If Demosthenes practised, shouldn’t you?

The success of The King’s Speech and now the airing on  BBC of its documentary, The Real King’s Speech,  have sparked off a number of articles on oratory and speech-making. One of these, ” In their own words” in the Guardian, discussed how the oratorial tricks formulated by the classical masters have survived for two and a half millennia.

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 Demosthenes Practising Oratory . Jean Lecompte Du Nuoy 1876

As the article explains, ‘in a culture in which oral persuasion counted for for everything , it was crucial to believe that public speaking was a skill that could be acquired by anyone prepared to put in the hard work’.  Advice given to boys training to speak persuasively included dealing with everything from how to move your hands or when to make a joke,  the rhythms, cadence and structures of effective oratory.

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Whilst oratory and business pitches are very different both aim to persuade and the structure tricks of the ancients still work today. The classical tricolon,  sentences in three equal parts, is the precursor to the ‘rule of three’,  accepted by many as one of the easiest and most effective ways of organising  content effectively  in any pitch. See  Content and Staging

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Pause for effect.

This Pugh cartoon was used to illustrate a story in the Mail claiming that ‘behind every successful man is a woman keeping out of the way’. Psychologists were claiming that the secret of success may be a spouse who stands at your side – but keeps out of the way. 

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Maybe, maybe not but the notion of a hidden “pause prompter” is interesting!

Many presenters, when the adrenaline is flowing and nervous energy kicks in, make the same error. They talk non-stop, with no ‘signposts’ and can’t wait to finish and get off stage. This is not a question of speed of speech, something difficult to change, it is a question of a one-way constant flow of uninterrupted verbiage.

It is very difficult to listen to and those evaluating will switch off. It means you come across as over-anxious and lacking authority.

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The solution is simple, it is the ‘power of the pause’. Practise it in rehearsal. Pause before every new point, to add emphasis, at the end of important statements and at handovers.  If you are using notes write in the PAUSES. It may feel  slow and deliberate  to you but your audience will see you as confident. And they will feel refreshed.

The pause is something of a hobby horse and covered in earlier posts: The King’s Speech. Some pitch!  Churchill 1, Obama 0. Next time imagine your hidden prompter and        pause      for dramatic effect.

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“Short, sharp and shiny.”

Hopefully, the Oscar winning acceptance speeches this year will be short. The organisers of the Academy Awards are aiming to keep extreme ’emoting’ under control. When they rehearse their spontaneous expressions of joy and surprise the winners are being urged to be “short, sharp and shiny.”

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The target is 45 seconds or less.  Given that most actors are much better with the words of others than their own, this is good thinking. When it comes to pitching something significant the temptation is to go long, often very long.  This is where the marvelous TED.com has got it right, like so much else.  In a TED Talk or video an “idea worth spreading” can take no more than 18 minutes.

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 Many business pitches could takes lessons from Oscar and Ted.  The temptation is not so much to ’emote’ as to cram everything in, leaving nothing unsaid. Whilst the nature of the brief will dictate to some extent presentation length, generally shorter is more energetic, communication is crisper and your audience will take in more. And like you more.

“Short, sharp and shiny!”

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The Reagan effect.

The Centennial celebration for Ronald Reagan have seen a number of articles and broadcasts discussing his achievements. The consensus is that he was one of the great American Presidents, up there with the Roosevelts. Tough politically he was not the ‘amiable dunce’ as detractors  described him but a man with an ‘uncanny ability to find words that expressed the deep feelings of a nation’.

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One of his most defining characteristics was his ability to infect others with his own innate spirit of  “sunny optimism”.  It was powerful stuff.

It worth thinking how a mood of “sunny optimism” would work in the business pitch. Even with the most stringent assessment,with scoring against  critical factors (strategy/insight/innovation/fees), scores will be higher across the board where the mood is right.

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 A mood or tone of professional enthusiasm is the expected minimum and unlikely to differentiate. Even the most hardened of procurement people have feelings and a team with sunny optimism will connect better than the one that is seriously worthy!

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“Mandy ‘coached’ Barclays boss”.

A headline in the Sunday Times reported on this, at first glance, unlikely alliance given that last year Mandelson had called Diamond the “unacceptable face of banking”.  However both men are too clever and self-serving to let politics interfere with their own interests.

Diamond is too bright and experienced a performer to need coaching on his presentation skills but neither is he, one assumes, the kind of man to leave anything to chance. He realised this particular  pitch was to a group, the Treasury Select Committee,  whose approach was unfamiliar to him. So he chose ‘the right coach for the right topic’.(The Tao of Coaching)

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Mandeson is an old and experienced hand at surviving grillings from Commons committees. With his advice Diamond came out relatively unscathed. He  won few friends with his lack of any remorse  and satisfied manner (with £9 million, not surprising) but neither did he make any gaffes or rise to attempted provocation from indignant MPs.

His briefing from Mandy, not revealed, may have pointed out that the Committees whilst well briefed have no collective plan of attack to unseat or unsettle their ‘captive’. Each committee member fires off the questions that excite them personally or that make them look good to their constituents.  The attack does not build or have momentum.

All Diamond needed to do was pick off one at a time his ‘divided’ enemy. Perhaps it is the Committees who really need a coach!

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