Speaking Persuasively

The essential guide to giving dynamic presentations and speeches

Patsy McCarthy, Caroline Hatcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781865088112
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000247404
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business General

To succeed in business, your message must be heard, understood and remembered. This book, with its combination of practical tips and case studies from the experts, will help you to become a more powerful and persuasive speaker, whether pitching for business or presenting to the Board. As a consultant in speech training, I can recommend it unreservedly.
Clare Willis, Senior Consultant, Speak First Training, London

YOU CAN BECOME A CONFIDENT PUBLIC SPEAKER

Speaking is one of the most powerful ways of influencing others at work and in life. And yet for many of us, speaking in front of large or small groups of people is one of our greatest fears. Speaking Persuasively shows you how to convert anxiety into effective communication.

LEARN HOW TO GIVE DYNAMIC PRESENTATIONS AND SPEECHES

Using real examples, Speaking Persuasively shows you how to hone your speaking skills in business and politics, in the classroom and in the community. It explains how to order your material, attract the audience's attention (and keep it), control your voice and adapt your techniques for different situations. It also includes practical advice on making a successful business pitch, communicating across cultures and handling the media.

Speaking Persuasively is for anyone who wants to become a more persuasive and more impressive public speaker.

Valuable information that will make the first-timer more comfortable and the gifted public speaker more persuasive.
Shari Armistead, Senior Media Advisor to Queensland Minister for Education

Strips away the mystery of the mass media performance. A useful guide for those on both sides of the microphone.
Ellen Fanning, television and radio presenter

1
Getting down to business: Think before you speak

We are all it seems saving ourselves for the Senior Prom. But many of us forget that somewhere along the way we must learn to dance. ¹

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY PRESENTATIONS?

We recently worked with lecturing staff at a large university. They were given the opportunity to present proposals to enhance the quality of learning and teaching within their institution. These professionals approached this situation as an opportunity to give ‘objective’ information. With our help, they realised that they must seize this opportunity, sell their proposals and persuade their seniors. Their approach to the presentation—its preparation and construction—changed completely as they pursued a new, clear intention.

Our term presentation covers a wide variety of instances. We mean any opportunity you get to communicate your point of view to listening others. Any such opportunity should be seized, and should be used to enhance your credibility with those listening, within your organisation or without. The opportunity to share your ideas at a meeting is a presentation; prepare for these listeners with the same care that you would for those in a formal situation where you are the single focus of attention. The opportunity to discuss formally in a one-to-one situation is also a presentation. Joint goal-setting interviews, or discipline or exit type interviews when a person is leaving an organisation should seem spontaneous, but they should actually be carefully prepared: read further into the communication rules which govern such interpersonal situations, as we will not concentrate on them in this book. You will find, though, that many of the rules we give in preparation for formal presentations can be used for interpersonal situations. When you present to a larger group, you will usually feel more pressured than in a one-to-one situation, and that is why we will concentrate on the more formal presentation of one to several in this book.

Most speaking situations have persuasive intentions, even if the speaker is not wholly conscious of them. Speakers who believe that they are presenting ‘objective’ information are unconsciously choosing words and positioning ideas so that they represent their point of view. The famous scientist Thomas Kuhn has argued that even scientists employ ‘techniques of persuasion’. He says that the great scientist transforms what other scientists mean by fact and logic and induces conversion.² This suggests that even scientific reports that appear ‘wholly factual’ are really partially subjective and partially persuasive. With this knowledge in your kitbag, you will be more adept at recognising and revealing the persuasive parts of any presentation, and in pursuing your own points of view with clear and conscious intention.

For example, one of the groups of university lecturers mentioned in the opening of this chapter was putting a proposal to reorganise one of their current procedures. Initially, they felt that it should concentrate on information about how the system worked and how it could be changed. After we worked with them on effective persuasive strategies, they examined more closely the real purpose of their presentation and the importance of its persuasive features. They decided to change the structure and emphasis of their material. They now moved to an overtly persuasive approach which showed the disadvantages of the old system and the possible advantages of their suggested new system.

If you accept your persuasive aim, it can sharpen the focus of the choices you make on what to include in and exclude from your presentation. So, in order to persuade effectively, you must have the right attitude to the material. Before we discuss further this right attitude for success, let us consider how attitude affects anxiety in speakers.

ATTITUDES CREATE ANXIETY

Before you begin work on presentations, you need to examine your attitudes to speaking to an audience, because your attitudes can have a great effect on your speaking anxiety and, therefore, on your performance. Attitudes affect how you see yourself as a communicator and can dominate every aspect of your preparation. Almost everyone experiences some anxiety before a presentation, but your attitude to presentations will either generate more, or act as a brake on, unnecessary anxiety. Try to confront your nervousness, control it, turn it into adrenalin and work it into a more effective and energetic communication.

Some interesting recent research by two American professors, Motley and Molloy, has provided us with some important clues about handling anxiety. The key to confronting and then controlling public speaking anxiety is to examine how you think about a public speaking opportunity. This attitude to the objectives of the speaking opportunity they call ‘cognitive orientation’.³ To understand your orientation, imagine a continuum with performance orientation at one end and communication orientation at the other: those who have a performance orientation believe that speaking must be a perfect aesthetic experience for listeners; those who have a communication orientation consider it important to share their message with their listeners.

‘Performance-oriented speakers are often unable to articulate what the critical behaviours for success are, but they invariably assume them to be more “formal”, “polished”, and “practised” than the skills in their ordinary communication repertoire.’⁴ These speakers assume that their listeners are involved primarily in evaluation.

Communication-oriented speakers, on the other hand, assume that their listeners are ‘focused with curiosity upon the speaker’s message, and that success is measured by the extent to which the listener understands the message and its point of view. Thus minor “mistakes” are as tolerable as in everyday communication’.⁵

It is Motley and Molloy’s belief that public speaking anxiety will be lessened if highly anxious speakers change their attitude or orientation to the speaking opportunity (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Cognitive orientation

After further studies to test this idea—that subjects with high public speaking anxiety would benefit from a treatment program to change their orientation—Motley and Molloy established a training program that successfully changed the orientation of the participants. These participants experienced a considerable reduction in public speaking anxiety. What they have done is to give us hard evidence that you can overcome your anxiety.

This research supports our belief that all of the work that you do to improve your presentation, and any of the evaluation you do of yourself as a speaker, must be done in the preparation stage: once you move into the presentation stage, you must treat the situation as one of communication. Your concentration must be on getting your message to your listeners. All else is irrelevant because you are deeply involved in a conversation. Your goal is to place your ideas before interested listeners in a presentation unhindered by interruptions. As a presentation is just an extended conversation, those listeners will want to feel you are speaking to them, not speaking at them.

In speaking to your listeners, you need to establish a warm rapport with them. The best persuaders seem to be speaking to each member of the audience individually. They show a verve and enthusiasm for their topic, for life in fact, which carries the listener along with it. This sense of excitement comes through in their vocabulary and their mental attitude, but it also is demonstrated to the audience by their physical actions. The term immediacy is used to express that charismatic physical expressiveness which causes an audience to feel the strength of the individual presence of the speaker and warm to it. You need not only to work on your mental attitude and your excitement about speaking, but also on your physical approach to it.

This is a second way to work on overcoming your anxiety and another way to gain an easy feeling: work on physiologically preparing yourself. Relaxation exercises will help you relax physically and thus relax mentally. This approach, like the Motley and Molloy approach, has proven success. In Chapter 4 we have included a full relaxation exercise which you can use as preparation. If you wish to be a polished speaker, it is worth working on all areas of your presentation at preparation time: you will derive the physical and mental confidence you need to become a powerful persuasive speaker in your preparation phase. It is the work behind the scenes, with your trusty kitbag at your side, that will lead to ‘mind over fear’⁶ and your chance of becoming a powerful persuader. Because of this, we believe that Chapter 4 on how to prepare is one of the most important in this book.

Figure 1.2 Performance orientation Communication orientation

Cartoon: Fiona Mitchell

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY COMMUNICATION?

This book is about practice, but good practice is supported by reflection, and reflection, of course, becomes theory. Early communication theorists set up a model of communication that spoke of the source of the message, the transmission of the message and the receiver of the message. On reflection, this model assumes that communication is a linear process: a message is sent and received, and communication is achieved. We all know intuitively that this is not how communication works. This is a too-simple perception of what is a more complex process. Come with us now as we examine some of our reflections on the communication process.

MIND OVER MYTHS

There are a number of myths associated with communication: that it is easy, that a message that is sent will always be clearly received, and a simple cause-and-effect process will ensue. Engineers even designed a model based on machines to explain this complex human process. In this model, words simply represent rather than shape ideas. The scientific approach to our conceptual understanding of ourselves has dominated in recent times, and this has influenced the study of communication. If we try to think of the process of communication as a puzzle with multiple parts, which can be put together in multiple ways to give different meanings, we would perhaps be coming closer to what we experience. Some of the major parts of the puzzle, missing in a scientific approach, are our emotional responses, which often rely on our previous experiences.

This leads us to one of the other important myths that has flourished because of the domination of scientific thought, and that is the myth of objectivity. This notion of objectivity arises out of a view of the world which takes as its starting point that information or facts are value neutral. As a consequence, it is simply a matter of transmitting value-neutral information to achieve good communication. With the rise of science, humanity has become obsessed with ‘factual’ knowledge. However, recent communication theorists, and scientists from many disciplines, question whether it is ever possible to achieve objectivity. Remember that when Newton’s ideas were overthrown by those of Einstein, even the faith in ‘scientific’ facts was shaken. We certainly are very sceptical about the possibility of being objective.

One of the most accessible examples of the impossibility of being objective in communication can be seen in the efforts of the media each day in reporting the news. One media magnate recently went on the record claiming that his papers were completely objective in their reporting of certain incidents. He evidently still believes in the possibility of objectivity and in the righteousness of achieving it. If we examine the idea closely from a communication perspective, we realise that every word chosen and sentence written would have been written differently by another journalist. All words have emotional force and, therefore, each journalist generates an individual mood which accompanies the ideas. It is even more obvious that objectivity is elusive when we turn to the television news media and compare the ‘objective’ reporting of news from one channel to another. Talkback programs such as CNN Talkback Live in the US and Right to Reply on Channel 4 in the UK demonstrate the heated debate which is generated by the presentation of differing perspectives on our complex world. A program which provides excellent examples of this is Media Watch on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which examines stories that have been presented in the media in the week prior to its going to air. It especially examines the way the different outlets have presented particular stories, and reflects on the meanings and ethics of these presentations. By this means, it reveals the varying ways in which a news story can be constructed. By selecting some information, and omitting other pieces, it is clear that different versions of the ‘truth’ can be told.

Pictures do not lie? Even this truism is now questioned. Our attention was particularly drawn to the precariousness of reality by the now famous trial in 1992 in which Los Angeles police officers were accused of brutally beating the black American Rodney King. A home videotape of the beating of King by the police was broadcast on television sets around the world. The jurors in this trial in Los Angeles could be convinced, by an eloquent barrister who justified the verdict they desired, that there was a reason not to believe their eyes. This enabled them to give a verdict of not guilty to the police who savagely beat King. The home video pictures of a savage beating were not enough when the defence attorney used words to build his own pictures of King and the possibly ethical motivations of his ‘honourable’ defendants. With a knowledge of the media, we begin to see how our own eyes and ear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Getting down to business: Think before you speak
• Chapter 2 Getting to know your listeners
• Chapter 3 Persuasive strategies: Calling up the past to make your point
• Chapter 4 Preparing to present
• Chapter 5 Structuring for listeners
• Chapter 6 Using language
• Chapter 7 Using non-verbal language
• Chapter 8 Getting to know your voice
• Chapter 9 Speaking across cultures
• Chapter 10 Using technology
• Chapter 11 Selling your ideas: Proposing and pitching
• Chapter 12 Handling the media
• Chapter 13 Developing leadership through speaking
• Appendix
• Further reading
• Notes
• Index