There are about 8000 book titles on the subject of public speaking. I recommend that you not buy any of them without first borrowing some from your friendly local public library. (Here in Boise, Idaho we only have a couple hundred books on the subject.) No matter what level you are at, or what problem you wish to solve you probably can find a promising title (if not several). It’s similar to browsing for cookbooks.
There are books for those starting from complete ignorance of the topic like:
Laurie Rozakis, Complete Idiot’s Guide to Public Speaking or
Malcolm Kushner, Public Speaking for Dummies
Many college textbooks also are out there, but I have yet to see the truly honest title, Public Speaking for Naïve College Students
There are books that address fear, uncertainty, and doubt like:
Ivy Naistadt, Speak Without Fear or
Lilyan Wilder, 7 Steps to Fearless Speaking
There are many books of small numbers like:
Carmine Gallo, 10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Business Communicators or
Mark Wiskup, Presentation S.O.S.: From Perspiration to Persuasion in 9 Easy Steps
For marketing reasons there are never titles that admit that the small number of steps or "secrets" truly are neither simple nor easy.
There are many other books of large numbers (or smorgasbords) like:
Caryl Rae Krannich, 101 Secrets of Highly Effective Speakers or
Mandar Marathe, The Successful Speaker: 273 Tips for Powerful Presentations
Just browse through the contents to find your topic of interest.
Finally, there are advanced books like:
Timothy Koegel, The Exceptional Presenter or
Margaret Ryan, Extraordinary Oral Presentations
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Bad PowerPoint 2: Too Many Tricks and not Enough Preparation
PowerPoint presentations can include neat tricks, like built-in video. What happens when the video will not run properly on the laptop and projector you bring along? The audience gets the wrong message that technology is complicated and unreliable. Before you head out the door you need to try the presentation out to find and fix any glitches.
Six weeks ago I toured the Idaho National Laboratory with a busload of seasoned citizens in a program organized by the Osher Institute in Boise. The morning began in the conference room of the Shilo Inn in Idaho Falls. One of the presentations was about a powerful computer software package called the Robot Intelligence Kernel (or RIK). RIK is an operating system for robots. It gives robots exceptional new levels of autonomy and intelligence. This revolutionizes robot capabilities and the robot/operator relationship. The robots can do cool things all by themselves, like detecting land mines both faster and better than humans can. A simple video-game style interface shows the operator what the robot is doing.
Their video about the Robot Intelligence Kernel would not run at all. Luckily they had brought along a 4-wheeled robot about the size of a lawnmower. Finally they gave up on the PowerPoint and just turned the robot loose. It took off like an inquisitive baby rhino. The robot galloped around the room all by itself, carefully avoiding the tables, the chairs, and their astonished occupants.
If you go to: http://www.inl.gov/adaptiverobotics/robotintelligencekernel/index.shtml you can click on the link in the upper right and see the video they did not show us that day. You can also download and read the fact sheet.
During the tour our guides mentioned that the Robot Intelligence Kernel had won an R&D 100 award for 2006. R&D 100 awards are presented by Research & Development magazine for the 100 most technologically significant new products of the year. The Chicago Tribune simply calls them the "Oscars of Inventions". Our guides never said it that clearly.
Can you understand the following description from the web page? How would you simplify it to communicate with a non-technical audience?
"RIK is a portable, reconfigurable suite of perceptual, behavioral and cognitive capabilities that can be used across many different platforms, environments and tasks. RIK integrates algorithms and hardware for perception, world-modeling, adaptive communication, dynamic tasking, and behaviors for navigation, search and detection."
"RIK is comprised of four layers. The foundation is the Generic Robot Architecture that provides an object-oriented framework and an application programming interface to feed data from a host of different platforms, sensors and actuators into a second-layer set of Generic Robot Abstractions. The third layer is comprised of many reactive and deliberative Robot Behaviors that take the generic robot abstractions as input. In turn, the top layer provides the "Cognitive Glue" that orchestrates the asynchronous firings of these behaviors towards specific application tasking. Dynamic autonomy interleaves different modes of human input into the functioning of the RIK behaviors."
Six weeks ago I toured the Idaho National Laboratory with a busload of seasoned citizens in a program organized by the Osher Institute in Boise. The morning began in the conference room of the Shilo Inn in Idaho Falls. One of the presentations was about a powerful computer software package called the Robot Intelligence Kernel (or RIK). RIK is an operating system for robots. It gives robots exceptional new levels of autonomy and intelligence. This revolutionizes robot capabilities and the robot/operator relationship. The robots can do cool things all by themselves, like detecting land mines both faster and better than humans can. A simple video-game style interface shows the operator what the robot is doing.
Their video about the Robot Intelligence Kernel would not run at all. Luckily they had brought along a 4-wheeled robot about the size of a lawnmower. Finally they gave up on the PowerPoint and just turned the robot loose. It took off like an inquisitive baby rhino. The robot galloped around the room all by itself, carefully avoiding the tables, the chairs, and their astonished occupants.
If you go to: http://www.inl.gov/adaptiverobotics/robotintelligencekernel/index.shtml you can click on the link in the upper right and see the video they did not show us that day. You can also download and read the fact sheet.
During the tour our guides mentioned that the Robot Intelligence Kernel had won an R&D 100 award for 2006. R&D 100 awards are presented by Research & Development magazine for the 100 most technologically significant new products of the year. The Chicago Tribune simply calls them the "Oscars of Inventions". Our guides never said it that clearly.
Can you understand the following description from the web page? How would you simplify it to communicate with a non-technical audience?
"RIK is a portable, reconfigurable suite of perceptual, behavioral and cognitive capabilities that can be used across many different platforms, environments and tasks. RIK integrates algorithms and hardware for perception, world-modeling, adaptive communication, dynamic tasking, and behaviors for navigation, search and detection."
"RIK is comprised of four layers. The foundation is the Generic Robot Architecture that provides an object-oriented framework and an application programming interface to feed data from a host of different platforms, sensors and actuators into a second-layer set of Generic Robot Abstractions. The third layer is comprised of many reactive and deliberative Robot Behaviors that take the generic robot abstractions as input. In turn, the top layer provides the "Cognitive Glue" that orchestrates the asynchronous firings of these behaviors towards specific application tasking. Dynamic autonomy interleaves different modes of human input into the functioning of the RIK behaviors."
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Learning Hand Gestures from YouTube Videos
Suppose you wanted to find examples of an excellent speaker using hand gestures. Where would you look? How about on YouTube. Don’t laugh! At least one member of the National Speakers Association has a series of his brief (five minute) videos posted there.
Alan Weiss is a well-known consultant. You can find twenty-one of his videos listed on his web site under "The Movies: The Writing on the Wall" at:
http://www.contrarianconsulting.com/category/the-movies-the-writing-on-the-wall/
Ignore the showoff opening and closing with his fancy red convertible and white German Shepherd. Concentrate on the talk, and look at what he does with his hands.
Elsewhere on his web site he has a hilarious (and very shaggy) dog story about why the dog is white and can moan. See: http://www.contrarianconsulting.com/the-dog-star-the-case-of-the-moaning-shepherd/
Alan Weiss is a well-known consultant. You can find twenty-one of his videos listed on his web site under "The Movies: The Writing on the Wall" at:
http://www.contrarianconsulting.com/category/the-movies-the-writing-on-the-wall/
Ignore the showoff opening and closing with his fancy red convertible and white German Shepherd. Concentrate on the talk, and look at what he does with his hands.
Elsewhere on his web site he has a hilarious (and very shaggy) dog story about why the dog is white and can moan. See: http://www.contrarianconsulting.com/the-dog-star-the-case-of-the-moaning-shepherd/
Monday, June 2, 2008
What to do with your arms and hands
What should you do with your arms and hands when you speak? Timothy Koegel has some good answers. On page 62 of his book The Exceptional Presenter he says you should NOT let your arms dangle uselessly in front of your body. He calls this the T-Rex posture, and shows a cartoon of that dinosaur in a business suit. Then he lists a whole series of irrelevant hand gestures that can distract and annoy your audience:
Four examples are:
The "spider on the mirror". Fingertips touching fingertips. Try some spider pushups!
The "sisters of mercy". Hands in the praying position, asking for the presentation to be over.
The "fire starter". Rubbing the hands together in an attempt to ignite the brain.
The "hand washer". Scrub up, and finish this dangerous operation.
Later in the chapter he discusses effective gestures. Now, Tim Koegel certainly knows what to do with his hands. If his name sounds vaguely familiar it is because he was the starting quarterback for the Notre Dame football team after Joe Montana.
Four examples are:
The "spider on the mirror". Fingertips touching fingertips. Try some spider pushups!
The "sisters of mercy". Hands in the praying position, asking for the presentation to be over.
The "fire starter". Rubbing the hands together in an attempt to ignite the brain.
The "hand washer". Scrub up, and finish this dangerous operation.
Later in the chapter he discusses effective gestures. Now, Tim Koegel certainly knows what to do with his hands. If his name sounds vaguely familiar it is because he was the starting quarterback for the Notre Dame football team after Joe Montana.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Bad PowerPoint: Rocketdyne Table Syndrome
How can you put your audience to sleep in less than five minutes? No problem! Just open your 50-minute technical presentation by showing a huge table lifted directly from the written version. Then spend the next four minutes pointing to and describing the contents of that table in excruciating detail. The engineer who committed this travesty 35 years ago retired long ago, but that event is burned forever into my memory.
I was projectionist for the opening evening session of an international conference at a mountain resort. Table 1 listed the detailed chemical composition (about fifteen columns) for each of about twenty different metal alloys. Only the presenter could read Table 1 from his viewpoint onstage close to the screen. The audience in the auditorium could not see anything. After less than two minutes they were both literally and figuratively in the dark. Their heads began to drop from a combination of jet lag and boredom. After five minutes most of the audience were fast asleep. Only some of them awakened when I turned the lights back on at the end of the presentation.
"Rocket Science" for Speech Topics
Sometimes we just run out of topic ideas for speeches. One unusual source is from NASA Headquarters - their Work/Life Navigator newsletter. It was a four-page monthly publication issued between 2000 and 2006. Navigator discussed serious issues like workplace stress, but it also had humor, health tips, food for thought, etc.
It is a hidden, noncommercial jewel buried on the Internet. You can find an archive of the last two-dozen issues stored as Acrobat .pdf files at: http://oim.hq.nasa.gov/oia/hqcmd/pasted.html
I found the Navigator when looking on the web for articles on business networking. That search pointed to "How to talk to Anybody, Anytime", the lead article in the March 2005 issue.
(Added May 2010) The archive now is here. This post also was published as an article in the District 15 Toastmasters quarterly newsletter for Spring 2008 with the image shown above.
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Welcome to Joyful Public Speaking. This blog will discuss going from fear to joy. It will include tips and hints, links to articles and blogs, and brief reviews of relevant books.
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