SPEAKING.APP

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my passion, my love and, according to my wife, my mistress in life: communication and public speaking. Seven years ago, I started analyzing public speakers from all over the world, amateurs and professionals. I studied about five thousand speakers to answer three questions: what makes a good speaker good, what makes a great speaker great, and what makes an outstanding speaker outstanding? The result was simple to say, but big to do: 110 core skills, with loads of sub-skills. And the equation is straightforward: the more of these skills you fulfill, the greater you become. Now, 110 skills is slightly too many for one TED Talk. So today I’ll do two things: 1) Show you what these skills look like in action. 2) Give you the five skills I focus on when I coach, plus four small bonus skills at the end. To make this practical, imagine this chair is an idea you want someone else to believe in. You want them to buy into it. This chair is your message. Your voice. You have two options. Option one: you stand on this side of the chair. You’re a fairly mediocre communicator. You shoot from the hip, you hope for the best, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Option two: you stand on this side of the chair. You know what you’re doing, moment by moment. You know that stepping forward increases focus. Tilting your head slightly increases empathy. Changing pace increases focus. Shifting lower increases trust. Lowering your voice builds anticipation. And if you pause, you get absolute and undivided attention. So the real question is: can everyone get to this side of the chair? Yes. Because it’s presentation skills. Skills. Skills. Skills. It is not, has never been, and shall never be called a talent. You’re not born with a gene that makes you brilliant on stage. These are things you acquire. Now let me show you the five skills. 1) BODY LANGUAGE: Stay open (Skill 34) If I welcome you like this, with closed body language, I’m signaling threat, defensiveness, or discomfort. Instead, I want to welcome you with an open posture: “Ladies and gentlemen, it is an absolute pleasure to have you here today. Good of you to come.” Open body language makes people feel safe with you. 2) BODY LANGUAGE: Don’t ‘reverse’ your welcome (Skill 69) A lot of presenters start with a kind of backward energy, a double incorrect. Compare: - “Ladies and gentlemen, absolute pleasure to have you here. Good of you to come.” versus - “Ladies and gentlemen, an absolute pleasure to have you here. Good of you to come.” There’s a difference, and the biggest difference is in here. You can feel it. You become what you are. 3) HANDS: Stop hiding them, use functional gesturing People ask me: “Fine, if I’m not supposed to close my body language, what do I do with my hands?” And wherever I went around the world, I found the same locked positions: - the fig leaf - the double bunny (and the right bunny, the left bunny) - the right heckle, the left heckle - the forklift - the peacock with flapping elbows - the major, the Merkel, the prayer, the beggar - the British horse rider: hands up here, eyes somewhere else… “Oh God, there’s a fox over here!” - and yes, two T-Rexes as well So what do you do instead? You use what I call functional gesturing: gestures that actually communicate. - show something getting better or worse - count: one, two, three, four, five - show what you’re about to go through Your hands should support your message, not distract from it. Here’s why this matters. I’m going to say something positive with my words, my face, and my tone, but my hands will say the opposite. “All of you should learn more about public speaking, because if you do that, you will become better. You will grow. People will love your presentations… So do yourself a great favor, learn more about this subject…” Now the question is: did you listen to what I was saying, or what I was doing? Most people focus on what you do. And if your body language doesn’t match your words, you create discrepancy, and that creates disturbance. 4) VOICE: Control pace Listen to this fast pace: “Ladies and gentlemen, what I’m going to take you through now is incredibly important now and for the rest of your future life. We’ll go through the cortex, the limbic and reptilian system… Aristotle, ethos, logos, pathos…” Now compare it to this slow pace: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m now going to take you through something entirely and utterly boring… a waste of time.” And look at your faces. You want more of the slow version. Why? Because when someone slows down, your brain treats the information as more important. When someone speeds up, it can signal they don’t want to be there. So as a baseline: keep a calm pace. 5) VOICE: Use the pause (and don’t replace it with ‘uh’) Is the pause important? Absolutely. Here’s a classical rhetorical line without pauses: “Did you know that every single decision you’ve taken in your entire life and will take for the rest of your life is based on one thing and one thing only? If you give that to the people listening to you, that is the feeling, that is what will move them.” Now with pauses: “Did you know that every single decision you’ve taken in your entire life, and you will take for the rest of your life, is based on one thing and one thing only? And that is an emotion. If you give that emotion to the people listening to you, they will take the decisions you want them to take.” Is there a difference? Absolutely. But some people fear silence, so they compromise with sounds: “uh… eh… ah…” It’s like a flock of sheep at certain conferences. And among these 110 skills, very few things lower your ethos and credibility more than ‘uh-ing,’ because it signals you don’t know where you’re going. Compare: “Did you know that every single decision… is based on one thing and one thing only? Uh… And that is a feeling. Uh…” I think you prefer the one with silence. If you haven’t used these five skills before, and you start using them, they will make a difference in your speaking. And I want to show you how small a skill can be while still having a huge impact. Here are four bonus skills executed in about five seconds: 1) I look up, which signals I’m thinking and increases your sense of my presence. 2) I do an audible inhale, which makes your brain anticipate something exciting. 3) I combine that with a Duchenne smile: smiling with mouth and eyes. 4) I add self-laughter, which increases anticipation again. Four small skills. Five seconds. A different state of mind. Let me end with one of them: the Duchenne smile. Studies show Duchenne smilers are more likely to be married, less likely to be divorced, happier, more content, and more relaxed in situations like this. So I asked myself, “Am I a Duchenne-smiling person?” I went to my computer and looked through about sixty thousand Google photos. Not all of me, of course, but family and others. When I found photos of myself, it looked like my brain required a miracle to do a Duchenne smile. And I thought: that’s not fair. If the psychological benefits are real, I’m going to learn this. So I spent not four, but six months learning how to do a Duchenne smile. And then suddenly my brain started launching Duchenne smiles in everyday life. I felt happier. Every summer holiday I take a photo of myself. 2014: no Duchenne smile. 2015: definitely not. 2016: still not. 2017: no. This year: Duchenne smile. Does it make a difference? Absolutely. It brings joy to you, and stability to me. And here’s the final idea. In boxing, Muhammad Ali and the greats don’t just throw random punches. They train combinations. Public speaking works the same way. You stack skills into combinations. So I’ll end with a combination: I’ll start with Skill 34, go to Skill 8, then to 69 and 98, to 67 and 18, 22, and then 101 and 121. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you’ve had fun. I hope you’ve learned. But more than anything, I hope you feel inspired to become a greater public speaker. Because anybody can become good, anybody can become great, and everybody can become outstanding. Because it all comes down to one single thing: skills.