Welcome.

I'm very excited today to talk about effective speaking in

spontaneous situations.

I thank you all for

joining us, even though the title of my talk is grammatically incorrect.

I thought that might scare a few of you away.

But I learned teaching here at the business school,

catching people's attention is hard.

So, something as simple as that, I thought, might draw a few of you here, so

this is going to be a highly interactive and participative workshop today.

If you don't feel comfortable participating that's completely fine, but

do know I'm gonna ask you to talk to people next to you.

They'll be opportunities to stand up and

practice some things because I believe the way we become effective communicators is

by actually communicating, so let's get started right away.

I'd like to ask you all to read this sentence, and as you read this sentence,

what's most important to me is that you count the number of fs

that you find in this sentence, please.

Count the number of fs.

Keep it quiet to yourself.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

Give you just another couple seconds here.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

Three, two, one.

Raise your hand please if you found three and only three f's.

Excellent, great. Did anybody find four?

Anybody find only five fs?

Anybody find six?

There's six fs.

What two letter word ending in f did many of us miss?

Oh. We'll make sure to get this to you so

you can torment your friends and family at a later date.

When I first was exposed to this over 12 years ago I only found three, and

I felt really stupid.

So, I like to start every workshop,

every class I teach with to pass that feeling along.

No, no. [LAUGH] That's not,

that's not why I do this.

I do this because this is a perfect analogy for

what we're going to be talking about today.

The vast majority of us in this room, very smart people in this room,

were not as effective as we could have been in this activity.

We didn't get it right.

And the same is true when it comes to speaking in public,

particularly when spontaneous speaking.

It's little things that make a big difference in being affective.

So today we're going to talk about little things in terms of your approach, your

attitude, your practice, that can change how you feel when you speak in public.

And we're gonna be talking primarily about one type of public speaking.

Not the type that you plan for in advance, the type

that you actually spend time thinking about, you might even create slides for.

These are the key notes, the conference presentation, the formal toasts.

That's not what we are talking about today,

we are talking about spontaneous speaking.

When you are in a situation that you are asked to speak off the cuff and

in the moment.

What we're going through today is actually the result of a workshop I

created here for the business school.

Several years ago, a survey was taken among the students, and they said, what's

one of the, what are things we could do to help make you more successful here?

And at the top of that list was this notion of responding to cold calls.

Does everybody know what a cold call is?

It's where the mean professor like me looks at some student and

says, what do you think?

And there was a lot of panic, and a lot of silence.

So as a result of that, this workshop was created, and

a vast majority of first year students here at the GSB go through this workshop.

So I'm gonna walk you through sort of a hybrid version of what they do.

The reality is that spontaneous speaking is actually more

prevalent than planned speaking.

Perhaps it's giving introductions.

You're at a dinner and

somebody says, you know so and so, would you mind introducing them?

Maybe it's giving feedback.

In the moment, your boss turns to you and says, would you tell me what you think?

It could be a surprise toast.

Or finally, it could be during the Q and A session.

And by the way,

we will leave plenty of time at the end of our day today for Q and A.

I'd love to hear the questions you have about this topic or

other topics related to communicating.

So our agenda is simple, in order to be an effective communicator, regardless of if

it's planned or spontaneous, you need to have your anxiety under control.

So we'll start there.

Second, what we're going to talk about is some ground rules for

the interactivity we'll have today and

then finally we're going to get into the heart of what we will be covering and

again, as I said, lots of activity and I invite you to participate.

So lets get started with anxiety management.

85% of people tell us that they're nervous when speaking in public.

And I think the other 15% are lying.

Okay? We could create a situation where we

could make them nervous too.

In fact, just this past week a study from Chapman University asked American's,

what are the things you fear most?

And among being caught in a surprise terrorist attack,

having identity, your identity stolen, was public speaking.

Among the top five was speaking in front of others.

This is a ubiquitous fear, and one that I believe we can learn to manage.

And I use that word manage very carefully because I

don't think we ever want to overcome it.

Anxiety actually helps us.

It gives us energy, helps us focus, tells us what we're doing is important.

But we want to learn to manage it.

So I'd like to introduce you to a few techniques that can work and

all of these techniques are based on academic research.

But before we get there, I'd love to ask you what does it feel like

when you're sitting in the audience watching a nervous speaker present,

how do you feel, just shout out a few things, how to do you feel?

>> Uncomfortable.

>> Uncomfortable.

I heard many of you going, yes, uncomfortable.

It feels very awkward, doesn't it?

So what do we do?

Now a couple of you probably like watching somebody suffer.

[LAUGH] 'Kay, but most of us don't.

So what do we do?

We sit there and we nod and we smile or we disengage.

And to the nervous speaker looking out at his or

her audience seeing a bunch of people nodding or disengaged, that does not help.

Okay. So we need to manage our anxiety.

Cuz, fundamentally, your job as a communicator rather, regardless of

if it's planned or spontaneous, is to make your audience comfortable.

Because if they're comfortable they can receive your message.

And when I say comfortable I am not referring to the fact that

your message has to be sugar coated and nice for them to hear.

It can be a harsh message.

But they have to be in a place where they can receive it.

So it's incumbent on you as a communicator to help your audience feel comfortable and

we do that by managing our anxiety.

So let me introduce you to a few techniques that I think you can

use right away to help you feel more comfortable.

The first has to do with when you begin to feel those anxiety symptoms.

For most people this happens the, in the initial minutes prior to speaking.

In this situation what happens is many of us begin to feel whatever it

is that happens to you.

Maybe your stomach gets a little gurgly.

Maybe your legs begin to shake.

Maybe you begin to perspire.

And then we start to say to ourselves, oh, my goodness, I'm nervous.

oh. They're gonna tell I'm nervous.

This is not gonna go well.

And we start spiraling out of control.

So, research on mindful attention tells us that if,

when we begin to feel those anxiety symptoms,

we simply greet our anxiety and say hey, this is me feeling nervous.

I'm about to do something of consequence.

And simply by greeting your anxiety and acknowledging it,

that it's normal and natural.

Heck, 85% of people tell us they have it.

You actually can stem the tide of that anxiety spiraling out of control.

It's not necessarily going to reduce the anxiety but

it will stop it from spinning out.

So the next time you begin to feel those anxiety signs,

take a deep breath and say, this is me feeling anxious.

I notice a few of you taking some notes.

There's a handout that will come at the end.

It has everything that I'm supposed to say, okay?

Can't guarantee I'm gonna say it, but you'll have it there.

In addition to this approach, a technique that works very well, and

this is a technique that I helped do some research on way back when I was in

graduate school, has to do with re-framing how you see the speaking situation.

Most of us, when we are up presenting, planned or

spontaneous, we feel that we have to do it right and we feel like we are performing.

How many of you have ever acted, done singing or

dancing, I am not going to ask for performances now, okay.

Many of you have.

We should note that we could do next year, maybe, a talent show of alums.

It looks like we got the talent there.

That's great.

So when you perform, you know that there's a right way and a wrong way to do it.

If you don't hit your, the right note or you right line at the right time,

at the right place, you've made a mistake.

It messes up the audience.

It messes up the people on stage.

But when you present, there is no right way.

There's certainly better and worse ways.

But there is no one right way.

So we need to look at presenting as something other than performance.

And what I'd like to suggest is what we need to see this is as is a conversation.

Right now, I'm having a conversation with 100 plus people.

Rather than saying I'm performing for you.

But it's not enough just to say, this is a conversation.

I want to give you some concrete things you can do.

First, start with questions.

Questions by their very nature are dialogic, they're two way.

What was one of the very first things I did here for you?

I had you count the number of fs and raise your hands.

I asked you a question.

That gets your audience involved,

it makes it feel to me as the presenter as if we're in conversation.

So, use questions.

They can be rhetorical.

They can be polling, perhaps I actually want to hear information from you.

In fact, I use questions when I create an outline for my presentations.

Rather than writing bullet points, I list questions that I'm going to answer.

And that puts me in that conversational mode.

If you were to look at my notes for

today's talk, you'll see it's just a series of questions.

Right now I'm answering the question, how do we manage our anxiety?

Beyond questions, another very useful technique for

making us conversational is to use conversational language.

Many nervous speakers distance themselves physically.

If you’ve ever seen a nervous speaker present, he or

she will say something like this.

Welcome, I am really excited to be here with you.

They pull as far away from you as possible,

because you threaten us, speakers.

You make us nervous so we want to get away from you.

We do the same thing linguistically.

We use language that distances ourselves.

It's not unusual to hear a nervous speaker say something like,

one must consider the ramifications.

Or, today we're going to cover step one, step two, step three.

That's very distancing language.

To be more conversational, use conversational language.

Instead of one must consider say,

this is important to you, we all need to be concerned with.

Do you hear that inclusive conversational language?

Has to do with the pronouns.

Instead of step 1, step, 2, step 3.

First what we need to do is this, the second thing you should consider is here.