This video has gone viral within the last few hours, and is a confrontation between a Baltimore Police Officer and a 14 year old skateboarder.
Technology has ensured that virtually any time you speak in public there is the opportunity that your words, your presentation, and your message will follow you, either in a positive way or a negative way.
This is just another reminder that all speaking is public speaking!
Last night, CNN hosted the final Republican debate at the Reagan Library, and it was truly debating 101, and why having a message and sticking to it is so critical. It was always an example of why repeating your opponents charges against you is a losing strategy every time.
Governor Romney was upset about Senator McCain’s characterization of his stance on a timetable in Iraq, and felt it was an underhanded tactic and referred to it as "the type of dirty tricks that Ronald Reagan would have found reprehensible."
Maybe a valid point, maybe not. One major problem — the issue on which Senator McCain is viewed as being the stronger candidate — national security. The issue on which Governor Romney has been campaigning fervently for the past week as being his key strength – revitalizing the economy.
Instead, the vast majority of this debate was spent as a running dialogue between the Senator and the Governor on what the Governor did or did not say with regard to Iraq withdrawal.
To make matters worse for the Governor, his second biggest strength has been leadership, and his biggest weakness has been flip-flopping. While continually going back to the timetable issue, the Senator was able to pull out a quote the Governor used at the time of discussing the surge — "I can’t weigh in, I’m a Governor." Not exactly a decisive comment and the Governor’s response was "That is a separate issue."
When debating, it is crucial to drive your message and spend the vast amount of time doing just that. The last thing you want to do is spend all of your time repeating a charge that your opponent has made (which lends more credence to it) fighting the intricacies of it, and spending very little time on your strongest issues.
It is often called "getting lost in the weeds" and forgetting that the idea is not to win the argument, the idea is to drive your message through, especially when this is the last debate forum to do so. This was a classic game of continually setting the trap, and the Governor fell for it last evening.
Yesterday marked the 2008 MacWorld Keynote Address, an annual event that is one of the biggest technology events of the year, and is usually viewed with much anticipation or derision, depending on your viewpoint on Apple.
Disclosure #1 - I am not a Mac user, nor am I an Apple aficionado. Disclosure #2 - While I have always been impressed by Steve’s ability to succinctly develop a message, I have not necessarily been as impressed with his ability to deliver that message. Disclosure #3 - I really expected to be bored to tears watching this, as in the past Steve has had a tendency to depend on a lot of "verbal noise" — umm, ahh, uhh.
Steve used his secret weapon. Not only was Steve on message throughout — no surprise, his delivery has improved significantly over past years. I planned on critiquing this performance with a play-by-play, but Steve’s use of a (not-so-secret) weapon was critical to his success today — Passion. The guy loves his products, loves his customers, and loves what he is doing. It’s as simple as that. His body language, facial expressions, tone and intonation all tell the same story.
Steve is not what I would consider a natural in terms of public speaking. Once again, his message is always great, but his delivery is often lacking. The commencement speech he gave at Stanford University is still one of my all time favorites in terms of message; however the delivery, lack of eye contact and lack of movement really took something away from the performance. I can see how Steve’s passion has really allowed him to come into his own as a public speaker, and has allowed him to become more and more comfortable every time out.
There is still room for improvement — he does not pause enough, he has a tendency to speed up when he gets excited (very normal), and the PowerPoint slides tend to be a little too wordy. That being said, his passion and frankness (When referring to Apple TV — "We’ve all missed…we’ve learned..") came through loud and clear. Whether you are an Apple fan or not, take a gander.
The secret weapon is out of the bag and everyone can use it – there is no greater key to public speaking success than caring about what it is you are talking about. Passion = Success.
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Speaker. In this clip, the presenter speaks about the missions, goals and structures of research universities.
I watched this clip very intently over 5 times before I was able to figure out the central message — that a university is about its people. And I was only able to decipher that after catching it on the top of a PowerPoint slide with entirely too much information.
Let us start with the positives. The presenter’s nice appearance and pleasant disposition present well. You want to like him, and you want to listen to him. There is no question in my mind that he is an expert on this topic. When he speaks with emotion, his body language and hand movements mirror his verbiage, and he comes across as passionate. Unfortunately, this only happens for a few brief moments during the entire presentation.
The presenter speaks for 3 minutes and 37 seconds. During that time period, there were at least 24 uses of what I would term as "verbal noise" - umm, uhh, or ehhh. If that did not lose members of the audience, then the numerous times throughout the presentation that he began a sentence and then changed direction did.
The lack of flow, use of confusing hand motions with poor eye contact, and frequent loss of place make it very difficult to follow the message of this speech. Even if you were completely focused on every word, it would be extremely difficult for a member of the audience to know what the message, and the point, of the presentation was.
Everyone can learn from this speech. Spending a short period of time preparing a brief outline would have improved the flow. Minimal practice alone would have dramatically reduced the verbal noise and would have shortened this speech by at least a minute, nearly a third of the entire presentation, without changing any content. There is no telling how effective this speech could have been with a lot of practice, a lot of tweaking, and a lot of feedback.
This should not be construed as an attack on the presenter in any way. He is brilliant in his subject matter, and could be an amazing presenter as his cadence and tone are very welcoming. What this is an example of is why every person who speaks publicly, no matter how busy or how high ranking, should practice a number of times prior to speaking.
It is often said that Winston Churchill spent over one hour preparing for every minute of speech he was going to deliver — a five minute speech would therefore require 5 hours of practice. There is a reason why he is considered to be one of the greatest orators that has ever lived.
