Once again, I am the speech coach who has run into a very accomplished person who mumbles.  He’s on the fast track at a major American corporation, and his boss has gotten word that senior people can’t understand him when he presents.

Receptive to help and concerned about the consequences of this life-long habit, he is struggling to be mindful of his speech.  Since the physical process of speaking is something we all do without conscious thought, the effort to be aware of the placement of his tongue and lips is a challenge.

He’s getting there.  He’s louder than he was, which is great, and he’s keeping his voice up all the way to the ends of his sentences, but he still needs to slow down and land on every vowel and consonant.  He tends to zip through syllables.  For instance, for constitutional he says cons-too-tional, leaving out that middle ti syllable.

When these mistakes pile up during a high stakes presentation, it makes him appear nervous, and makes him harder to understand.

Smart guy.  He shouldn’t be held back by something mechanical like not knowing where to place his tongue and lips when speaking plain old English.  Of course it’s nothing that voice and speech training can’t fix.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.  Sign up for our presentation tips and learn more about us at http://www.simswyeth.com/.

Most of us need training because: 

1. We are unaware.
2. We don’t do what we want, or know how, to do.
3. We don’t practice.

We are not aware of how we come across.  We have blind spots.  Blind areas.  Our education is incomplete.  We have not read the great books on the subject of effective speech.  We have not trained under masters of the art.   We need to expand our awareness.

Even when we know what we should do, or want to do, we don’t do it.  Doing it a new way is hard.  It takes time.  It feels weird.  We experience a drop in our abilities before we see a rise. 

We need a teacher, mentor, trainer, guru, or coach to keep a tab on us.  We need that coach to give us the right tools—the right suggestions—convince us that his or her ideas are the right ones, and then attend to us, patiently, until we are able to make use of the optimal techniques he or she is offering.

We need greater awareness of ourselves and of the inherited traditions of highly effective speech, and we need a chance to practice those techniques under the watchful eye of a coach. 

All top performers have coaches.  They used to be called Dutch Uncles—guys you went to for advice.  Now the uncles specialize in narrow little areas of life, and get paid for their knowledge and their ability to help you implement that knowledge.

You need Dutch Uncles and coaches because this stuff is important, it doesn’t come naturally, and it takes time and effort to make it real.

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

I recently had the privilege of sitting through four investigator meetings, two in the United States and two in Europe. 

They comprised speaker after speaker with slide after slide.  Topics included the disease, the drug, the PK, the efficacy and safety, statistical modeling, and then the process by which patients were to be enrolled and cared for throughout the study.

Occasionally, at the end of a presentation, the speaker would ask multiple choice questions about the topic just covered, and the audience could select an answer using a remote control response device.  The percentage of correct answers ranged from a high of 70% to a low of 35%.

One of the key scientific presentations was delivered by a young doctor with a foreign accent, her hair in her face, and a specialty in another disease state.  She was hesitant, focused primarily on her notes, and unsuccessful in creating any excitement or passion for the long and arduous assignment the investigators had in front of them.

Another similar problem occurred with the presentation delivered by the statistician who had devised the null hypothesis and necessary endpoints for the study.  He had a severe foreign accent, spoke extremely quickly, and although he was appealing and expressive, was for the most part unintelligible.  I surveyed about five people after his talk and they all complained that they could not understand a word he said.

Some of the other speakers were quite effective, in that they stated their objective at the start, showed an agenda slide, and then marched the audience through a slide deck with varying degrees of energy, volume, and personality. 

Each meeting lasted two days, even though the investigators themselves only needed to be there for the first day, while their assistants did in fact need to be there for both days.

The sponsor is no doubt obliged to document that a meeting was held, and that thorough and precise instruction was given.  But might the sponsor accomplish more than checking the regulatory “tick box” and actually create real learning, while at the same time creating a strong attachment to their company within a community of influential doctors?

We all know that a process such as the one described above is not optimal for teaching adults how to do something.  Adults actually need to “do” what they are being asked to learn, in addition to listening to instruction and reading slides. 

Adults need to practice active problem solving, engage in role plays and case studies, and participate in debate.  Hands-on learning gets better results and better reviews.

It’s time to get creative with investigator meetings. 

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.