Note to Flipside: 10/4/24

Note to Flipside: 10/4/24

Speaking, with Humility

You only become really good at a speech once you’ve delivered it 20 times. In a row. Without changing a single thing. Not a word, not a pause, not a transition. Nothing. 20 times, no less, exactly the same.

So says Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s first evangelist and a hell of a public speaker. He notes that speeches require understanding the rhythm of the room, but mostly the rhythm of your work: when exactly the crowd will snort at a joke or when a long silence will snap snoozers to attention. One must cut away the fat to the perfect pattern of words: tip tap, tip tap, tip tap. Breathe through your eyelids and all that sh*t.

The speaker circuit is an odd sport to say the least. The Speaker Bureau calls and pitches the hosting org, the hotel, airfare and five-figure fee; they sell the other participants as goodies from a candy bar, It’s Samsung, at the Breakers in Palm Beach, first class, $24,000 stipend, we’ll have Jack Welch, ex-CEO of GE, sit with you for an armchair conversation and then a private VIP-only reception.

Seth Godin was one my earliest mentors (although I suspect he’d decline the title), whom I spent countless hours with at his Hudson home and nondescript diners in NYC. I sponged his marketing DNA and lapped up his process with prose. He played the speaker’s circuit like a first chair violinist; his words flowed with such craft that it was as if the audience was a Mourning Dove, meditative and cooing in the palm of his hand.

Don’t bother introducing yourself. Avoid the agenda or setting of expectations. Use pictures, forget bullets. Show don’t tell. And just begin. I’d stand in the wings as he’d splash headlong into his talk, shaping a story while mid-stride, controlling the audience before they even completed clapping.

Failures are the easiest way to learn, as became evident at the Meat Conference in 2007. Yeah, uh huh, a conference about…meat. Humor wins, so why not open with ghastly pictures of quadruple decker hamburgers and fleshy piles of corned beef, with a talk track about my love of all things carnivorous? Because having a laugh at an audience of 2,000 who made their living peddling meaty wares is a no no, or so the following speaker whispered to me as I handed off the wireless remote, that was brutal, Son.

At an Adage lunch held one spring afternoon — on my home court of Boston — my confidence was provided a lesson so stern I had to turn around to see if half my ass was chewed off. The opening speaker was Frederick Marckini, CEO of primordial SEM firm, iProspect. He seemed just another wide-grinned marketing lad until he sauntered up to the podium where he absolutely obliterated the room, the marketing executives munching on salads awkwardly frozen in rapture, forks of ranch-drizzled Bibb lettuce hovering in air. He spoke loudly then whisper soft; he bent low so that he was hardly visible then popped up like, well…like Diana the CoreDAO Prairie Dog. He nailed punchlines with force; he moved around the stage, waving his arms, he made deep eye contact, he called out members of the audience, heckling a dashing gentlemen in a bowler hat for the way he nibbled on his cornish game hen. I followed with a talk so comparably boring that the only things paying attention were the ice cubes melting in water glasses.

A few weeks later, Marckini met me in his Watertown, MA office. I asked to be shown his bag of tricks; he was polite and said it was really all about commitment. He was determined and, after some web sleuthing, had asked the 2005 world champion of public speaking, Lance Miller, to take him under his wing. He learned that there was no rule against pumping pushups as a stage prop, and that the best way to own an audience was to learn timing — so he giddy-upped himself to jump onstage during open mike standup comedy nights, bombing again and again until he became fearless.

The biggest mistake about jokes, Marckini offered, is that people step on their lines. They ruin good jokes by trying to get them out too fast. I had to learn how to read the audience, to pause at just the right moment, to use volume and small facial gestures to evoke the audience to laughter.

Is there an ultimate secret to delivering good speeches? It’s obvious, of course: practice. The audience is aware of your rehearsal the way birds sense magnetic fields. Sadly there are no corners to cut here, so best get started (Son):

• How long do you have to speak? How big is the room? Key facts to know to prepare something that fits
• Write the words to your talk long form, just like Jane Austen did for Pride and Prejudice
• Design your own presentation; it may be efficient, but it’s practically impossible to deliver someone else’s work
• 4x6 notecards are your speaking bestie, so get to it and write the entire presentation in pen, each card equaling one slide
• Your first card, the opener, should be written out exactly as you’ll speak it, in its entirety, every word, every squibble, then memorized entirely, so well you could reproduce it in pig latin — backwards. A winning speech begins by nailing the opener
• Do the exact same with your last card, the closer. People tend to forget the middle and remember your open and close, so get these just right
• Every other card should follow this format: opening sentence written in full up top, bullets with context for the slide, then full closing sentence to slide at bottom
• Dry run by reading the cards while flipping through presentation. Edit both until they map and match exactly; nothing hurts like you saying one thing and the slide another
• Now rewrite the cards. Yep, go ahead, do it again, from scratch. The act of rewriting it will force you to visualize it better than any of the effort you put in from here
• And..practice it in full. Let yourself fail a few times, find out where you stumble; eventually the words will fall into place, interlocking like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle

There’s something to be said to remaining current, whether it’s switching from ankle to calf-height socks or flipping from a keto diet to jabbing yourself with Ozempic. In the case of speaking gigs, your relevance requires constant reinvention — or you’ll find the slap of reality stings when your demand for a keynote fee is returned with a volley for a sponsorship should you be permitted the opportunity to give a short talk in one of the smaller side rooms.

Remember: speaking well requires practice and confidence, but speaking with humility can be the gift your audience deserves.

Originally posted on medium.com