The Art of Public Speaking

One can't be a great speaker in the absence of content, I mean, that's the single most important thing, and by that I don't mean content that everybody agrees with, but content that is clear, that is thought out, that's substantive. And the ability to say it has to do particularly with how one relates to an audience, and establishes connection with an audience, and is able to deliver this speech, and to do all of the sorts of things that enhance the communication of the message. And it doesn't mean that one has to be a Barack Obama or a Winston Churchill or a Margaret Thatcher in terms of delivery ability, but at the very least, you want your ability not to get in the way of the message and ideally, you can have a strong enough delivery that it will enhance the impact of the message.

Rachel Salaman: And those are things we can all learn, are they?

Steve Lucas: Well, ideally yes. Some people I think have more natural talent as a public speaker, in the same way that some people have more natural talent as a football player or a violinist or a painter. And it may be that some people don't have, if you will, the natural ability to reach the Olympian heights of some of the great orators, and some people, of course, face the issue of stage fright and they're nervous and they're anxious and they have difficulty relating with an audience, they have difficulty being comfortable in front of an audience, but that can certainly be overcome and people can also learn the skills of public speaking. It's remarkable to me in the years that I've been teaching at how often people say, "Boy, when I was in school," or, "Before I took my speech class, I was scared to death of the very prospect of talking in front of an audience, and now I do it all the time, I'm a teacher," or, "I'm a lawyer," "I'm involved in business," and they say, "I may still get nervous," but they just work through it and it doesn't get in the way of their communication and they're just fine. And those things can be learned.

Rachel Salaman: Well, that's very good news for most of us.

Steve Lucas: Yeah, yeah, for all of us I think. And it can always be improved upon, even if you come in with a great deal of natural talent. Again, there's a good analogy to an athlete or an artist or a musician is you don't just rest upon your natural talent, because that's not going to get you that part, it's still a matter of a great deal of work and a great deal of practice over the years, and acquiring experience. And there's one line that I always liked about writing, by a fellow named William Zinsser who taught writing at Yale for years and he said, "Easy reading is always the result of hard writing." And I think the same is true with regard to public speaking, easy listening is always the result of hard work by the speaker himself, or herself.

Rachel Salaman: Well, you mentioned the importance of content and in your book, The Art of Public Speaking, you talk about how important it is to pick the right topic to talk about. In a work environment, if you have to give a presentation, you can't always choose, so what should you do if you're asked to give a presentation on something you don't feel comfortable with?

Steve Lucas: I think that the issue would revolve around, to some extent, the reason or the source for the discomfort. If the lack of comfort has to do with an ethical issue, that is to say you're being asked to do something or say something or take an approach with an audience that doesn't seem quite ethical to you, telling them that a product is maybe better than it truly is, that would be one thing. And I could see somebody simply saying, "I'm not comfortable with that, I really would prefer that somebody else do that." Now, obviously the constraints of a business situation may be such that there's enough pressure and job performance issues involved that somebody wouldn't want to say that, but an ethical concern is one thing. The question of whether one feels competent on the issue, for example, or whether one just simply feels comfortable giving speeches is a different kind of issue, and if you think that there's somebody else who would be better to do the job, it would make a great deal of sense to me, perhaps, to suggest to one's manager, for example, that, "Well," you know, "we've been working on this project a lot and Sharon is much better informed on this than I am, I think she might be better on this aspect of the topic, and then maybe I would do better on a different aspect of the topic." But if it's just a matter of saying, "I don't like to give speeches," that you have to be careful of, I think, because the research is overwhelming on pointing out the importance of oral communication to getting hired to business positions, to being effective in business positions and to being promoted in business positions. So if you just don't like giving speeches, I don't think that's going to be a very effective response and if you don't like giving speeches, then the thing to do is to acquire experience and training through various kinds of private courses, Dale Carnegie and Toastmasters and so forth, that are available in various parts of the world.

Rachel Salaman: And we'll be getting some tips from you as well in this interview, which will be very useful. Perhaps starting with the planning process, how important is that when you have to make a public speech?

Steve Lucas: It's absolutely imperative. I mean, my three primary guides for being a successful public speaker are prepare, prepare and prepare. That's the most important thing that you can do, and there are all sorts of reasons for that. One never wants to go into a situation, whether it's a speaking situation or it's a violin recital or an athletic performance in which you don't feel prepared. If you're prepared, the chances are you're going to do much better, which is why athletic teams practice and musicians practice and speakers practice. And preparation is not just a matter of rehearsing the delivery of the speech, it goes all the way back to the very first steps of thinking about the topic you're going to deliver, researching the topic, gathering the materials that you're going to use in the speech, organizing the materials for effective communication, adapting your ideas and your language to the audience, preparing visual aids, if you're going to use visual aids, whether they're PowerPoint or anything else, and then practicing the rehearsal of the speech. The rehearsal of the speech is the last step in preparation and it's absolutely crucial, but it's preceded by a number of other steps that are just as crucial. If you don't have something to say, there's really not much – you don't have much to rehearse on in terms of delivery.

Rachel Salaman: So is it possible to say how long it should take to plan a speech or is it, like, how long is a piece of string?

Steve Lucas: You know, a rough guide is something like an hour per minute for the length of the speech. There's no hard or fast formula to that, it's something that I just, for example, in a class with students and they're giving, say, a six, seven minute speech and they want to know how long it's going to take to get ready to deliver the speech, I tell them, you know, "Figure at least an hour per minute." But a lot depends on how fast the research goes and how quickly the ideas of the speech fall together. It can certainly take quite a bit longer than that.

Rachel Salaman: So what's better, writing out what you want to say, or trying to improvise, or perhaps bullet points or is it possible to say which method works best?

Steve Lucas: Both methods can work depending on the speaker. Personally, because I'm a writer and a scholar, I like to write things out so that I know I have thought my thoughts through fully, and when I teach public speaking, I want students to do the same thing. Now they don't have to write it necessarily in a full and formal manuscript, in fact, there are often times I require them to write in outline form, but in full sentences, so that they've thought their thoughts through fully. If you don't do that, you find that you get up in front of the audience and you get to your really key point and you've not thought the key point through as completely as you ought to and then you're unclear, your ideas start to get garbled, then if your audience isn't understanding you, you perhaps start to lose some confidence and things can just, kind of, go downhill. So personally, I recommend working your ideas out thoroughly, preferably in written form.

But you don't want to just stand up and read those words to the audience, that's usually a recipe for disaster. If you're very experienced as a speaker, and you're used to giving a lot of manuscript speeches, you can do that. I mean, one of Barack Obama's great strengths as a speaker is his ability to read a prepared script from a teleprompter, I mean he is, in fact, at his best in that situation and he is remarkably talented at it. But most people don't have that talent and of course, most people don't have teleprompters when they give a speech, and learning to give a speech from a teleprompter in any case is not an easy thing, I mean, I've done it and it's a challenge, you have to work at it, you have to have just the right relationship with the person who's moving the teleprompter to make sure the words are where they're supposed to be and so forth. I mean, it's an art that politicians need in the modern age, but it's not an art that most ordinary speakers acquire. So we have to find out a way to get from that written manuscript, or detailed outline, to something we can use to present the speech in such a way that it will be clear and compelling and animated and interesting for the audience. You can't just stand up and read the speech as if you're reading a grocery list. And each one of us will develop our own method of doing that, and that method can change, it can grow over time, it's a matter of experience, it's a matter of trial and error, and it's also a matter of practice, and one can, for example, to video tape one's speeches, or even one's practice sessions. Take a look at them. See how they sound, see how they look, and adjust accordingly, and one can also do the same thing with an audio recording. But nobody is fully formed as a public speaker their first time, or second time or even 20th or 100th time, on a platform it's always a work in progress, no matter who the speaker might be.

Rachel Salaman: You talk about videoing your rehearsals, what if you haven't got a video camera, should you be practicing in front of a mirror, perhaps, or in front of friends, are there any good ways of rehearsing?

Steve Lucas: Both of those are excellent. One of the advantages of rehearsing in front of a mirror is that you can see what you look like, but the other is you can also see what kind of eye contact you have. And if you find that you're speaking in front of a mirror when you rehearse and you're not seeing yourself, then you know that you don't have a lot of eye contact. And it's a good way to force yourself to speak to the mirror and not just simply read your notes then you'll simply develop more command of the speech and be more comfortable with it as you go along. Same thing with friends, family, anybody who can provide feedback is excellent, and like I say, audio recordings can work as well.

Rachel Salaman: Now a lot of people don't feel particularly comfortable standing up in front of people and talking. What kind of problems have you found that people encounter – how do nerves affect them?

Steve Lucas: Nerves are one of the facts of life with regard to public speaking. You know, there's an interesting study done back in the United States in the 1950s and it's often cited, in which people were asked, "What items made them most fearful?" and more people said they were fearful of giving a public speech than said they were fearful of death, so the line has come about that people are more anxious and more frightened or nervous about giving a speech than they are about dying.

Now I personally don't think that's literally true, if somebody is confronting the prospect of meeting their maker within the next ten minutes, or making a speech, I think they would probably at least try making a speech as an alternative. But there have been all sorts of other studies as well, that have indicated how serious stage fright is, and it's a form of performance anxiety. Speakers have it, athletes have it and musicians have it, anybody who's performing in public is going to have some form of performance anxiety. With regard to public speaking, the research indicates that for some 20% of the population, they have such severe anxiety that it's not necessarily something that can be overcome by a public speaking class or by gaining additional experience, that it can almost become a phobia in the most serious cases. But for 80% of the people, stage fright is a perfectly normal occurrence and it tends to diminish with experience and with practice. For most people, the fear of public speaking is the fear of something that's unfamiliar, and the more experience they acquire, the more familiar they become with it, the better they are able to control their nerves. They don't get rid of their nerves altogether, the aim is not to eliminate your nerves, because the nerves are coming partly from an excess of adrenalin, it's like the fight or flight response that we have in our bodies and it's a perfectly natural response, but the aim is to control it so as to help make the performance better, rather than to hinder the performance.

Rachel Salaman: So apart from practicing, is there anything else that people can do about it?

Steve Lucas: Well, yes, I mean, there are some little tricks of the trade, before you get up to speed, for example, you can clench and unclench your hands or tighten and release the muscles in your legs, you can do this without people noticing and that will help take off some of the extra adrenalin. You know, if you can do calisthenics, that would be even better, but I think the audience would find that a little strange if you were doing that before your speech. Another thing is to be fully prepared, the more prepared you are, the more confident you're going to be, particularly once you get past the introduction. And again, the research indicates that nervousness is much higher at the very start of a speech than it is as the speech goes along. Most people are nervous right at the beginning, and this is – I'm referring to well known speakers as well, Abraham Lincoln was a great orator but he was always nervous at the beginning of a speech. Once he got going, he was fine, so if people recognize this and they're really prepared and they have a really strong introduction, and they're confident and they can get through that first couple of minutes of the speech, they'll soon find that everything is going well and they'll just tend naturally to relax. So there are lots of things that people can do, in addition to acquiring experience. And then of course, the more positive your experience, the more positive your attitude will be as time goes on.

Rachel Salaman: You talk about the introduction there, and in your book you make it clear that the introduction and the ending of presentations are really important, what do people tend to get wrong with their introductions and endings?

Steve Lucas: Well, what they tend to get wrong is they're dull or they don't relate the subject to the audience, they don't let people know exactly what the subject is going to be. Probably the biggest problem in an introduction can be summed up by saying, "If you find yourself talking more about you and less about the audience or less about the relationship between the topic and the audience, then you're probably going to be in some trouble."

The conclusion is a somewhat different matter because a conclusion is ideally it's your last chance to make a positive impact on the audience, but if the speech has been a disaster, you can't recoup it with the good conclusion. And of course, if the body of the speech is bad, a good introduction is not going to save it, I mean, you have to have not just a good introduction and a good conclusion, but the rest of the speech has to be strong as well. But sometimes people just don't put enough attention in to the introduction or the conclusion, and actually if they're going to ignore one or the other, it tends to be the conclusion, and that's because they practice the speech over and over again, and when they practice, they always start from the beginning. "Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen," and they say that so many times that by the time the day comes to the speech, they should be able to get through that and the rest of the introduction very well. But when you practice a speech, you often get interrupted, and you stop and you go back and you work on something, so that the end of the speech doesn't get practiced as much as the beginning. So when one's practicing, one has to be sure that you've worked out the conclusion and given it adequate time as well.

Rachel Salaman: We've talked quite a bit about the importance of the relationship with the audience, in all types of public speaking. What tips do you have for relating to the audience, presumably things like eye contact are really important?

Steve Lucas: Yes, there are really – there are a couple of things that are crucial in regard to relating to the audience. One is the level of speech content. You need to think about what you're going to say to the audience and what it is that you want to say, what is the message that you want to get across, but then you have to think about how you can adapt that message so it will be clear and interesting and convincing to the audience. And it doesn't mean that you compromise your beliefs, it just simply means that you work on finding a way to get your ideas across to that audience. And you can have the same topic with two different audiences and have two quite different looking speeches, because the primary obligation of the speaker is to communicate his or her ideas to the immediate audience being addressed. And that's a matter of content and it can affect everything from the content of the introduction through the main arguments and ideas and evidence and the speech, it can affect the visual aids and how they're presented. It can affect the conclusion of the speech, every aspect of the content. And then there's the matter of delivery, because an audience always sees a speaker before they hear the speaker, and we know that people tend to give a lot of attention to the visual, and a lot of attention to the kind of delivery style and delivery manner that a speaker has. And we also know that bad delivery can overpower good content. Someone who does not establish eye contact with an audience will be judged in most situations as less competent, less dynamic and perhaps even more evasive than a speaker who has good eye contact. A speaker who is dull, who is not dynamic, who is not engaged with his or her material, will be regarded as less credible, less trustworthy than a person who is more dynamic and more engaged with the audience. So all of these things affect the way the audience responds to the speaker, and in some cases, the audience is not just thinking, "Gee, the speaker's not very interesting," they may be thinking, "Gee, the speaker's not very credible, I'm not sure he or she knows what they're talking about," so speakers have to pay attention both to the content and to the presentation style.

Rachel Salaman: And that's something they can practice in their rehearsals, isn't it?

Steve Lucas: Oh, absolutely. Yes. I mean, practicing the presentation style is absolutely crucial and not just the words, but also the pacing and the timing and the use of pauses and the use of emphasis and in an age of PowerPoint, I can't stress enough the importance if, one's going to use PowerPoint, of practicing with one's PowerPoint, which is an entirely different question from what it takes to get – to put together a good PowerPoint presentation, but however – whatever you use in the content of your PowerPoint, you want to be sure to rehearse with it thoroughly. While you're practicing the speech, you can't just think, "Oh, it'll go fine on the day of my speech," because it usually won't if you don't practice with it.

Rachel Salaman: Well, let's talk about PowerPoint for a minute because it is something that divides people. People tend to see it either as a really useful helpmate or as a complete energy killer that sucks all the energy out of the room. What's your view?

Steve Lucas: Well, my – I have two or three views on it. One is that as typically used, PowerPoint is a disaster, and what's developed in the last five, ten years, in the literature and the writings on people who deal with public speaking, and oratory, is the so-called stereotypical PowerPoint presentation, and the stereotypical PowerPoint presentation is one in which the speaker stands up in front of the audience with one bulleted list after another, that essentially recapitulates what the speaker is already saying. The room is dark; nobody's paying attention and when the speaker is all finished, he or she may make the slides available to the audience, which makes one wonder, "Why bother to give the speech in the first place?" And as a result of that, PowerPoint has developed a really bad reputation among people who take public speaking quite seriously. Personally, I think PowerPoint can be used very effectively if, first of all, one uses PowerPoint only when it's necessary, to help communicate the speaker's ideas and secondly, if one uses PowerPoint in such a way as to take advantage of the special resources afforded by PowerPoint. PowerPoint is a wonderful way to help clarify a speaker's ideas, and I'm working now on a lecture that I'll be presenting in Shanghai next month, and I – it would be very difficult for me to do that lecture – it's in English, to an English speaking audience, but nonetheless, whenever you're speaking to an international audience, there are always certain issues of phraseology and nuance in the language that it can be very helpful to have something like PowerPoint to flash the word up on the screen, or the phrase up on the screen, and make sure the audience understands it, or to include photographs, or to include video. These are things that can be very, very valuable, but they should be thought of not in terms of what can be done with PowerPoint, but what should be done with PowerPoint, to serve the ultimate objectives – communicative objectives of the speaker. And then it's a splendid resource.

Rachel Salaman: Now you point out that a lot of speeches and presentations end with a Q&A session which requires a whole other set of skills. What's the best way to prefer for Q&A sessions?

Steve Lucas: Well, the first thing is to take it as seriously as the speech itself, because a good speech can be undermined by a weak Q&A session. After all, you spend a half hour giving a speech, and you spend 20 minutes answering questions, and people remember the speech, but the last thing that will be in their mind is the Q&A session. So the first thing is to take it seriously and the second thing is to try to anticipate questions that might be asked and to work out answers to those questions. I think that's the most important thing. You can't anticipate every single question, but you certainly can anticipate some, and if there are things that are going to be particularly controversial or particularly problematic – imagine that you're making a business presentation and it's a sales presentation and you can – and you know that you're going to get one, two, three or four certain kinds of questions. I mean, you are as certain of that as you are of the sun coming up tomorrow morning, then work out those questions and figure out what your answers are going to be, and then use the answers to plug holes that might have been in the presentation, but more than that, really to advance the points that have been in the presentation. Think of the Q&A as an opportunity to further cement your point and to nail down the support of your audience, rather than just something that you have to go through, 'cause a lot of times, audiences in a selling situation are going to be making their decision on the basis of the Q&A, and that's why it has to be taken as seriously as the speech itself.

Rachel Salaman: Now most people only have to deal with small work based presentations in front of a dozen or two dozen people. What about when you have to speak in front of hundreds of people at a conference, perhaps? What difference does the size of the audience and the hall, indeed, make to a speaker's approach and delivery?

Steve Lucas: Good question, because any physical aspect of the speech to the setting will make a difference, whether it's the size of the hall, the size of the audience, the lighting, the air conditioning, the way the chairs are set up, everything will make a difference. As the audience gets larger, as the venue gets larger, one thing that tends to happen inevitably is that the mode of presentation, the style of the speech gets more formal. You just can't sit on a tabletop or stand around in your shirt sleeves talking to an audience of 3/4/500 people gathered in a banquet hall or a conference room, as you can dealing with the small group in a seminar room, or in a small meeting room. So things become more formal. You also have to stand behind a lectern, and you can't wandering around because you're going to be on the dais and you're going to have speakers on either side of you, and so you're going to have to remain there and you're going to have to have the ability to present a dynamic speech while you're standing in one place and being more formal in your language and in your mode of presentation. Some people prefer speaking to large audiences. I, for example, am very comfortable speaking to large audiences and find it almost easier in a way. Some people, on the other hand, are not as comfortable with a large audience, they'd much rather be with a small audience. I'm comfortable with both, but they really are different kinds of speeches, they're different kinds of presentations.

Rachel Salaman: So how can that actually affect your preparation, what should you be thinking about?

Steve Lucas: Well, if you're speaking to a small group, you have much more – you have much greater margin for error. Small groups don't expect things as formal. If you run into a little glitch with your PowerPoint, if you're using PowerPoint, you can make a small joke about it and take care of it. If you misplace some of your notes, or something like that, you can, with a smaller group; it's less of a problem, although again it can depend. If you're speaking to a small group of six people in a high powered international business negotiation, you'd better not make any mistakes, so I don't mean to suggest that all small informal presentations are not challenging or don't carry the same high risk reward ratio as a large presentation. If you're speaking to a large audience, you have to prepare for that and you have to anticipate that you're going to have to project better to the audience, that your gestures will probably have to be larger, you're not going to be able to make contact with each member of the audience, you make eye contact with certain segments of the audience rather than with each individual and everything has to be a little bit larger when you're talking formally to a large audience. And it's going to affect your presentation, and your preparation, both, no doubt about it.

Rachel Salaman: Well, finally, let's say I have a presentation to make next week to a potential client, and not much time to prepare. What would be your top three tips for me to give the best presentation possible?

Steve Lucas: Well, the first tip still would be to put in as much time as possible preparing. You don't want to wing it or do it off the cuff, unless it's a subject that you've done over and over and over again, and there certainly are people that give speeches on the same subjects repeatedly. A politician on the stump or out on the hustings is maybe doing variations of the same speech and they don't have to have their manuscript written out because they've uttered the same words, they can virtually do them in their sleep. But when they start to make a major policy presentation on a different subject, then of course, they will have things worked out in a manuscript form. There are people in business who work on the same subject, they do the same, kind of, sales pitch over and over and over and over again, and they can do that, again, virtually in their sleep, and they can also do it in such a way that they can make adjustments to the audience on the fly. But if you have a subject that is, in essence, new, and you have to make a presentation in the circumstances of which you mention, the first thing is still to put in as much time preparing as possible and make sure that you have the content of the presentation exactly the way you want it. The second thing is know your audience. This is a key in every situation, because if you don't know the audience, then you're going to have great difficulty adapting your ideas to the audience, so as to communicate those ideas. And the third thing is always to speak expressively and sincerely, and with good eye contact, and those things can carry you a long, long way, but at the end of the day, there's no substitute for preparation. It may require, you know, less sleep for a few nights, and maybe some extra cups of coffee on the morning of the presentation, but you still have to go through all of those steps.

Rachel Salaman: Stephen Lucas, thank you very much for joining me.

Steve Lucas: That's my pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: Steve's classic book is called The Art of Public Speaking and it comes with a range of multimedia material to illustrate the points he makes.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.