Merce Cunningham

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.

When bacon fries, it makes a crackling, bubbling, splashy sound and smells delicious.

When young women fry their voices, they make a grinding sound in the back of their throats, and regardless of how they smell, they are undermining their stature and impact by doing so. 

I am going to call the Center for Disease Control to announce that I have detected a dangerous new epidemic of The Vocal Fry. (Please see the bottom of this posting for a definition of Vocal Fry.)

It has mostly infected young women, and it makes them sound as if they’ve run out of air, and are generating their voices by grinding their vocal chords together.

It manifests itself mostly at the ends of sentences. To me, it makes them sound tense, cerebral, and unappealing. I do not want to listen to them speak about anything.

No doubt this is a failing on my part, but I am confessing now, in public, that The Vocal Fry is like fingernails on a blackboard to me.

I think it’s mostly educated young women, maybe even educated young women from a certain background that have developed this as a fashionable way to talk.

I am going to capture recordings of it and put them up here on the blog, or on my other blogs at www.simswyeth.com/blog or at executivespeechcoachny.com

The human voice must stand guard over the content of a spoken message, or the content will evaporate, no matter how precious it was in itself.

The Vocal Fry has to go.

Definition:The vocal fry register (also known as pulse register, laryngealisation, pulse phonation, creak, glottal fry, glottal rattle, glottal scrape or strohbass), is the lowest vocal register and is produced through a loose glottal closure which will permit air to bubble through slowly with a popping or rattling sound of a very low frequency.

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.