In praise of words

"as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn't a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth."

This was my favorite phrase in last night's State of the Union. Why? Because the words are so great. For one thing, they're plain old garden variety anyone with a seventh grade education can understand them words. For another thing; they're accurate. Certainly when speaking to a room full of public servants. (OK, that moniker may not seem so accurate to you, but I digress.)

I absolutely LOVE words like "messy" in a speech. Messy says something, it's wonderfully descriptive. We ALL know from messy, whether we are messy or not. The word "messy" is not a word typically associated with the pomp and circumstance with our Congress, or the building in which its work is done. Yet when people with strongly held opposing views try and hammer out policies and laws, messy is probably all over the place.

Here's my point: if our president can use a word like "messy" in his most high profile presentation, why can't we? Ditch the five syllable super smarty pants words for your next presentation. Use juicy, real, descriptive ones instead. You'll have the audience eating out of your hand.

carrot! carrot! carrot!

After reading some of the mini hoopla about the "tiger mom" and her daughter's rebuttal, I came up as I usually do, a big fan of the carrot versus the stick. (the idea that you can get a mule to move faster if you dangle a carrot in front of his nose than if you beat him with a stick.)

The carrot as motivator worked for me as a kid, worked for my own kids and works for audiences as well. Put another way, I believe in inspiration, aspiration over guilt and fear any day of the week. Here's why.

Guilt and fear may move an audience emotionally, but I'm not convinced it will move them literally. Think about it. Too much doom and gloom just makes us feel bad, scared and hopeless. Tell us what we can do to make something better, solve a problem, (and what the happy result will be) and we're up and out the door on our way to ACT.

If we make our kids, or our audience, feel bad about themselves, their situation, their future, how energized are they going to be to move in the direction we want them to go? Plus, how much more will we have to "beat" them to get them there? Yuch.

I say build them up. show them what they can aspire to and why and how they can get there. Then you stand in the background and cheer them on. Remind them of the "payoff" at the finish line. How much better does everyone feel? How much farther, faster, do you think they'll go?

A missed opportunity; Robert De Niro and the Cecli B DeMille Lifetime Acheivement Award

Watching the Golden Globes last night, I was thrilled to see Robert De Niro given the Cecil B DeMille life time acheivement award and then stunned as I listened to him give his acceptance speech. Didn't hear it? (click here) Worse than him reading it, obviously unrehearsed, from the teleprompter, was what he was reading. The text sounded like a script, written by a "comedy" writer, and not a great one at that. (In fact less than 24 hours later the blogosphere is heating up about a whole bit he did about deportation...totally UNfunny.) Where was the sincerity? Where was the humility? Where was the thanks?

We've all seen Mr. De Niro be very very funny, (Analyze This comes to mind) and a funny comment or two would have been in keeping with the evening and taken the edge off what is typically a very emotional speech. (It's a lifetime acheivement award, for heaven's sake.) What was missing was a glimpse of heartfelt anything, especially gratitude, not only to the Hollywood Foreign Press, but also to those with whom he has made movies and (p.s.) to his family.

I don't have any way of knowing at this posting if the contents of Mr. De Niro's speech were self written or ghost written, but either way he missed an opportunity to show his gratitude.

In my opinion the chance to show your appreciation to your peers, those you love and the world at large is an opportunity not to be missed. These kinds of speeches, when delivered from the heart, are inspiring and moving for the speaker and the audience. Mr. De Niro missed this opportunity last night.

Mind the gaps

Coming up on four years of working with folks to enhance their presentations (and thus their result) I'm finding that once we build the thing and run it for the first time we are usually faced with gaps between concepts. Ideas without transitions is another way of putting it. We begin with our introduction and then stumble um and ah, stumble some more, until we stop and figure out how we're getting from the intro to our first big idea. Same thing happens when we go from the first big idea to the second, or even to the first idea supporting the first big idea. yikes.

Sometimes we realize the first big idea doesn't even belong after the intro, it belongs after the second big idea. Every once in a while we take a big deep breath and admit that the first big idea doesn't belong in this presentation! (I'm always glad when the client is the realizer for this one. Of course I'll always tell them if something doesn't belong, but it's better when they tell me first.)

These "gaps" between parts of our presentations are inevitable and important to work through. No matter what we discover, whether it's a transition point or story, moral to the story, whether it's moving things around or taking things out, the key is to do it BEFORE you actually give the presentation. That is unless you like walking a tightrope without a net.

As laborious as it is for my clients to go through their presentation that first time and find and fix these gaps, it's much better than the panic they would feel were they to fall through the gaps in front of a live (gulp) audience.

For my beloved mother in law; Ann Heath Fay. She died last month after a 2 year battle with ALS. Although her son and I divorced almost a decade ago, she and my father in law and I remained connected. We visited, talked and laughed. When she called to congratulate me on my engagement she said, "No matter who you marry, you'll always be our daughter in law." I will miss her every day.

The Ship

We are standing upon the seashore...A ship spreads her white sails to the morning breeze, and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until at length she is only a ribbon of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then someone at my side says, "There! She's gone!"

Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination...Her diminished size is in me - not in her - and just at the moment when someone at my side says, "There, she's gone!" someone on the Other Side and other voices are ready to take up the glad shout, "There! She comes!"

And that is what we call - dying. Col. David Marcus

business speak = yawn

Last night I had the opportunity to talk about elevator speeches with some of Hartford's sharpest business women at a meeting for the CT Women's Council. It was a very very short talk, 10 minutes in fact, because the main purpose of this hard working group is to get to know one another socially.

As I went around the room and listened to a few of them try out their newly crafted elevator speeches and the stories that accompanied them, I heard the all too familiar super duper boring "business speak" in which they were (not at all surprisingly) fluent. The worst thing about business speak, even worse than its ability to induce sleep, is its inability to SAY what we really MEAN. One poor woman had written out a paragraph about "stakeholders" and "maximizing ROI" Her title, (which she told me she never tells people because it just confuses them) doesn't even accurately depict what she does, which is to PROBLEM SOLVE. She's really truly a problem solver. How great a job is that??? What's so bad about that for a title? "VP of Problem Solving" (and it sounded like she was really good at it to boot.)

Even my friend Jody Ferrer, who owns The Perfect Promotion, was struggling to talk about what she does. She was mumbling something about "apparel" HUH? How about "I get you in front of your clients and prospects even when you're not there." THAT would get people sitting up and taking notice. Then she could say, "We can put your name and logo on anything; but we don't. We only put your name and logo on things that help illustrate who you are and what you do."

Wouldn't it be great if people started talking about what they DO in ways an eleven year old could understand and BE INTERESTED IN? How about if we could get people to gather up all the business speak words and throw 'em in a big black hole. (along with all the songs that should never be played again, but I digress...)

the beauty of a deadline

I know, I know, most of us hate deadlines. (I think the word "dead" might have a little to do with this, but still.) But if we're really honest with ourselves we have to admit that deadlines help us GET THINGS DONE. More important, when you know you have a deadline and it's a reasonably distant one (not a "I need this yesterday" one) it helps us GET THINGS DONE RIGHT.

Such is the case for the most successful clients I work with. They know they'll be giving a presentation in three months so they contact me NOW. They don't wait til 5 days before they're to speak to 800 people. They give themselves time to design and develop their presentation and even time to (gasp, no kidding) practice it! Even my most reticent (a polite way of saying they HATE it) speakers are exponentially LESS nervous and thus have an exponentially BETTER experience when they take advantage of their deadline and use it as the impetus to prepare.

For me deadlines give me something to look forward to, something to move toward, a finish line.

And it looks like I'm about to have a BIG one, or a series of small ones. I've met this morning with three very dynamic gentlemen who, if all goes as I think it will, will be instrumental in the publishing of my book about public speaking! Stay tuned.