American politics is a must watch for the rest of us. Whoever becomes the next President will have major ramifications for every country on the planet. I will not get into a political discussion about who should be the next leader, but I do want to pick up on some relevant aspects of the campaigns. In particular, the way Joe Biden handled the recent debate and the subsequent massive criticisms of his public speaking ability.
I wonder how many of the people concerned about his poor performance are also having the same issues? The major conclusions from the debate were that he was low energy. He may or may not have had a cold, but he was certainly low energy as a presenter. What do I see, though, in most business presentations by leaders? If they are Japanese CEOs, then invariably, they are also low energy. Don’t stand out in the crowd is how you “go along to get along” in Japan, so this low energy approach is baked into the culture.
That is all right then, isn’t it? When in Tokyo, do as the local Tokyoites do when presenting. Actually, no, it is not okay. Being able to have an audience absorb our message is the goal, otherwise why are we presenting? Low energy presenters are vying with the allure of the internet for the attention of the audience. If, as the speaker, we are not gripping the listener’s focus, they will switch that focus away from us to their email or social media – while we are still talking. These days, even the good presenters have people in the crowd multi-tasking on their phones at the same time.
Here is the point: criticize Joe for his low energy, but just make sure you are not doing a version of that yourself. Are you able to hit keywords and phrases to lift their value in a sentence? Are you able to move words to a higher plane to grab interest from the listeners? Democracy is great, but there is only the dictatorship of the most important words in a sentence to be applied when speaking. Not every word has equal rights and equal value, so elevate those which are more important to your message.
Joe is certainly not a fluent speaker of English. In fact, he has never been a fluent speaker of English because of the stutter he has had his whole life. What is amazing to me is that someone with such a stutter should choose a line of work which requires a lot of speechmaking. Somehow, he has adapted his speaking to account for this stutter and that directly impacts his timing and speed of speech. Well done, Joe, for being able to take such an obvious high profile speech defect and overcome it to be able to speak in public as a politician. I hope it gives encouragement to others who have the same malady. The lesson here is if you work on it, you too can improve your public speaking ability. Maybe you won’t become an outstanding speaker, but at least you can become effective.
I have never stuttered, but I have done its close cousin – umming and ahing. This can be similarly distracting as someone with a stutter. I worked with a colleague whose every few words were interspersed with “ums”. It was seriously, seriously painful to have to listen to him. What can we do about overcoming this annoying habit?
The clue is to focus on the first word of each sentence, hit that word hard, say the sentence and then purse your lips, and rinse and repeat. Over time, the umming and ahing will lessen. I don’t think I have 100% eradicated my old habit, but I know it is a lot better today, by following this simple technique.
Another useful habit has been to use pauses more effectively when I am speaking. The filler words are just our brain buying to time to construct the next sentence and decide how we want to say our thoughts out aloud. The pause delivers the same thinking time payoff, without the annoyance.
Another criticism of Joe was that he was sometimes rambling. This happens in CEO speeches too. They fail on three levels usually. One is they don’t take public speaking seriously enough, usually because they are technical people who consider this stuff as fluff. They were great at maths, chemistry and physics at school, but were duds in English class.
Secondly, they have not spent the time and effort to sufficiently plan the speech and focus on the navigation to make it easy for the audience to follow. I was attending the speech of a global CEO pre-Covid and honestly, I was listening hard, but was still lost. He went off on a tangent and “esoteric” is a kind word to try to describe what he was on about. Actually, it was flat out puzzling what was the point.
I asked some of the others sitting at the table, after the speech, if they could follow him and, like me, they were similarly lost. When we speak, we have to make sure that the direction of where we are going with the point is clear to the audience. Each section must link to the next and there has to be a navigable flow to the thoughts and arguments.
The other speech preparation fatality is rehearsal. I will be bold and assert that 99% of business speeches are only ever given once – to that audience, on that day, at that specific time. The preparation time is usually sucked up with the slide deck assembly. No time is left to actually do a full run through of the talk before it is unleashed on a live audience.
Rehearsal allows us to understand the time control required, to check the fluency of how we deliver the talk and whether all the bits stitch together properly or not. Please, please, please schedule time for the rehearsal. Also, carefully instruct those giving you feedback, to only give you “good/better” feedback. Otherwise, they will launch a witch hunt of your public speaking misdemeanors and destroy your confidence entirely.
Joe may have been a train wreck during the debate, but let’s not crow too loudly about his faults, when we may still share versions of them ourselves. We should always be looking to learn something from both fabulous and underwhelming speakers. Remember, in the latter case, without training, “but for them there go I”, applies in spades when presenting.
