The “less is more” approach to public speaking
April 5, 2009
I am moving! My new home is about one quarter the size of my current home. This is a conscious choice for me as I have begun to realize that the only way we can truly impact our ever growing environmental crisis is to make a much smaller footprint on the planet. And, I have discovered in the past year that a “less is more” approach to living brings me considerable joy!
This process of packing, though, is not an easy one. As I prepare to pack each item, I have to make a decision. Does it come with me, or do I have to find a new home for it? I have many things that have been in my life for a long time. They are important to me. But are they essential? That’s the question I have to ask as I pack. And, if I bring too much stuff with me, there’ll be no space for me to enjoy myself. (There’s a great video by Annie Leonard called the Story of Stuff which is very worth watching!).
In my work as a public speaking presence coach I’ve found that my clients often confront the same issues. Most people feel like they won’t be doing their jobs as speakers if they don’t cram everything they know into their talk… if they don’t fill their time with words… if they don’t provide every single piece of useful information on a slide show.
I would say that the bulk of my work with clients is helping them discover the value of “less is more”.
We begin by discovering the value of silence, learning to be comfortable with pausing so that we can give ourselves a chance to regroup and our audience a chance to take in what we’ve said.
We then focus our attention on the core message. What is it that we want our audience to leave with? Once we have real clarity on that message, we then identify the minimal number of key points we need to speak about in order for them to fully get what we want them to take away. In this process, we often have to let go of many of our favorite stories or much of the detail that we are deeply attached to.
Finally, for those clients who use slides in their presentations, we spend a considerable amount of time eliminating the number of slides and the density of information on each slide. (I’ve written an article on the misuse of PowerPoint called Wake Me When It’s Over! which addresses many of the problems that poorly designed slides shows create.)
One of the many reasons to ruthlessly eliminate information in our slide shows is because too much information on a slide makes it very difficult for our audience to know what to focus on. Should they read the slide (thereby not listen to us) or should they listen to us (thereby not read the slides)? Most of the time, they do neither well and so don’t fully get the message.
As speakers, we need to make it easy for the audience to know where to focus their attention. So, the important question to ask is, what should appear on the slide that will truly support my message? And, we eliminate everything else (if it’s information that you think they need to have in written form, then create a separate document as a handout).
The process of sorting through everything you could say, letting go of most of it, and staying committed to what’s most essential will make it so much easier for your audience to truly hear your message. And, then you might even find that when you do this, you and your audience will truly enjoy the experience.
(Check out my photo blog, www.revealedpresence.com, where my commitment is to post a photo everyday (either from my archives or from a photo shoot of that day) that reveals the presence of whatever I have focused my camera on!)
Contemplative practices reduce anxiety
April 4, 2009
Several weeks ago, I gave a talk with Dr. Sara Lazar, neuroscientist and researcher at Mass General Hospital, a Harvard teaching hospital. Sara’s research is centered on changes in brain structures that result from meditation and yoga.
Her results are very interesting! Basically they show that regular awareness (or contemplative) practices like yoga and meditation thicken those parts of the brain that have to do with self-awareness, well-being and embodied presence and decrease the size of those parts of the brain that are most active when we feel anxious.
Now, those of us who do any of these practices on a regular basis already know this from experience. Personally, I’ve certainly recognized that after 20 years of meditating, doing yoga and practicing tai chi (another contemplative practice not currently part of Sara’s research), my general state of anxiety has significantly decreased.
This became very clear to me several years ago when I stopped my daily practices for about 3 months because of some health issues. I began to notice that a background level of agitation which had been so present when I was younger was beginning to resurface. It was only then that I realized just how much calmer I had become because of my daily contemplative practices.
A common principle that runs at the core of each of these contemplative practices is “Where we put our attention, that’s where energy flows.” If we become preoccupied with our anxious thoughts, we actually strengthen our anxiety. If, instead, we focus on our breath, the contact we make with the ground, a mantra (a calming phrase), or any other anchor for our attention, we begin to quiet the mind and become more present.
So, how can we apply this understanding to reducing the anxiety that comes from public speaking? I think there are two ways to support ourselves through contemplative practices.
First is to commit to some minimal degree of daily awareness practices. Many of my clients start out with 5 minutes a day of simple meditation (I might do another post some day on developing a meditation practice to support your public speaking). Meditating on a regular basis, even in very short increments like this, can help to calm that sense of floating anxiety that might always be there in the background.
The second is to practice what I call a relational meditation whenever you speak, whether it be at the dinner table with your family, in the check-out line at the grocery store, on a phone call, in a meeting with your colleagues, or in a formal presentation. Rather than focusing on the situational anxiety that can arise in a stressful speaking situation, we focus on our audience, asking ourselves how can we be of service to the people in our audience. In effect, we anchor our attention on the relationship and not on our anxiety. Paradoxically, this can help calm us down, steady us, and help us be more fully present in the moment and responsive to the needs of our audience.
By strengthening our self-awareness through our daily practices, and then regularly anchoring our attention on our audience when we speak , I believe we are actually making changes to the structure of our nervous system that can have a long term impact on our degree of comfort speaking in public.
The Tai Chi concept of Sung
March 28, 2009
This has been an interesting week for me and I think I’ll create separate posts to allow my thinking to develop.
It began on Monday night in my Tai Chi class where we explored the experience of Sung. There is no literal translation for Sung. It seems the closest we can come to it in English is relaxing or sinking. In my mind it has something to do with allowing my weight to drop with gravity while at the same time experiencing the accompanying rebound that comes from fully experiencing the support of the earth. When I do that, I’m no longer “uptight” but rather deeply relaxed, flowing and grounded at the same time.
I’ve often been curious about why it is that when we feel nervous and anxious our muscles try to lift us off the ground, causing us to feel that uptightness. I think it has something to do with all our energy flowing up into the anxious thoughts in our head, the highest point of our physical self. Where we put our attention, that’s where energy flows. So if we’re focused on all our anxious thoughts that are up in our heads, our muscles lift up to meet that energy.
When we feel anxiety speaking in public, that uptightness gets amplified and there’s no sense of being grounded. So, I’m always trying to help people experience Sung when they speak. How can you drop your weight down to the earth? How can you give your weight over to gravity and allow the rebounding, upward flowing energy to happen naturally?
To me this has something to do with learning to trust ourselves and to trust that when we let go, let down, relax, we will have far more access to all of ourselves and consequently far more access to both our audience and the message we want to convey.
(I hope to post the second theme of the week tomorrow.)
The power of silence to unite…
March 7, 2009
I recently attended a meeting where after we went around the room and introduced ourselves, we dropped into a period of silence before anyone began to speak. This was not an uncomfortable silence but simply a time for each of us to become present so that the ensuing conversation felt very different than the way an ordinary discussion might go in a typical meeting. When the conversation finally started, it felt as though we were each speaking from a grounded collective as opposed individual separate voices.
Several years ago, the keynote speaker at a conference started his talk with a full minute of silence. This wasn’t a nervous silence but simply one of “arriving”. It seemed to me that as he looked out into the audience in silence, the speaker was inviting us into his world. While the audience was restive to begin with, as the minute passed everyone seemed to calm down and wait with quiet expectancy for him to begin. When the speaker finally did begin to talk, the entire room was with him.
I was on a conference call several months ago where each of us was invited to take a few minutes to check-in. That day one of the participants wasn’t feeling particularly verbal and said so when it was her turn. But instead of passing up the opportunity to take a turn, she simply became quiet allowing the rest of us on the call to drop into a meditative state. It seemed that after her turn, the quality of the call moved from the ordinary busyness of day-to-day conversation to one of deep respect and regard for each other.
These are three examples of how silence can bring people together if we allow ourselves to rest rather than chafe when nothing is being said.
Consciously slowing down can reduce anxiety
March 5, 2009
I just caught the tale end of an interview on NPR with Michael Tilson Thomas, music director for the San Francisco Symphony, talking about the audition process for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. I tuned in to the interview just as he was talking about how musicians tend to speed up when they are nervous. My guess is that as music director an important aspect of his work is to help nervous musicians slow down.
This was so interesting to me because it reminded me that speeding up when anxious is a universal problem, not just one that speakers have. If there’s one principle I return to in every conversation I have with clients, it’s that if they simply slow down, it will make all the difference in their speaking. And, I’m not talking about speaking slowly. We can speak quickly but still have an internal awareness that is slow and easy.
It seems that when we deliberately decide to slow down and take our time, we actually send a signal to our nervous system that there’s no need to feel anxious. Which, in turn, helps the nervous system calm down, and we begin to have a sense of internal quiet and clarity.
On my 45 minute DVD, The Seven Crown Jewels of Public Speaking Presence, there’s a five minute talk on slowing down and how important it is for a speaker. Here’s the clip:
Space… The final frontier!
March 2, 2009
Last summer I received an email in response to one I had sent out. Something weird happened in the transmission. All the space between words had been stripped away and the email I received looked something like this:
LastsummerIreceivedanemailinresponsetooneIhadsentout.
Somethingweirdhappenedinthetransmission.Allthespace
betweenwordshadbeenstrippedawayandtheemailI
receivedlookedsomethinglikethis:
While I eventually was able to figure out what it said, it was hard work!!! My mind had to parse each word (and each paragraph) so that I could distinguish one word from another (and one thought from the other). It probably took me 5 times longer to understand what was being said than if the spaces had been included.
We all understand this and take for granted that when we write, we add the space between each word and an even larger space between one paragraph and another. But when we speak, particularly when we’re anxious, we completely forget that adding a little space (pausing) between thoughts and ideas helps the listener integrate what’s being said.
Anxiety causes all our rhythms to race: our heart beats faster, our breath becomes shallow and rapid, our thoughts are racing, our eyes jump from one thing to another without really focusing, and we begin to speak very fast.
And, when this happens during a talk, our audience simply can’t keep up with what we’re saying. There’s too much information coming at them at one time. If we jump from one point to another without pausing, the audience has to work too hard to hold on to what we’ve said and they get only some very small percentage of our message.
Pausing is the equivalent of the space between words and paragraphs. How can you slow yourself down and pause frequently to make it easier for your audience understand your whole message?
Paying attention
February 25, 2009
I was in yoga class this morning doing a posture in which I was paying most attention to the position of my upper body. While in the posture, I suddenly became aware that I had no sense of what my left leg as doing… it was just hanging there without any awareness on my part (it had no presence in my consciousness). Once I tuned into my left foot, in particular, while also paying attention to what my upper body was doing, the posture felt more integrated and I felt more present.
I find that when I speak, I can get so focused on what I have to say or how the audience is responding that I lose myself – some people describe this as having an “out of body” experience. I find that by simply paying attention to the contact my feet are making with the floor, I can then re-occupy myself and be much more present to myself, what’s happening in the room, how my audience is responding and the message I want to convey.
Syncing and sourcing
February 23, 2009
Eileen commented on my last blog and included a link to a video of birds moving in sync with each other. This idea of syncing is fascinating to me. I’ve been intrigued with how flocks of birds (and fish, for that matter) seem to have one mind and sometimes have found myself standing stock still when a flock of birds is maneuvering overhead. How do they do that?
This idea of syncing reminds me of several conversations I had today around the idea of listening to the collective wisdom of a group (some people call this sourcing). I believe that when we speak and listen from a place of true presence, we then have access to the collective wisdom that’s present in the group with the potential of then “moving with one mind”.
Having a conversation…
February 11, 2009
I’m a newbie to blogging and I’ve just discovered that I had the “making comments” section turned off. Now I’ve just got to figure out a way to make them more readable! So if you’ve tried in the past to comment and were unable to do so, please feel free to try again.
Find the haven of your back body…
February 7, 2009
The ability to step back, not get caught up in the fray, see the forest for the trees, is key for leaders in all capacities. When the chaos of an emergent crisis grabs everyone’s attention, it is so easy to jump in with both feet. All our attention gets pulled to the details of the events at hand, and with that, we so easily get pulled out of ourselves. This is especially true when we are making an important presentation. And, in fact, this particular skill is essential for all of us today given the current economic uncertainties that can so easily throw us off balance.
Ideally, it would be optimal if, in the midst of a crisis we could say “Time out!” and then physically step back from the situation to get a “10,000 foot view”. Most of the time we’re so caught up in what’s happening and don’t even remember that this might be a good strategy. But even when we’re aware enough to realize that this is something we ought to do, we don’t always have the luxury to do so – the timing might be wrong, someone might feel slighted, or the issue is too urgent and you need an answer NOW.
This morning my yoga teacher Judy Scribner-Moore, a wonderful yoga teacher in the Boston area, said, “Find the haven of the back body” as we were entering into a difficult posture. This got me thinking (maybe not what I should have been doing in yoga, but there you go…)! What if when we are confronted with all the difficulties that life presents us that take us off balance, what if in those moments, we simply pay attention to our spine, to what our backs are in contact with, to the space behind us? Wouldn’t that provide us with same psychological haven as physically stepping back? And, we could do it so easily without anyone even knowing!
I have often suggested to my speaking clients to include in their awareness the space behind them as they speak, and for some people this has been the key to diminishing their fear and anxiety around speaking to a group. But it occurred to me today that simply changing our awareness to focus on our spine, our back body and the space behind us could also provide a moment of respite (a haven, if you will) and a new perspective in difficult leadership situations as well as in life itself!
