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In this episode Katie and Carol discuss Tips 4, 5, 6 and 7 from Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership. These tips are are all focused on public speaking, how to do it better and how to be more confident, less fearful, and maybe even have some fun!
Tip #4. Volunteer to be a conference speaker. You will be surprised at how it strengthens your business acuity.
Tip #5. Be prepared when planning to speak in public. Use someone as a sounding board in a dry run.
Tip #6. Join a Toastmasters group. They are designed to help people speak in public.
Tip #7. Use a coach or a close friend to get feedback from after a public appearance. We are each subject matter experts in many areas of our lives. Put your experience in a logical, interesting format and you have a speaking topic. A formal speaking engagement means you must prepare something. And when you are required to put something into a “package” it forces several beneficial outcomes. The early payoff is an inventory of what you know that others may find interesting. This will build your confidence, because, believe it or not, we rarely assess this outside of that rare family dinner where Aunt Mary sweetly asks what you do for a livelihood. That is a good thing – a grasp of what you know and what you can accomplish. To help create your outline see our blog titled How to Outline a Speech. When you find the topic to match the forum, prepare. As you create this content, you are defining your subject for an audience in a way that you do not do in the workplace. Your presentation gives you the opportunity to look at your subject from a different perspective and prepare to defend it. And the pièce de résistance, the thought-provoking Q&A that you may get from an audience. You will gain ideas and subtle areas to extend into for the next speaking engagement. This is a terrific exercise for you to build confidence and become an expert on your subject matter.
Exercise: Sit down with a pen and paper, and create a list of your lessons learned in __________ (blank).
Insert any topic areas, which may include things like:
– managing a career and kids
– gaining sanity in a day full of mishaps
– notes-to-self that I created for being a great leader
– solid strengths for someone to have in a high stress job and so on.
For a work-related area, consider where you have excelled and what others may be interested in knowing.
People love lists. They give structure for delivering verbally.
This list can lead to an outline, a great starting point to keeping your content simple and with a clear flow. Start general, provide a list of tips, and wrap up with advice or a recap of the list.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Hello and welcome to the Skirt Strategies podcast, the podcast to help you get the support, validation, and skills you need to accomplish your goals and really succeed in a male-dominated world, all without having to give up your incredible female strengths.
Katie: We’re talking this episode about a really super interesting topic, public speaking in general. We delve into the book, Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership available at the website and Amazon.com.
Carol: And today we will be talking about tips.
Katie: Specific tips within that book and Carol has nicely compacted four of them together that are germane to one another.
Carol: Yes so this is tip 4, 5, 6 and 7. So tips 4 and 5 are Volunteer to be a conference speaker. You will be surprised at how it strengthens your business acuity and tip 5 is Be prepared when planning to speak in public. Use someone as a sounding board in a dry run.
Now Katie is a public speaker. I am semi-terrified of it.
Katie: You are a public listener.
Carol: I am a public listener. I’ve heard Katie quite a few times speaking and I do know that she practices and she does it in a certain way. So tell us a little bit about what you do and Katie has actually helped me become a better public speaker because she invites me to do these kind of things and I just show up and get on stage with her.
Katie: Well, the more that you do it, the less fear you have. That’s self-confidence.
Carol: True.
Katie: Someone approached me yesterday in a class that I was teaching and that’s kind of public speaking when you are talking to the class but that’s more interactive, it’s not quite like being on a stage behind a podium.
Carol: See, I can do that.
Katie: You can do the class?
Carol: The class– simply and easily.
Katie: He said to me, “Are we going to do anything today in this class where I’m called out or have to stand up in front of the class?”
And I said, “We might, why?”
And he said, “Please, please do not call on me. I have a terrible anxiety. In fact I’d like to talk to you about it sometime in coaching to see how I can address it.”
And he said, “Even as I’m telling you now, and we were in the hall outside of the classroom, he said, “even as I’m telling you now I’m starting to feel my neck get hot and starting to breathe shallow.”
I really felt for the guy but I said to him, “You know, people would rather die in a fire than public speak.” It is one of the biggest, if not the biggest fear.
Knowing that to me is a little bit calming. Maybe it doesn’t calm you down but you are not unusual if you feel that way.
Carol: Right and poor guy. As we say here “pobre tipo.” To be that fearful of it – very difficult situation and for him to ask you beforehand means he knows his fear and he was preparing.
Katie: I was glad that he did that because I would have hated to put him on the spot.
Carol: In a precarious situation.
Katie: I have had speaking events that didn’t go great and I have had some that I’ve been nervous about. If the audience is a little intimidating, I might be a little nervous.
Carol: Katie doesn’t show it though.
Katie: My humor comes in because to me I figure, what’s the worst thing that could happen? When you are sitting in an audience and you listen to a speaker, do you feel like, “Oh they just screwed that up. Oh they could have said that better.” Are you critical of the speaker?
Carol: Never.
Katie: That’s what I tell myself when I’m standing up there. I can say almost anything, and because I’m on the stage, they buy it.
Carol: Sure oh keep that in mind. That’s a great tip actually.
Katie: I don’t know why I don’t sell like fake organic herbs or something that’s really a stretch because really probably would all buy it.
But when you do have the audience’s attention, what’s more fearful is losing their attention. So am I moving along in enough of a pace? I’m very good at reading what’s happening in the crowd. I will usually see firm stares if they are engaged in what I’m saying.
Carol: Oh that always makes me nervous when everybody in the room is quiet.
Katie: They start yawning?
Carol: No I always think, “They don’t understand what I’m saying.” It’s really because they are listening intently but I’m not used to that kind of interaction. I’m used to an interaction where somebody is talking to me and that’s how I know that they are paying attention.
So when they stop and just stare at me –
Katie: That’s the signal, “I’ve lost them.”
Carol: I feel like that. It’s not true.
Katie: No.
Carol: So I heard once and I don’t know if this is true, but if you start to hear coughing in the audience, that means that you’ve lost them.
Katie: Really? What if it’s allergy season?
Carol: Well let’s just pretend like it is. So tip 4 is volunteer to be a conference speaker.
Katie: Why this is a leadership tip – this does amazing things for your self-confidence and your composure. Now you are under fire. You have to listen to what you are saying. You have to sound logical. You have to put together something that you are going to speak about that others find interesting.
Carol: So that’s actually tip 5, which is be prepared. And I think you’ve got a great outline of how to be prepared when you are a conference speaker.
Katie: Well I do one of two things. I either speak spontaneously but I still have outline. I rarely memorize the whole thing.
Carol: That’s a little dangerous.
Katie: Unless it’s – is that angels coming to take me away? It sounded like it. I rarely take a look at the audience and just kind of shoot from my hip. I will need to have – if I were going to memorize something I might have the five rules of women’s leadership and I have them in my head and I can go from that. But even then I’ll give myself little cheat sheets.
Know that when you are watching somebody, do you ever see them look at a sheet of paper and if they do, do you think it looks bad?
Carol: No. If you are standing behind a podium, white knuckled I think that looks a little bit and the podium is shaking, that doesn’t look good. But if they have to reference something, as long as it is not a stack of cards. I always think of a stack of cards being from your speech class in 6th grade.
Katie: My friend Matt Rix helped me with my public speaking when I first started doing it about 4 or 5 years ago. He taught me how to put something together, what a cheat sheet should look like and how you color coding and so I would have, if it’s a story I highlight a keyword that says, “Tell the story right here.” Maybe it’s a wheelchair story, so I have “wheelchair” highlighted in yellow.
All I have to do is look down at that and know now I am at the wheelchair store. Then I don’t have to look again until the end of the wheelchair story.
If you have to refer to it, that’s fine. You just take a minute, in fact there were times when there was a pregnant pause, I look down at something, and I thought, where am I on this? And then come back in completely composed like you meant to be quiet for that moment and people actually like that kind of break in the verbiage. They like that period of silence.
Carol: In the listening as well. And it makes you look like a calm speaker.
Katie: Exactly, so Matt who used to be a standup comedian did a keynote one time. He was introduced so he walks up onto the stage. He’s got a stack of cue cards, like index cards. He walks up. He pretends he trips on the top step and the cue cards go all over the stage. So and he pretends like, “Oh crap.”
The audience is looking at him thinking, “Uh-huh. What’s he going to do?” His entire speech was all over the floor. I thought about emulating that. I think that would be a funny icebreaker.
Carol: But he did okay?
Katie: He had something. So you can speak extemporaneously. If I’m not behind a podium I’m walking either around on the floor or I’m walking on the stage, but I’ve still probably have something somewhere, maybe a small table next to me that has the general outline.
Then the other approach is to have a scripted speech. But if you are having a scripted speech and I did one of these last Friday, it was scripted, but I didn’t want it to look like I was reading. So I was behind a podium. I had everything in front of me. I knew exactly where I could go. I could follow along with my finger but I still talked as if I was not reading.
Carol: So you had prepared. You knew what you were reading before. You had read it out loud. You practiced quite a few times.
Katie: Well I had done that one before. I knew what the content was. It came from a workshop so I delivered it in a workshop before. It was in 2 or 3 pieces. And part of it was a story from a book, an excerpt. So that right there was 3 or 4 minutes and it was the wrap up, kind of on a high note.
But anyway that’s more formal type speaking. What we want leader is to do is think about how they can be in a position where maybe it’s not the keynote, maybe it’s the luncheon that they are offering. Maybe they are the marketing person in their department. Maybe they are a marketing person and they own their company and they want to offer some marketing tips to a client or what a technology person can learn from a marketing person, something like that.
So they write something that’s maybe a little bit interesting. It should be half way interesting. Maybe it’s just about what you do that people would want to know. That’s probably the hardest part of this.
But if you can get yourself in front of an audience of any sort and practice with that, you will find that your leadership skills really start to get refined because now you’ve had to perform.
The other thing it does is if you are speaking engagement is on what you learned and what you do or the finer points of leading others or the finer points of being a marketing expert, something that’s a piece of what you know well, it forces you to articulate it.
Writing an article in the local newspaper does the same thing. But it forces you to have to think through, what am I good at? How do I formulate it? And what would I tell others? When you and I had the five rules of women’s leadership, a month before that we really didn’t have five rules of women’s leadership.
Carol: We had to make that up but it worked out.
Katie: But we knew what they were once we started putting our mind to it. We thought what really are the no gives? These are non-negotiables for women’s leadership? And when we started to write them down, all five of them we would run across, we knew, we felt strongly about, we just never put them in a list before.
What is it that you have that you can put in a list?
Carol: And say the five things and I’m going to mention just recently I was asked to co-present at my association, and this is an association of my peers, and it’s interesting because like I say, I’m not the one who is necessarily get up there alone but because I could co-present with somebody that I really respected and I knew that together we can really bring life to this topic and it happened to be the road for relevance in the association industry.
So we presented together and it was fun and I noticed the audience really getting to be a part of it because there were two of us and she would go through a couple of slides and then I would go through a couple of slides and I was much more comfortable with that because I knew she had my back and I could shine where I needed to.
Katie: That’s a great approach – good tip.
Carol: If you don’t want to do this alone, find somebody to do it with.
Katie: Now something else that I will do is when you are speaking, change the temper of your voice. So occasionally say, (high-pitched) “What do you guys think about that?” Expect don’t squeak like I just did.
And other times you may go slow because it’s a strong point.
Carol: Do you know what? That brings me right into the next tip. The next tip is: join the Toastmaster’s group. They are designed to help peoplek speak in public.
They teach you that with your voice, that you should moderate your voice in different ways because people will, if you whisper, if you say “and that’s how it happened.” People will actually come into the speech and listen deeply.
Katie: (Slowly) Carol, that is amazing. It’s a good tip.
Carol: And I do want to say something about Toastmasters. I have belonged to Toastmasters and it’s a group of people who will make you feel good about speaking in public. It’s usually a lunch group or a small I’m going to say up to 20 people. You go there and you make speeches and they tell you how you did. It’s fantastic.
Katie: For practice, practice, practice.
Carol: And it’s great for anybody in any profession really to get to the point where you can speak in public. It may be one of the reasons I’m not afraid behind a microphone.
Katie: I’m afraid behind a podium. You know why. I carry a stepping stool with me except if I’m speaking out of town. I have to find something because I won’t travel with the stepping stool but I keep one in my car when I speak locally.
Carol: Katie’s 4’11” and most podiums are –
Katie: I’m over 5 feet when I have shoes on.
Katie: The most awkward was when I spoke at my alma mater-my high school for their cum laude society presentation, which thank you, I am a member of. Yeah I know I’m bragging about that and they asked me to come speak to the seniors. They were inducting the seniors into cum laude. It’s a small private school in Kansas City and I told them ahead of time, if you still have that old podium from 19 – when I was there and they did. If you haven’t gotten a new one since then, I can’t see over that one. So I told them ahead of time and they went and got from the gymnasium, one of those stair steppers, the little green plastic step that’s about 4 or 5 inches tall.
Carol: That they use for PE?
Katie: Yeah but like three feet wide. So they put it up there ahead of time and there were 3 or 4 people that were speaking and presenting is headmaster, and everyone of them had to step up. It looked like they were doing aerobics. Well thank you everybody for accommodating me. You know, it’s better than not saying anything. Often if a podium is deep, like it’s a thick podium you can’t see the people in the front row. So there’s no sense in doing that.
Carol: So you speak without a podium whenever you can?
Katie: Or with a step. Funny yet sad in so many ways. And the last tip –
Carol: Is use a coach.
Katie: Use a coach or a close friend to get feedback after a public appearance.
Katie: Now does that make you fearful to get feedback because you might get painful feedback?
Carol: No I’d much rather get painful feedback from one person that I trust than a whole audience coughing.
Katie: I wouldn’t see coughing as feedback unless they were going ahem. I don’t think so. A coach can give you that feedback to help you improve or video tape yourself but that’s really hard to watch.
Carol: Well it’s probably good to watch yourself but I doubt if an audience changes things, having somebody that you are talking to changes thing, so I would think that being in front of somebody live is good and I have to say, I would think that most people that are public speakers do some kind of coaching and they probably wouldn’t mind coaching you around public speaking.
And take the step. I think that’s a good introduction to make anyway.
Katie: One of the greatest things Matt taught me was the format of the flow of a speech and there are a couple of approaches.
In the wheel approach you come back to the center point over and over again. You can do that with a joke? You’ve heard my screw mac and cheese joke?
Carol: Yes.
Katie: So that’s a punch line and I’m not going to tell everybody because I’m going to prompt them to call me and say, “Can you come speak and tell the screw mac and cheese?”
So if you come back to the screw mac and cheese occasionally and maybe the very last thing is so what do you all think of it? And you point to them and they say, “screw mac and cheese.” They love it because you have audience participation. There is a theme that is weaved in and out of the content and it’s just funny and entertaining. That’s a good thing.
Another tip, this is an easy one, buy a digital recorder that fits in the palm of your hand and put it up there on the podium or in your pocket with a lapel mike or if you are doing a more professional one you probably already know this but you can ask the AV folks to make a recording for you or plug it into their system and it doesn’t have to be a good one, but get some sort of semblance of recording. It downloads into an MP3. You can plug it – the one I use actually has a USB port right on it so you take it straight from the recording mode and you plug it into your computer and now you’ve got it on your system and you can listen to it any time.
So I can go back and listen to, I sounded like I was a little unsure about this and this and you can go back and listen to it after a period of time – boy I learn a lot.
Carol: I bet.
Katie: I will hear points that I made and oh I forgot that I knew that. That was a good point. I should remember that, because I think of thing of things when I’m on my feet that I don’t know why it happens, but I will think of things when I’m on my feet that I can never recall when I’m sitting around at home.
Carol: Well I wonder if that’s the adrenaline working while you are up on stage?
Katie: Well I think it’s early onset alcohol induced can dementia. E-O-A-I-D.
So number six is use a coach or close friend to get feedback after a public appearance.
Carol: No I am going to say that in the blog post on Skirt Strategies.com, for this podcast, we are going to put in how to outline a speech. It’s a blog post from our –
Katie: We wrote it?
Carol: We actually wrote that. I think it was you that wrote that.
Katie: Oh yeah.
Carol: So that will be there so if you do have to outline a speech we will post that with this podcast but it’s on a blog post as well.
Katie: Here’s an easy out tip 2: how much of your talk can be Q & A? Let’s say you are listening to us and I can’t think of anything that would be interesting.
Katie: In our book we tell you after these tips, we say sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and write down what is it that you know well and what part of that would other people be interested in knowing?
Just kind of stew on that. For many of you you’ll come out with, oh I’ve done this for 10 or 15 years. I’m really good at it. Then answer the question, who would like to hear it? How can you put it in a framework where somebody else would hear?
So if you can come up with the content, ask yourself how can you make it clear? How can you make it step by step approach, use the outline for writing a speech, but also add a good chunk of it that might be Q & A. Maybe you’ve got 20 minutes set aside to speak to a group. You really only have to speak for ten if it’s a great topic that’s good f Q & A. Have a few key questions ahead of time so that if you are not getting anything, you might be able to say, “How many of you know about blah and blah?”
Carol: You can seed the question.
Katie: Yes and you can start to get them a little bit more involved and then they start asking questions.
Wait for people to answer though too because nobody will raise their hand until maybe 6 or 7 awkward seconds have gone by.
Carol: Interesting that’s a good tip.
Katie: Don’t jump in and save them. Give it a minute and somebody will say something. It’s usually the loud mouths in the group that will say something.
Carol: Katie will say something. The other thing you could do for a topic is do something on a book that you’ve recently read.
Katie: I know some good books.
Carol: Besides Skirt Strategies there are a few other books out there. If you’ve read a good book lately and you need a topic to speak on, talk about the book. What did you learn? What was the theme? How did it come back and what did you learn that you are implementing in your daily life?
Really you don’t need a whole lot. I mean that sounds like a very short outline but for a 20-minute speech you don’t need that much. You just have to keep coming back. Tell what you are going to say, tell them and then tell them what you told them. That’s kind of an outline for a speech as well.
Katie: Let’s say you are the HR manager or let’s say you are the VP of customer care, any of the above, whatever you might be in your organization and it’s probably a small to midsize. We do have some corporate that follow us but for most of you, you are small to midsize, whatever it might be.
Now ask yourself what would be a great book that interests you. Let’s say it is Outliers by Malcom Gladwell. You read Outliers and you think oh this is interesting and you pull from that little piece of information about when you start to become a master of what you are good at I think it’s like 50,000 hours and I think he talks about Tiger Woods and somewhere in your career you just start doing this, I get it. I get it and I’m good at it.
Wouldn’t that be interesting for whatever position you are in for some people in the company to hear? Or for an association that you belong to to hear? Or from a book club maybe you are going to present to them? I don’t know why you would do that but let’s say that there is some group of audience – now ask yourself how can I make this Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers of interest to the people in my department or the people in my company? So maybe your title is, “What the technology sector needs to know about being masterful, excerpts from Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers.” Now you’ve got a source or content and you can really rely on that.
Carol: And you can come back to where they are coming from, your audience as well.
Katie: Yeah because you know them. You are connecting the dots for them from a good book to one that is applicable to them. When you read a good book, you have ahas. I had a lot of ah’s in that book.
Carol: I had a lot of ahas and I have one I need to share with the people who do education in this state.
Katie: You mean fix them?
Carol: Yeah. It was something about if somebody’s held back in school they actually do better throughout school.
Katie: That was in Gladwell’s book.
Carol: We just panic if we pull somebody back but in fact they are probably going to do better in their lives if we will hold them back to get the early learning.
Katie: So true.
Carol: That’s my big Outlier’s piece.
One other thing and we said it before you can make a list and speak from the list. The five things that – the ten things that – if you do that it’s pretty simple to keep up with your speak and get through it.
Katie: People like listening to that because it gives them a structure and they know where you are. So when I spoke last Friday and I will just refer to that one because it’s fresh in my mind, I gave them a little lesson learned, I gave them 11 principles of writing your own wellness story, sometimes it’s leadership story but this time it happened to be wellness story, and then I read a story from a Robert Fulcham book, who wrote Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. He has a story in one of his books that I pull out that’s just kind of a nice little wrap-up. It’s a little bit of a tearjerker and so I told them up front. I’m going to talk first about the big picture about how changes works. Then I’ll give you the 11 steps to writing principles of your own wellness story and then I’d like to end with a story from an author that I really enjoy.
So I said that and then I don’t do the thing at the end where you say, we talked about this, we talked about that. If I’m teaching a class I might because I want them to remember those 11 concepts now maybe they get an assignment or something but I won’t necessarily do that unless it doesn’t feel like it is going to be stilted. Sometimes that feels a little stilted.
Carol: If you wrap with that story that brings it all together, that’s fine. Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them. You might not come back to the tell them what you told them is what you are saying.
Katie: Right.
Carol: You would just wrap with a story and hope that they remembered the rest which is fine. It’s just another way to do it.
Katie: I think we’ve worn everybody out. They are excited about talking or we have created more fear?
Carol: Oh no. Don’t be fearful. It is so much simpler if you do it a lot.
Katie: If you do it a lot. Start with, do it with a buddy. That’s good.
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