Executive Speech Coach NJ - Sims Wyeth » presentation skills training nj

Public Speaking is like splitting wood

SimsBeth — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:36:40 +0000

When I was 12 years old, I went to a canoe camp in northern Quebec. Thanks Mom and Dad. It was great.

We paddled for thirty days straight, pitching camp every night, foraging and cutting our own firewood. I was taught how to split logs by a master axman. In the time it takes for a squirrel to twitch its tail he could split logs into firewood, firewood into kindling, and kindling into pencils.

His rules for us were simple: spread your feet, wear steel-toed boots, go with the grain, and keep the axe sharp. The most dangerous thing to a wood splitter is a dull axe, because dull axes bounce off wood and hit you in the leg.

Can we stretch these rules to apply to public speaking? Let me try.

First, as good presenters, we’re trying to hit the audience where it counts. We need to be talking about something that they care about, so they’ll open up and listen. That’s going with the grain.

When we deliver a speech or presentation, we need to take a stand, have a point of view, and attack the issue in a balanced manner, giving voice to both sides of the argument. That’s presenting with your feet apart—taking a balanced perspective.

Public speakers also need to have thick skin—rhino hide, even—to have the courage to speak in the first place, to advance our opinions and push through any skepticism, prejudice, or inertia. And we need to be able to respond to antagonistic questions from our skeptical listeners. These presentation skills represent our steel-toed shoes.

Finally, public speakers and presenters need to strike the heart of the matter with force, to express our opinions as fact, so that our points sink deep. We can’t be wishy-washy. This is our sharp axe.

Splitting wood is a deeply satisfying activity. When you hit the wood in just the right place, and the log pops open, it feels good.

Public speaking is more complicated. It’s torture to prepare, but if you do happen to build a talk that turns you on, it’s exciting to deliver it, nice to get the compliments afterwards, and satisfying that you did well something that is difficult.

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.

Shock and awe work in presentations

SimsBeth — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:46:15 +0000

I recently got a letter from a lawyer threatening to sue me because I had mistakenly used a copyrighted image in a blog.

The letter was not a cease and desist letter. It was a shock and awe letter, so threatening and hostile—so long, tedious, and burdensome in its language and requests– that I went into a state of deep hostility myself.

I will leave that there, and simply ask if you’ve ever wanted to deliver a presentation that begins with shock and awe. Not the same kind of shock and awe—threatening and hostile—but the kind of shock and awe that is pyro-technical and theatrical, filled with dramatic stories, extravagant claims, and demonstrative behaviors on your part, all designed to make the audience say, “WOW! What a speaker! What a great presentation.”

I have had that desire many times. I collect stories, and admire speeches and presentations that begin with a bang. But I also recognize that when I go for shock and awe, I surrender a slice of my gravitas and professionalism.

I am coming to feel that a good speaker is in service to the audience, and does not draw attention to himself. He only uses his expressive power to bring the message to life for the audience, similar to an actor, who is at his best when you don’t see the acting.

As a speaker or presenter, when you drop shock and awe on an audience, you’re swinging for the fences (a baseball analogy suggesting that you’re taking a big chance and are increasing the likelihood of failure.) Your audience may very well respond to you as I did to the lawyer, and go into a kind of resentment—judging you as a show-off, a person of intemperate character, and watching you skeptically.

There is an old bit of wisdom among actors and other performers: never take your showmanship to the Nth degree. Never get so loud and passionate that you have no more loudness or passion to give. Always stay in control, at least several steps this side of the edge.

Modesty in all things, you might say—even in your dalliance with shock and awe.

The #1 Sales Skill

SimsBeth — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:32:29 +0000

Client facing skills (also known as sales skills and interpersonal skills) are essentially the skills of a very good conversationalist. Good conversations can lead to connection, mutual respect, and understanding (not necessarily agreement.) They can precipitate new, and strengthen existing, relationships. They also reveal character, and can cause two people to become fast friends, be indifferent to one another, or to avidly avoid one another for the rest of their lives.

While the overt medium of conversation is language, the covert media are also highly influential, and they are numerous. In no particular order, they are the voice, the body’s gestures (including the effective use of ears), and the symbolic power of clothing, grooming, and other signs of social status, such as your resume, alma mater, and accent—to name just a few.

If you misuse words—for instance, if you say “irregardless,” instead of “regardless,”—some of your listeners will write you off as half-educated.

If you interrupt someone even once (without apologizing), they may decide it’s not worth their time getting to know such an egotist.

If you don’t look at the other person when you speak, or when you listen, they may conclude that, at best, you are shy and at worst, you’re shifty, unreliable, or maybe even crazy.

If you consistently demonstrate that you either have not heard or understood what the other person has said (because you’ve been busy composing your clever retort rather than listening) they will most likely conclude that it will be difficult to do business with you.

And if your speaking voice lacks an adequate range of volumes, pitches and speeds, or if your speech is laced with “likes, you knows, I means, uhs, uhms, and ers,” your partner in conversation will have a difficult time concluding that you are a bright and talented individual.

But all is forgiven if you are deeply curious about other people. Good conversationalists, and good sales people, are curious. Really curious, not only because they want to make the sale, but also because they are just plain old curious about people and the world.

And if, in addition, you are endlessly interested in others, not because you want to sell to them but because you really do have the capacity to empathize with them, to see the world as they see it (not necessarily agreeing with them), then you can screw up all the things I mention above—misuse of words, interrupting, lack of eye contact, and speaking in a dull-as-dishwater voice—all of these rules you can violate with impunity if only you listen, really listen, and show them that you’ve listened and understood, and made them feel heard.

Public speaking requires self-mastery

SimsBeth — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:21:32 +0000

I am in and out of major American corporations as a consultant, a career which allows me to observe the good, the bad, and the ugly in presentation of self, and presentation of thinking.

I hate to get real tactical-practical on the presentation skills continuum, but somebody’s got to say something. People who jiggle their knees while talking are not doing themselves any favors.

I was sitting across a desk from a young guy and could see that his knee was going up and down like a hummingbird’s wing—so fast you could hardly see it. The rest of him—the part above the desk—was vibrating slightly.

When he got up to present, the amount of extraneous presentation movement detracted from his credibility as a presenter and limited my ability to listen to him. When I mentioned it to him, he said he couldn’t help it, that he’d always done it, that he was Venezuelan by birth, and that his parents had given him espresso from day one.

I said, “Let’s pretend you have no memory of your past. Just for a few minutes, all your memory chips are erased. Do it again, and stand still.”

He did much better. Then I said, “You are still water. You are calmness personified. You are so still you are like a Sphinx. Try it like that.”

Bingo. Even better. Then he sat down and started jiggling his knee again.

Oh well. Now he knows he can stop when he wants to. I have it on tape.

Occupy PowerPoint

SimsBeth — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:40:02 +0000

Occupy Wall Street has given voice to long-simmering resentments in our economy. But there is yet another dystopia that is giving rise to a rebellion, and strangely enough, it’s against elite software.

American business culture expects its white collared millions to use slides when they speak to groups. But many business presenters are beginning to lift their voices against the tyranny of PowerPoint. Crushed under the monopolistic power of the nearly ubiquitous Microsoft slide-maker, brave cubicle denizens have been heard to complain of their inability to utter a word on the public stages of corporate Amerika without filtering their thoughts through the sieve of slide designs and pre-fab layouts. As you might expect, the movement lacks central leadership, is disorganized, and lacks specific demands and messaging, but it is growing.

Let’s first look at what is good about PowerPoint. What does it bring to the meeting? Before a meeting it allows attendees to review presentation material, and after the meeting, those unable to attend can read the slides.

It rids us of the need to pay recording secretaries to jot in short hand the powerful points made by the speakers at the meetings, and then pay them again to circulate their apt summaries to attendees. It also stores information in a familiar format to refresh our memories, and thus allows us to reflect on the drift of the conversations in which we found ourselves engaged.

PowerPoint is also good because it provides a visual to focus the eyes of the listener while he or she is listening. People learn more when they simultaneously see images and hear spoken words (a fact proven by educational psychologists.) However, few business presenters use creative images on their PowerPoint slides, which may be one cause of their antipathy to the software: many corporate cultures have micro PowerPoint cultures based on the traditional bullet point model.

Senior executives want it done the way they did it in the past (a lethal number of bullet points), and thus newly minted MBAs cling to the same format, lest they be thought fringey by their superiors. We must also acknowledge that few business leaders are great writers, or skilled essayists, and I haven’t met too many MBAs capable of marshalling the language and sending it into battle. So bullet points, despite their lack of nuance and subtlety, seem to suffice for the guys and gals making the big decisions in the executive suites.

But the resentment, felt and expressed by a growing number of highly accomplished people, is real, even though it’s hard to measure the actual cost of using PowerPoint. So let’s do a little math. We know that American workers deliver an estimated 30 million PowerPoint presentations per day.

Let’s assume that the average length of a presentation is 30 minutes, the average audience size is four people, the average salary of those in attendance is $35K, and that one-quarter of the presentations are entirely useless, all of which are conservative estimates.

The cost to our economy is $250 million per day, and about $100 billion per year. And that’s just for those in the audience. What about all of us who struggle to create the presentations?

PowerPoint represents a staggering burden on our economy, and a troubling medium for speakers and audiences alike. It can give the illusion of competence, the illusion of simplicity, and the illusion of understanding.

It has also excused the great majority of our leaders from learning to use language as an incisive tool of leadership.

It is not all bad. PowerPoint can save us money, and store information. But as a tool, it is over-used and frequently abused by those who do too much public speaking and not enough private thinking.

Keep your ears open. The low grumble you hear in the halls may soon swell to a chorus, a cacophony, a crescendo of complaints. PowerPoint may soon be demonized as a tool of the devil, an instrument of dystopia, the destroyer of Western Civilization that wastes time, wastes money, makes us look and sound like idiots, and prevents us from flourishing in a state of high dudgeon when calling our listeners to action.

Presentation Tips: All in one book!

SimsBeth — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:55:13 +0000

Heads up! Those of you who read Presentation Pointers may be interested in buying a paperback or e-book version of:

A Zen monk had sweaty palms: Pointers on the path to better public speaking

The Tire They Want to Kick

SimsBeth — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:09:00 +0000

A few years ago, I was on a panel at the Princeton Club in New York. The subject was “best practices in raising assets.” At some point in the meeting, I said to a roomful of hedge fund managers that we should all take a consultative approach to selling our strategies, a suggestion that made the audience bristle. To remind you, the consultative approach suggests the best salespeople uncover the customer’s business problem through effective questioning, diagnose causes and consequences, and recommend solutions that will take away the pain.

But, as I was told, in raising assets for alternative investment strategies, this approach may not work, and in fact could be irrelevant. The problem potential investors have is patently obvious: they want to increase return and lower risk. And, I was told, they will almost certainly refuse to tell you anything about their portfolio of investments, thereby cutting off the possibility of you conducting an empathetic discussion about their business needs.

If this is the case, and I understand it usually is, then our best hope is to tell our story well and respond to their questions with candor. How can we do this so that we increase the likelihood that we can raise sufficient assets in the required time frame?

The Investor’s Point of View

One way is to reconsider asset raising from the investor’s point of view. At the core of the decision to hire a manager is the question of risk. While the investor will certainly have rational business concerns about your track record, performance, team turnover, etc., they might also be concerned about personal risk. After all, the decision they make will reflect on their judgment, and they may be rewarded for the performance of the manager they hire. This is especially true for large institutional investors, where lack of trust can cause them to delay their decision or prevent them from responding favorably.

So in a sense, we are back to a consultative approach to asset raising. The investor has a problem – he is full of skepticism, distrust, and fear. When we meet with him, it is our job to overcome these obstacles and persuade him that we are capable of meeting both his rational business needs and his personal emotional needs for security.

Persuasion

There are two ways to persuade people. The first is by using conventional rhetoric, which is what most executives are trained in. It’s an intellectual process – you build your case by giving statistics and facts and quotes from authorities. It’s what we do with our pitch books. But there are two problems with rhetoric. First, the people you’re talking to have their own set of authorities, statistics, and experiences. While you’re trying to persuade them, they are arguing with you in their heads. They’re questioning your selection and arrangement of the numbers. They’re comparing you to the six other firms they’ve been talking to. And second, if you do succeed in persuading them, you’ve done so only on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough, because people are not inspired by reason alone.

The other way to persuade people, and ultimately a much more powerful way, is by uniting your strategy with an emotion. The best way to do that is by telling a compelling story – about yourself, your strategy, the founding of your fund, and all the obstacles you’ve overcome, and continue to overcome, as you strive to serve the needs of your investors.

In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling but you also arouse your listener’s emotions and energy. The story you tell about your approach can communicate who you are, where you come from, where you’re going, what you believe, all in a vivid way that will enable your listeners to connect with you.

Persuading with a story is hard. Any intelligent person can sit down and make lists. A standard recitation of the fund’s history, staff, approach and accomplishments may be traditional, but your audience might very well find it repetitive and indistinguishable from hundreds of others they’ve experienced. It takes rationality but little creativity to design an argument using conventional rhetoric.

However, it demands vivid insight and storytelling skill to present an idea that packs enough emotional power to be memorable. If you can harness imagination and the principles of a well-told story, then you get people to truly listen, nod their heads and reach across the table to shake your hand, rather than sitting there slouching toward indifference as you round up the usual facts and figures.

Telling the Story Face-to-Face

The interesting thing is whatever you do in a face-to-face meeting with potential investors, you and your strategy become a story. While they’re listening, they’re telling themselves a story about you. When you leave, they tell others the story of your meeting. You become a story, filed away in their library of experiences.

Cognitive psychologists describe how the human mind, in its attempt to understand and remember, assembles the bits and pieces of experience into a story, beginning with a personal desire, a life objective, and then portraying the struggle against the forces that block that desire. Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.

For instance, the traditional pitch follows a predictable pattern, and in fact, most funds will make more or less the same claims about their managers, strategies, processes, and teams. This is a safe approach, but not optimal. Instead, you want to display the struggle between expectation and reality in all its nastiness. Tell the truth, in other words.

Most companies and executives sweep the dirty laundry, the difficulties, the antagonists, the struggle under the carpet. They prefer to present a rosy and boring picture to the world. But as a storyteller, a blood and guts guy who’s out there every day running money for his clients, you want to position the problems in the foreground and then show how you’ve overcome them.

The typical positive, polished pitch doesn’t ring true. They know you’re not spotless. They know everyone slants their statements to make their company look good. Positive boilerplate actually works against you because it foments distrust among the people you’re trying to build trust with. When you tell the story of your struggles against real antagonists, your audience sees you as an exciting, dynamic person.

I was pretty upset with myself when I left the Princeton Club, thinking that I’d demonstrated a lack of understanding of the hedge fund market. But in the end, I think I was right. If you take a consultative approach to raising assets and look at the investor’s business and professional problems, you discover several things: (i) they see a lot of pitches that look and sound the same, (ii) they are skeptics, and rightly so, (iii) the decision to hire a manager represents both a business and personal risk.

In the end, given relative parity between your strategy and others, their decision is about you, the manager. You’re the tire they want to kick. If you dramatize the challenges you face, and tell stories about how you overcome them, you make yourself more real and increase the awareness of your alpha. And that should help you raise assets more efficiently.

The 3 Greatest Presentation Skills

SimsBeth — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:30:05 +0000

I came to the career of speech coach and presentation strategist from the world of the theater. I was an actor, director, and writer of plays for 15 years before I joined a consulting firm that served the pharma industry. At this point in 2011 I’ve been counseling business leaders, experts, scientists, researchers, sales people and marketing folk for 21 years.

I have grown.

With my first clients, I was all about the physical stuff, the acting stuff: eye contact, voice and body language. It was all I knew: I had no idea what anyone in business was talking about.

Then I got interested in presentation structure. “Have a grabber,” I’d say, “Something to make them sit up and listen.”

I also found myself urging clients to have a call to action at the end of their talks. I quoted Confucius: “To talk much and arrive nowhere is the same as climbing a tree to catch a fish.”

And of course, I was advocating that they limit the number of points they make in their talks and on their slides.

For ten years or so, these bits of advice kept me off the bread lines. However, there were at least three problems with offering up these helpful tips.

1. My competitors were saying the same things.

2. It felt cosmetic instead of transformative.

3. I was giving everyone the same advice.

As a result, my business suffered, I was frustrated because I wasn’t truly making an impact on people’s lives, and I was bored saying the same thing all the time—which is the curse of the advice giver.

What to do with this mid-life crisis, this search for meaning and integrity? Never mind that I also needed to build my savings for retirement, pay off my child’s mountainous college debt, and maintain my self-image as a card-carrying member of the upper middle class.

I stumbled around for a long time, quite honestly, holding it together with duct tape and chewing gum. But I think I may have stumbled on a few ideas that could restore my sense of self-worth. Let me explain.

It is my belief that presentation skills get greater as they become more meaningful for the audience. This means that a presentation skill that makes the speaker look good is not as great as a presentation skill that benefits the audience.

Many skills that are taught by the likes of me are cosmetic, more packaging for the speaker than meaningful contribution to the audience. This is not to say that packaging is unimportant. It is important for the speaker because it helps to predispose the audience to see the speaker as a trustworthy source of information. An example of packaging you may have heard is the injunction to dress for the job you want, not the job you have.

Cosmetics such as this do nothing to strengthen the actual intellectual , emotional, or ethical appeal of the speaker. In fact, they make it harder for the audience to discern the truth. And when such packaging overpromises and under-delivers, trust is broken, the speaker loses influence, and the audience looks elsewhere for meaningful value.

Should the speaker wear more humble clothing and lose his chance to shine? No, not at all. Looking good is a good presentation skill, but it’s not a great one because it benefits the speaker and not the audience. A great presentation skill provides a meaningful contribution to the audience. The improved image, authority and influence of the speaker is a by-product of that contribution.

So here’s the question. Whether as a leader, sales person, researcher, or influencer of any kind…what are the great presentation skills that one must demonstrate in order to make a meaningful contribution to an audience?

The speaker must:

1. Take apart the thinking of the audience on a given topic and rearrange it so that it’s new, improved, and widely embraced by the audience.

2. Move the audience out of a state of contemplation and into a state of action or preparation for action.

3. Give himself so generously and authentically to the audience, and create such a memorable experience for them, that he forges a personal bond with the majority of his listeners.

Please keep in mind that I do not claim these are ironclad laws of the presentation platform. Rather, they are my attempt to define great presentation skills (as opposed to merely good ones), those skills that would enable a speaker to make a meaningful contribution to an audience.

Ask yourself, can you do any of the above three things sitting, slouching, mumbling or standing with your hands in your pockets? I believe the answer is YES. Can you do any of these with poor eye contact, disheveled clothing, and awkward body language? Yes.

Of course a pleasing personality, a lively voice, and expressive, even colorful body language could help. But strangely, such attributes can harm as well, because polished speakers can become slippery ones, and slippery turns people off.

Let me supply examples. Charlie Green of Trusted Advisor Associates took my thinking about sales and rearranged it. I now think of selling as problem solving, as doing well by doing good, so now it’s a lot easier to pick up the phone and prospect.

Barack Obama got me out of my state of contemplation and into a state of action. For me, he was exciting, new, and a welcome change from the previous administration. I was against him at first because of his lack of experience, but he got me fired up, and out of my seat. I took action.

Beth Frates is a physician at Harvard Medical School. She speaks on the subject of exercise—her theme is exercise is medicine. Not only is that a powerful idea, but she has all the science to back it up, and the stories to make it compelling. Plus, she’s working on changing the role of the physician from expert to coach, or change agent, with the interpersonal skills to help you do what’s right.

Good presentation skills benefit the speaker. Great presentation skills benefit the audience. I urge you to start the journey from good to great.

Presentation skill: Problem definition

SimsBeth — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:00:36 +0000

Our audiences are interested in their own problems and how to fix them. This is old news to anyone who has studied the arts of rhetoric, persuasion, and of course advertising. If you can define the problem faced by your audience, you build your credibility and engender in them a need – an itch – to solve the problem.

So how and when can a public speaker talk about the problems of the audience? The answer is: right off the bat.

A few years ago at Cisco, the sales organization got together for a major overhaul. Individual sales guys were hoarding client information, which benefited them but undermined the progress of the enterprise and the quality of the company’s service.

Among the speakers was a young woman speaking on a new subject: the data warehouse. She stood in front of a large auditorium filled 99% with men, and said simply, “Cisco, we have a problem.”

You could have heard a silicon wafer drop.

She went on to describe the problem, its causes and consequences, and only after she had finished her problem definition did she introduce the solution: the data warehouse.

There is a point at which the presentation skill of problem definition becomes tedious. But it doesn’t come as soon as you think. If you truly understand the issue, and tell stories that illustrate the problem, then you have got the audience hooked emotionally and intellectually: they are going to listen hard to your problem definition, and your proposed solution.

You may get push back, because every idea gets scrutinized by critics and skeptics, but that’s good – they are pressure-testing your reasoning. And it’s better to get them involved in a discussion than to have them ignore you.

The presentation skill of problem definition helps your audience move forward in the right direction, creates dialogue, and gives birth to creativity and innovation. Plus it makes you look like one smart cookie.

Good presenters are problem solvers.
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.

The purpose of presentation skills

SimsBeth — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:54:12 +0000

When we watch American Idol, we may talk about the competitors’ singing skills, but what we really care about is whether or not they created a little moment of magic for us.

When we go to the symphony or the opera, we may discuss the mechanics of the fingering required of the first violinist in Bach’s B Minor Mass, but what we really care about is the enchantment we experienced, the transport we felt as we were taken out of ourselves by the music.

When we attend a business presentation, we may momentarily think about the presenter’s ease and comfort at the front of the room, but what we care about, and remember, is the value of the experience, what we learned, and how much it shed new light on an issue important to us.

Our audiences want to get our big idea, and have that idea illuminate their battlefield like a flare, so they can do business better, or make a better decision. They don’t give a hoot about our presentation skills unless they’re having trouble grasping what we’re trying to say. They’re looking for an “Aha!” moment, not for body language or eye contact.

It reminds me of my transition from theater into business. In theater we spoke about the truthfulness of the moment, about what the actor was trying to say with the words, about his expression of intention, his ability to be in the moment – responsive and alive to the immediate circumstances.

In business, I was suddenly engulfed in conversations about the mechanics of speaking – how to stand, gesture, move, and use your eyes. It was all about appearing, and not about being – being enthusiastic, being full of conviction, being able to bring new ideas to life.

I recognize that actors have scripts written for them – scripts they memorize, and that they are pretending to be passionate, or ambitious, or sly. So do we. But the audience doesn’t want to see acting skills. Acting skills are a given. The audience wants to be deceived to such an extent that they believe that what is happening on the stage is really happening. That it’s real. We want to suspend our disbelief, and live vicariously through the dramatic (or comedic) struggle to which we are witnesses. Otherwise, without the illusion, we don’t get the emotional kick. When we see the mechanics, the illusion is destroyed.

The art of presenting lies in hiding the art. As long as you can suspend the audience’s disbelief – in other words, get them to believe in you and your message, you’re doing your job.

Your skills are in service to the creation of value for the audience, and like all good servants, they’re at their best when they don’t draw attention to themselves.

Public Speaking: 3 reasons why your voice does not do you justice

SimsBeth — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:43:55 +0000

I can think of any childhood friend and recall the sound of his voice, and I believe we can all do the same. Your voice is an auditory thumb print, and it gets smeared on the memory of your listeners.

Yet few of us are happy with our voices. We hear them on recordings of any kind and we’re shocked. And we should be. A lot of us have voices that do not do us justice.

Here are the 3 most common voice problems that could be holding you back.

Uptalk

Also known as Valley Girl, this is a pitch pattern that rises at the end of sentences that would normally resolve on a downward slope. Repeated, the rising intonation causes the speaker to sound tentative, as though she were asking for agreement. Anything repeated too often is annoying and destracting, but this vocal habit causes the speaker to lose any trace of credibility and gravitas.

Glottal Fry

Again, this is primarily a girl-thing. Not sure why, but it seems to be more common than in the past. A speaker with glottal fry grinds her vocal chords in the back of her throat when she speaks, so her voice sounds like she’s croaking, or frying her voice, rather than supporting it with her breath.

The most pronounced frying comes at the end of sentences, when the speaker has run out of breath to support the sound. I even hear glottal fries on the radio, and it makes me think the mouth of the speaker is closed, and that she’s too lazy and self-important to generate any vocal energy. A glottal fryer makes the listener come to her. She is not making the effort to reach out to them.

Compression

This is a both-sex-thing. And mostly a young person thing. It’s basically speaking too fast, or machine-gun speaking, but it tends to come in bursts, rather than in a continuous flow.

For instance, a speaker could be walking calmly through his thoughts, and then suddenly burst in to a sprint through a particular phrase so that all consonants are lost (burs in oo a sprin through a particular phrase.) Listeners are polite and don’t say anything, but they often have to work hard (offen hata wur har) to decipher what was said (wa wa seh), and while they are deciphering, they aren’t listening.

Again, this tends to happen at the end of a sentence or a thought, and it undermines the speaker because he sounds as if he thinks that what he has to say is not worth listening to and that his inner word processor has lost the functionality of the space bar.

Your career depends on how you speak. These vocal habits make you look bad, and you should, and can, clean up your act.

The psychology of persuasive speaking

SimsBeth — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 19:36:12 +0000

I’m in Athens exploring the origins of public speaking. I’ve always been fascinated by rhetoric, and I’ve finally pulled the trigger and launched myself back into the 5th century BC.

Because Athens was a democracy, they needed leaders who were capable of speaking to large crowds and convincing them to take action together. It was a government that functioned by winning the assent of the governed, just like ours. And public speaking was the primary tool of governing.

They had no radio, TV, advertising, whistle stops, bus tours, microphones, websites, email, or direct mail. Just words in public places, strong voices, and passion for their city and their culture.

The Athenians believed that there were three keys to being a persuasive speaker. The first they called ethos – the ethical appeal of the speaker. We get our word ethical from the Greek. If you are not perceived as trustworthy, you could not be persuasive. David Brooks, the columnist for the New York Times, has said that Lincoln may be the only U.S. President who could qualify for beatification from the Catholic Church. That’s ethical!

The second key to effective speaking, according to the Athenians, is pathos – the emotional appeal of the argument. We get our word empathy from this Greek word. The Greeks believed that people make decisions using both reason and emotion, and that any speech that does not connect emotionally with listeners will fail to move them. Martin Luther King is a good example of someone in our own history who appealed emotionally to our national desire to live up to our own stated values.

Finally, logos – the logical appeal of the speech. You have to be seen as an expert to be persuasive, smart, well-informed, and clear minded. Of course you can be an expert without being trustworthy, and you can be trustworthy without being an expert.

For instance, Gary Hart, the former Senator from Colorado who self-destructed during his presidential campaign, is an example of someone who was seen as incredibly smart but lacking in the ability to connect with people emotionally. Same with Governor Dukakis, who also ran for president. Both of them were logos oriented individuals, meaning that they believed that just because they could prove something to be true, others would accept it.

The study of rhetoric, or persuasive speaking, indicates that logos arguments only go so far. Without trust in the speaker, and with no emotional reason to believe, people are not likely to be persuaded.

Three very large ideas in one short blog, but they have huge practical (and tactical) implications for any speaker.

Here I am in the land of Pericles, Demosthenes, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – to name a few of the Greek superstars who thought long and hard about how to speak, govern and live.

Public Speaking as Olympic Sport

SimsBeth — Wed, 18 May 2011 17:27:23 +0000

The original Olympics were a religious festival meant to occasion the divine spark in man. The early Greeks believed that humans could come close to being gods when competition pulled the best out of them.

They also believed that humans had four fundamental attributes: will, emotion, intelligence, and imagination. These four brothers were most in harmony when forged together by the heat of contests.

Public speaking could very well have been an Olympic Sport, because it requires will to accomplish a goal, emotion to move oneself and others, intelligence to craft a persuasive message, and imagination to see the possibilities, make them visible to your audience, and do it in a novel way.

Scientific Presentations

SimsBeth — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:29:03 +0000

Over the last few years, I have worked to help discovery scientists within the pharmaceutical and biotech industries make persuasive scientific presentations in order to sell their ideas for new drugs to decision makers.

The challenges were many. Often, scientists had to report to their bosses in Europe via video conference. The image projected in Switzerland was a wide-angle shot of six people sitting at a table in New Jersey. It was difficult to know which person was talking.

English was being spoken in a variety of accents. America is blessed to have brilliant people from all over the globe come to work in our pharmaceutical and biotech industries, but understanding each person, on both sides of the Atlantic, through a wire thousands of miles long, was a continual challenge.

When English is spoken as a second language, it is often delivered in the pitch pattern and rhythm of the first language, which makes it hard for us Americans to grasp, and perhaps even harder for those who come from yet another country and whose first language is different from that of the speaker.

Sensitive cultural issues arose. In some European cultures, one does not tell a senior scientist overseeing a vast number of crucial experiments that his presentations are incomprehensible. One calls on a consultant to say such things, if in fact the scientist in question agrees to meet with the consultant.

And then there’s the problem of the traditional approach to scientific communication. The language, form, and conventions of published scientific papers- which spill over into scientific presentations- could almost have been devised to conceal information.

Even in conversation, scientists use words that are perfectly ordinary within science but are simply never heard at a bar, dinner party, or on the side of a soccer field. When speaking to marketers, scientists have to learn to stand back from their own work and see it as strangers might.

They need to ask themselves what is the most significant thing about their research? Is it that they can’t account for 70% of the efficacy since the mechanism of action is unknown? What is the detail, the issue, the problem that will make most people sit up and pay attention?

Many distinguished scientists- Richard Feynmann, J.B.S. Haldane, and Peter Medawar among them- knew how to hold a popular audience, and they weren’t afraid to address their peers with the same vividness and economy. In fact, their fame became inseparable from their gift for words.

Scientists can be great communicators. Carl Sagan, Primo Levi, E.O. Wilson were (are) great examples. They each had the engaging quality of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is derived from a Greek term that means divinely intoxicated.

In order to be useful to their companies, and to society, scientists must be able to sell their ideas. Most scientists can think clearly. Many can write clearly. Fewer are spellbinding on the presentation platform, but thoughts that are clearly expressed, especially in live meetings, have greater potential value, and bring credit to the presenter.

What makes a great presenter?

admin — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:35:50 +0000

Adam Bryant, author of the weekly “Corner Office” column in The New York Times, has compiled 70 interviews with CEOs and come up with five X-factors that contribute to great leadership.

You can find them all here, but I want to share one of them as it relates to this blog: A simple mind-set.

A Simple Mind-Set

There is a stubborn disconnect in many companies. Most senior executives want the same thing from people who present to them: be concise, get to the point, make it simple. Yet few people can deliver the simplicity that many bosses want. Instead, they mistakenly assume that the bosses will be impressed by a long PowerPoint presentation that shows how diligently they researched a topic, or that they will win over their superiors by talking more, not less.

Few things seem to get C.E.O’s riled up more than lengthy PowerPoint presentations. It’s not the software they dislike; that’s just a tool. What irks them is the unfocused thinking that leads to an overlong slide presentation. There is wide agreement it’s a problem: “death by PowerPoint” has become a cliche.

If so many executives in positions of authority are clear about what they want, why can’t they get the people who report to them to lose the “Power” part of their presentations and simply get to the “Point”?

There are a few likely explanations. A lot of people have trouble being concise. Next time you’re in a meeting, ask somebody to give you the 10-word summary of his or her idea. Some people can do a quick bit of mental jujitsu, and they’ll summarize an idea with a “Here’s what’s important…” or “The bottom line is… .” Others will have trouble identifying the core point.

Another possible explanation is that a lag exists in the business world. There was a time when simply having certain information was a competitive advantage. Now, in the Internet era, most people have easy access to the same information. That puts a greater premium on the ability to synthesize, to connect dots in new ways and to ask simple, smart questions that lead to untapped opportunities.

“I’d love to teach a course called ‘The Idea,’” said Dany Levy, the founder of DailyCandy.com. “Which is, basically, so you want to start a company, how’s it going to work? Let’s figure it out: just a very practical plan, but not a business plan, because I feel like business plans now feel weighty and outdated. It seems, back in the day, that the longer your business plan was, the more promising it was going to be. And now, the shorter your business plan is, the more succinct and to the point it is, the better. You want people to get why your business is going to work pretty quickly.”

Steven A. Ballmer, the C.E.O. of Microsoft, said he understood the impulse in presentations to share all the underlying research that led to a conclusion. But he changed the way he runs meetings to get to the conclusion first.

“The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation,” he said. “You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call ‘the long and winding road.’ You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion.

“I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s efficient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: ‘I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.’ That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to their reccommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.”

From persuasion to enchantment

admin — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:07:10 +0000

I grabbed my Blackberry when I woke up this morning and saw that Bnet was promoting a webinar called How to Change Hearts, Minds, and Actions: Guy Kawasaki Speaks on Enchantment.

Guy Kawasaki, for those of you who don’t know, is a venture capitalist and an original thinker. For instance, when people came to him with an idea for a business, he enforced the 10, 20, 30 rule: No more than ten slides; no longer than twenty minutes; and no font smaller than 30.

Now he’s into enchantment, which is a game-changer. Most of us are talking about persuasion, story, brain science, stickiness, and presence. Suddenly we’re into the realm of the magical, the mystical, the enchanting!

It is a great word, one that has freshness and bite, so let’s run with it. But it speaks of the oldest art of the public speaker, the rhetorician, the spellbinder, and rainmaker. The ability to get an audience to believe, to see a new reality in the theater of their own minds, and to carry it with them into action.

You may be familiar with Bruno Bettelheim’s seminal work, The Uses of Enchantment, in which he writes about the power of folk and fairy tales.

Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Bettelheim thought that by engaging with these socially-evolved stories, children would ge through emotional growth that would better prepare them for their own futures.

- Wikipedia, The Uses of Enchantment

We are enchanted by stories and by performances; by the artificial world of opera, sports, and theater. Any story that doesn’t suspend our disbelief is a failure. Good novels and movies are more vivid than real life. They lodge in our minds forever. And because they last, they have a chance to teach us how to behave, how to act. The drama is so captivating, so enchanting, that we are penetrated by it – and instructed by it.

Combined with the wisdom of rhetoric, cognitive and social science, and the art of the theater, the spoken word can also be enchanting. When we learn how to shape our arguments, structure language patterns to captivate the mind, be both conceptual and concrete, and perform like an actor, we can alter reality for our listeners.

Percy Bysshe Shelley said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. I think what he meant to say is that great speakers and storytellers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

They are, in fact, the acknowledged leaders of countries, companies, and institutions, because they are the people who are able to tell the stories that shape their followers vision of the future, and their interpretation of the past.

And maybe even more importantly, the personal story of the leader – his or her biography – very often embodies the values held up by the institution he or she leads. Think, “Obama,” a new kind of President. Think: “Lincoln,” “Mandela,” “Thatcher,” “Reagan.” Their personal stories represented the aspirations of their cultures. They enchanted the electorate, not only by what they said, but also by what their lives said.

The bar has been raised. Kawasaki has done it again – jumped out ahead of the conversation and elevated the discourse to urge us to a higher level.

It’s no longer persuasion and influence. It is no longer presence or power. And it certainly is no longer “presentation skills,” that mechanical, pedestrian phrase that fails to lend any magic to the art of speech – that is so 1980s. No, the new word is enchantment. Can we enchant our audiences?

Can you see it now? A whole generation of MBA’s studying the art of suspending disbelief.

The first purpose of language and presentation

admin — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:40:23 +0000

It is widely held that man is the only creature with language. But that may not be true.

African vervet monkeys are always looking around for danger, and when they perceive a threat, they give an alarm that is specific to the threat.

If it’s an eagle, they give an eagle alarm, and all the vervets take up the cry, and take cover under the trees.

If it’s a snake alarm, the vervets do the opposite. They climb up into the tree repeating the call — Snake! Snake! Snake!

If the sentry monkey spots a leopard, it makes the leopard cry, and the vervets likewise leap into the tree, only this time they go out onto the narrowest, most lightweight branches — the perfect place to be when being pursued by a 200 pound cat.

Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania have even stimulated these responses in vervets using alarm call recordings.

I think it’s pretty clear that African vervets have a language. Their vocabulary may be limited, but their cries perform the same task that our presentations are meant to perform: They get their listeners to pay attention, solve a problem, and DO something specific.

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.

Public Speaking Course in New Jersey

admin — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:41:01 +0000

There are multiple layers of challenges for the business presenter.

For instance, there’s the psychological—the fact that we are all anxious about public speaking, even the best of us. And when we are anxious, some of us tend to become shy and tentative, and others begin to put on a persona that isn’t natural to them. Both of these tendencies are less than optimal.

Then there is the physical aspect. As soon as we allow our nerves to take over, our voice becomes less confident and so does our body language. And that, in turn, makes us even more anxious.

And then there’s the struggle to select and arrange the material to include in your talk. Too much and you lose their attention. Too little and you lose credibility. And while you’re trying to figure out what to include, you have to ask yourself what your objective is—what’s the purpose of your talk, or what you want the audience to know or do.

And in order to answer that question, (what you want them to do) you have to know who they are, how they think, what their biases are, and what motivates them. Even what words will turn them on, and which will turn them off.

And after that, you have to take a cold hard look at your slides, because if they are designed poorly, they may actually be damaging to your success.

And what if the audience asks you a bunch of tough questions about your information or about possible implications of your content? Are you prepared for questions and answers, and do you know how to stay in control in the midst of debate?

All these issues are addressed fully in a public speaking course in New Jersey called Presenting for Results^SM. It is designed for pharma people, biotech, consultants, financial folk, and anyone else who is a “knowledge worker,” which is someone who makes a living gathering and mastering a body of information, making sense out of it, and then communicating the meaning of it so that wise decisions can be made.

It’s a soup-to-nuts program, two-days long, Feb 22 & 23 at the Upper Montclair Country Club on Rte. 3. The instructor is Sims Wyeth. The program is offered four times a year, and has had participants from McKinsey, Health Strategies Group, Roche, Pfizer, Johnson&Johnson, and many other major New Jersey firms.

Visit the website. Check out the agenda. Or give us a call to get your questions asked. 973-783-4205.

The ability to connect with an audience and sell your ideas has an unfair impact on your career. You can always get better at this hugely important skill.

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.

Your biggest presentation skill: Boosting your signal to noise ratio

simswnj — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:15:57 +0000

If you read this blog about presentation skills and your signal to noise ratio, you can make more money, save money and time, reduce your uncertainty and anxiety, and look good in the eyes of others.

When I was in college, I drove a truck full of modern art from a New York gallery to a museum in Tennessee. It was October. The World Series was on the radio. My team, the Mets, were playing, and the signal was irregular and full of static.

It was raining. It was dark. I was on a two-lane mountain road. I had to deliver the paintings by morning. The windshield washers could not keep up with the downpour. The road was twisting and I was fiddling with the radio dial desperately trying to tune in through the static to hear how my Mets were doing.

I was an audience of one in the cab of that rented Hertz truck, fighting to hear the signal through the noise. And I don’t think I’m reaching too far for a simile to say that our audiences are in a similar position when they listen to our presentations.

Our audiences are on a mission to achieve their business objectives. The market is dark and unpredictable. The staff cannot keep up with the constant demands. Our listeners worry about hitting their numbers, managing the budget, and positioning themselves for a promotion. Plus, their tummies might be rumbling with hunger, or their kids are home alone and they’re worried.

They try to tune in to what we’re saying, but it’s hard. We may take too long getting to the point. They get bored or frustrated.

We may start talking about ourselves, or our product, or our company, and fail to relate the information to what they care about.

They will have to fight through the noise of our talk to hear the information that they care about. And they only care about information because they have an emotional interest in what it could mean to them.

Does the information you offer make them more successful at their job? Is it simple and clear? Does it solve a problem? Does it save them time, or help them make more money? Does it make them feel more secure, or less uncertain? And could it make them look good in the eyes of others?

These are the signals that most of us want to hear. Your job as a presenter is to boost your signal to noise ratio.

Do so, and you will make more money, be more successful, reduce your anxiety, and look good in the eyes of the world.

Sims Wyeth is a 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.

Presentation Skills: Stay Tuned for a Month of Presence

simswnj — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:17:34 +0000

Every great store has a theme. Nordstrom’s has the theme of customer service. Starbucks has coffee. L.L. Bean used to be great when it stuck to its theme of outdoor clothing you could pass down to your children.

Sims Wyeth & Co is a store that sells presentation skills, and one item that some customers want to find on the shelf is PRESENCE.

So, I choose as my theme for a month the idea of PRESENCE. What is it and how do you get it?

If you ever had the pleasure of seeing Merce Cunningham, the great dancer and choreographer, you may know what presence is.

Johnny Carson had presence, more than Dave, Jay, and Conan combined.

Bruce Springsteen has presence, even when he’s not filling a stadium with his energy.

And Roseanne Barr has presence–she radiates mischief. Sarah Palin too, although her presence comes more from combativeness.

All of these people have presence—a magical aura that makes them appealing to others. We suppose they were born with it, they did nothing to cultivate it, and they didn’t have to do anything to send it our way. It just leapt off them like light off a mirror.

I will challenge that notion for the next month, until October 15th. I will argue that all kinds of people can have presence, that it is a multi-dimensional attribute that can be cultivated, and that it can be thrust upon all of us by the circumstances of life’s ups and downs.

So my assignment is to answer two questions: What is presence? And how do you get it?

Stay tuned for a month of presence.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching 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.

Presentation Skills: I Hate the Elevator Speech

simswnj — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:40:38 +0000

Browsing the web recently, I ran into a video teaching the purpose and structure of 3-minute elevator speeches.

The advice was sound for structuring a formal talk, but I couldn’t conceive of an elevator speech lasting three minutes.

I could see an elevator dialogue being three minutes long, but not an elevator speech!

Three minutes in an elevator listening to someone trying to sell me on her business sounds like an eternity. Three minutes at the water cooler would be half an eternity. And three minutes at a networking event would be long enough to make me look for the guy passing the little crab cakes.

We all recognize the increasing value of brevity and concision, but three minutes does not feel brief and concise in an elevator, or any other social or public setting.

I recommend an elevator dialogue that starts with an elevator question.

How about this for a starter after you’ve rubbed elbows with (and introduced yourself to) a VP of Marketing. You ask each other questions, he finds out you’re an expert in the principles and practices of persuasion, and then you ask him if you can give him your value proposition.

“How long is it?” he’s bound to ask. If you say three minutes, you’re dead in the water.

You say, “Short,” and begin.

“What is the value of your Brand Directors being able to make their plans clear and exciting to the organization?”

The answer should be, ” Uh…that’s important.”

You say, “Why is it important?”

And he says, “Because it saves time and money, reduces indecision, and gets the whole machine humming — it improves the vitality and energy of corporate life.”

Then you ask, “How are your Brand Director’s doing?”

He says, “Okay.”

“What if they were doing great? What if you could take time and cost out of the marketing process, and at the same time electrify the brand teams?”

He might look at you a little skeptically at that point, but admire you for your enthusiasm.

“I’m not sure that’s possible,” he might say.

And you, taking the bull by the horns, say, “Listen. Every day, information is sneaking off to make babies with other information. The world is overrun with information, and it’s only getting worse. The most valuable thing on this planet is a person who can create a sense of clarity and alignment out of the tsunami of information that demands our attention. The ability to communicate well is a hard corporate asset masquerading as a soft skill. It’s the ultimate competitive weapon. And that weapon can only be developed through training.”

He looks at you, and says, “You really believe this, don’t you?”

You say, “Yes, I do. I’d like to schedule an appointment with you to show you how my company can save you time, money, and frustration, and give you the one competitive advantage that is hard to replicate overnight.”

And more than likely, he’ll say, “Okay, give my assistant a call and get it on the books.”

How long was that? A minute and 10 seconds. And it wasn’t a monologue. Yes, it had a speechy part, but it was based on asking questions, listening, and asking follow up questions. And only once, when he tried to dismiss the argument, did you get on your high horse and get salesy.

The world has hype-fatigue. Engage in dialogue. Don’t make speeches in elevators.

Presentation Skills: Your Passport to Promotion: “1, 2, 3…Poof!”

simswnj — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:46:33 +0000

I had an interesting session with a new client. Let’s call her Fiona. She came in from the field to take a position in marketing with a major pharma, and has discovered that, at her company, your career depends largely on how you present.

Amazingly, they don’t offer any developmental support for people coming into the job. But she pushed her boss for help, and he relented.

Here’s a rough summary of what I learned about her experience in pharma marketing. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have not heard this before, and I have been deep into pharma marketing for 20 years.

1. Everyone wants to get promoted. The easiest way to get promoted is to get visibility in front of senior people. And the easiest way to get visibility is to present to them.

2. If you’re not a good presenter, your boss will know it and will be reluctant to stand you up in front of the senior execs. She could be afraid it will hurt your career chances and her image as an up-and-coming executive who is the fire under a red-hot group of high achievers.

3. Presenting marketing information internally is essentially selling ideas, and if you can’t get listeners to understand and believe in your idea, they are unlikely to see you as a good marketer, even though your ideas may be strong.

4. Finally, everyone listening to your presentation is so busy that they don’t want presentations to go on for too long, and therefore they don’t ask questions. They’re afraid of being seen as the “problem” person, or the “know-it-all” who makes everyone else look bad. She said the preferred method of presenting is, “1, 2, 3…Poof!”

This means that you show your slide, say up to three things about it in a confident voice, and then move to the next slide (as in “Poof. It’s gone!”) Everyone will be pleased that you got through your material quickly, and displayed confidence and conviction as you spoke.

5. Finally, while every product and market is different, the process of marketing is the same across brands. This causes many presentations to look and sound the same, i.e., they’re boring. So listeners like it when you’re articulate, energetic, and concise because you save them from the embarrassment of falling asleep.

She says you’re especially valued if you have a highly expressive voice.

Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun in this big pharma. But if you want the rewards–the promotion and the fatter check– you gotta sing for your supper.

And the name of the song you have to sing? “1, 2, 3…Poof!”

Presentation Skills: Acceptance Speech Tips

simswnj — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:28:57 +0000

Thank Your Wife

My father and I graduated from the same high school, 25 years apart. This past weekend we went to our reunion and watched as one of Dad’s classmates won the lifetime achievement award for his work in cancer research.

The winner was a distinguished gent, a good friend of my father, and a slow, but charming speaker. He told funny stories of his time at the school, and only at the end did he mention his work.

I happen to know, thanks to Dad, that the prize winner’s wife has been a a tower of strength over the years, but he never mentioned her as he recounted the story of his career. There she was, sitting in the front row, but not a single acknowledgment came her way.

The speech was largely well-received, and I certainly enjoyed the stories, but it would have been even better if it had included a gracious and loving tip of the hat to his spouse of sixty-odd years.

Such a remark would have alerted the audience that she was present in the hall, and would have made the remarkable accomplishments of the speaker’s professional life even more salient by drawing attention to his personal graciousness and private character.