Competences in Public Speaking: Stagecraft

00:02 Stagecraft. It's very important when you're giving a speech to focus not just on what you're saying, but how you're saying it.

00:11 Because look at me right now as if I'm leaning on a lectern.

00:15 Now, we've seen speakers like that.

00:16 They lean on a lectern, or they're grabbing their lectern.

00:20 And sometimes you feel like it would be pried out of their hands to get them off the stage. It is critically important to know how you're looking and how you're coming across at all times when you're presenting in front of people because you're going to have a great message.

00:37 But for example, if I'm like this the whole time, and I'm unaware of it, you're going to think, Oh, is he riding a motorcycle earlier it was in a wind tunnel.

00:47 All those thoughts are going to just waste time and preoccupy people. It's not that you have to be in a business suit or in a suit at all, but how you dress needs to send the message of what you're about. It needs to be consistent with who you are and what you're about.

01:05 If you're some young 28 year old tech guru, tech billionaire.

01:10 You don't want to wear a suit. You probably want to be in a jeans and t shirt and a hoodie. So you've always got to think about your dress and everything you're doing with your body or not doing with your body.

01:21 I've seen speakers do this the whole time.

01:23 They're speaking as if they're thinking, Gosh, I wish I didn't have a wedding ring on.

01:28 Look at all the attractive people in the audience.

01:30 That sends the wrong message.

01:32 Now, the biggest problem most people have when they're presenting is not that they're pacing or doing something fidgety, it's that they're just doing this the whole time.

01:41 And next slide, as you can see on this slide here, our fourth quarter results were 2% higher than expected.

01:49 And really nothing is moving the whole half an hour speech other than my lip.

01:54 It puts people to sleep.

01:57 It's boring and it makes you look scared.

02:01 It makes you look frozen stiff, uncomfortable.

02:04 And if you're uncomfortable, it makes the audience uncomfortable.

02:09 Now, I'm not suggesting you're so comfortable.

02:10 You put your feet up on the table, but you need to give people the sense that you're happy to be there, you're excited about this, you're happy to talk to them.

02:20 And when people are excited about something, they generally move.

02:24 Now, you don't necessarily have to run all around the room like the old Phil Donahue show, the host.

02:31 But in general, most of the time, more movement is good as long as you're not seen as pacing back and forth and doing something in a rhythmic way.

02:43 But if you ever go to a large convention, and they have a first class professional public speaker, they're going to use the whole stage now. There will be many times when they stop for an important point pause.

02:59 There's no movement, but it's all thought out.

03:03 It's all planned.

03:04 It's not random.

03:06 They're doing it on purpose to further their communication.

03:11 And if they want to think and reflect, they'll walk a little bit over here.

03:15 Now, I'm not going to walk too much here because I have one camera on me.

03:19 But for a speech or presentation, I'll try to use the whole stage or the whole front of the room, or in many cases, let's say it's a classroom style setting and a corporation or university or government office.

03:32 I'll start at the back, move all around the room.

03:37 Here's why it's important.

03:38 There are two main reasons.

03:39 Number one, it's just a lot harder for the audience to fall asleep if their head is moving.

03:46 If they have to move their head to follow you, it's harder to fall asleep.

03:52 The second thing is, when you are moving around, you're sending a very clear signal to the audience that, Hey, everybody, I'm not going to be one of these boring hack speakers like the other speakers we've seen today who get up behind a lectern and are just looking at notes or pushing a button staring at a PowerPoint slide.

04:14 You're sending a very clear message that you're much more confident than other speakers, that you're going to be more interesting, that you're more captivating and that you're not reading.

04:25 One of the biggest pet peeves most audience members have is when a speaker stands up and starts reading, Good morning.

04:34 My name is T.J.

04:36 Walker. I'm president of Media Training Worldwide.

04:39 I'm very happy to be here.

04:41 Oh, really? You really have to read that.

04:44 You're happy to be. And yet I've seen it.

04:47 I know you've seen it.

04:49 And it's just deadly dull.

04:53 So you had to be very, very concerned about every aspect of stagecraft, that means.

05:00 What you're doing with your body, not doing with your body, what you're doing with your voice, not doing with your voice, what you're doing with your eyes and what you're not doing with your eyes.

05:11 If you're staring at notes, staring at bullet points, guess what? You are ignoring your audience.

05:18 Your relationship with your audience is like any other relationship in life.

05:23 If you ignore someone, they tend to ignore you back.

05:26 There's reciprocity.

05:27 So if you're ignoring the audience, audiences have a great mechanism for dealing with that. It's called Let me check my email, sports scores and stock price.

05:39 That's people's reaction to being ignored.

05:41 So you need to be looking at your audience members at least 95% of the time.

05:47 Nothing wrong with looking at notes occasionally, but your notes should be limited to a single sheet of paper.

05:56 If you have more than a single sheet of paper, chances are you're trying to cram way too much information, way too many message points to your audience.

06:05 Now, when you have your notes limited to a page, and you have stories for each one of your points, that's what frees you up to walk around.

06:13 You can now walk around the room because you're used to telling a particular story. It's easy for you, and it allows you to have good eye contact.

06:25 Speaking of eye contact, there's basically three types of eye contact in the world.

06:32 There's the bottom sort of 5% of speech.

06:35 And these are rough approximations.

06:36 Bottom 5% of speakers, they're staring at their notes, staring at the PowerPoint.

06:41 They're looking at a clock over someone's head.

06:43 And if you're on the audience in the front row, back row, you feel like that speaker never saw you.

06:49 You feel like you could stand up, light your hair on fire, and that speaker wouldn't notice because they're just going to keep on going with their little presentation.

06:57 That's the bottom five.

07:00 Now, the next sort of 94.9% of speakers, they're doing some version of this, the windshield wiper or the water sprinkler.

07:09 It may be fast, it may be slow.

07:13 And they're looking at people, but they're looking at the whole audience the whole time.

07:18 You never feel like that person is looking right at you.

07:22 And because of that, you feel almost like there's a wall between you.

07:27 You're not really talking to you, they're not really looking at you.

07:31 Therefore, you don't really have to look at them intently.

07:36 You don't really have to pay attention.

07:38 It gets back to this relationship.

07:40 They're not giving you personalized attention.

07:43 Why should you give them personal attention? Now, that's not what great speakers do.

07:51 Any of you ever see Bill Clinton speak, by the way? Non-partisan here today? Reagan is a great speaker.

07:56 Most fair-minded people would say Bill Clinton is a great speaker and he's still actively speaking.

08:01 As I record this, most fair-minded people would say Bill Clinton is an excellent speaker, but he does something a little bit different from most speakers. Now, one of my trainers used to work with Clinton just as a campaign aide.

08:17 One day it was re-election time.

08:20 In 96, they'd finished a long day of campaigning.

08:25 Their sleeves are rolled up.

08:26 They were at a table playing poker, having a beer, and my guy Andy turned to the president.

08:33 Yeah, Mr. President, you did it again.

08:36 You gave a fantastic speech.

08:38 You had 10,000 people in the palm of your hand.

08:40 How did you do it? And the president turned it, says, Andy, very simple.

08:48 I didn't speak to 10,000 people today.

08:51 I picked one person in the audience and I had a private one on one conversation with that person for a full thought.

08:59 And then I went to another person in the audience, locked eyes, and talk to that one person for a full thought.

09:07 Now, here's the thing, Andy.

09:08 It's only 3, 4, maybe 5 seconds.

09:11 It's really not long.

09:13 But you look much steadier to the audience, even if you're not giving them context because you're looking at this one person just for a sentence or two. And then you go around and here's the thing, Andy.

09:25 If it's a relatively small group, 100 people or fewer, you can give every single person personalized eye contact.

09:33 Now, if you're speaking to 10,000 people and the light is on you, it still works because you can look 200 feet out there and all you see is a sea of blackness.

09:45 But you can look out 200 feet, keep your eyes in one spot, and the 20 people in that area all feel like, wow, he really spoke to me.

09:54 Guess what? Anyone can do this.

09:57 Absolutely. Anyone can do this.

10:00 And it really changes the impact on the audience.

10:04 They will perceive you as a much more confident speaker, a stronger speaker.

10:11 So let me step back. What did I do right there? I convey technical information.

10:18 Three types of eye contact.

10:20 Bottom 5%, staring at notes, 94.9%.

10:25 Windshield wiper, top 1%.

10:28 Whole eye contact for a couple of sentences, a full thought.

10:32 But rather than just putting up bullet points or putting out the facts, I told a story.

10:39 Now, the story happens to be true in this case.

10:42 It was told second hand to me.

10:44 So the beauty of telling a story like that is I didn't have to look at notes because I actually had a conversation with this guy and he recounted his conversation with former President Clinton.

10:59 So it's easy for me to tell I'm not memorizing it.

11:02 I'm just retelling an actual conversation I had.

11:05 That's what makes it easy.

11:07 And because you're just telling a story, I can look at you.

11:12 I could walk around and look at you.

11:14 It frees up my body, frees up my hands.

11:18 It frees up my eyes to look at you.

11:22 Here's the first thing I do in most of my private workshops with people.

11:27 Someone will stand up to give a speech or do a media interview, and I'm taping it and the light is on. But then I'll turn the light off, but I'll keep recording them.

11:38 So then we play back their first speech or their media interview, and I always ask them what they like and what they don't like.

11:45 They typically mention that they don't like that they seem a little frozen, a little stiff, a little scared.

11:53 So I always ask the same question.

11:54 I'll say, How would you like to see somebody a lot better than you? Someone who's a better communicator, someone who seems more natural, more energetic, and they think, I'm going to show them a video clip of Winston Churchill or Ronald Reagan.

12:08 Instead, I just show them the video clip of themselves when they didn't realize they were on, they didn't realize they were being videotaped because most people, when they're relaxed, when they're comfortable, they become animated.

12:23 Their head moves, their face moves, their hands move.

12:26 They lean forward.

12:28 They're not frozen stiff and uncomfortable.

12:31 So that's the real beauty.

12:33 People think that if you come to someone like me, I'm going to teach you how to act in front of a crowd or act in front of the camera.

12:41 And the reality is, no, I don't teach people how to act.

12:45 I teach them how to stop acting.

12:48 So, so much of the problem people have when they get up to give their so called formal speech is they start acting.

12:54 They start acting scared.

12:56 And when that happens, we all become little bunnies.

13:01 We freeze.

13:02 When you freeze, it just looks bad.

13:05 You look scared.

13:07 You send a message to the audience.

13:09 I'm scared. I care more about me, and you might hurt me rather than helping you and giving you information you need.

13:16 And that just sets off a negative chain reaction with the audience.

13:20 Now, the solution to this and it's the solution to every other aspect of style and substance with your presentation, is you have to rehearse, and you have to rehearse on video, even if you don't want to, because then you can see exactly what you're doing with your hands, body, face, walking around and everything else.

13:39 So please pay attention to not just what you're saying, but how you're.