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Awards For Training Excellence in the Work Place

The Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) is a not-for-profit membership association dedicated to the profession of training, workplace learning and human resources development. The CSTD offers awards to honor Canadian-developed stand-alone learning products and programs once a year. These types of training products must have learning objectives, instructional material, and methods to evaluate learning.

Criteria for Winning the Canadian Society for Training and Development Awards

1. Originality - Entry addresses current need in an enterprising manner.

2. Instructional Design - Entry respects Adult learning principles

3. Evaluation Strategy - entry measures Kirkpatrick’s 4 levels of evaluation.

4. Packaging - Entry has visual appeal

5. Communication Style - entry is well-organized, clearly written and easy to follow in language, grammar and content.

6. Overall Value - Entry offers value to the organization/purchaser and to the training profession.

The awards are given based on merit of submission, not in comparison with other submissions.

Entry Categories for the CSTD Award

1. WOW Award - Process or program that introduces a new idea into the marketplace in the form of a new product or service or n improvement in organization or process.

2. External Learning Program - Classroom based programs and/or a blend of learning modalities designed for sale on the open market.

3. Internal Learning Program - Classroom based programs and/or a blend of learning modalities designed for exclusive use within a company.

4. External E-Learning Training Program - Instructional content or learning experiences that are delivered, enabled, or mediated by electronic technology and designed for sale on the open market.

5. Internal E-Learning Training Program - Instructional content or learning experie4nces that are delivered, enabled, or mediated by electronic technology and designed for exclusive use within a company.

Award Benefits

As a member of the CSTD, you gain professional recognition, educational resources, services, networks and international partnership with others in your industry. You will find validation that your learning product uses “best practice” learning principles as well as receive feedback outlining merits and areas of improvement at the Canadian Society for Training and Development Conference. Recognition of your learning product through being awarded the CSTD Award for Training Excellence will enhance your marketing through a profile in the Award ceremony booklet during the presentation at the CSTD

All of these things will benefit your company or organization as well as give authority in your industry. Your clients will have confidence that your learning program or products will provide above industry standard training for their employees. With this confidence of authority in your field, your company is sure to guarantee superior training methodology to future clients.

The CSTD Canadian Awards for Training Excellence have honored innovative, Canadian-developed learning products and programs since 1995. This program is open to all member organizations. Entries are judged on originality, instructional design, evaluation strategy, packaging, communication style and overall value. The CSTD is a strategic world leader, striving for excellence in the workplace learning and performance business applications. Validation through peer feedback is an ideal way to ensure your learning product or training program uses best practice learning principles.

A Canadian Society for Training and Development Awards gives your clients and peers confidence that your Management Training program exceeds industry standards.

Public Speaking - Let’s Get Physical

Passion

Although developing proper eye-contact technique and learning how and when to pause are absolutely essential to acquiring “The Skills” - you’re not finished yet. The last element involves adding the emotional to the mechanical. What we’re referring to here is the element that works to lock in your audience once you’ve successfully engaged them with your eye-contact and person-to-person approach. What we’re talking about is passion.

The truth is, you can break almost all the ‘rules’ about proper delivery if, in the end, you deliver your message with true passion. There are even some great speakers out there whom you’ll notice will occasionally break some of the rules, but they get away it because they wrap you up so tightly in their passion that you don’t notice.

With the easy availability of information today, there are many people who know a great deal. But knowledge matters very little if you can’t convey what you know with a level of passion that drives people to sit up and listen.

After all, it’s not likely that anybody in the audience is going to care more about your topic than you do, so to ensure that audiences come away interested and motivated to learn more, it’s incumbent upon you, the speaker, to stretch to the point of almost going over the top with passion and enthusiasm for their topic.

So how exactly do you convey passion?

Gestures

One way to let your audience know how you feel is to demonstrate it physically. In our on-site classes we have a lot of fun with the gestures module. What you need to know about gestures is that in keeping with Rule #2, when you incorporate meaningful body movement into your presentation, it provides a win-win for all.

The presenter wins, because every time you move the muscles in your upper body it burns some of the excess energy running through your body. In a modern world one-against-many environment, it’s not healthy for your career or your freedom if you choose to either fight your audience or flee the scene. So what do you do with that excess energy? You move your arms and hands in concert with the words coming out your mouth. You paint pictures of the words or the action you’re describing. We say in concert because, unfortunately, most of the body motions we see presenters use tend to distract from the message rather than add to it:

If you’re not guilty of any of the above, you probably err on the other side - in fact, most people don’t gesture at all. Or their gestures are so reserved that they fail to either burn off energy or signal enthusiasm. What you want to do is put enough energy into your gestures that you both burn calories and let the audiences know that you care enough about your topic to actually get physical about it.

So far, we’ve talked a lot about what not to do. Now its time to examine (and practice) the type of physical skills that will project your professionalism. As easy as it is to define distracting gestures and nuances, it is also fairly easy to adopt the practices that can define you as a professional presenter. In this lesson, we’ll work on the basics of maximizing your impact on the audience.

The first thing is to adopt a stance that both appears balanced and also allows you to keep from needing or wanting to rock or pace back and forth.

The Neutral Position

Then, figure out exactly what you are going to do with your hands and learn to gesture from the shoulders, not the elbows. Use your hands to describe and emphasize. Drop your hands down gently to your side (known as the neutral position) when you’re starting your speech or when you’re finished gesturing.

When you gesture from the neutral position, your gestures become more emphatic. If everything comes from the middle magnet position it looks like you are stuck in a phone booth. Dropping your hands down to your side is of course extremely difficult to do. With most people the hands immediately come back together like magnets or start grabbing things like clothing, various body parts like your face, or they jump back into your pockets.

So when you’re talking about an increase in sales, show us your hand up in the air. To demonstrate lowering costs, extend your other hand down below it. And here you might mention that the space in between represents profit, which is a good thing, because that’s where profit sharing comes from!

Studies have shown that gesturing lightens the cognitive load while speaking and actually helps you think. This may be why its not unusal to watch someone become very physically animated while talking on the phone, even though the person on the other end can’t see them.

For maximum impact, then, balance your stance, feet shoulder width apart. You want to use your hands, but you want to use them appropriately. You want to use them in a way that helps to further your message. And then you want to increase your volume, increase your inflection as much as possible to show how strongly you believe in the words you have to say.

Passion is the driver.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

Public Speaking - Lock, Talk & Pause

The process that sets you on your way to speaking like the best speakers in the world, speakers who possess The Skills, goes like this: You find a target in your audience and you lock eyeballs. You deliver a complete thought to that one person, and then you do the hardest part, you pause. You pause before turning to the next person, and speak to the next person with your next thought.

Here’s a tip to begin the whole process correctly: Whenever you get up to speak, before you ever get out of your chair to come to the front of the room, know which person with whom you’re going to begin speaking. Have that person picked out before you get up there. Otherwise, you’re going to start off on the wrong foot: you’re going to start scanning around for those “friendly faces”. Choose the person you’re going to deliver your opening line to ahead of time, and begin your talk by looking at that one person and letting it flow.

Let’s be clear - one thing you definitely don’t want to do is to look for and speak to only a few “friendly faces”. That might be advice that works well for the few faces, but what about all the other less than friendly mugs? How do you suppose they feel when they notice that you are engaging other people but not them? Do you suppose it might get them thinking about something other than your message? Do you want a few people buying into what you’re saying, or the whole group? Your job, remember, is to look at everyone in the audience. Everyone in the room needs to leave feeling that you took the time to personally engage them as individuals.

If you’ve been to a speech or a presentation by someone with The Skills, you have no doubt noticed that they did this. In fact, have you ever been to a large event with perhaps hundreds of people and come away feeling that throughout the program the speaker kept coming back to you? That for some reason the speaker picked you out personally for special notice, and repeatedly?

This is perhaps the most powerful advantage you will have with The Skills, but it’s also the easiest to acquire, because it happens all by itself! One great thing about The Skills is that they are infinitely scalable. That is, the larger the crowd, the better they work for you, but you don’t work any harder. You engage in exactly the same behaviors with twelve people as you do with twelve hundred!

Parallax Universe

The reason is this: thanks to the ways our eyes are built, from distances as short as ten feet, a phenomenon known as parallax kicks in, and for the very same reason we see railroad tracks converge in the distance, our eyes see the other person’s eyes converging on ours even when they might be pointed a few feet away. Speakers with The Skills are always only looking directly at one person at a time. But from a short distance, and increasingly with greater distance, people sitting around the person to whom the speaker is actually looking believe the speaker is looking directly at them.

So from, say, fifteen feet away, the four people around the one person you’re looking at will feel the benefits of your engaging them as individuals. From thirty feet, twelve people around your target will swear you’ve singled them out for attention! Your circle of influence keeps getting larger and larger, but you’re just doing the exact same thing you’d do in a small conference room. In our classes we enjoy asking the women if they’ve ever been to a concert where the singer sang directly to them, and we inevitably get at least one response of, “Yes, but how did you know?”

Rock stars know how to create and keep fans, and this skill is a big tool in their box.When you lock on one person, everything else kind of fades away. You focus all of your attention on that one person and nothing else. For the moment, your entire universe is composed of the one person to whom you are directing your one thought. And when you do that, for those three to nine seconds or so, your brain isn’t making new threat calculations all the time, trying to get you cranked up, cranked up, cranked up. Everything kind of fades away.

Advantages

Just as when you work from a nice, clean desk, or as when you’re given just one task to do, and that’s all you have to do, by talking to only one person at a time, it creates a nice, strong point of focus. All of your attention can be given just to this one moment, so that nothing else that’s going on affects your brain. Focusing on one person creates an environment that helps you focus on one thought - the thought that you’re delivering to that one person.

You’re also able to pace yourself. When you learn how to pause, when you learn how to say what you have to say and then stop talking for a moment, move on to the next person and only then begin speaking to them, it helps to create a smooth pace that the audience can follow, and also one that doesn’t foul you up.

One of the problems people have when they get up to speak is that, with adrenaline in your veins, your metabolism is elevated. Consequently, your perception of time slows down. You thus tend to speak much more quickly when you’re up in front of a group, when our juices are all flowing high. And unfortunately, with your somewhat diminished cognitive ability it’s not impossible for your mouth to overrun your brain. You know, you can push the words out so fast that your brain is not be able to replenish the queue quickly enough. And so you do end up finding yourself with nothing to say.

When you find yourself with nothing to say, that can be quite an anxiety-producing situation. It starts cranking up the whole fear juice thing again. The more you get cranked up, the more time slows down. That’s one of the reasons most people don’t pause. In your slow-motion state, you feel your pauses to be much longer than the length of the pauses your audience hears. But when you’ve been speaking on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, and then all of a sudden, you just stop, the pause then becomes very, shall we say, pregnant.

By working pauses into your speech from the very beginning, you’re able to establish a pace that seems natural to the audience, and will actually mask any moment when you might not be able to think of what to say.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

Public Speaking – Owning “The Skills” Part II

In order to present at the top, in order to acquire The Skills, you must remember three rules that govern everything you do whilst presenting. They’re really quite simple, but sometimes it’s easy to forget the simple things, and these rules must remain in the forefront of your consciousness at all times.

Rule Number 1 states: If you’re working too hard, you’re doing it wrong!

Rule #2: When you’re doing it right, it’s always Win-Win.

The sad truth is, typical speaker behaviors more often fall into the category of Lose-Lose. Whether it be the way the speaker engages the audience with his eyes, or what she does with her hands, or the pace with which either cranks out the word stream, most things that speakers do work both against their feeling comfortable and the audience’s ability to follow and buy into what is being said.

For instance, think about what you see presenters do with their arms and hands. Instead of using the opportunity to throw off excess energy by using the full swing of their arms and hands to paint pictures of the words they are saying, your average speaker locks them up in some position that not only keeps the excess energy trapped in a re-circulating loop, but in a position that translates to a body-language signal that is off-putting to the audience.

Luckily, as is the case with the other counter-productive behaviors in which speakers engage, these can all be changed simply by engaging in other, learnable behaviors that produce positive outcomes. You don’t need talent to do it right, you simply need to know how to do it right, and then practice those physical behaviors.

When you employ the behaviors that comprise The Skills, not only are you more relaxed, authoritative and convincing, but your audience has a much easier time hearing, seeing, and ultimately agreeing with the message you are trying to impart.

One thing to remember is that audiences, as Yale’s Professor Edward Tufte likes to point out, “are lazy, and audiences are fragile”. You can’t ask audiences to work in order to get your message because they won’t. And you can’t make them feel uncomfortable because they’ll spend their small amount of energy trying to get comfortable and won’t have anything left to spend on trying to comprehend your point.

Proper eye-contact, gesturing, tone, inflection and volume all work to make for a great experience for both speaker and listeners alike. When you’re using The Skills, it’s always a Win-Win.

Rule #3: People only START listening when you STOP talking.

This is an easy concept to understand, but a very difficult one for most people to implement. If you stop to think about it, you don’t so much hear what is being said as you do to what was just said.

In fact, the left hemisphere of your brain, where speech and text are processed, is programmed to not absorb information immediately, but rather put it through a process of analysis before storing or acting on it. It’s a momentary process to be sure, but nonetheless one that is immensely aided when a moment or two of silence follows the words or phrase that the speaker wants his audience to really hear and comprehend.

Think for a moment of what happens when someone tells a joke. Jokes are structured to get the listener thinking that the action in the setup will proceed along the expected path, and the humor comes when the listener realizes that the punch-line has altered that path in an unexpected way. But you don’t laugh at the moment the punch-line is delivered. You laugh only when you realize your line of thought has been diverted, and that always takes a moment, or sometimes, if the joke is really good, two. You only hear what was actually said when the joker stops talking and your mind has the opportunity to recognize the misdirection.

Of course, what most speakers do is continue with an endless stream of verbiage from the moment they open their mouths until they discover that the talk is over and they can (Thank God!) take their seats again. Once people start talking in front of a group it is very difficult to get them to stop, as it goes against what they’ve taught themselves to believe: that as long as they continue to hear words coming out of their mouths they’re still OK. A very common fear is that somehow that stream will stop and they won’t be able to get it started again. But why is this so?

A stitch in time

Because of the physiological changes that occur in the body when you are facing an audience, your perception of time actually s-l-o-w-s d-o-w-n. The universe doesn’t change - just how you perceive it. So although the audience is listening to you in real time, you perceive even a momentary lapse in your word-stream to be much longer that it actually is. A 1-second pause for the audience might feel like 3 or 4 to you.

This is where umm’s and ahh’s are born. We hear that dreaded silence, and in a desperate need to fill it immediately, we grab for the closest thing - a non-word that we don’t have to structure into our word track.

It might be hard to believe, but time goes by quite nicely even when it’s not filled with your words.

As you develop your eye and an ear for The Skills, you will come to see that ALL great speakers not only know Rule #3, but also embrace it. They not only embrace it, it is at the forefront of their thinking whenever they are speaking. It is the Number 1 issue on their minds. And that says a lot, because Rule #1 says that we can’t be thinking about too many things at once.

Being able to resist saying the next thing on your mind immediately after you offer your last thought is the most difficult idea for participants to learn, but it is an absolutely essential.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

Public Speaking – Owning “The Skills”

People who get paid well to speak all share one of two traits: either they’re famous, or they own “The Skills”. To be able to move people who don’t know you as a celebrity of some sort, you must know how to keep your audience focused on you and your message, and how to keep them on the same page, on the same wavelength, every step of the way.

Keeping an audience with you is simply not possible with the way 99% of all public speakers behave when at the front of a group. When you speak the way most of us have been taught to do from an early age, you engage in behaviors that send the wrong signals to your audience - in many cases exactly the opposite of what you would like to signal. Worse, these standard behaviors actually reduce your cognitive capacity at the time you most desperately need it.

If these statements seem sweeping, please understand that we at PublicSpeakingSkills.com have been training people from business, politics, the military and the clergy for over 12 years in The Skills.

During that time, we have had the privilege to work with over 10,000 people from all walks of life, and here is what we have learned: 99% of speakers engage in exactly the same behaviors, and consequently produce similar results when it comes to the quality of their speaking.

In fact, in every one of our on-site programs, we begin with an exercise that “benchmarks” how each student speaks prior to training, and we are able to predict to the second what each and every participant will do during their initial delivery. To the second!

Good News!

But that’s the good news. It’s good news because we also know that most people speak the way they do simply because they’ve never been shown the proper way. And though many people take courses in public speaking in high school or college, the format of those courses tends to emphasize the content part of speaking rather than the actual physical behaviors one needs to understand in order to acquire The Skills.

If you have ever taken a course in school, we bet that your assignments were to create a series of different types of speeches: The Informative, The Inspirational, The Motivational, etc., etc. Sound familiar?

But what were you taught about the actual delivery, other than to look at everyone in the audience and watch your umms and ahhs? Worse, during your speaking career you probably have been receiving positive feedback for your behaviors no matter what you’ve been doing by people either too polite or simply not knowledgeable enough to tell you otherwise.

Speaking well: talent or training?

When people learn the proper way; when they understand what the audience expects of them as human beings; when they embrace the idea that it’s OK to go into a presentation without having spent hours and hours rehearsing it; when they become comfortable with not knowing what they’re going to say until just before they say it; and when they come to accept that often the most powerful thing they can say is nothing at all, they never engage in the old behaviors again.

They approach every opportunity to speak to a crowd with desire and enthusiasm, and the larger the crowd, the better. They actually see speaking to a group as one of the most relaxing things they can do, as it is one of the few times left in life where they are free to do only one thing at a time. These people have The Skills.

And we can’t emphasize enough that The Skills are, indeed, a set of behaviors that you learn, and not something that you are born with. Only a very small subset of people is ‘born’ with the ability to move a group to action with their words and actions. Those people have what the rest of us don’t: it’s called “charisma”. Charismatics have been known to lead thousands to action by the power of their spoken words, often for good, and sometimes not.

But charisma alone didn’t get Bill Clinton to the top job in the world. Bill Clinton, believe it or not, was not always a great speaker. What he had was both charisma and the brains to know that he did not know everything - and that becoming a great speaker was both an essential job requirement and something that someone could be taught.

Bill Clinton was one of only a handful of men who was elected president of the United States without great personal or family wealth. He got elected on his ability to motivate people to listen to him, work for him, follow him and support him all the way. He was successful because he didn’t simply speak; he spoke with a manner and a style that caused people to not only listen to his words but also to hear them, remember them, and to believe them. Bill Clinton has The Skills.

The Skills supersede genes, culture, background, heritage, and to a large extent even education. Many clients come to us because they want help with their accents or they feel their voice needs correcting in some way.

Although we grant that there are some people with a speaking voice better suited to silent films, for the vast majority an accent or unique pitch only adds to the level of interest they can create as a speaker. That’s because, as we’ll learn, these traits simply add to one’s “humanness”.

It’s about being you

People are not moved by messages delivered by speakers whom they don’t feel are “real”. And yet most of us were taught behaviors that cause us to adopt completely alien personas when we speak to groups. We try to become “Presenterman!” or “Presenterwoman!”. Sadly, Hillary Clinton does this. Could you imagine spending dinner across the table from Hillary Clinton and having her speak to you the way she does to crowds? Pretty painful thought! Yet you could pretty much imagine that if you were sharing dinner with Bill, or Ronald Reagan, the conversation would be not unlike how you know them to speak in public.

Alas, Hillary does not have The Skills.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

Public Speaking - Masters of the Pause Part II

An Inconvenient Speaker

We have made the claim many times that Bill Clinton is the Master of the Pause. In fact, we have said that it is exactly this mastery that causes more people in polls to name the former president as the greatest living public speaker hands down.

If you doubt Bill Clinton’s ability to embrace the pause might have been responsible for his being elected, it might be useful to look at the other side. A great example of somebody who didn’t until recently have a clue about the pause is Al Gore. Do you think of Al Gore as being a great speaker? Do you think there might be a relationship between his speaking ability and the fact that couldn’t maintain the Clinton dynasty even four more years?

Now before we are accused of being anti-Gore, understand that one of the worst places to go seeking great speakers is your local, state, or federal government. Most politicians’ egos are greater than their intellectual capacity, and many simply won’t take anybody’s advice, period. So we end up having to endure the insincere-sounding shrill of a Hilary Clinton or the mind-numbing drone of a John Kerry.

But back to Gore: When Al Gore delivered his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination at the 2000 Democratic convention, he had a 30 point Program for America that he thought was very important to get out. He had 30 points and 45 minutes in which to deliver them.

What happened was that during the first 20 minutes of his speech, people in the audience would hear things that they liked and, quite naturally, applaud. At least they tried to applaud. But instead of pausing and bathing in the glow for a moment or two, Al would hold up his hands to silence them and just kept on speaking. This went on for 25 minutes - although they would applaud, he wouldn’t stop speaking.

After a while, the audience started to become uncomfortable, because they were applauding over him. The applause then became more sporadic, and eventually stopped altogether. And so for the last 20 minutes of the speech, he continued to speak, and nobody applauded at all. He just spoke for 20 minutes straight. Not a single break.

We think if you were to have given a pop quiz to the audience and ask them how many of those 30 points for America they could remember, it probably would be no more than three, if any. Al thought it was all about the content, without consideration for the audience’s ability to take it all in.

Years later, prior to filming An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore sought and received professional presentation skills training, and he has a somewhat better grasp on the process that when he ran for president in 2000. In fact, in a May 2007 article in The New York Times Magazine, Gore was asked if he had any regrets about how he ran the campaign.

The reporter was hoping to get him to say something related to the legal process, but instead Gore replied, “If I had had the presentation skills I’ve since learned, I think I’d be in my second term as president”.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

Public Speaking - Learning to Say, “I Don’t Care!”

Early in the movie, The Fugitive, Officer Gerard catches up with Dr. Kimball near the outlet of a high dam. Gerard had been chasing Kimball not as a suspect in a crime (the murder of Kimball’s wife), but as fugitive from justice. With seemingly no where to go, and Gerard’s gun trained on him, Kimball still hesitates to surrender.

Looking Gerard straight in the eye, Kimball shouts, “I didn’t kill my wife!”

Gerard, staring back at his captured prey, replies, “I don’t care!”

Sometimes as a presenter you have to learn to accept that as long as you are performing by the rules, you can’t necessarily care about how you are being received by every member of the audience.

In other words, one thing that should never be a source of discomfort for you is an audience member’s response to your engagement at any one time.

When you complete your thought with a listener, and you pause and move to find your next target, there will be times when your new your target has his head down or is otherwise not returning your engagement.

Although once the audience realizes that you are actually engaging them as individuals, it’s not likely to happen often, but when that does happen to you, it’s an example of how you have to learn how to not care.

Seriously. The last thing you ever want to do is when you shift from one person to the next and the next one is not looking at you, is to give in to the temptation to quickly find another target. She may be asleep. He may be on his Blackberry.

You have to learn to some extent to simply not care. Here’s where the win/win comes in, because the rest of the audience wins when you don’t care and you simply continue on as you were. You certainly don’t want to shift your vision, see something you don’t like, and then quickly revert to aerosol eyes to find somebody else.

You have to really learn that there are all kinds of reasons for an audience member to not be engaged with you at that moment, and most of those reasons having nothing to do with you or the quality of job you’re doing.

The side of caution

The problem is that part of the anxiety speakers feel is based on their ongoing assessment of what the audience is thinking about them. The brain is always going to make a worst case assessment, because it needs to err on the side of caution. It’s going to think the worst, and determine that there’s a threat.

In the absence of any totally proactive - “Oh, yes, you’re great, I love you!” - response, your brain will tend to think all sorts of bad things. Your brain is looking for threats all the time, so that’s what it finds.

When you turn to somebody and his head’s down, or he’s asleep, you’re likely to say to yourself, “Oh, no, what am I doing? I must be boring.” The reality is that the person’s head is down because she was out at The Roadhouse until 5:00 in the morning.

You know, she came back late, had a shower, crawled into work, and now she’s sitting in the dark and she falls asleep. There are all kinds of reasons why somebody might not be giving you totally positive feedback.

If you turn to your target, regardless of the response you get, you need to learn to just stick with that same person for the rest of your thought, and not be shifting around quickly, looking for another target.

The win for you in this situation is that for that particular engagement, you’re using that person to reduce your visual over-stimulation by taking no more action than you would have if she were returning your contact.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

Public Speaking - One Person, One Thought, One Pause

Perhaps the most difficult thing for speaker to learn is knowing when and where to stop speaking.

When you pause, you establish the pace from the beginning of your talk. You let the audience know that the information is going to be coming at them at a pace that they can handle. You let them know right up front that you will be delivering your story in the form of a newspaper - not a textbook.

So to put the process all together, speaking properly is about is finding one person, giving one thought, and then taking one pause. One pause long enough for them to ingest the last thing you said, reference it and catalog it, before you ask them to open up to new information.

When you engage these behaviors, you will find that your relationship with the audience changes in many ways. Not only does the group dynamic change, but also the types of feedback you get from the group, because in many cases, you’ll find people in the audience who’ve been through lifetimes of presentations and never felt engaged at that same level.

When you master Lock, Talk, & (especially) Pause, what you find is that people actually come up to you at the end of the meeting say things like, “You know, Jane, I’ve heard this information before, but nobody’s ever explained it in quite the same way. Somehow, you made it all understandable”. Or, “Somehow, I felt that you really cared about my understanding what you had to say. This was a great presentation”. That “somehow” was your giving them the ability to actually hear what you said.

The positive feedback is a good thing, too, because the more of it you get, the more it will reinforce your desire to hone The Skills every time you speak. And you will get a little bit better every time you do. In fact, speaking well is a lifelong process - but one that just keeps on getting better as long as you do it.

Mark Twain gets a lot of quotes attributed to him that he never said, but one of the things he did say was:

“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause”.

Way back then, Mark Twain knew good old Rule #3, that people only START listening when you STOP talking.

Master of the Pause

When we ask our on-site participants to name the person they consider to be the most effective speaker in public life today, Bill Clinton is the name that most often rises to the top. People think of Bill Clinton, regardless of his politics (which we won’t discuss here) as a great public speaker. And the reality is Bill Clinton was some poor kid from Arkansas who made it to a pretty high office because one thing he figured out how to do is speak.

Bill Clinton is thought of as a great speaker for good reason. Bill Clinton is the Master of the Pause. There’s no speaker today who knows more about how to get a message across by saying a few words and then pausing to let it sink in. In fact, Bill Clinton probably says fewer words between pauses than any other politician. [Editor’s note: Barack Obama is fast on his heals, but still has a ways to go before he can steal the mantle. We suspect history will weigh in on this in time.]

When you listen to Clinton speak, you find yourself not just hearing what he just said, but also waiting in anticipation for his next words. And that is the second reason that the pause is so vital. When you don’t give the audience frequent breaks in the stream of your words, foremost on their minds is when you are going to stop talking so their brains can have a rest.

But when you fill your stream of thoughts with opportunities for them to rest between each one, you will find your audience actually waiting to hear your next words. They are primed to listen, so the impact of the words when they do arrive is much, much greater.

Bill Clinton learned The Skills, and learned how to be a master, by listening to his hero in life - John F. Kennedy. Coming up, you will hear for yourself how each of these masters deliver their words not to hear themselves speak, but with their audience’s ability to hear and comprehend foremost in mind.

Bill Clinton is an effective speaker because he gives everyone in the audience all the time each needs to absorb what he said before he asks them to pick up on the next thing he’s going to say. He gives them the time to absorb it, process it, and form a clear picture of the words before he asks them to take in new information.

Bill Clinton, and Jack Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King and just about anybody that has ever really moved you by their style of speaking all know one thing: the most effective thing you can do when you speak is to NOT.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

Presentation Skills - Three Points and Your Out!

Organizing Your Presentation

Before organizing your presentation keep reminding yourself that Less is More. Also consider that most presentations have far too many concepts, and the concepts far too many details..

You should be able to put the gist of your presentation into one sentence or “headline”. What would the headline of your speech be? Think about it. Start by writing a few full sentences to describe your overall theme. Edit out the superfluous adjectives, and then see if you can combine the sentences all into one. Then make that sentence a phrase. If you can’t put all that into one headline you may have to simplify your idea.

Most presentations end up having too much content, although ironically presenters always fear not having enough to say.

It’s also probable that you’re audience has never heard your idea before. Though old news to you, its very likely something new to your audience. If you’re on a traveling road show giving the speech over and over again, no matter where you go on the whistle-stop tour, it’s always their first time. Don’t forget that.

The Kitchen Sink

Most presenters end up using the “kitchen sink” approach and tell their audiences all they can, about everything they can, in the short amount of time allocated to them. Therefore it becomes a race to spew out as much information as possible as quickly as possible, essentially a self-serving data dump. How disheartening for the audience.

Your presentation is about your audience, not about your finishing everything you want to say as quickly as possible. And its certainly not about your demonstrating the breadth and depth of your knowledge, even if the CEO is in the back of the room. Although we’d like to believe it, nobody can recall everything that you say anyway.

So choose to make your headline important, relevant to your audience, and to the point. Once they have the headline, they have a context into which to put your supporting evidence. But if they’re still trying to figure out what your main point is while you’re trying to offer them proof, the impact of your evidence will be highly diluted.

And speaking of points: Keep it to three. Humans have an amazing ability to remember things that come in three, and forget things more complicated. The rule of three is a principle in writing that suggests that things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things.

No matter what your topic, either break your supporting data apart or put them together to form three main components. Repeating those three components often will lead to not only greater comprehension, but much greater retention, too.

So an argument that is broken down into three concepts, each supported by three solid sources of evidence, becomes an argument that your audience will find very easy to buy into, even it they don’t see the simplicity of the symmetry.

Remember FDR’s advice: “Be sincere, be brief, be seated.”

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

Presentation Skills - Organization is Key Part IV

In Part III we discussed the four different types of evidence you can use: Personal, Statistics, Example, and Analogy. Each has its good points, and the type of evidence you choose will depend on both your topic and your audience. Whatever evidence you choose, make sure that you’re not just delivering the facts, but rather how those facts can benefit the audience.

Benefits to the Audience

So, make sure that your audience is aware of how your point has direct meaning to them. For example, “What this means to you is greater earnings in the future”… “more opportunities for growth within the organization”… “job security”. Whatever that positive connection to the audience is, make it very clear.

Too many less-than-seasoned salespeople do a great job of pointing out their company’s product’s features and advantages, but neglect the only part of interest to the customer, which is the benefit they will derive from using a product with all these great features and advantages.

For those of you unfamiliar with FAB: The Feature is what the product IS. The Advantage is what the product DOES. The Benefit is what the product does FOR YOU, the consumer.

Classic example: Windshield wipers

Feature: A device that swings back & forth across your windshield

Advantage: Clears the windshield of water

Benefit: Allows the driver to operate the vehicle in any weather

In other words, you can see where you’re going in the rain.

Too often in presentations do we see large percentages of screen and time devoted to promoting features and advantages. Less frequently do we see space devoted to what exactly all the cool stuff can do to make the client’s life easier, or more secure, or more profitable. Don’t waste your audience’s time telling them what you do. Tell them what you can do for them.

We’ve all heard about everyone’s favorite radio station being WIIFM, “What’s In It For Me?” Keep it tuned to the station your audience is listening to and your ratings will go through the roof.

Call to Action / Next Steps

You’ve gotten them motivated. You’ve excited them. You’ve done it all with great style and panache. What do you want them to do? Don’t forget to finish your job by asking them to do some things for you, and being as specific as possible.

Don’t end your presentation like this: “Thanks for your support”…“I appreciate your time, let’s stay in touch”…“Please do what you can”.

Instead, use phrasing such as:

“I need everyone to write their congressman”

And have that address in a handout or up on the screen. Or:

“At the end of the month we’ll be meeting again, so please e-mail your suggestions. I need at least two paragraphs from everyone, on my desk by the 15th.”

Or perhaps you need to mention what criteria must be met, who specifically will be responsible for what, and how this all will be measured. Either way, make sure that your message is on the top of the in-basket and not at the bottom of the circular file. Be precise and ask for specifics.

End with a Bang

Your last words should leave your audience inspired or with something to think about. If you’ve done everything right, your audience will have stayed with you every step of the way. But even if you’ve lost a few of them in the middle, your audience will especially remember the beginning and the end.

Think of an Olympic gymnast, who spins her lithe little body around the parallel bars and into seemingly impossible airborne positions: what does she always have to do to get the points? That’s right, stick the landing.

Stick the landing with your next presentation by summing up with a reference that alludes to, or makes whole, your unforgettable grabber. Give your audience something to talk about after they leave your talk.

Review

Don’t make your next presentation just a stream-of-consciousness data dump. Instead, organize it around a formula that grabs their attention in the beginning, direct their attention through the middle, and wraps it all up into a neat bundle at the end.

You’ve got 30 seconds to let them know that this presentation is not going to be like ones they’ve suffered through before. Let them know exactly where you’re going from the beginning so they can put everything you say into a pre-formed context. Give them evidence that they can relate to and hopefully has direct benefit to them.

Close with a call to action that, no matter how small, gives them a reason to keep thinking about your presentation after they leave the room.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

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