Ladies and gentlemen, hold your horses. You may be chomping at the bit, but stay calm. Get a grip and wait a minute for the butterflies to settle. Take a breath. A big breath. One that will pad your chest. One that will protect you from the heebie-jeebies. You are standing in front of a room full of highly intelligent people. You have, I hope, grasped what they want from you–a speech or presentation that will satisfy their need for information, connection, humor, honesty, trust, suggestions, conversation, metaphor, and imagination. They want a speech or presentation that will make them think ..read more

A bearded man with stubble on his cheeks looking like a hedgehog in green pajamas, and with a voice that gurgles and grunts like that of a football coach, strolled up the aisle of the The House of Representatives and got down to the business at hand. The free world is not always so free. Democracy comes with a price. His English was sometimes hard to understand, but he bravely came prepared for our own sometimes difficult language. He placed his text on the podium, and pushed his fingers carefully along the paper, so as not to lose his place. He wobbled his head and spoke of his Ukrainian valu ..read more

“Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” —Sophocles The curse of the advice giver is to find himself saying the same things over and over. I am an advice giver, giving advice to public speakers from rookies to senators, scientists to ministers, CEOs to little old ladies. But even with my wide clientele, I got bored. It wasn’t because my clientele were boring–far from it. It was because I was burning out, and I didn’t know it.  I needed to go off piste, which is a skiing term that in my case means, “I don’t like doing the same thing over and over,” and in your case, “Ski ..read more

If you want to position yourself as a high-status individual with the capacity to lead, consider this:  Power comes from abstraction, not from facts. According to research in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, abstract thinkers feel less constrained by details and prefer higher-power roles. Abstract thinking broadens options, while thinking concretely is more likely to make people discouraged. So, if you want to take a step up the pay scale, envision advancing the company’s wider game plan, and leave the bean counting to others. The key to making big moves, according to l ..read more

Seductive title, right? The assumptive opening: presence exists–and you too can acquire it, turn heads, and own the room! I started my adult life wanting to be a Shakespearean actor—the center of attention, radiating charm and ease. I worked with many acting teachers using many different techniques, and I also worked with many actors, in class, in rehearsals, and in performance.  Let me say this: some actors have presence and some don’t. Peter Brook, the great English theater director said, “One actor can stand motionless on a stage and rivet our attention while another does not interest ..read more

Got in the car and drove to Jersey City. Met with the new President of Saint Peter’s University. Wanted help with a speech.  Big doings. Major fundraising event that night, and it was raining cats and some dogs too. Arrived.  Showed me around. He thought an hour or so would work. Not so much.  Speech not bad, just pedestrian. No time to rehearse. Off to the venue. Danger. First appearance as President. All those wealthy Alums talking about the good old days. I worry the horderves will be more interesting than the speech. It was one of those events where you can’t even hear yours ..read more

You may not have noticed but Vice President Kamala Harris made a pretty good speech on November 7th, 2020. It was good because it got right to the point. She started with the pitch, not with the wind up. She quoted John Lewis, reminding the crowd that, “Democracy is not a state, it is an act.” The speech was about 11 minutes long. It is a very effective technique, especially in business. She took a straight, no-nonsense path to the heart of the matter, which was the real threat Trump would somehow find a way to win the White House.  Most of the time brevity is a breath of fresh air f ..read more

Words are the fuel of courtship.  Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation. Geoffrey Miller, an American evolutionary psychologist, notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words.  And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations.  Why do humans bother knowing those extra fifty-six thousand words? So they can more effectively sort through and impress potential mates, says Miller.  He calculates that if a couple speaks for two hours a day, and utters on aver ..read more

It was raining in the park. Trees were tossing their leaves and the wind was blowing hard.  On Psy Blog that morning I learned that a twenty- to thirty-minute walk in nature could release a whole lot of stress, so I decided to venture into the woods. My wife and I had been cooped up for almost nine months. I was hoping that the woods would work their magic on me.  I walked to the park and stepped onto the trail that wound into the dense part of the scrub trees where I lost the trail in the wet yellow leaves.  In the summer, kids put up jumps for their mountain bikes and I though ..read more

Effective communicators are aware that persuasion is a high-wire act–it requires precision and balance. Or it’s like Olympic figure skating.  You practice your message until you know every micro move you’re going to make, and you pray that you don’t fall on your face on the final triple-lutz. Practice makes perfect, but since there is no such thing as perfection, here are 19 paradoxes all great speakers must master. Be brief, but take your time.  Listeners love brevity, but they dislike people who speak too fast. People who speak too fast are perceived as smart, but they get derogat ..read more