To Speak with Your Heart
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A person who owns or runs a business does not have to be a brilliant speaker. Even a politician or a public activist who just begins his/her career or a science/arts/sports “star” does not always (or, to be more precise, hardly ever) starts being able to hold their audience perfectly. But so much the better for them as they can’t be called to account. So let’s talk business today.
Recently I have alarmingly often seen heads of companies who have a horror of public speaking. And as alarmingly often have I seen C-suites who consider themselves Ciceros and Demostheneses having no reasons whatsoever. I believe it is connected with the particular nature of the recent years of various crises that have caused pretty severe distortions of top managers’ personalities. I have quite strong reasons to think so.
The representatives of the first group, those who experience an unreasonable fear of public speaking, are guided not only by irrational dismay but by quite rational motives:
uncertainty over stability (or even reliability) of positive tendencies of their business progress;
paranoiac unwillingness to speak about their progress fearing that supervisory bodies will get interested in the financial equivalent of this progress and will demand their share;
a constant feeling that they are “under the owner’s microscope” (if they are hired executives);
a fear of not complying with glamorous and vulgar standards of looks or manners propagated by mass culture.
So they either evade communicating with the audience altogether – up to literally escaping from an event or notifying of an imaginary contingency that had stood on their way of coming to an event 5 minutes before it started. Or they are cheerlessly mumbling something from notes. Or they “drive dangerously” – troll their audience even if asked quite friendly questions.
The representatives of the second category are corporate zombies as a rule http://forbes.ua/woman/1359119-korporativnye-zombi or media zombies as its kind http://forbes.ua/woman/1360552-pogovorim-ob-evolyucii. Having been coached by experts of dubious competence at various trainings they
option one: improvise recklessly pleasing their audience with a stream of consciousness which most often does not have any rational kernel at all;
option two: speak in communicative blocks which tinkering psychologists mark in the framework of speeches with the help of incantations like “we are inspiring”, “we are scaring”, we are promising” and are in horror of forgetting a single word or swapping paragraphs.
The pathologies of the two kinds look absolutely inartistic and are impractical for business. So if you have diagnosed yourself or your employees with the case, take action. I am not aiming at telling you how to make Count of Monte-Cristo of Edmond Dantes in this single column. But I can give a couple of fundamentally commonplace pieces of advice that will help you to avoid shameful follies:
1. Try to speak only about the things you are knowledgeable in.
2. Any improvisation must be carefully prepared.
3. It makes sense to read your report word after word only if you are the president and do not have any equipment at hand that will substitute for a paper report-carrier or if you are presenting your research paper to a hostile scientific board.
4. There is nothing more useful than to write (by hand!) 7 points of your report on a piece of paper and using them to perform in front of a mirror a couple of times and to leave this piece of paper at home.
5. If eye contact with your audiences annoys you, defocus your eyesight or look just above people’s heads.
6. If physiology deceitfully lets you down this or that way, don’t be disdainful of medicines that neutralize it.
7. Believe in yourselves and let the Power be on your side.
It is up to you whether to follow this half-serious and half-playful (there's a grain of joke in every joke) advice or not. Because each of us is destined to loneliness of the third kind where all fateful decisions are taken by us on our own in the end.
Tags: Career; Work