How To Speak With Confidence in Public

1:

INTRODUCTION

Jerry Seinfeld once joked that most of us would rather attend a funeral in the casket than give the eulogy. Many of us would agree. A 2013 poll in the UK had glossophobia – the fear of speaking in public – as the second largest fear (after losing a family member). Fear of being buried alive – or just dying – came third and fourth, respectively.¹ Why does the thought of standing up in front of a group make our knees knock and our voice tremble?

Think about all the times you’ve drifted off in a meeting, or in a class. All the times you’ve listened to a speech and it has just failed to land. Most of us are guilty of reaching for our mobiles to send a message during a presentation, and of getting caught there for several minutes before turning back to the speaker. This is despite knowing how it feels to be on the reverse side of the podium. As speakers, we have all noticed people gazing out of the window or getting sucked into the black hole of their phone screens while our own mouths have been open, our carefully composed words pouring out.

At the heart of this book is the idea that good communication is about building connections. This is true whether you’re a head girl giving a talk at school, a political candidate speaking to a crowded room, a CEO giving a conference speech, a graduate going for a first interview, a scientist giving a TED talk or anyone, anywhere, having a meeting.

We all know what it is like when we have connected with someone, even just one-on-one. We can see the person we’re talking to smiling and nodding as we speak. We feel visible, memorable and in control of the impact we make.

But what can happen when we feel in the spotlight, or when we need to deliver, is that the confident, comfortable and engaging person our friends recognize can drain away to leave a drier, less effective version of ourselves. We might disappear into a rabbit hole of detail. We might use thirty words when three would do. We might forget the point we are trying to make. We might just appear worried and nervous. This can have devastating effects on us. At best, our message may fail to land, leaving our audience unmoved. At worst, the audience may make negative judgements that impact on whether they buy into us as a speaker and a person.

We live in a world where everyone is short of time and attention.

Yet, despite this, we all know those people who manage to command attention. People who speak with gravitas and authority. People who get listened to. People who charm, entertain or persuade with their words. People who get hired.

How can you be compelling and get buy-in to both yourself and your ideas? To do so, it is vital that you are aware of your personal brand and style and in control of how others perceive you.

What are the skills that enable you to develop solid relationships? What are the techniques that build rapport and win confidence and trust? How can you sell your ideas and products while letting your personality and warmth come through?

This book will help you build your presence and profile, and explore techniques to help you present yourself, your personality and your message in a confident, personable and compelling way – wherever you are, and whomever you are talking to.

We’ll look at the obvious but often overlooked qualities of effective communication and impact. By exploring the concepts of dynamic energy (to increase presence) and telling a story (to bring to life what you say and make it concise, accessible and memorable), we’ll work on putting you in control of your impact and content so that you come across as engaging, personable and authoritative. This is the foundation for real self-awareness and self-assurance.

We believe that – just as everyone can learn to play a better game of tennis, or a musical instrument – everyone can learn to speak in public.

This book tells you how.

What you’ll learn from the following pages:

• A heightened awareness of what effective and engaging communication looks and sounds like.

• Practical techniques to take away and immediately put into practice, which will help you come across with more confidence and authority.

• A practical methodology to help you prepare and structure your content and bring it to life.

• How to control nerves.

• How to make your communication resonate with your audience.

The book is divided into chapters that address many of the public speaking opportunities in which you’ll find yourself in life, like job interviews, big speeches and business pitches. Feel free to dip in and out – but don’t skip Chapters 2 and 3, on ‘dynamic energy’ and ‘telling the story’. These concepts are at the heart of the book. The case studies come from real work we’ve done with real clients. There’s some science – not too hard core – in Chapters 4 and 8, which explains why our theories work and will show you why – if you make these techniques your own – you’ll be unstoppable. Or at least memorable and interesting, whenever you open your mouth.

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DYNAMIC ENERGY

This chapter is about what it takes to look and sound comfortable and confident, regardless of how you’re feeling inside.

Why is it that when one person starts to speak, we sit up and listen – then, when another person speaks, we switch off and zone out? More often than not, we do the latter. Whether we are at school, at university or at work, we rarely find speakers who are truly engaging. Think about the teachers and lecturers you have known. I have copious memories of time in the classroom moving imperceptibly slowly, of listening to a dull monotone and watching an expressionless face. Consequently I doodled, wrote a shopping list, or – even worse – nodded off. But it was a subject I was passionately interested in! I had signed up to study it! So how could they make it so dull?

In our business lives we are communicating all the time – on the phone, on conference calls, at internal meetings, pitching to a new client, speaking to the entire company, being interviewed for a new job. How often do we walk away from a meeting or presentation thinking ‘I really enjoyed that,’ or ‘Wow, that was interesting’? Not very often. In fact, we usually walk away thinking ‘That went on a bit,’ or ‘I thought he was never going to finish.’ This strikes me as a waste of everyone’s time. No one wants to be described as dull. No one wants to be described as ‘a bit of a bore’.

So, what is effective and engaging communication all about?

In my fifteen years as a communication coach working with businesses, teachers and graduates all over the world, what I come across, again and again, is that the written word and the spoken word get muddled up. For me, the two are radically different.

Dr Albert Mehrabian is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at UCLA, and is best known for his publications on the relative importance of verbal and non-verbal communications. In his studies, Mehrabian concludes² that there are basically three elements to any face-to-face communication:

• words

• tone of voice

• non-verbal behaviour (e.g. facial expression).

For Mehrabian, the non-verbal elements are particularly important for communicating feelings and attitude. If the words disagree with the tone of voice and non-verbal behaviour, people tend to believe in the latter.

Mehrabian is often quoted as saying that the meaning of a message is communicated by:

• your words: 7 per cent

• your tone of voice: 38 per cent

• your body language: 55 per cent.

There are recognized limitations to Mehrabian’s experiments and results. There has been debate and disagreement about his findings. However, there can be no doubt that how we speak and how we appear when we speak can have a significant impact on our ability to land messages and engage listeners.

For example, if a CEO of a business addresses his or her employees with the claim, ‘I feel hugely confident about the success of this business,’ but delivers what he says with an anxious expression or in a dull monotone, then he or she is giving a mixed message. It is incongruent. How a speaker delivers their message, and how they come across when they are delivering their message, have a huge influence on how we, the audience, feel about them. Do we like them, do we feel confident about them, do we want to work with them? Are we going to be influenced by what they say?

Similarly, anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell³ looked at non-verbal communication in his study of what he calls ‘kinesics’. He estimated that the average person actually speaks words for a total of ten or eleven minutes a day, and the average sentence takes about 2.5 seconds. Birdwhistell also estimated that we can make and recognize around 250,000 facial expressions.

His findings were similar to those of Mehrabian:

• The verbal part of a face-to-face conversation is less than 35 per cent.

• Over 65 per cent of communication is non-verbal.

Allen and Barbara Pease⁴ recorded thousands of sales interviews and negotiations in the 1970s and 1980s. They showed that in business meetings body language accounts for between 60 and 80 per cent of the impact made around a negotiating table. They also found that 60-80 per cent of a negotiator’s initial opinion about a new person in the room was formed in less than four minutes.

So we don’t have long to grab people’s attention. Body language is important.

How can we make our