How to Speak So People Will Listen:
Tips for better verbal presentations.
By Teguh Wijayadi
Ndok, a conscientious, informed planner, always gets his reports in before they’re due. Hispresentations sound like commodities futures reports, and his audience looks half asleep.
Purwoko, also a planner, hands in reports at the last minute, and they’re not always complete. But when he speaks, people listen. He sounds as though he knows what he’s talking about.
Clearly, Purwoko has an edge when it comes to plum assignments and even promotion. His advantage is the ability to make highly effective presentations to public officials, citizens, peers, and businesses. However, he didn’t necessarily start out that way.
In 26 years of coaching thousands of people to be successful presenters, we’ve heard this said many times: “Some people are just natural speakers.” And it’s true that some people are natural speakers just as others are natural tennis players or singers. But anyone can develop these skills. Even fear that paralyzes many of us when we must speak before a group can be transformed into increased energy and used to great advantage.
The secret lies in a simple formula: A + P = C: Awareness of proven techniques plus frequent practice equals consistent control. These are the steps to success.
Be prepared
First, you must decide where you are going. That means knowing who your audience will be – concerned citizens or city council members. Then think about what they want to know – how the proposed plan impacts their neighborhood or what kind of tax base expansion can be projected.
The next step is to clarify your goal. Do you want to reassure the citizens, or do you want to communicate data about the project to the city council? Let’s assume you’re a planner for a coal company that is seeking a permit for a strip mine in a rural area. Citizens are concerned about the mine’s environmental impact. The company eventually intends to restore the sire as parkland. If you talk only about the geology of the area, you’ll bore the audience and do little to allay their fears. You may even create hostility. Instead you should be reassuring the citizens that the company will be a good neighbor.
Follow the two-step process: Know your audience, and define your goal. You’ll also have to decide whether to write out your presentation, rely on notes, or simply wing it. The best approach is to write out first but to speak from an outline.
Winging it is like playing Russian roulette. One of these days, you are going to shoot yourself in the head. Writing out a presentation forces you to focus on the important points, cutting out irrelevancies and ramblings. It’s the first step. The easiest way to start is stream-ofconsciousness.
Let your thoughts flow without worrying about order or grammar. If you would rather talk than write, use a tape recorder, then transcribe to paper or computer. Then move segments around into a logical order. Don’t worry about the introduction until you have the major points down.
Added fillips
Now is the time to think about ways to zip up your presentation. Avoid jokes, which can rebound and cause problems. Instead, think of humanizing your talk with anecdotes and examples. This magazine offers many of both. In July, for instances, Sylvia Lewis began an article on growth management with an anecdote about a couple who got thousands of signatures on a petition to overturn a local wetlands ordinance. It was an effective story because it was so specific, giving the names of the couple and describing what they did.
Sometimes it’s a good idea to insert a reference to someone you know will be in the audience: “We owe a lot of credit to Jack Phillips for organizing the new Main Street project.” Also, consider including arresting statistics, particularly for an opening: “Four hundred empty apartments in 1989, 1,000 empty apartments in 1990, 1,500 in 1992.”
Visual aids – slides, maps, flowcharts, diagrams – may not be appropriate. Don’t make the mistake of the planner who makes his entire presentation with his back to the audience while pointing to details on the screen in front of him. These guidelines are helpful in deciding what visual aids should be used – and how:
Prepare the speech first. The choose visual aids. If visual aids were meant to do all the communicating, you wouldn’t need a presentation.
Cull the pile. The fewer visual aids, the more effective the presentation.
Simplify. A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but a chart with 1,000 words isn’t worth anything. The audience should be able to grasp a message in two or three seconds. If you must use words, limit yourself to a few bulleted items.
Be creative. Overlays allow you to prepare original and colorful maps and graphs.
Slow down. Introduce each visual aid and point out salient points. Then remove it and comment on it. Don’t switch to the next visual aid right away. If you are using slides, use every other space in the carousel so you have some time to talk between images. Cover maps that you’ve tacked up until you’re ready to refer to them.
Eyes front. Visual aids don’t need your attention; the audience does.
Practice
Now read your presentation aloud. Listen to yourself. Then ask these questions: Have I achieved my goals? Are all my points relevant? Can I cut? Be ruthless. Don’t use up all the time allotted to your presentation.
After you’ve cut, it’s time to prepare a key word outline, which is what you will speak from. The outline should highlight your main points, with just enough words to keep you on track. Now run through your talk again. All that practice will give you confidence in your material and free you to establish rapport with your audience.
Once you feel confident about what you are going to say, you can focus on communication. These are some of the questions we often hear from people who are nervous about presentations:
- What should I do with my hands? The answer: Be natural. Don’t try to be dramatic.Natural gestures reflect your personal style. Keep your hands out of your pockets –and don’t cross your arms, which can suggest insecurity or hostility to your audience.
Where should I stand? Stand next to the podium so you can glance at your outline from time to time. Standing behind the podium erects a barrier between you and theaudience. Don’t sit down unless you’re part of a panel where everyone is seated at a table. In such a situation, make an effort to project energy by leaning forward while speaking and turning your head to the other speakers.
How does a speaker establish eye contact? Divide the room into several areas and make eye contact with one person at a time in each area. Hold the contact until your attention is recognized, at least four seconds. Then move on to a person in another area. In a question-and-answer session, maintain eye contact with the questioner while the questions is being asked. Immediately after, however, turn to the audience, using the same kind of eye contact as for the original presentation. That way, people won’t feel left out.When a question-and-answer session becomes heated, a simple technique can help. It’s called “listening for a point of agreement.” The rules are simple. First, find an honest point of agreement. For example, “I agree with you that we have a difficult situation here, and that we need to do something about it.” Next, enumerate the pointes of agreement. Never add the qualifiers “but,” “however,” or “yet.”
Should I go to a speech therapist to get rid of my squeaky voice? The answer is no. You don’t have to have a powerful or melodious voice to give a successful presentation. However, you can’t afford a colorless voice. Watch your pacing (speeded up for excitement, slow for importance) and inflection (emphasize important words and phrases). Speak louder at some points, quieter at others. Use pauses like commas to break up phrases and sentences or introduce thoughts. A long pause allows your message to sink in.
- How should I dress? “Professional is the key word. Don’t use the occasion of a public presentation to try out a new fashion, and avoid distractions like flashy jewelry or loud ties. The main thing is to know your audience. A powerful blue suit may put up barriers in a school auditorium but a sport jacket would be just right. Unbuttoned jackets on both men and women suggest openness and honesty.
All of these suggestions will help you become a poised, confident speaker. Remember,
though, that sincerity shows: If you don’t mean it, don’t say it.
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A Guide For Creative Thinking
By: Teguh Wijayadi
Einstein once said, “Every child is born a genius.” But the reason why most people do not function at genius levels is because they are not aware of how creative and smart they really are.
I call it the “Schwarzenegger effect.” No one would look at a person such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and think how lucky he is to have been born with such tremendous muscles. Everyone knows that he,and people like him, have worked many thousands of hours to build up their bodies so they can compete and win in bodybuilding competitions.
Your creative capabilities are just the same. They actually grow as they are used. But you don’t need to spend thousands of hours to increase your creative-thinking abilities. By practicing a few simple exercises and applications, you can start your creative juices flowing, and you may even amaze yourself at the quality and quantity of good ideas that you come up with. Let’s start off with the definition of creativity. In my estimation, after years of research on this subject, the very best definition of creativity is, simply, ovement.” You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or an artist in order to be creative. All you have to do is develop the ability to improve your situation, wherever you are and whatever you are doing. All great fortunes were started with ideas for improving something in some way.
In fact, an improvement needs to be only 10 percent new or different to launch you on the way to fame and riches. It has been estimated that each year, driving to and from work, the average person has about four ideas for improvement, any one of which could make him or her a millionaire.The problem is not that you don’t have the ideas you need to accomplish anything you want but, rather, that you fail to act on those ideas. Most people dismiss their own ideas because they think that those ideas cannot be very valuable if they were the ones who thought of them.
Thomas Edison, arguably the most successful creative genius in human history, once said that creativity is 99 percent perspiration and only 1 percent inspiration. Extensive research on creativity tends to bear him out.
There are four generally accepted parts of the creative process:
There is preparation, where much of the work is done. There is cerebration or rumination, where you turn the matter over to your subconscious mind. There is realization, where the idea or ideas come
to you. And finally, there is application, where you work out the creative idea and turn it
into something worthwhile. Of the four, preparation seems to be the most important, and it involves gathering the right data and asking the right questions.
Your success in life will be determined largely by the quantity of ideas that you generate. It seems that the quality of ideas is secondary to the quantity and that if you have enough ideas, one or more of them will turn out to be prizewinners.
You can begin building your creative muscles with focused questions. Some that you might think of are the following:
What are we trying to do?
How are we trying to do it?
What are our assumptions?
What if our assumptions are wrong?
All improvements begin with questioning the current, existing circumstances. If you are not making progress for any reason, stop and think, and begin asking yourself the hard questions that will stimulate your mind to consider other possibilities.
When they were doing the research to land a man on the moon, scientists were stumped for months and even years. They could not figure how to send a rocket to the moon with enough fuel to land on the moon, blast off, break the moon’s gravity and come back to earth. The problem was that if the rocket had that much fuel to start with, it would be too heavy to take off from the earth in the first place. Finally, they began to question the assumption that the lunar rocket ship had to land on the moon. When they questioned that assumption, the scientists concluded that a main rocket could orbit around the moon
while a smaller module dropped to the surface of the moon and then rejoined the orbiting rocket for the trip back to earth. The mental logjam was broken, and the rest is history.
Asking focused questions-hard questions that penetrate to the core of the matter-is the real art of the creative person. The next step is to have the courage to deal with all the possible answers. Once you have come up with a possible solution, ask yourself, “What else could be the solution?” If your current method of operation were completely wrong, what would be your backup plan? What else would you or could you do? What if your current procedure or plan turned out to be a complete failure? Then what would you do? And what would you do after that? All of those questions will force you to think further
and come up with better answers.
The second way to build your mental muscles is with intensely desired goals. The more you want something and the clearer you are about it, the more likely it is that you will generate ideas that will help you to move toward it. That is why the need for clearly written goals and plans for their accomplishment is repeated over and over. Any intense emotion, such as desire, stimulates creativity and ideas to fulfill that desire. And the more you write down your goals and plans, and review them, the more likely it is that you will see all kinds of possibilities for achieving those goals.
The third generator of creative-thinking muscles is pressing problems. A good question to ask is “What are the three biggest problems that I am facing in my life today?” Write the answer to this question quickly, in less than 30 seconds. When you write the answer to a question in less than 30 seconds, your subconscious mind will sort out all extraneous answers and give you the three most important ones.
When you have your three most pressing problems, ask yourself, “What is the worst possible thing that can happen as a result of each of these problems?” Then ask yourself, “What are all the things that I can do, right now, to alleviate each problem?” If you have a problem that is worrying you for any reason, think about what you could do immediately to begin alleviating that concern. This is a prime use of your creative powers.
So a key to success in creative thinking is clarity. Take the time to think through, discuss and ask questions that help you to clarify exactly what you are trying to accomplish and exactly what problems you are facing at the present moment. Just as fuzzy thinking leads to fuzzy answers, clear thinking leads to clear answers. A second key is concentration. Put everything else aside, and concentrate singlemindedly
on focusing all your mental powers on solving one single problem, overcoming one particular obstacle or achieving one important goal. The ability to concentrate on a single subject without diversion or distraction is a hallmark of the superior thinker.
A third key is an open mind. The average person tends to be rigid and fixed in his thinking about getting from where he is to where he wants to go. The creative thinker, however, tends to remain very flexible and open to a variety of ways of approaching the problem. The average person has a tendency to leap to conclusions and determine that there is only one way to achieve a particular goal. The superior thinker, on the other hand, tends to be more patient and willing to consider a variety of options before moving
toward a conclusion.
There is one other creative concept that can be very helpful when it is used in combination with what we have already discussed, and it is called the “limiting step.” Between you and any goal that you want to achieve or any problem that you want to solve, there is almost invariably a limiting step or a “choke point” that determines the speed with which you move from where you are to your destination. This limiting step
may be another person, a particular obstacle, a specific difficulty, or even a lack of some information or skill. Invariably, there is a particular factor that determines how fast you get there. Your job is to think about it and decide what it is, and then go to work to remove it.
For example, if you are in sales, your limiting step may be the number of prospects you have. If this is the case, then your job is to do everything possible and to use all your creative capacities to increase your number of prospects until it is no longer a problem.
Then, of course, there will be another limiting step, and your job is to go to work on that. If you have a business, your limiting step may be the number of qualified people who are responding to your advertising. If this is the choke point that hinders the amount you sell and the speed at which your company grows, it behooves you to concentrate your mental powers on relieving that bottleneck. You must concentrate the very best thinking abilities of yourself and others on increasing the number of qualified prospects that your advertising and promotional efforts attract.
In relationships and misunderstandings between people, there is almost invariably a sticking point or subject area that needs to be resolved in order to bring about harmony again. Your job is, first, to identify this limiting step and then, second, to find a way to alleviate the difficulty to the satisfaction of everyone involved.
You are a genius, and you were born with the potential for exceptional creativity. But creative abilities are latent. They are like muscles that grow with use. You can increase your creative powers by using them, over and over, in every situation, deliberately and specifically, until creativity and a creative response to life is as natural to you as breathing in and out is. There are very few things that you can do that can have a more powerful positive impact on your entire life than becoming excellent in creative thinking.
And you can if you think you can.
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