Standing one in front of many is where I am happiest, except maybe in the kitchen Saturday PM with sport on the Big Telly, S in the garden and soup on the hob.
In June I have nine gigs to 100 on Perfecting The Pitching. To the extent they play any part, nerves are motivators. This is not the case for everyone but, to be sure, choosing to channel your nerves positively, to embrace the fear that comes with big audience speaking, is a powerful tool. Some of the best exercises at these events are the simplest ones: having everyone stand up and see how much energy they can create in the room by passing a pen and just speaking, loudly, to your table when the pen is in your hands can be a light bulb moment. You have to go for it or no one will hear you.
You need to be more than loud and vertical, even if that is the ambition of many, if you want top marks in the feedback stakes. In the midst of these big gigs I had a coaching session with someone a senior exec. Right at the top of the public Speaking Pyramid: anticipation and stimulation. As I put him through his paces it crossed my mind I might not have much to say as grounds for improvement: it certainly would not be around embracing the fear as he loved the love he got from the room.
And yet, even at this level, there is fine tuning. The first thing was pace and pause, more specifically pause. If you want presence and gravitas learn to use pause, it plays with your audience. My subject used pause and varied pace well enough but by showing him how to wait longer he improved his delivery style. Comedians or actors would call it timing.
The next key learning point for those who are already good is “the phosphorescence of learning”, to quote Emily Dickinson. Having knowledge is one thing, displaying it with vibrancy and colour another. Every story or example I got from my experienced exec was rooted in a project or an outcome or a statistic. This is fine, but not terribly memorable. In fact, it’s one dimensional and formulaic. Finding the analogy from left field that speaks to your audience is the highest of oratorical skills and all good platform speakers do it: they make the complex understandable and the mundane memorable. More than that though, at its best there is a spark, a cleverness, that turns a three-bed suburban semi into Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water.
Analogy is always riskier than boring, read, PowerPoint-led and you could miss the mark at which you take aim. Such is life, sometimes the gods are not with you. Wright famously said that a doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only plant vines. A podium speaker can get tumble weed as instant feedback with no opportunity to come up with another plan if falling over is out of the question. But you have to try, in your preparation, to find some phosphorescence, because you are unlikely to find it once on the stage.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh said that “the power the artist possesses in making objects to himself and their tendency towards symbolism illustrates the hallucinatory character of his work. But it is the creative imagination that is much more important. The artist cannot achieve mastery of his art unless he is endowed, to the highest degree, with the faculty of invention”. Mackintosh is saying that his drawings- beautiful as they are, valuable works of art in themselves- are simply vehicles that convey what is the essence of architecture: creating beauty by enclosing space. And it is the faculty of invention, the creative imagination, that allows this beauty to be created.
In the end my top talker went away with a goal to find some gems in the rough and tumble of his business and personal life and uncover ways to infect his pitches with the emotional connection. It was my soup story, the oldest and still one of my favourites after nearly two decades, that swung it for him.
Over time, try to get to the top of the Public Speaking Pyramid. That’s when you look forward to your biggest pitches with anticipation and love every minute of your preparation; are stimulated by the upcoming opportunity; eyeball the audience and think: yes, I like the view from the top, this is going to be just fine.
Trust me, at that moment your audience gets that vibe and are fully present.
