The rigid pre-shot routine is believed to help transfer control of the activity away from the cerebral cortex (good for learning new things) to the cerebellum (good for performing complicated tasks under pressure.)

This shift is also documented in an article in Scientific American. However, there are two complicating factors: 1.) The cerebellum is not accessible through conscious thought, and 2.) If we over-monitor our own performance in real time, we run the risk of choking.

So how do you get to the zone of peak performance and overcome your stage fright?  Research suggests that giving yourself one-word instruction (e.g., “smooth,” or, “calm.”) is a good way to go.

“If you use one word, it prevents you from regressing into conscious control, but it’s still strong enough to activate the schematic cue to get that motor program running,” says researcher Daniel Gucciardi.

A good presenter has a routine for preparing early, rehearsing often, and giving herself effective instruction in order to transfer content from her cerebral cortex to her cerebellum.

My advice: Get a routine.

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. 

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Michael Alley 

This approach employs succinct sentence headlines (sentences that make an assertion) at the top of the slide.  Under it, in the main section of the slide, there would appear a visual representation of evidence, such as a picture or a graph.

In multiple experiments, Alley has found that students viewing presentations following this design were better able to recall the main assertion of slides than were those students viewing presentations employing phrase headlines and bulleted text.

An example of a phrase headline would be, “Product safety,” a phrase that contains no information of value and no point of view. 

If the author of such a slide were to use Alley’s “assertion-evidence design,” the headline might read, “Product safety is competitive.”  That is, the sentence would make an assertion, or a point, and then the viewer would be able to glance down to review the evidence on display that supports the assertion.

McKinsey and Co.,  a leading consulting firm, has used this methodology for years, if not decades, as have other reputable institutions, including the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.  

Any presenter whose job is to create clarity out of complexity will benefit from using Alley’s “assertion-evidence design.” 

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/.

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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/.

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No problem.  A little SuperGlue, and now, from a distance, they look fine. 

It’s not so easy with a presentation. I recently worked on an Advisory Board presentation at the FDA.  We worked hard to locate the weak spots in our data, prepared arguments to stress the appealing risk/benefit profile, and told our story to the distinguished physicians on the board.

Leave it to those who treat the patients on the front line to find the weak spots in our argument, and send us packing to get more data to ensure the safety of those they treat.

It’s hard to protect the weak spots.  Perhaps no amount of packing could have saved our African sculptures from damage, given the mauling they were destined to get on their way to the States.  Similarly, perhaps no amount of back-filling argumentation could have saved us from the weakness in our data, given the bruising skepticism of physicians entrusted with the public interest. 

I believe wishful thinking plays a part in these two episodes.  My wife and I were exhausted at the end of our trip.  We had too many bags. They were overweight.  We had to fit the sculptures in the best we could.  We crossed our fingers, and hoped.

On the professional side, my clients and I may have brought wishful thinking to the FDA as well. We were desperate for a new compound to be approved: the company had not had a winner in a long time.  We saw a chance that this new one might get over the hurdles.  We made the commitment, ratcheted up our belief, and began to prepare.  The train left the station, and once it was rolling, we had to keep believing, even when weak spots emerged.

The day arrived, we did our best, but a jury of our peers poked a hole in our claim that the drug’s benefits outweighed its risks. 

Back to the drawing boards we go…for a couple of years.  It takes more than SuperGlue to fix a clinical trial.  

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.

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Who is Gary Forman?  He’s a speech writer, a good one.  I know he’s good because last year I partnered with him on a speech for Endo Pharmaceuticals, and he kicked butt. 

What are Mind Mints?  They are nuggets of observed experience that Gary bakes into rich morsels of insight.  They are short, conversational, intelligent, positive, and practical.  They make you think about speaking in new ways.    

Gary surrendered himself to me one day last year to try out a speech he wrote about kicking butt.  Kicking butt is important to Gary because he dislikes mealy-mouthed speeches.  He is adamant about the value of edginess, verve, and the unexpected.   His speech and his delivery were very, very good.  He kicked butt.

If you want to read some good, short presentation tips about speaking, presenting, and speech making, subscribe to Mind Mints at www.GaryForman.com.  

And no, he did not ask me to write this, and I have no financial interest in his business.

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This article is based on a book preview in Fortune Magazine, Oct 27, 2008.  The book is: Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin.

We admire great performers and often attribute their success to a unique talent they have for their particular field.

The problem is that there is no evidence that talent has much to do with extraordinary performance.  In fact, a few researchers contend that the very existence of talent is not, as they carefully put it, supported by evidence.  If this is true, our naïve belief in this “thing we call talent” misdirects our efforts and undermines our potential to develop ourselves and others.

Thanks to recent findings, we now have a more accurate view of how top performers in any field achieve their remarkable results.

So what do top performers do—to win the prize, earn the money, bask in the glory, get the girl, get the Standing O, and blow away the competition?

They do what scientists call Deliberate Practice (DP).

Deliberate Practice has the following characteristics:

1. DP is designed to improve performance.  It is highly targeted, even engineered to address particular weaknesses that the performer has.  It is almost always designed and implemented by a teacher, coach, or expert of some kind.
2. DP is stultifyingly repetitious.  Most people practice what they’re good at because it feels good, and they do it until they get tired.  Top performers practice what they’re bad at, even though it’s frustrating and humiliating, and they do it to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. They go until they break down old habits, and have to develop new ones.
3. DP provides continuous feedback.  Every swing of the club, every passage in the concerto, every stump speech given, every marketing tactic undertaken, every meeting run– is assessed, measured, compared, and diagnosed for improvement.
4. DP is mentally demanding.  The quality of our attention is more indicative of success than our willingness to endure mindless repetition.  The more we concentrate on the task, the less time needed to improve.  
5. DP is so hard that few people have the stomach.  Most of us lack the desire and the belief in self required to endure the long mental, emotional, and physical struggle needed to achieve world class performance.  This is good news for some.  It means that if you’re willing to put in the work, you won’t have much competition.

The bad news is that most business cultures are not using the principles of DP.  It’s cheaper and less risky to stick you in a job doing things you already know how to do and keep you there.  And the feedback you get may not be continuous, or useful.

Of course, this means that the opportunities for achieving advantage by adopting the principles of great performance are huge.  A few companies realize that.  They embed mentoring and coaching in the culture, use developmental assignments, and put people through high-fidelity simulations.

But if you want to try it yourself, there are things you should do before, during, and after the work.

Before the work:  Set goals, not only for outcomes, but for how you will achieve the outcomes.  Top performers focus on the process, and even on one aspect of the process.

During the work:   Self-regulate.  Be mindful of what’s happening in the moment.  Top distance runners scan their heart rate and breathing patterns to maintain a target ratio between steps and breaths.  Average runners tend to think about anything other than what they’re doing because what they’re doing is painful.  Even in purely mental work, elite performers monitor what they’re thinking—it’s called metacognition—knowledge about knowledge, thinking about your own thinking. 

After the work:  Assess yourself against a chosen standard.  Average people are content to say they did well, okay or poorly.  Top performers are more specific.  They measure themselves against a standard that is relevant to what they are trying to achieve.  Such a standard could be their last effort, or the results achieved by a competitor, or the world record.  Too high a standard is of course discouraging.  Too low a standard produces no advancement. 

What you do with the evaluation of your performance will determine your success.  Chances are your performance wasn’t perfect, and parts of it were unpleasant.  Elite performers respond by changing their approach, trying new behaviors, and getting back into the task.  Average performers are more likely to avoid the unpleasant parts, and go back to what felt easy.

What you want—deeply want—is fundamental to success.  Deliberate Practice is hard.  It demands sacrifice now for results later.  You have to want the results badly to put up with the sacrifice. 

And you must believe in the work—believe that it will bring you the results you’re looking for.   Without that belief, you will not have the ability to endure the difficulties. You will begin to think that you just don’t have the talent.  And when you think that, you will stop working.   And that will be the end of your development.

The price of top-level achievement is high.  Few are willing to pay it.  But most of us can learn how to use the elements of Deliberate Practice and put them to work for our own purposes.

Those who do will stand out. 

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.

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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.

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When we consult Maslow’s Theory, we learn that people have a hierarchy of needs.  At the bottom of the pyramid are physiological needs—the need for air, water, food and excretion.  Most business arguments cannot invoke these as rewards for compliance, or as punishments to be feared if the listener fails to do what the speaker suggests.

Next up on the list are the emotional needs for safety. These include the needs for security of body, employment, and property.  Politicians often claim that certain ideas, programs or “isms” threaten our security.  Healthcare companies appeal to our deep need for well-being.  And business arguments can invoke the loss (and the possible increase) of employment security as emotional reasons to endorse a particular initiative.

The need for love in the business world is the need for social connections and a sense of belonging.  Since we spend more hours with our colleagues at work than we do with our families, this need provides a strong lever for a business speaker seeking to sway an audience.

The workplace is even more significant for us as a forum in which we can earn distinction and status.  Our need for esteem is profound, both self-esteem and the need to be respected and acknowledged by our peers.  It is often said that pay is not the greatest motivator.  The greatest motivator is recognition and acknowledgement.

If we are lucky enough to satisfy all the needs mentioned above, then we will work for self-actualization. This will include our desire to make a difference, to develop our deepest human abilities for feeling, imagination, caring, and spontaneity.  It seems that Apple Computer and Google have marketed themselves as employers where self-actualization is possible—where creativity and “changing the world” are part of the business culture.

All persuasive arguments have an emotional component.   But it requires a deft touch.  If you overplay your point, you lose credibility.  Subtlety and indirectness are essential.

For instance, you cannot say,  “You are a small and vulnerable outsider dealing with a vast, deceptive insurance industry.  Work with us.  We’re friendly.”

Much better to hire a little talking gecko with an Australian accent and get him to personify your company.  He’ll reduce your audience’s anxiety, and build customer loyalty, even while he’s making a simple rational argument that he can save you money.

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.

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This is sensible, since one person, left to his own devices, might occasionally make an error that could be caught if only a group of experienced people looked over his shoulder.

The Investment Committee, as they might be called, serve as editors to prune and shape the creative ideas of the money managers, whether they might have a tendency to swing for the fences, be too cautious, or drift too far from the declared strategy.

The problem arises when a board, a family, or an individual goes shopping for a money manager, and has to listen to the five potential firms describe their investment process. They all sound the same.

Those making the pitch try hard to differentiate their process, but as the old saying goes, most of us are interested in sausage, but few want to know how it’s made.  Let’s face it, process can be boring.

Nevertheless, the financial professional has to have a process, and she has to demonstrate to a prospect how it works and why it’s good. After all, if she doesn’t mention it, the prospect might assume that she doesn’t have one, and exclude her as a preferred candidate.

So how can a financial services presenter make the investment process interesting and a source of differentiation?

The first step is to answer the question, “Why should they care about the process?” This is often the most forgotten component of informal, sit down meetings conducted using a pitch book.

One way to bring an investment process to life is to lead the prospect through a series of questions to determine what he knows about the process, and why he thinks it’s important.   If he knows little, and if he’s unclear about its value, you have opened what psychologists call a “knowledge gap”  which creates curiosity. 

Another approach is to confess aloud that everyone has a process, for good reason, and then paint the picture of what can happen without it. Given the recent collapse of several well-known firms due to lack of oversight, it should not be hard to tell a story that will capture the prospect’s attention.

You may fear bringing fear into the conversation, but fear not. Your brief depiction of what happens when money is invested without due diligence can make your process all the more attractive and interesting.

Another way to draw attention to your process is to FLAG it. FLAGGING is a verbal technique that professors use when they say, “What I’m about to present to you will be on the test.” Students wake up and take notes at that moment.

You can use the same technique to encourage prospects to focus on what otherwise might be a dry recitation of a complex diagram or set of bullet points.

For example, you could say, “What I’m about to tell you may seem boring and routine–you may think you’ve heard it all before–but it is the most important and powerful thing we do to protect your assets and ultimately your purchasing power.”

And then off you go, with the prospect leaning forward intent on understanding how you protect and preserve his hard-earned wealth.

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For men, a red tie does the trick. If you’re not wearing ties these days, at least wear a sport coat you can button. It hides the wrinkles we get in the lap of our pants, and the bulge we may have acquired in the midriff.

For women, lipstick or a red scarf or blouse will work. The red draws the eyes of the listener to your face. I would also suggest avoiding sleeveless blouses and open-toed shoes. Much better to present in a suit, or at least in a blazer or jacket.

Dress for the position you want, not for the position you’re in.

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