EINTKABILFR: 5 Ways to Accidentally Become Better at Public Speaking

This blog is mainly about freeing the creative impulse from the confines of those fields we typically think of as “creative” – the performing and visual arts, for instance – and understanding how it can create better results in other domains. But just as the world of business has its creative aspects, the world of performance has its business aspects as well. Every so often I’ll put up a EINTKABILFR post about that relationship. Today: public speaking.

I was thrust into the lead singing role in my first band as a matter of necessity. We were in high school, had been “booked” for our first big performance – playing a school dance – and were rehearsing desperately when we got the news that our singer Craig, a popular and handsome guy who also happened to be the student body president, had mono. Craving the attention that the gig would bring us (and, let’s be honest, it was mainly about attention and girls), we vowed that the show must go on. But none of us could sing. I gamely stepped forward and offered to do it. I was a distant Plan B from Craig on almost every dimension, but more than anywhere else in the charisma department. I had a deep-seated, paralyzing fear of public speaking.

By the time I was 22, I was standing on stage bantering with audiences with the best of them, 10 or 20 times a month. I had discovered a few techniques, some well-known and some unorthodox, that made my lack of charisma less damaging – and maybe even a strength. Years later, after being told by a corporate executive coach that I was “a good speaker for a short person,” I realized that performing had taught me those secrets and turned a liability into a strength. Here they are:

1. Content is king. It is kind of depressing that this is not always obvious, but if you don’t have a good message that is relevant to your audience, it doesn’t really matter how it’s presented. And if a band has terrible songs that aren’t memorable, it really won’t matter how well it plays them. (This assumes that you are neither a virtuoso guitarist like Joe Satriani nor a brilliant showman like Robin Williams; at the extremes, somebody can be so good technically that audiences are astounded and their content isn’t important, but it’s very rare and has little lasting impact.)
2. Practice until it’s automatic. If you are singing a song and you don’t know all the words, you will waste valuable mental cycles trying to remember them. Like pretty much any multitasking, this will result in both activities (singing and remembering) being distracted and half-hearted. If you are speaking about a subject, there is no substitute for knowing the content cold. If there is some element of the subject that has you a little confused or turned around, take the time in advance to understand it and be able to explain it without notes. If you don’t know the topic that well, maybe you shouldn’t be speaking about it in public.
3. Don’t fake anything. Maybe you’re an actor and can be completely convincing as a boisterous, Tom Peters-style showman, but you’re really a shy geeky type on the inside. But most likely, assuming a fake personality will just give you one more thing to think about other than communicating with your audience. It’s not worth it. When I first started singing, I thought I had to be rock-star cool, and act like the guys I saw on MTV. David Lee Roth would be doing cartwheels and backflips… the least I could do was a little “Hello, Cleveland!”, right? Wrong. Acting like you’re playing a stadium when you’re really at a frat party is disingenuous and off-putting. Lose the attitude and be who you are.
4. Stay in the pocket. The thrill of live performance, either at a concert or an important presentation, is enough to make your heart race. But your material has a natural pace and tempo of its own, and you ignore it at your own peril. People go too fast for a variety of reasons – sometimes involuntarily, or other times to give the illusion of power or forcefulness. Either way, playing or talking at the right speed will work better than going too fast.
5. They don’t want you to suck (or, it’s not you, it’s them). You might think that because you’re at the front of the room and have a microphone, you’re the most important part of the experience. Not true. People are basically self-centered – they are the most important part of the experience for themselves. If you’re a little insecure or nervous, this is actually a wonderful thing. They don’t need to hear the most brilliant song or sales pitch to have a good time; they just need it to be good enough that it doesn’t distract them from their own internal cues. A guy who goes to see a concert with a beautiful woman he’s in love with is going to have a better time than one who just got dumped, unless the band is so egregiously awful that it intrudes upon his inner monologue. A potential client will be excited about your sales pitch to the extent that your analysis of her problem and potential solution agrees with her own. You need to know as much about the audience’s situation as possible so you can connect your message with their needs.

If you have good content that you know inside and out, you approach it honestly, you keep a sensible pace for the material at hand, and you know what the audience would think a successful presentation would feel like – usually, by the way, it will feel brief – then it’s pretty hard to give a bad presentation. Even if you’re short.

Intro: crunching numbers vs. crunching riffs

A few years ago, I had a job for which I traveled a bit doing recruiting. On one recruiting trip, I was sitting at dinner with my colleagues in a restaurant near my alma mater, where we were searching for new recruits, and a young woman came to our table.

“Excuse me, is your name Paul?” she asked shyly. I replied that yes, it was.
“Are you in ‘otis wants bread’?” she asked.
“I was, but we’re not around anymore,” I told her.
“Well, that’s too bad. I love your CD – I still play it in my car all the time!” she said.
“Thanks, I appreciate it,” I responded with a blush.

As she left, my stunned co-workers stared for a minute, and then began to interrogate me. They hadn’t known that I had been a musician, or at least a musician successful enough to have people recognize me in restaurants.*

They asked a few questions, I told a few road stories, and so on. Then, finally, the last question was:

“So, uh, why are you doing this?” By which he meant, why are you working for a credit card company crunching data when you could be a rock star living the high life, or at least the interesting life?

I was stumped. I’m sure I came up with an answer that had something to do with the relative incomes and working conditions of the two professions. We moved on to talk about different things, and the moment was gone.

But two things always stuck with me about that conversation. First, my co-workers clearly felt that they were doing what they were doing because they “had” to; since they didn’t have the miraculous gift of creativity, went the reasoning, they needed to find dull office-type jobs in finance and human resources where they could do well. And second, they could not believe that somebody like me, who apparently was blessed with the gift, would choose to work where they did for a living.