Times are tough. As the world economy lurches from crisis to crisis many leaders – from the President of the United States and captains of industry to school principals and Scoutmasters – will have to give speeches which motivate the audience to overcome obstacles and achieve tough goals in challenging times. Such speeches are never easy, but done well they make a huge difference. These ten tips help you tell it like it is.

1. Tell it like it is. Authenticity is a rare commodity, especially when people speak to an audience. Avoid abstractions and keep it simple and concrete. Honest words win people over.
2. Find common ground. Meet the audience at the place they are, then take them to the place you want them to be. Say ‘we’ more often than ‘I’ and create a bond with your audience.
3. Deal with uncertainty and doubt. Admit to shared doubts and concerns. Identify challenges. Discuss the potential for failure if we don’t rise to the challenge.
4. Be realistic. Don’t sugar-coat the situation. But quickly bridge to a vision of a better alternative. Ground the vision in reality. Share your vision with energy and enthusiasm.
5. Put things in perspective. Both positive and negative stories can motivate. Tell how things are often much worse elsewhere. Show how others faced greater odds and came through. Set stretch goals and paint a picture of the rewards of achieving them.
6. Speak from the heart. The best way to engage an audience is to tap into their emotions. Make your case with passion and purpose. Avoid the passive voice and use of qualifiers.
7. Match your actions to the words of the speech. It is crucial that you are seen to ‘walk the walk’. Don’t fly in on a corporate jet to ask for a subsidy, and don’t award yourself a bonus when laying people off.
8. Be aware of non-verbal communication. People will judge you on how you look as much as what you say. Use open gestures. Consider every aspect of your dress and manner.
9. Keep your sense of humor. No matter how serious the situation, self-depreciating humor can break the ice. The audience who smiles with you is more sympathetic to your argument. Make sure that you connect humor to the point you are making. Keep it short and sweet, not long and drawn-out.
10. Conclude with a call to action. At the end of your pitch, ask for something concrete. Outline specific steps that must be taken.

Speakers who follow these tips will meet the challenge of presenting in challenging and dynamic times in ways the audience will feel is honorable and worthy of respect. Great challenges offer great opportunities. More than in easy times, speeches delivered in tough times make a difference.

I noticed in my blog stats page that the search terms ‘financial crisis explained’ and ‘current financial crisis explained’ were showing up in the top 10 search key phrases for my blog. When I entered them in Google I couldn’t believe my eyes:

I mean, if this is the #1 search result on Google for something of this magnitude?

Not that the article I posted is really what I think, it’s just a recommendation to two articles in the Sunday New York Times which struck me as appropriate to the subject of my blog (executive communications) since, I noted:

Both articles shed light on the dynamics of executive communications when group-think rules. Thinking outside the box before the box imploded was not encouraged or rewarded. Pity.

But c’mon people, this can’t be the #1 explanation of the current financial crisis, can it? Say it ain’t so.

Attendees at the 2009 Speechwriters Conference comment on the effect of the economic hard times on speeches by CEOs and politicians. In today’s tough economic environment, is executive communications more or less important?

Last month I attended an introductory evening on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). It was taught by Jeff Slayter of the World’s Hidden Masters publishing company.The course promised that the techniques were for applying NLP, easily and professionally in business. To survive in a retracted economy only those with top leadership skills and extraordinary ability to create results will thrive.

Here’s Jeff’s infomercial:

World’s Hidden Masters is a leadership training organization offering cutting edge education for group and corporate settings. The content of our workshops are a culmination of a decade of world travel interviewing the top executives, coaches, investors and professionals on the models and systems they have found to be the most effective in creating results in business and financial growth through investments. Using a combination of proprietary models in business & financial systems, neuro linguistics, executive leadership tools, collaborative systems & movement analysis, we train executives, investors and professionals on how to create unexpected and sustainable bottom line results in their businesses and investments.

.

Jeff is holding another introductory evening in San Francisco at 6:30pm on February 24th.

I asked Jeff how and why NLP is useful for professional speakers. To hear what he told me, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:30 — 1.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

The difference between an average presenter and a great one is the ease which the speaker engages the audience. Great speakers engage people’s hearts as well as their minds. They involve everyone in the presentation. They talk with them, not at them. Content (“just the facts”) is less than 5% percent of what people remember about a speech. How you look and what you sound like are the other 95%. Use these 10 tips to involve everyone in the room as active participants in your program. They’ll remember you for it.

1. Engage the audience’s emotions. The best way to engage an audience is to tap into their emotions. Don’t just present dry facts. Involve them emotionally. One way to do this is tell a story in an interactive fashion. Help people see themselves as the hero of the story. Turn the ‘I’ in your story into the ‘we’. Use metaphors and analogies to help explain new concepts. Analogies are best taken from common experiences that everyone shares.
2. Get physical. People can only sit in place for so long. If your presentation lasts more than 45 minutes plan ways to move people around. Do a pop quiz where you ask everyone in the room to stand and then sit down as they respond to questions.
3. Make the speech compelling. Exhibit empathy with the pain the audience is feeling. Align your personal interests with those of the audience. Make every sentence count – eliminate fluff. Deliver your speech with passion and focus. Use evocative words that engage each of the five senses.
4. Be aware of different learning styles. Adults acquire knowledge in different ways. Every audience will include a wide range of ‘learning styles’. Visual learners will want to see your presentation and take a look at what you will reveal. They appreciate PowerPoint, graphics and handouts. Auditory learners hear what you tell them and decide if it resonates. They respond to stories and vocal variety. Kinesthetic learners grasp the foundation of your argument. Involve them in discussion and Q&A. Auditory Digital learners love to get a sense of your material and process the talk. Give them plenty of data, graphs and statistics. They need time to digest the information and a way to contact you after the program is over.
5. Move beyond PowerPoint. Remember that your presentation is more than the set of slides. The slides should complement your outline, not visa-versa. Consider switching off the computer and using the whiteboard or flipcharts.
6. Make eye contact. Before you begin speaking, take a moment to breathe. Then look at one person and connect with your eyes. Begin your speech talking directly to that person. After you finish a thought, pause and move on to the next person and repeat the process. This helps calm your nerves and connects with your audience one person at a time.
7. Avoid reading a verbatim script. Reading a script sounds stilted and distances you from people. Free yourself from having to use extensive written notes. Take your script outline and create abbreviated notes. Carry 3×5 cards onstage with large-font key words to jog your memory.
8. Listen to the audience. Communication is a two-way street. Your audience speaks to you all the time, whether with questions spoken aloud or their facial expressions and body language. It’s critical that you listen to them. Ask questions during your talk to confirm that what you are saying connects with what they are hearing. Use body language to react physically to the audience. Don’t just speak from the neck up.
9. Challenge the audience. Audiences love controversy. Always be controversial around issues — never around personalities. Challenge conventional wisdom. Point out a glaring inconsistency in received wisdom. Offer a clean, easily-understood solution to a complex problem.
10. Use humor. But never tell jokes. Self-depreciating humor works best. The audience who smiles with you is more sympathetic to your argument. Make sure that you connect humor to the point you are making. Keep it short and sweet, not long and drawn-out. Avoid saying, “This is a funny” before you speak. Avoid offensive and off-color humor.

Speakers who follow these tips will present with an authenticity and energy that the audience will feel and respond to. Speaking honestly in a manner that involves the audience minimizes separation between the person on the podium and the listeners. We can ‘tell it like it is’ so members of the audience move beyond where they were before we showed up.

An authority or expert has instant credibility on the podium. But many experts giving technical presentations fall into the trap of overwhelming the audience with too much content. They fill in every moment of the talk with data and facts. The charts and statistics become a security blanket. Being an effective communicator requires that you understand the listener’s ability to absorb information. These 10 simple rules will help you give a talk that connects with an audience, moves them to action and leaves a positive impression.

1. Do your research. Talk to other experts, especially inside your own organization. Ignoring them might bruise the egos of co-workers who have a stake in the topic. Know what the audience expects. Research their existing level of knowledge about your topic. Make sure your content is relevant to the audience.
2. Choose one ‘big idea’ or main thesis for your talk or presentation. Don’t try to put too many ideas into your speech. Research shows that people remember very little from speeches, so just give them one big idea to hang onto. What is the one idea you want the audience to hear, remember, and act on?
3. Choose a ‘destination point’ for the talk. When people leave the room what will they do or feel differently than they did before you started presenting? Before you know where you want to take the audience, you need to be honest about your own hidden assumptions and the audience’s current situation.
4. Aim to make three main points in the talk. Use three related words or phrases to grab attention, encapsulate, summarize. The number three is interesting – we easily remember three things. Beyond this it becomes progressively more difficult to remember. Three items act as a powerful unifying format. Examples:
   • Three key themes that together cover a wide area.
   • Three items that act in sequence to get to a desired goal.
   • Two problems and a solution that resolves the problem.
   • Two actions or objectives and a solution that will result from achieving these.
5. Create the speech Abstract first. Focus your content in your own mind. If you cannot (or choose not to) do this, the chances are that your thinking isn’t clear enough for the audience to understand your purpose.
6. Construct a logical argument. There is no reason to give a speech unless you have an argument to make. A speech should never be confused with normal conversation such as “Nice day, huh?’ The speech argument is an explanation of why one believes something to be true.
   • State the Big Idea that forms the content of your argument.
   • Ask the question: Why is my interpretation of the evidence true?
   • List, in order of importance, all the reasons why you find the interpretation persuasive.
7. Start with an outline. Once you have a clear outline, writing the details is relatively straight forward, almost like filling in the blanks. Within each section of the speech:
   • State the question you are answering
   • Support the premise with examples, stories, statistics.
   • Tie-in each of the section premise to the speech thesis.
   • Transition to the next question.
8. Avoid burying the audience in raw data. Subject experts can overwhelm an audience with too much data. Less is more. Give each statistic a context that makes it relevant to the audience. Numbers alone are often meaningless and difficult to grasp by themselves.
9. Include a human element. No matter how ‘dry’ your topic, look for ways to humanize it. Including stories and case studies enables you to engage the audience and raise levels of motivation, acceptance, and approval.
10. Conclude with a call to action. State what the audience has to do, change or think after your talk. Many speeches avoid a call to action. Even in an educational presentation you want to ensure the audience knows what you want them to do. It can be something as simple as ‘read the new accounting regulations’.

Following these rules will minimize the chance that the audience will mentally check-out during your talk. They will still respect your expertise, and remember more of your speech the next day.

According to US News and World Report, ghostwriting is one of the 30 Best Careers for 2009 – along with audiologist, clergy and hairstylists. This mix clearly caters to busy people who need a benediction said while their hearing is checked in the hair salon as their autobiography is written.

Marty Nemko dishes the dirt on what it takes to become a ghostwriter – the ability to write powerfully and fast in another person’s voice with the interviewing skills to unearth interesting information from clients. Apart from emailing random celebrities and offering to ghostwrite their autobiographies, Nemko suggests other ways to break into the field.

Another source of celebrity ghostwriting work: writing speeches and articles for politicians or business leaders. You can also ghostwrite for just plain folks: websites, family histories, or Grandpa’s memoir.

The financial reward: A median salary (with eight years in the field): $56,900. Which sounds suspiciously low – are ghostwriters spiriting away their earnings from the eyes of IRS?

On the eve of President-elect Barack Obama’s eagerly anticipated Inaugural speech, newspaper headlines are reporting on past Inaugural speeches and millions of Americans plan to engage in the unnatural act of listening to a speech from beginning to end.

Obama, more than any living US President, consciously embraces oratory and the art of rhetoric. A superb assessment of Obama’s speech-making skills appeared in the Weekend Financial Times. Author Sam Leith shows how Obama deploys the terms and tools of formal rhetoric — first described by Aristotle four centuries before the birth of Christ. “They still work the same way on the human ear and the human heart as they did in Aristotle’s day.” His article covers a lot of ground. The main points I took from it are:

Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle

The rhetorical triangle sets out the ground rules for the art of persuasion. It describes how a speaker uses ‘ethos’ to establish their bona fides, ‘logos’ to make the argument logically and ‘pathos’ to manipulate emotion.

Tricolon

The ‘rule of three’ applied in a sentence with three clearly defined parts (cola) of equal length, usually independent clauses and of increasing power. Caesar’s “I came; I saw; I conquered.” Lincoln’s second inaugural with its line “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right … “. Obama at the Berlin Victory Column in front of 100,000 European’s last July: “As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice-caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.” As Leith notes, this is rhetorical power in pure form:

A double (“Boston” and “Beijing”), leading to a tricolon whose third term is itself doubled up, the whole mixture thick with alliteration. This is very far from informal or direct or off-the-cuff speech. It is marvelously and intentionally musical.

Syntheton

The balanced double words used in “Boston and Beijing” or by speakers who say “young and old” or “black and white”.

Anaphora

The repetition of a phrase at the beginning of successive lines. Consider Churchill:

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.

Now Obama at the Iowa caucus victory speech on January 3rd:

“I’ll be a president who finally makes healthcare affordable … I’ll be a president who ends the tax breaks … I’ll be a president who harnesses the ingenuity … I’ll be a president who ends this war in Iraq … ” Then: “This was the moment when … this was the moment when … this was the moment when … ” And, as his speech built to its climax, “Hope is what I saw … Hope is what I heard … Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire.”

Leith’s article includes an inventory of the debt Obama owes to the rhetorical power of his absent father; to the framers of the Declaration of Independence; to his schooling at Columbia and Harvard; to past President’s; to the Civil Rights movement and the Bible:

Obama sets out to position himself, and his rhetoric positions him, as the inheritor of the oratorical and political traditions of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Jesus Christ.

Leith concludes by remarking the scorn republican’s poured on Obama as “a person of words” and “an elitist who works with words” – while championing the inarticulate leaders they admire (Bush, Palin and the rest). Let’s not forget, as I blogged in February, Hilary Clinton also criticized him as someone who just “gives speeches”.

It’ll be interesting to see the effect a US President with such a command of rhetoric will have on the general level of discourse in the political and commercial arenas. For too long in this country our politician’s and CEO’s have avoided eloquence as something unworthy, untrustworthy, vaguely “European”. They were proud of being plain spoken. Of being a man or woman of the people. That refusal to heed Aristotle’s simple techniques might have worked until now.

The bar has been raised.

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,
Nothin’ don’t mean nothin’ hon’ if it ain’t free
– Janis Joplin, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’

Economic downturns turn many of us from employees into entrepreneurs. We have no choice. Those turned out of the corporate fold can make a decisive move to establish themselves in a business of their own over the option of trying to get hired into yet another ‘secure’ job, (perhaps up near Salinas, Lord) with no job security.

The current economic environment is a forcing function for start-ups created by displaced corporate staffers. It’s an opportunity to ‘Seize the Day’ writes Financial Times columnist, media chairman and private equity chief Luke Johnson.

A big employer may offer security and benefits, but what about creative satisfaction and the chance to change the world? Working for yourself is not an easy road, but few who make that choice would revert to the grey, restrictive life of a hired hand.

He sees armies of freelancers creating new industries and a bright new future. Claiming entrepreneurs are made by hard graft, not gifted by genes, Johnson says we can all achieve something if we work at it.

Better to try than return, tail between our legs, to the corporate fold and the burdens of a W-2 job.

In the words of Thomas Huxley, coincidentally a friend of Darwin: “It is better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.”

Gentlemen, he said,
I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes,
I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards
But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.
– Bob Dylan, ‘Changing of the Guards’

In the midst of the worst economic crisis in 70 years, business needs to clearly communicate the benefits of capitalism. Being able to articulate the advantages of the market system to audiences in an authentic and compelling manner is a necessary skill for executives facing skeptical or hostile audiences (workers threatened with redundancy, investors suffering losses).

Too often, those who defend the market system are the system’s worst enemies, claims John Kay in today’s Financial Times. He lists a series of business leaders claims which strike a false note:

• Talking about “wealth creation” while actually diverting money to a few individuals rather than creating new wealth for all.
• Thinking private sector activities – securities trading or auto manufacturing – creates wealth while public sector activities – healthcare – use it up.
• Arguing that financial rewards are the mainspring of innovation. This was not the main motivation for those like Sir Tim Berner’s-Lee when he invented the Web, or Steve Wozniak when he tinkered at the Homebrew Computer Club. Nor is it the primary motivation of the hundred’s of PhD’s choosing to work at places like HP Labs rather than launching their own start-ups.
• Justifying excessive financial compensation of senior managers as necessary performance motivators while condemning those who work in the public sector as too lazy or ineffective to get jobs in large corporations.

Kay concludes:

The complacent sense of personal entitlement these corporate politicians expressed was deeply unattractive: as unattractive as the similar sense of personal entitlement displayed by the lazy teacher who knows he will not be fired.

In contrast, he suggests:

Young people looking towards the world of work should understand that the greatest reward from a job is the satisfaction of doing it well. The people who are most successful in business in the long run are people who are passionate about business – whose aspirations are to bring new products and services to market, to serve customers better, to motivate their staff to greater efforts. And, by the way, you can make a lot of money in the process.

For corporate executives wishing to communicate authentically in 2009 the lesson is to be honest and straightforward with audiences. State where your self-interest lies. If there is bad news to deliver, address it early and show a human-level understanding of how it affects your employees, customers and partners.