Err on the Side of Brevity

“No one ever complains about a speech being too short!”    – Ira Hayes

There are lots of quotes that convey the same sentiment – e.g. “always leave them wanting more” – and for good reason. You can never really be too brief, but you surely can be too long-winded.

So the tip of the month is to err on the side of brevity. Even the best speakers can lose their audiences when they overstay their welcome.

You’ll never be criticized for being brief; you’ll probably be thanked for allowing the audience time to ask for the detail they’re interested in hearing! 

It is, after all, all about them!

What to Do When Your Topic is You

Unless you’re a motivational speaker or a celebrity, it’s not often that you’ll be invited to address a large audience to talk about yourself – your career, your experiences and your path to where you are now. But it could happen, you never know. It recently happened to me, and I will admit, it stopped me dead in my tracks.

Whether you are asked to introduce yourself at an event (as in, “tell us a little bit about yourself,” or the dreaded, “let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves”), or you are asked to share a little bit about your background and experience in a meeting or capabilities presentation, you may have been stopped dead in your tracks too.

I’m about to give you some ideas, because, for those of you who have been SmartMouth followers for even a little bit of time, you know that my Rule #1, the ultimate speaker guideline, the holy grail of an effective talk is … drumroll, please … “it’s all about them, it’s not about you!” So, what to do when the topic is you yet it needs to be all about them?

Here are 3 tips:

        1. Start with something valuable you want to leave with them.

Don’t begin with life data points; i.e. don’t start with your birthplace, and avoid chronology whenever possible. Try and begin with today and work backwards. Or try and start with your biggest accomplishment or most important lesson learned, where and how you it happened, and then you can weave in bits of chronology that way.

Here’s an example of what that would look like as an opening statement: You’ve asked me to share a little bit about myself and my career, so I’d like to do that by talking about my biggest career mistake – what the situation was, how I’ve learned from it and where I am today because of it.

2      2. Have a message about yourself or your work. An interesting one-sentence message.

If you have an elevator pitch for yourself, that’s great, but even just one quick message point about yourself is helpful.

I’ll give you an example: I have a friend named Janet. Janet is bright and curious and always the first to try something new. Case in point: she was one of the first adults I knew to go on Facebook when it was just venturing out of the college-student-only arena. Janet’s message about herself is, “I’m an explorer.” As marketing director for a large organization, “explorer” is obviously not on her business card, but it’s her message. It’s a quick statement that distinguishes her, it’s a grabber and gets people to pay attention.

3      3. Really think about your audience and decide what it is about you that will be most relevant or valuable for them to hear.

If you do have to be the topic, then be sure to pick what it is about your topic that might benefit your audience, and leave the rest out! We all have talents, accomplishments, and lessons that could benefit others, so identify those and see which might be most useful to your particular audience. Any other info or detail then becomes cutting room floor material. Less is always more anyway!

Even if it’s about you, it’s still all about them!

Ain't that the truth!?

“There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.”

- Dale Carnegie

At the End of the Day …

At the end of the day, you want people to like you. If you’re in sales, you know the likeability factor is huge in making the sale. If you’re in management, the same is true for motivating staff. If you’re a keynote speaker, delivering an address to hundreds, you are still hoping they’ll like you and be moved by your message.

When communicating to others, whether in a formal or informal presentation, we’re striving to connect, to reach people, to engage, and to propel them into action of some kind.

But first they have to like us. It’s that basic, that simple.

I turned to an old classic for guidance on the likeability issue. Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends & Influence People” has been in print for more than 75 years. In it, he identifies “Six Ways to Make People Like You” and here they are:

• 1.     Become genuinely interested in other people.
• 2.     Smile.
• 3.     Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
• 4.     Be a good listener.
• 5.     Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
• 6.     Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.
• 
  

Rocket science? Nope. Basic, good common sense? Yup.

If I were to get scientific, though, and look for some trending patterns in his list, two items stand out:

First, it’s all about them, it’s not about you! This is SmartMouth’s Rule #1. And I’m pleased (and relieved!) to see that I’m in total alignment on that with Dale Carnegie. People, audiences full of people, an audience of one, all want to know that you have thought about them, that you have considered their interests, that you care about them. They want to be noticed, appreciated, understood.

So even when you are invited to speak because you’re a subject matter expert, or even when you’re at the front of the room because you’re the boss, or even when you’re making a sales call and you’re selling exactly what the customer wants or needs, it’s still all about them. Your challenge is to present your material and incorporate acknowledgements of them, their background, accomplishments, interests, and needs. It’s always all about them.

Second, be real about it. I love how he uses the words “genuinely” and “sincerely” – and he gives “smile” it’s own stand-alone billing. There’s a lot to be said for warmth and sincerity.

For sure, people are able to sniff out a phony in seconds (and I guess they’ve been able to do that for 75 years!). More important, though, people are drawn to warmth and sincerity. It’s just human nature.

It was so interesting to revisit these basics. And actually kind of inspiring. I plan to take these 6 principles to heart and look for ways to be more actively conscious of them in my work with 1:1 clients and with groups.

I hope you too will look at the list again and identify a few principles that will help step up your likeability … and, in turn, step up your effectiveness as a communicator!

Recipe: Message Sandwich

One of the most frequently asked questions I get at the beginning of a Presentation Skills Training workshop is “how can I make my point?”

I like to turn that around and suggest that we explore the question “how can I make my audience remember my point?” (Yes, I’m always suggesting a subtle mindset shift from egocentric thinking and communicating to audience-centric thinking and communicating.)

Enter the Message Sandwich!

First ingredient: the message. For every major idea you need to get across – it may be a section of your presentation or the material you’re sharing at a meeting – there’s an important statement to be made. That statement is a message.

And here’s how to find it …

If you are engaged in some form of persuasion (selling, motivating, influencing), the message will convey the significance or benefit or value of what you’re putting out there. If you are engaged in some form of education (informing, reviewing, updating), the message will be more of a capture statement that summarizes the material.

A shortcut to finding the message is by going straight to your conclusion. Ask yourself, how would I conclude? What would I say to wrap up? What is it about this chunk of material that I would want them to take away? Interestingly, we usually save the best for last.

Yet I’m saying, use the best for first and last.

Your message then becomes the top and the bottom slice of bread – i.e. the statement you use to open and close your point.

What’s in the middle of your sandwich? Information. Background, detail, supporting data and statistics, stories and anecdotes.

All too often we lead with information, tons of it. We build a case and then conclude with the message. So forget about evidence first, conclusion last. Go for the sandwich: conclusion-evidence–conclusion; message–info–message.

Reinforcement of your message is the only hope for your audience’s retention of it. Good luck!

New to C-Suite: CRO

Enter the CRO, Chief Reinforcement Officer, the person charged with reinforcing company messages over and over and over again.

I was with the management team of a heavy industrial company last week. The culture of this company is such that they are super responsible to the point of being obsessed about accountability and safety. And there are tons of examples of how they live their words of accountability and safety. Yet they face a lot of audiences that just don’t like the business they’re in and so they’re often faced with unfriendly interactions. Opposition. It happens. It’s not fun, but it happens.

So, in training some of this company’s top-level spokespeople, it came up that the General Manager calls himself the CRO, the Chief Reinforcement Officer. I laughed initially, but then I decided it was brilliant! Of course, a CRO! A CRO is absolutely necessary in any company – not just in a company that has a lot of critics. In fact, it should be a team; anyone who is a spokesperson for an organization should be on the CRO team.

Unless audiences hear a message over and over and over again, it will never stick. Reinforcement is the key. Actually, reinforcement is the only way. Saying the same word or phrase or sentence over and over and over again. Tedious for spokespeople perhaps, but effective in creating stickiness with audiences.

I think I’ll cover messaging sandwiches next time. Message – Info – Message. Yep, a perfect sandwich.

Smartphones in the Audience?

Have you ever been giving a talk and watched – insulted, helpless, and wondering what to do – as the smartphones start popping out in the audience? Pretty discouraging, isn’t it? Or is it? How can anyone be paying attention while they’re clicking away on their phone? Or can they?

The old school of thought was anything that wasn’t pen to paper on a lined pad with focused eye contact was a distracted audience. However, padfolios are giving way to smartphones and tablets; it’s inevitable, so embrace it. Worst case scenario, the smartphones are coming out because the audience member is checking messages, that’s the worst case. But what if they’re taking notes? Or tweeting the point you just made? It’s really no different from the pad and pen days. Maybe they were taking notes on the pad, or maybe they were drafting a memo they forgot to write the day before. You don’t know what people are doing with their smartphones and tablets, but you really never knew what they were doing with their pads and pens either.

Bottom line is don’t be insulted, don’t feel helpless and, most of all, don’t admonish your audience! Instead, use it to your advantage. The whole reason you are giving a talk is to propagate your ideas, right? So hash-tag it. Give them permission to take it beyond the boardroom or conference room; make them work for you. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. All of them allow you to spread your ideas. So embrace the devices that help do that. And welcome to the 21^st Century.