Episode #402: Presenters Who Hit The Mark

Watching the avalanche of speakers to the Democratic National Convention has been interesting. Some really hit the mark and others not so much. What makes the difference? From what I could see they were all using teleprompters, so effectively they are reading what they wrote to us. Some I felt were just reading back to us what they wordsmithed and others connected with us. How did they do that?

Comfort with the medium is a big differentiator. There is also the issue of which teleprompter you look at, because they had them left, center and right. Too much rapid head turning is distracting. Burrowing into just one screen seems to be denying the love to the other areas of the audience.

Teleprompters are set at certain speeds and the advanced models will coordinate with your personal timing. You stop and it will wait until you start again. I couldn’t tell which type they were using, but I would have to expect the most advanced tech was being used for such an important event. Nevertheless, it was obvious that the cadence for some people was slightly off and that may be because they don’t get a chance to give many speeches using teleprompters.
If you think about the case of businesspeople, I would guess that 99.9% of those located in Japan, have never had an occasion to use one. So here is a hint, don’t make your speech your test bed for trying out a teleprompter. Get hold of one early and practice with it until you feel comfortable.

Holding the moment is another skill. Imagine facing an audience of 25,000 people and having your face projected on the most monstrously huge JumboTron screen for the folks in the cheap seats at the back. You also have all of those at home tuning it on television to watch, an audience of around 29 million people, plus all the social media views. That would make anyone nervous, but the pros are not feeling rushed or speeding up because their pulse rate is going through the roof. They know how to hold the moment and build anticipation for what they are about to say. As business folk, we have to have the same ability to hold the moment. Probably we won’t have a massive audience putting incredible pressure on us, so we should be able to manage it, if we do our planning well.

Pausing is a tough skill. You feel the pressure to speak, but the ability to deny that itch is important. By creating a gap between what you have just said, what you are saying now and then between that and what you will say next is powerful. I thought Michelle Obama did a masterful job of combining the anticipation component with her pauses. The speaker’s one liners are like a punchline for a comedian and timing makes all the difference. Too short doesn’t work and so does too long, so it is a real skill to find the right gap.

The key for businesspeople is to programme in pauses at certain points of emphasis in the talk. These pauses will highlight and illuminate the key point we want to make and have it rise above all the other points we are making.

Energy is a tricky beast. Too much and you are seen as verging on insanity or at least hysteria. I recall when I saw Kimberly Guilfoyle at the Republican National Convention, it seemed too much to me. Her speech felt histrionic and just too forced.

Too little and the connect with the audience is hard to establish. Biden and Clinton are both losing their voice strength and it stood out in terms of the energy they could bring to their points.

Where is the line is a good question? There is a tendency to go hard from start to finish, rather than having some modulation. That is easy to say but hard to do, with 25,000 people screaming out, while you are talking. You feel you have to project above the noise of the room.

In business, that is not a likely scenario, so we can have better control over where we insert strength and softness throughout our talk and we should be aiming for both.