Archive for July, 2007

Hear him, hear him. Jeff Nolan (punctuated with a hilarious suggestion from Anil Dash) on how counterproductive corporatespeak is.

See also: Bureaucraspeak, featuring links to Josh Hallett & Brazen Careerist primers on Jargon and What Not to Say.

I truly do not know where to begin. Disney thought they should… There aren’t words. Just go wince. I mean watch.

Twilight Wish Foundation in People Magazine

Exciting news for a nonprofit whose board I’m honored to serve. The Twilight Wish Foundation grants wishes to elders living near the poverty line. People Magazine’s “Heroes Among Us” feature honored Founder and Executive Director Cass Forkin. People caught up with Cass in June during the granting of USN(ret) Veteran Edward MacDonald’s wish to take a group of underprivileged orphans charter fishing. On the following day The Intelligencer Record profiled Catherine Wells’ wish to fly in a biplane. Twilight Wish Foundation has previously been featured in USA Today, Family Circle and on CN8 and Sirius Radio.

Donations and corporate sponsorships are needed in order to permit us to grant more wishes, faster. More than 100 unfulfilled wishes are waiting for your support. Individuals can sponsor and dedicate wishes at www.TwilightWish.org. Blog & more news links here.

Confidence is an overwhelmingly important part of presenting well. Where to even begin? You guessed it, with a recurring feature. Below are just a few posts in the pipeline, but you tell me you’d like to see addressed. Or, ask your questions about confidence. Then watch this space for answers..

• Confidence for the unconfident presenter: owning your topic
• Rent-A-Confidence: finding the confidence to get through your presentation, even if you’re shy
• Confidence for the overconfident presenter: confidence is not ego; obnoxiously brazen usually = insecurity
• Confidently handling questions: why do they want to know? what do you want to achieve?
• Confidently controlling the experience: handling the situation, managing the room
• What you want to know?

Muhammad Saleem at Copyblogger sums it up elegantly:

On November 19th, 1863, popular orator Edward Everett gave a two-hour speech that nobody remembers. Following Everett, President Abraham Lincoln stood up, delivered 269 words now known as the Gettysburg Address, and sat down.

A riff about what you THINK while you are presenting…

That voice inside your head, can I speak with it for a moment?

Look, you need to lay off. Your person has been trying pretty hard lately, and I just don’t think you’re adding to the effort.

Honestly, if your person were my client, I’d tell them to fire you. Even you know that. If you heard someone in the audience heckling your person the way you do — nonstop — and creating all kinds of insecurities and problems, you’d put the smackdown on THEM too. Why do you expect special treatment?

Try a little kindness. No, seriously. It’s pretty much the only thing that really works, per Dale Carnegie via Scott Adams. Get your supportive, considerate talk on. If you’re not even rooting for yourself, how can you hope anyone else will be? (Psst, don’t tell but they will be anyways. the audience WANTS you to succeed!)

In recognition of Movie Misquotes week on the twitter.com/twitterflix game, some thoughts on getting quotes… Wrong.

It’s a small point, but it matters. Quotes are fun in presentations. They can add a lot. But when they’re wrong — especially famously wrong — they can be just one less thing to believe about you.

Take a moment to check your quotes and get them right. Don’t just go with the first search result. Can you find 1 or 2 good references that agree? This handy page of famous misquotations at Wikipedia is a good start. Some that surprised me:

“Let them eat cake.” — Marie Antoinette (The original quote comes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions)

“Elementary, my dear Watson.” — Sherlock Holmes The complete phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson” does not appear in any of the 60 Holmes stories written by Doyle.

“Billions and billions.” — Carl Sagan Johnny Carson coined this while parodying Sagan. (Who had enough of a sense of humor to say it jokingly in class.)

“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” — Lord Acton It’s actually “PowerPoint tends to corrupt, and absolute PowerPoint corrupts absolutely” (ok, we jest)

Even the much revered Twainism “Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt” doesn’t actually appear in his books. It also gets attributed to everyone from Einstein to Lincoln. Twain’s Puddinhead has a paragraph or so that amounts to the same thing, but not the sweet, pithy turn of phrase that’s come down to us.

Like any “rule,” break this one when you need to. Wrong quotes aren’t nearly as annoying as the urban legends clogging up your inbox. They may even have more impact than the correct words. But you might want to use them with a wink and a “did ya know they never said that?” to increase your credibility…

LOL, Here we have more real presentations stuff covered on “fake” blogs. The actual advice is in BusinessWeek, but we love the FSJ blog too much not to point to that first.

In the BusinessWeek article, Carmine Gallo distills 5 lessons from RSJ’s (Real Steve Jobs) presentation style:

1. Build tension.
2. Stick to one theme per slide.
3. Add pizazz (pistache?) to your delivery.
4. Practice
5. Be honest and show enthusiasm (ok, that’s two, but who’s counting?)

Link roundup: podcast on confident speaking; blogs entry on fear and likeability…

Blogging and Beyond: Public Speaking with Confidence Patsi and Denise interview Guest Expert: Dr. Larina Kase, co-author of The Confident Speaker. LOVE Larina’s points about being good at your own individual style of speaking, and agree strongly with the myths she busts. But? I was a little disappointed? by how much she used the Little Girl Voice?

Step Forward Scott Schwertly on fear. Key points: A fear of public speaking is healthy, Fear is your friend, Public speaking is abnormal

Create Your Communications Experience: The Likeability Factor money quote is a paraphrase of Dale Carnegie: “‘You will win more friends in the next two months developing a sincere interest in two people than you will ever win in the next two years trying to get two people interested in you.’”

The one that kills your credibility? And tacitly asks the world’s permission to voice your ideas?

Stop it!!!

Now.

Please?

Guilty pleasure Jezebel delivers with this well-sourced post on the Little Girl Voice and otherwise successful women who use it:

“… the disturbing — and apparently growing — trend of adult women who sound like little girls… this sort of vocal dumbing-down among female professionals. The theory behind it is that some women are either so scared of their own professional shadows or so afraid of being labeled feminists that they “overcorrect” by speaking and/or acting like young girls.

…

But, seriously: If, as Naomi Wolf intimated in the Washington Post yesterday, the childlike behavior exhibited by certain women is some deep-seated attempt to reassure the world of their vulnerability and femininity, who exactly is pushing them to do so? Other women? Or the same type of men who criticize someone like Hillary Clinton for being nakedly ambitious and “shrill”?”

For a variety of opinions, read the comments too. I think the point most missed by the commenters is which the overall pitch of your voice may be hard to modify at will, the tone and inflection are all yours and frequently used to “Little Girl” effect. It’s not that women have to be poured into a mold of “booming professional woman voice.” More important is to be clear about what women are adding to (and detracting from) the genuine voices they have.

I’m concerned on a lot of levels about the trends suggested in the NPR story, particularly as womens’ voices are figuratively and literally criticized as shrill, nakedly ambitious, etc.