Confessions of a Public Speaker (8 page)

If all else fails—you know the audience hates you and your point of
view—seek out the person who hates you the least. All rooms, no matter how
tough, have one person who hates you the least. Even if you’re a Flying
Spaghetti Monster disciple speaking at the Vatican, someone in that room
will hate you less than everyone else.
^[
23
]
Maybe it’s because he thinks you’re cute or he’s amused by
how scared you are to be there, but he’s your best chance. If you are
going to get a first smile, a nod of support, or a round of applause, it’s
going to come from him. Once you find that one person, use him as your
base. Don’t ignore everyone else, but know where to look for support. Or,
if you arrive early, take the initiative to talk to people in the crowd
and find some supporters. Ask them to move up front. Alternatively, you
might discover the one person who has a really good reason to hate you and
make sure not to let him ask the first question during Q&A.

Sometimes the tough crowd is entirely imagined and then created by
the speaker, who, realizing the audience is
hostile, blames them. What kind of idiot does this sort of
thing? My kind of idiot. The first big lecture I gave was in 1996. It was
an internal lecture at Microsoft to about 200 engineers and managers. At
the arrogant age of 24, I was so certain the crowd would tear me to pieces
that I made sure they never had a chance. I spoke in my fastest
New-Yorker-who-wants-to-kick-your-ass tone, never smiled, and made clear
my unwillingness to let anyone in the audience enjoy anything from the
moment I opened my mouth. Why did I do all this? Why did I come off so
unpleasant? I was terrified. And as an arrogant and frightened young man,
I took it out on the people I most feared. I watched the video of this
talk and destroyed it afterward. That’s how ridiculous my behavior
was.

In the act of protecting myself from what I thought would be a
hostile, critical, skeptical audience, I set about on the
one course most likely to create the thing I was trying to avoid. I’m sure
this happens
often: being paranoid has strikingly good odds of creating
what we’re afraid of, perpetuating the paranoia. If I hadn’t later seen
that video of my performance, I wouldn’t have the life I have now. I would
always have thought I was responding to the crowd, not that
it
was responding to me
. I would have continually wondered why my
crowds were so unpleasant, and eventually
given up. Now I know I have to embody what I want the
audience to be. If I want them to have fun, I have to have fun. If I want
them to laugh, I have to laugh. But it has to be done in a way they can
connect
with, which is hard to do. A drunken toast at a wedding is
often great fun for the toaster but miserable for everyone else. But great
speakers are connection-makers, sharing an authentic part of themselves to
create a singular, positive experience for the audience.

One unusual way to think about tough crowds is that a crowd has to
be interested in you to hate you. A
hostile crowd gives you more energy to work
with than an indifferent one. Giving a lecture to a room
full of people in comas, literally in hospital beds, wired up to IVs
filled with various horse tranquilizers, has a zero percent chance of them
being interested in you. But if people are angry or rowdy, it means they
care about something. They have some energy they are willing to
contribute, for better or for worse. If you can figure out what it is
they’re interested in, preferably early on, it’s possible to connect with
them. Find common ground and bring it to the surface. Their hate will
quickly turn to respect, as you’ve said the thing on stage they’ve never
heard someone like you say before. After watching and giving hundreds of
lectures, I’ve learned that by far the thing people seem angriest about is
dishonesty. Show some integrity by speaking the truth on the very thing
that angers them, or even acknowledging it in a heartfelt way, and you
will score points. People with the courage to speak the truth into a
microphone are exceptionally rare.

Few people know that Dale Carnegie’s most popular book,
How to Win Friends & Influence People
(Pocket), which is one of the bestselling self-help books in history,
received significant backlash
from the press and cultural elites of its time. Carnegie was
ridiculed in editorials and cartoons, and mocked at colleges and
universities, for offering over-simplified and sappy advice (in the same
way Deepak Chopra and Dr. Phil are made fun of today). He was invited to
speak at the Dutch Treat Club in New York City, an elite group of
publishers, editors, and advertising men, the kind of cynical,
tough-minded folks most critical of his work. Despite warnings
from his advisors, he chose to speak anyway, and here’s what
he said:

According to one report, he received a huge round of applause. While
I’m not a big fan of that book, I am a fan of this story. He handled a
tough crowd in a bold, smart, and honest way.

However, on some days, no matter what you do, some folks will hate
you anyway. Occasionally, I encounter people who love to hate, or I just
rub them the wrong way for reasons I can’t explain. I once had a professor
at a university I was invited to lecture at interrupt me three times
before I moved past my first slide. Minutes later, after long glares and
inventively loud sighs, he got up and left.
^[
25
]
Could I have done anything differently? I didn’t think so.
Sometimes a person just doesn’t like you and takes pleasure in hating you.
If I had tried to please him, perhaps I’d just make someone else equally
mad. I don’t mind being hated, since I hate some things and people, too.
But when it disrupts the audience, it’s now ruining something the rest of
the room seems to enjoy. Once the professor left, he spared me the
challenge of having to ask him to shut up or leave, which I would have had
to do if he continued.

For that, perhaps I should be grateful. It’s easy to forget that
most people feel trapped in their seats. If they want to leave, they can’t
bear the attention they’d get for standing up and scrambling over people’s
knees to get to the aisle. If someone is unhappy, I’m happy to see him go
rather than spoil the energy for everyone else. I don’t find it rude at
all—it’s a blessing. A small crowd of 5 interested people looks bad but is
a better situation than 50 people who want to leave but won’t.

If you’re truly afraid you will be on hostile turf, some extra
legwork can relieve your fears. Ask your host how large the crowd tends to
be and what common questions might get asked. Request the names of three
people to interview who are representative of the crowd you will speak to.
See if your fears are real or imagined. Then, when giving your talk, make
sure to mention, “Here are the three top complaints I heard from my
research with Tyler, Marla, and Cornelius.” Including the audience in your
talk will score you tons of points. Few people ever do this, and if the
rest of the crowd disagrees with Tyler, Marla, or Cornelius, they can sort
that out on their own after you leave.

There are many stupid people in this world, and I’m sure you’ve met
some of them. George Carlin, one of the brightest minds of our time, once
observed that the average person isn’t that smart—and worse, half the
population is dumber than that average person. More interesting perhaps is
whenever I ask a room full of people, “Who here thinks they’re above
average
intelligence?”, more than half the room always raises their
hands. If you are truly smarter than those around you, your superiority
should make you feel good; but then again, even the smart among us do
stupid things. Einstein flunked his college entrance exams just as Julius
Caesar overlooked the pointy knives in his friends’ robes. I’m sure Mozart
spilled coffee on his piano and Julia Child burned Thanksgiving turkeys
now and then. All considered, given the vast number of stupid people—and
bright people doing stupid things—in the world, some public speakers will
seem less than smart. There is no way around it. No amount of training
will make a man with two brain cells seem anything but dumb, as the
problem is not his ability to speak, it’s his inability to think. It’s
rarely said, but some people will never be good public speakers. Unless
they find someone to do their thinking for them, they only have, at best,
half the tools they need.

Even for many
smart people working on
a presentation, they’re so seduced by style that they lose
the substance. They worry about slide templates, images, movies, fonts,
clothes, hair, and the rest, forgetting to do the harder and more
important work of thinking deeply about what points they want to make. It
is possible to become an eloquent speaker, who makes beautiful slides and
has a great vocabulary and perfect diction, without having much to say. Or
worse, has much to say that is untrue, misleading, and impractical for or
irrelevant to the audience. I wouldn’t call these people idiots precisely,
but it would be fair to say they’ve squandered much of their brain’s
energy considering problems that were not the most important to solve. The
problem with most bad presentations I see is not the speaking, the slides,
the visuals, or any of the things people obsess about. Instead, it’s the
lack of thinking.

There are many things that get in the way of good thinking, but the
legend that
Lincoln wrote the
Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope is especially
notorious for doing so. The story is often told to suggest Lincoln’s
brilliance—that he could just scribble one of the greatest speeches of all
time in a few spare moments while riding on
a train. It’s a story that inspires many to forgo preparing
in favor of getting up on stage and winging it, as if that’s what great
leaders and thinkers do. The fallacy of the legend is to assume that the
only moments
Lincoln spent thinking about the points he would make in the
speech took place as he wrote them. That somehow he never thought about
the horrors of the Civil War, the significance of human sacrifice, and the
future of the United States except while he wrote down the words of the
address on a random scrap of paper. The anecdote is so charming that few
consider the years he spent thinking about these complex issues, the
lengthy debates he had with peers and rivals, and the stacks of speeches
and letters he wrote on these subjects, all of which helped him refine his
thoughts and clarify his points.

If it matters any, the story of the envelope is probably a myth.
Dale Carnegie, who spent many years studying Lincoln, has this to say
about the making of the
Gettysburg Address:
^[
26
]

All good public speaking is based on good private thinking. JFK, for
all his brilliance, had speechwriters, who likely penned his famous quote,
“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your
country.”
^[
27
]
Same is true for Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, most CEOs, and
many of the most famous public speakers throughout history. Much of what
these speechwriters do is transform a rough set of ideas into clear
points. This means the difference between you and JFK or Martin Luther
King has less to do with your ability to speak—a skill all of us use
hundreds of times every day—than it does the ability to think and refine
rough ideas into clear ones. Making a point,
teaching a
lesson, or conveying a feeling to others first requires
thinking, lots and lots of thinking, before the speaking ever happens. But
we don’t see the thinking; after all, it’s not very interesting to watch.
We only see the speaking, which makes it seem as though the thinking
magically happened all by itself.

No matter
what kind of speaking you are doing, there are only a few
reasons people will be there. As you plan your talk, start with the goal
of satisfying the things listed below. People come because they:

Only a fool can talk for an hour and completely miss them all. Many
talks hit one or two of these at least by accident. However, a thoughtful
speaker—a speaker without extraordinary eloquence or magic powers but who
cares deeply about giving the audience something of use—can talk for 30
minutes, nail most of the first six, and end early, setting everyone free
and having satisfied all of those in attendance (including those in the
room for reasons seven and eight).

Many speakers at conferences provide bios explaining in detail how
great they are at running companies, managing teams, getting degrees, or
writing books, all evidence to support the claim that they are good at
doing things for other people. If speakers are as smart and talented as
their resumes claim, we should expect them to take seriously the reasons
people are in the room listening to them. But since they’re presenting,
and they have the microphone, they allow themselves to become the center
of attention, forgetting where their priorities should be.

Put
another way, when 100 people are listening to you for an
hour, that’s 100 hours of people’s time devoted to what you have to say.
If you can’t spend 5 or 10 hours preparing for them, thinking about them,
and refining your points to best suit their needs, what does that say
about your respect for your
audience’s time? It says that your 5 hours are more
important than 100 of theirs, which requires an ego larger than the entire
solar system. And there is no doubt this disrespect will be obvious once
you are on the stage.

In February 2009, at a major conference, I watched a famous
executive give a lecture to a crowd of hundreds of people. Minutes into
his presentation, he fell into a sea of silence, flipped through the
papers in his hand, and finally confessed that he was confused by his own
notes.
^[
28
]
This was because he had stopped following them minutes
before; flustered, he apologized and said he would never do this again.
What he discovered, and explained to the audience, was that he found it
impossible to speak extemporaneously and use notes at the same time. His
entire speech was 20 minutes long, so if he had spent 20 minutes
practicing in the weeks before the event, he could have figured out just
how impossible it was to do this before he ever got on stage. This would
have helped him understand the key points he wanted to make, saving the
entire paying audience from using its time to help him figure it all
out.

Audiences are very
forgiving. They want the speaker to do well, so they will
overlook many superficial problems. But if the speaker is not going to
think carefully about his points, willfully disregards his own material,
and gets lost as a result, how forgiving can the audience be? In most
professional situations, such unpreparedness would be unacceptable.
Imagine if a doctor stopped midway through your brain surgery and asked
you to remind him of the goal of the surgery. If you don’t know why you’re
on the stage, the audience cannot help you.

In the speaking trade, this is known as
eating the
microphone
. It’s the moment when the audience’s confidence in
having its needs met is lost. Everyone stops listening. This never happens
because of typos, bad slides, or even a momentarily confused speaker. It
happens when the speaker wanders far away from anything the
audience cares about. When this happens, it’s
understood that it’s OK to daydream, play Solitaire on cell
phones, or simply get up and leave—people know they will make better use
of their time than the speaker will.

When a fool eats the microphone, it might be a good thing. But it is
a tragedy when a smart, interesting person, with great stories and
insights to share, fails an audience due to lack of forethought. The
potential for all the good things in the aforementioned list was in the
room that day—a thousand possible connections of people and ideas and
passions—but it was squandered because he forgot about the audience. My
point isn’t even about practice; although it’s important, it’s not
sufficient since anyone can throw hours at a problem and still stink. The
goal is to use your preparation time so your thinking is strong, making it
easy to satisfy most audiences despite any
mistakes that might happen when you get on stage.

To prepare well, you must do four things:

The fastest way to achieve these things is to start with a strong
title. Titles get so little attention, but they’re always
the first words on your slides. And if you’re speaking at an event or
conference, it’s how people choose whether they want to attend your
session. Most people pick boring, lifeless titles for their presentations.
This is a spectacular disaster of lost opportunity. A title divides the
universe into what you will talk about and what you won’t. There are a
million ways to do this, but most of them are boring. If you can’t figure
out a smart way to divide up the topic, odds are poor that you’ll find
useful points to make. If you had only one single point, what would it be?
That’s what your title should communicate.