Nancy Bos on Speech + Style: 5 Essentials for Speakers

Take a straw and hand them around. My name is Nancy Bos, and I have been a voice coach for a little over 2 decades and a performer, and I am a harsh critic of presenters. Lisa did a great job. So in my job of voice coaching, I realized there was a tremendous opportunity to coach everybody who's presenting on an everyday basis, whether that's in front of a big audience or around a table people like this. And then when I joined this organization called Business Networking International, where everybody in the room presents every week, I saw the anxiety around it. And I started to realize that there's a real need on a grassroots level for presentation coaching. So for those of you who pay only attention to the slides that I'm going to show, there are 5 great takeaways there. But there are other people in this room who are going to be looking behind the curtain to see what else I do. So things you might want to keep in mind are that occasionally I'm going to introduce silence, because when I'm silent, it gives you an opportunity to process what I've just said or to catch up, and pacing is an essential part of presenting. Another thing that you're gonna see me do every once in a while is that when I'm just gesturing too much and I realize I've got too much passion going on with my hands in front of my face, you're gonna see me put my hands on the seams of my pants, middle finger on the seams of my pants, because that gives me something positive to do with my energy so that I'm not just gesturing wildly the whole time. And then I will give you an annoying look because you all know what I just did. Right. So, you have to judge the room's loudness. I know from experience this room sucks up sound. And so I will sometimes be looking at the people in the back of the room to see if they're engaged, and if they're not, I might start talking a little bit louder just to make sure George stays awake. But if you're sitting in the back of the room and you can't hear a presenter, it's perfectly reasonable for you to go like this. We appreciate that as presenters knowing that we can't be heard. Okay? And not trailing off at the end of your sentence. I shouldn't do that either. So, we will begin. It is typical in a presentation to be advised to just give 2 or 3 points. What do you really want the person to take away from this? And what you're going to find today is that I'm going to present on 5 points. And 5 points in 20 minutes is just rude. I'm sorry. That's a lot for takeaway. The points that we're gonna be talking about are mindfulness, authentic passion, stories, simplicity, and breath. You'll see that I'm going to break these 3 points up into 2 different sections. So starting with Section 1, mindfulness. Mindfulness is essential when you're presenting. So often you'll see presenters who are very mindful of their slide, and they completely forget about the audience there, or even wish the audience wasn't there, because all they can look at is their slide. And you'll see other people that are completely in the future, like, "I know that slide number 23 isn't quite what I wanted it to be, and I'm on slide 12 right now, and I'm nervous about slide number 23." They're not present in that moment. Have you ever been driving down a road and you realize after a couple minutes you have no idea about the last 4 miles? Right? You were so not in the moment. You were in your head. Obviously you were safe because you're here today. But there are other times when we are incredibly present. When I travel, I hear every sound and I smell every smell and I see every color. Occasionally I do that here at home and I'm like, "Wow, why don't I do this at home more often?" to be present in that moment. And right now, here with you in this talk, I'm trying very hard to be very present in the moment, not get distracted by my slides or anything else that's going on. That's what I would encourage with mindfulness. The next one is authenticity. If you're a little odd and you're a little quirky, that is highly memorable. Don't try to be the polished network TV personality if that's not who you are. If you can imagine somebody who's quirky that you love to see present, you probably each got a different person in your minds. That's perfectly acceptable and very memorable. So be authentic. People are fine-tuned to detect if you are not being authentic. That's part of our human skill set that we're born with. For your audience to trust you, they have to see the real you. But an idea that Lisa gave me from her clothing that is so essential to this slide is that comfortable equals confidence. If I feel that I need to be bigger than this room can handle, and I'm going to use my great big presentation voice and puff out my shoulders a little bit, I am not even remotely comfortable, and I can feel my skin's a little prickly and my heart rate has gone up, and I can see in your faces you all just got a little uncomfortable. And that's a great example of comfortable equals confidence. Yeah. Alright, and moving on to the third point: stories. I have a pastor at my church who during her speech classes in seminary learned to become an amazing storyteller. In fact, it was her minor in seminary was storytelling. So when she came to our church, she was an incredible storyteller for children's sermons. And she would give the children's sermons to these little people that were so amazing. Those kids would be marching around the room and they'd be carrying props and they'd be so engaged and enthusiastic and it was really exciting. But after a couple years she got really tired of having her skills just in children's sermons. So she started giving the main sermons and bringing that storytelling skill to the sermons and it was so much more effective than just a dry delivery of content. I would highly recommend, no matter how dry your content is, that you include stories because you'll tap into your audience's emotions. And what we feel is what we remember. So to review those first three: Be present. Mindfulness while speaking is achieved by knowing your topic very well, knowing how you will present it, and not allowing yourself to be anywhere but right here. Now, those of you looking behind the curtain will notice that I just looked at the screen while I read that, and then I got tired of looking at the screen, so I looked at my computer, and for those 5 seconds, I wasn't present in the room. I was present in my computer, and I felt off track. I felt like, "Okay, wait, I gotta get back to them," which isn't what you wanna do during your presentations. So as much as possible, have your presentations be flowing from memory or flowing from complete knowledge of your topic. The next one is authenticity. Go ahead and be yourself. That's about all I can say about that. And then stories. Just include stories every chance you get. There's a really good idea that for every point that you give, there would be a story. And that's what I would encourage you to do. So moving on to the last two points. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. You like what I did there with the blank slide? Keep it simple. We've all heard that phrase. And, boy, I don't know if I need to say much more about this except we have a tendency, if we don't speak very often, to want to deliver it all. Like, "Oh, I've got so much information to share." But the simpler you keep it, the more that the audience will retain. It's an inverse relationship. So if you're not sure if you should include some information or a slide, just don't. Give them a chance to follow up with you later if they want more information. And finally, breath. When we breathe, our audience breathes with us. That's not a quote from anybody except for me. This is a guiding principle in my life. As a performer, I control I control my audience's breath. As a speaker, whether you are speaking to a small room or a big room, you control your audience's breath. For example, I'm going to go really high up into my breath right now. I'm going to speak in the top of my lungs and a little bit too fast. I'm going to take quick little breaths and then I'm going to move on to the next topic. You not only have a hard time following me, but some of you actually feel the change in your own throats. That was beautiful. She's like getting smaller and smaller. And you've all had professors or teachers along the way. Yeah, a little too much breathing going on. So just be aware that this is an actual metric that you can control in your audience, is their breathing. You can set this as your goal. I know my talk. I know what I'm gonna talk about, I'm a little bored, I've given this topic 5 times before, you know what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna mess with their breathing. And for a little while, I'm gonna talk up in here and see what happens. And you'll start to see physical reactions. It keeps you as a speaker a little bit entertained. But even more importantly, it touches into the emotional core of that person. And if you can get people to breathe relaxed and confident, but not so relaxed that they're asleep, then they're gonna take more of the message home, they're gonna like you better, they're gonna follow you better. So those two points: simplicity— remember the inverse relationship— and breath, controlling your audience's breath by controlling your own. So there are our five points that I want you to take away from today, along with all those behind-the-curtain peeks that I gave you at the beginning. Let's see what time we've got here. Oh, we've got so much time. Good! So what we're gonna do next is with these straws. The straws are part of— and Lisa, you can have one too. The straws are part of what we call semi-occluded vocal tract exercises in voice therapy, also known as straw phonation. And what we're going to do with these straws is we're going to make sound through them. Now, why you would want to do this: before you get up to speak, it's important to become mentally focused and physically warmed up. I didn't do the physical warm-up before I spoke today and I can feel the tiredness in my throat. What I should have done is right before Lisa spoke, I should have said, or right before I spoke, we're gonna take a minute now, go ahead and talk amongst yourselves, I'll be right back. And then I should have gone out on the balcony and gone, "Mmm, mmm, mmm," and warmed up my voice. If you're sitting in the audience of the presentation right before yours and you know you're up next, You want to do some physical warm-ups, you know, just maybe clenching your body a little bit just to get blood flowing. If you have the opportunity, step out in the hallway to get a drink of water. Bring a straw along. So I want you guys to experience this yourselves. And by the way, thank you, Lisa, for providing these. Don't throw these straws away. Keep them. They're part of your future. Okay? Put them in the bottom of your bag and keep them. So what we're going to be doing is first I want you all to experience your voice as it is right now at full volume. So in order to do that, we're going to all talk at the same time fairly loudly. After we do that, everybody is going to spend 60 seconds making sound through the straw. This is weird, it is boring, and if you check your emails during that time, I have no problem with it. And then after that minute is over, then you're going to say basically the same thing you said at the beginning like a bookend at the same volume and kinesthetically within your own body I want you to notice how it feels different and externally I want you to notice how the room sounds different. Okay? This is the best warm-up tool in the world. There are literally lectures and conferences that are held about partially occluded vocal tracts. It's crazy. I'm not kidding you. There was a 3-day conference about these. So first thing I want you to do is talk about the weather outside in your full voice piece please starting now. It's a pretty sunny day— Hi! You guys are awesome, thank you. Sometimes groups are so shy about that. I want you to do that one more time and this time I want you to feel what your throat feels like, what your breathing feels like, is your voice effortful, does it sound rich or not. So again, please go. The weather is sunny and cloudy, it's a little bit bright outside, I can see the frozen pond, I'm thinking Gracie, oh hey, it's Nancy Bosom! Cut! All right, thank you. Let me get my timer going for 60 seconds here. 60 seconds is going to feel like forever, and again, you can totally check your email. I won't, I promise. All right! Yeah? Worry about the gum— So through this straw I want you to do your whole vocal range which is about 3 octaves so it's gonna sound something like this: Mmm... Please do hold the straw. It's not rolling. It clenches up your teeth and your jaw. So please hold this straw, and here we go! Woo-hoo! It's called The Hive for a reason— it's a bunch of bees! Photographers, no laughing unless you're using a straw! We got a long way to go. That's 30 seconds. Do you feel how your breath is strong and lower? You're actually using your abdominal muscles. Try to be loud, try to be quiet. Notice how it's different. 20 seconds. 3, 2, 1, stop. Now in a very similar voice, noticing how your body feels and how you sound and how the room sounds, please talk about the weather. Wow. Wow. Huge difference. Oh my gosh, wow. Everybody feels this in their body. And cut. Wow, okay. The people in the room, camera guys, did you hear a difference? Can you describe what you heard that was different? Sounded richer. Way richer. More sophisticated, more confident. Wow. Awesome, you got a British accent. Yes. I'm much more sophisticated than I was before the straw. Hello. Hi! I love it. Would anybody like to share any difference they felt in their body? Do you have something? Sure, yeah, I could feel the vibration a little bit more. Like when you were using the straw, you could sort of feel your whole face vibrate. Yeah. Before that, it felt, everything felt kind of like tight. Fantastic. Yeah. Anybody else feel anything different in your throat, your breathing? Did anyone notice that they sounded better or worse? Great. Better? Did anybody sound worse or feel worse? So no harm done. So 45 seconds to 2 minutes would be your ideal with the straw phonation. So that's just a little bonus takeaway.