that she’d recently purchased online at Amazon.com, and scrutinized her facial expressions, her hand gestures, the pitch of her voice, and her use of eye contact. She told Bill she found the process tedious. He said, “This could mean votes. Voters make decisions, even unconsciously, on how likeable a politician looks.” But it wasn’t only the tedium that bothered her. She didn’t like the results she saw from the Whitehaven video sessions. For comparison, she screened videos that had been recorded live by her people when she was on the road and gave one of her six-figure speeches. From the collection of videos, she selected the ones she liked and sent them off to Steven Spielberg’s office, with a reminder that everyone involved in the project was sworn to secrecy. Not that she had any reason to mistrust Steven. He’d always been more than generous to her. Spielberg let her use his corporate apartment in the Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue when she ran for a Senate seat from New York in 2000. Hillary felt right at home in the lavish surroundings, and she crashed at Spielberg’s pied-à-terre more than 20 times. Accustomed as she was to being treated like royalty, she asked the management of Trump Tower to give her the exclusive use of one of its elevators. The management refused. She had to share an elevator with the skyscraper’s other millionaire peons. When the Hollywood coaches sent back their critiques of Hillary’s video sessions, they noted that she looked irritated and bored. Most times, after she glanced at the printout of their notes — she called them “notes from La-La Land” — she tossed them in the wastepaper basket. There was one thing about the process that she thought was worthwhile: working on her facial expressions. If she got the facial expressions right, she believed the rest would fall into place. But as she pointed out to friends, she could just as easily work on her facial expressions in front of the bathroom mirror without having some Hollywood schmuck tell her what she was doing right or wrong. “Sometimes they’re helpful,” she told the friends, “but just as often they’re full of s- -t.” A couple of weeks after Hillary began her likeability lessons, she invited several women friends to Whitehaven. When one of her friends noticed a video camera standing on a tripod in a corner of the room, she asked Hillary what it was for. “Speech practice,” Hillary said, according to the recollection of one of the women. “My coaches tell me I’m supposed to pretend when I speak. Pretend that I actually like the audience. I’m supposed to force myself to keep a smile on my face. I’m supposed to think happy thoughts. To think of Chelsea or Charlotte or my [late] mother. But not about Bill, because even though I love him to death, he makes me tear my hair out.” That got a laugh from the women. But as the campaign heated up, one of the first casualties was the Spielberg likeability lessons. Everyone agreed they weren’t working. “For more than a decade, Mrs. Clinton has tried to swat away a persistent concern about her ability to connect with voters,” noted The New York Times. “‘Saturday Night Live’ recently captured that problem in a sketch featuring an actress playing Mrs. Clinton, who said of herself at one point, ‘What a relatable laugh!’ Years of security-infused Bubble Wrap around her travels and a wealthy lifestyle have done little to pull Mrs. Clinton closer to voters.” “Given that [Hillary] has been in public life since 1992, it’s a bit incongruous to consider that her speaking style is often so lacking,” wrote The Washington Post. “She has yet to master ‘the big speech,’ which is part of the toolbox of any major politician.” When Hillary spoke in public, she still had trouble making eye contact with her audience. Her eyes wandered from the text of her speech or her talking points to some unfocused spot on the ceiling and back again. Her voice was flat and uninflected. In exasperation, Hillary quit taking the likeability lessons. “I decided I had enough with the camera and the recordings and the coaches,” Hillary told a friend. “I got so angry I knocked the f- -king camera off its tripod. That was the end of my Stanislavski period.” Excerpted from “Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary” by Edward Klein, rom Regnery Publishing. There is a pattern when I work with my clients. Most of them ask me, "What can you do for me?" This question as well intentioned as it is poses a challenge. Most clients are fixed on going for a product and miss the opportunity to live the questions. Finding my client's proverbial voice is something that can be attained through the journey. By being open and receptive to the questions, with less concern over the end product, the session begins to reveal an authentic voice from my clients. Something that can't be gained by pushing for a final product. So my advice to future clients? Remain open and live the questions....
Let me pose a question: Why is it difficult to recite or rather speak content that one drafts up? Is it possible that writing content is not really the way we speak and vice versa?
As a creative presentation coach, I constantly observe the challenges innovators have when they're finally reading to begin rehearsing their speech of what they've drafted up on their powerpoint deck. The issue is that most entrepreneurs do not have the proper way of rehearsing their content. I can help by coaching and teaching my clients a rehearsal approach that transforms mere content to a more organic, integrated and compelling speech. I can help. Book an appointment now! Our discomfort in front of an audience actually feeds audience discomfort. So the stakes are high. The sense of urgency greater. Your passion around your ideas, core values, and your emotion around your opinions culminate into a personality. Your own unique personality. Ultimately, I believe that your personality will convince your audience (potential investors) over the story any day. Do you want to stand out from the rest? Then instead of taking tips from "presentation coaches", watch instead great speeches of all time. Watch great movie speeches of all time. I challenge you.
Or if you want to maintain the status quo, stick with a "presentation coach". When you do, I guarantee you'll get good presentation tips. You'll end up doing a good pitch or presentation. A well packaged, canned presentation. Now, let me challenge you one more time: Do you want to give a good presentation? OR DO YOU WANT TO GIVE A MYTHIC PRESENTATION ON PAR WITH SOME OF THE GREATEST SPEECHES OF ALL TIME?? A COMPELLING SPEECH, TEEMING WITH THE ENERGY OF YOUR TRUE AUTHENTIC SELF? |
About Ben
Ben Gonio is a university educator, public speaking coach, and professional film & stage actor with a flair for creative innovation. He is the founder of Narrativus, a licensed consulting business providing engaging and highly interactive presentation coaching services to executives and professionals alike, particularly in but not limited to the technology startup space. Other services include designing and conducting interactive workshops for professional development using the mechanics of acting. He also conducts theatre improvisation workshops and how it relates to effective communication, team building, and leadership skills that ultimately results in positive team dynamics. Archives
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