Are Great Athletic Coaches Great Speakers? Rick Sheridan

Speaking with TJ Walker, dissecting the communication skills and practices of world class leaders. Vince Lombardi, Knute Rockne. You think of some of the most famous coaches in the history of athletics and you think of coaches who are giving great impassioned speeches rallying their players before the big game at halftime. It's a part of pop culture, but is it real? Does it happen that way? Our special guest today is an expert not only on communication and public speaking, but he studied how coaches and athletes speak and what they do that's different. Our guest today is Rick Sheridan. He is an assistant professor of communications at Wilberforce University in Ohio. He's lectured at Stanford Cal State University all over the place. He's been a columnist at major newspapers like the Chicago Sun Times and a lot of other places. Rick, thanks for joining us today.

I'm glad to be here.

So, first of all, is it even true that a lot of coaches are great speakers or passionate speakers? I went to Duke University and my first year was Coach Kyck's second year. He always had a very low key demeanor. As far as his public image, I wasn't. I obviously wasn't in the locker room at halftime. But how much of this is real versus something that makes for a good movie?

You know, I think all coaches are good orators. At least they aspire to be. The reality is that some coaches just seem to have that certain something that kind of rally the players and doesn't mean they're necessarily loud or aggressive. In fact, some of the best coaches, ones that I've known personally, were small in stature and they spoke softly. But like this high school coach, he ended up with a 91% winning record. They featured him in Life magazine, so I can talk more about him later. But the point is that it's more than just shouting or more than just insulting the players.

So it's not just about yelling and screaming and high energy antics. It can be a variety of styles, which you could say the same for successful politicians or newscasters too.

Exactly.

So what did your study reveal to you in looking at coaches and how they communicate? Because I do remember one of my very first coaches, a football coach when I was in fifth grade. Several of them, they just bombarded us with obscenities. And these days I don't even notice it. But at that age, when I was 10 years old, I grew up in a somewhat conservative Baptist household. This will amuse some of our listeners. And I had just never really heard curse words other than once every two years. So I associated it with mass danger and something egregiously horrific about to happen. So it just made me cringe. But I want to get a sense of you, of the range of speakers and styles and language when you study these coaches.

Well, you know, I think the really highly successful ones are able to vary their. Not only the tone of their voice, but they adapt to the situation. If the team is way behind, they're going to deliver a much different speech than if they pretty much won the game and they're just, you know, walking off the clock. And also, I think these highly successful coaches, they can kind of read the situation and they can adapt in the moment. Often they will start out really almost quiet, you know, and you probably heard that or you've experienced where teachers can whisper and actually get the class's attention better than if they holler and scream. Now, that being said, the best coaches are able to kind of work up and down the scale. In other words, they might actually start out hollering, but then get really quiet to help.

It's the contrast. It's not about yelling all the time or whispering. It's about the range of voice. Right?

Yeah. Now, I put together kind of three big ideas that I wanted to communicate. And so let me just see what you think of these.

Sure.

The first point would be that any public speaker can learn from these successful coaches. Point number two is delivering passionate speech is often more important than the precise details. And in fact, number three is to trust yourself in the moment. And this would go for coaches and public speakers. In other words, if you make a mistake, like I taught a lot of these computer courses and about one time in 20, the overhead projector wouldn't work. And, you know, it was devastating. It meant that my day was going to be a whole lot more challenging, you know, because I'd have to run around, help these students individually instead of just being able to show them on the projector. And so I would have to really calm myself down and trust myself to respond in the moment to whatever kind of problems might come up. And so I think a mechanical coach that has a memorized pitch is not going to be as successful as somebody who maybe speaks ad lib, but they've got that passion, they've got that burning desire to really communicate with the players.

I mean, isn't it almost a function of any coach, the way they speak? It can't be scripted. And I'm certainly no great athlete, but I've, over the years, junior high school, high school, was on a number of sports teams. I Never had a coach pull out a written speech. They were always looking at the players and it was, Walker, you're not made of rock candy. You're not going to break things like that. It was personal and it was specific. It was never scripted because they're having to analyze what they just saw and critique it right away. So it's almost impossible, I think, to be a boring coach as a speaker, unless you're really doing something awful.

No, actually a lot of them have these index cards maybe stashed in their back pocket. You got to realize part of the speech is the mechanics. Like they want to execute a certain number of plays. Like in football, maybe it's screen pass or end around. So see part of it. They're just going over the playbook, the details, but they've got to arouse the passion, like at the beginning and primarily at the end, where they get the players to dash out on the field and get the job done.

And what of those skills is transferable to your typical business? Because most of our audience is not made up of coaches. We have a lot of business people, people who work for large banks, governments, NGOs, United nations organizations. And while they can certainly enjoy whether it's American football or worldwide football, that is soccer, they won't necessarily see that as well. TJ, how does that relate to me giving a PowerPoint presentation to my board of directors on Tuesday morning? What do you think? Which of these skills are transferable and relatable to others?

You know, probably the main thing would be to present a compelling vision. So it really wouldn't matter how loud as long as they could hear the message and as long as it resonated, as long as it made sense to them. In other words, like, here is the game plan, here is how you're going to benefit personally, here's how the team or here's how the department is going to benefit. So once you've got this compelling vision of the future, then they would go back to the more logistic, step by step, here's what our department needs to accomplish in the next quarter, next six months.

And I guess that's the beauty of being a coach, is you by definition have a compelling vision of the future. That is 60 minutes from now, we have more points on the scoreboard than the opponent. It's a very, very specific vision.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

And what do you see is, let me ask, do you see this phenomenon continuing of well known coaches going out and being sort of superstars on the lecture circuit? Pat Riley, the Basketball coach for many years has just made absolute fortunes. Coach K, whom I mentioned at the beginning, makes a lot of money on the lecture circuit. To what extent is that coming about? Because they are great speakers versus here's a famous person who's successful in one thing, and people are just willing to pay money to be in the same room with them and to have a picture taken with them.

You know, probably both. I think that a lot of these highly successful coaches would have to go through a certain amount of retraining because they will use the type of vocabulary that would not be acceptable in a business setting. They would come across not just the obscenities, but the tone of their voice, maybe not really connect with the audience all that well. Now, there are certainly trainable. They would still keep some of the. Some of the aggressive passion that they would use for the pep talk, but at the same time, they would really have to tone down parts of their aggressive language.

Yeah, I guess if you're. If you're at a banking convention and you're the keynote, you can't just say, you people at JP Morgan, I want you to look at the Goldman Sachs people and just think about ripping them to shreds and incapacitated. That wouldn't really go over very well.

Well, you know, there's a scene from that movie, Coach Carter, that we play in class, and the Richmond Oilers have fallen behind. There's only a couple of minutes left. And so what Coach Ken Carter, you know, does in the movie is to.

He.

He tears them down first. You know, he lets them know how poorly they played and how disappointed he is. But then he's able to build up again and convince them that they've got what it takes. See, they've made it to the championship, so there's some reason why they've got that far. And he's able to communicate that effectively. And so the team does rally and they end up winning the game.

What, in your opinion, is the most effective style of speaking as a coach when it comes to positive versus negative? There's certainly some coaches who just want to point out flaws, problems. You did this wrong. You did this wrong. You did this wrong. In the quest to make the player better, even if they're favored to win by 50 points, they want them to feel on the defensive and like they've got a fight and scrap for it, and some of them are successful. You have other coaches who believe it's through positive reinforcement where you make the most change and build confidence in players. Have you seen any empirical or anecdotal evidence to suggest one is a better system than the other.

You know, there are some like refereed journal articles. I've got a citation here we can go over at some point. But anyway, I would tend to vote for the more positive. Just like these politicians. They've done studies like the presidential candidate that has a more positive vision for the future. They have won, you know, vast majority of the elections versus the realist that would complain about having to raise taxes. Those kind of folks usually end up losing and I would say the same is probably true of the coaches.

Our special guest today is Rick Sheraton. He is a professor teacher in the communications world. He works at a variety of universities and is currently at Wilberforce University. He has more information on these topics. If you'd like to go to his website ricksheriton.com we'll link to it in the show notes. But it's Rick S H-E-R-I-A N.com and you can contact him there. Get more information about his expertise. You are listening to speaking with TJ Walker. I appreciate you listening, but I'd ask you to do a little bit more. If you're listening but not subscribing yet, please subscribe. It doesn't cost anything other than the energy to make one click with your mouse so you can subscribe at no charge. And if you're going to do that and like the show, I would really ask you to share it with others and ideally leave a review on the program as well on itunes because certain people do care about that and it helps. This program is brought to you by Media Training Worldwide. If you have a speech or media interview in the near future and you're not completely confident that you're going to be great at it, then write today for our free online media training and presentation training course. These courses will be sent to you. They're video based, more than 100 videos and you can start learning right away from the comfort of your own home or office at absolutely no charge. So you can check out the link in the show notes to receive that. Rick, you are working on a daily basis with students from across the country who are trying to learn how to be better communicators, whether they want to be journalists, whether they want to be better at public speaking. What is the state of speaking among young people? Because when you listen to people, my I'm thinking and when I talk to my friends, all they do is complain about those young people. All they do is say like, like, like and they're inarticulate. And since the days of Plato, people have been complaining about how the younger generation is inarticulate. But is that the case? What's your assessment?

Well, I think a lot of students definitely need, need the fundamentals of public speaking courses. You know, they will start out kind of unprepared, maybe. Well, the typical problem is where they would try to read the entire speech. So I learned pretty early to limit them to whatever they can fit on an index card. And even with that, I still ask them to maintain like let's say 85 to 90% eye contact. That's on the grading sheet. So it does take a little bit of work. Now what I do in all my courses is the very first day I try to win them over to the idea that, hey, you're going to, not only will you benefit from this, but also the people you really respect, they're all good public speakers. You know, it's very rare that you'd find a leader who is not a good speaker. Vice versa, if somebody's a good speaker, they will often fast track them for promotion.

Definitely an essential skill in not every career, but the vast majority of careers. I've yet to meet anybody where a good speaking skill in their arsenal would harm their chances of career advancement. Walk us through the state of public speaking training in academia today. Obviously you're most familiar with how you teach it, but you must know how other professors are doing it at the schools you're associated with. When I occasionally talk to people who come to my courses, sometimes they've graduated from college in the last few years. I always ask them first question, I ask them if they've had public speaking training in college. How many times were you videotaped in a semester? Oftentimes the answer is zero. And I guess about 50% of the time they say they were videotaped three times in a whole semester. To me, that always strikes me as just insane because I never let someone out of a room if it's a one day training without getting them videotaped at least 10 times. Because I have found that's the only way people really improve. But I want to know how you do it and what you think your peers are doing it, how they're doing it in academia.

Yeah, we do a fair amount of videoing, especially with the smartphones. The ability. Now I give students extra credit if they want to do a practice speech, even if it comes across as lousy. Just the fact that they practice it at home and they would email me the video that they did on their smartphone.

Now, I think I'm curious how many of them take you up on that?

Not as many as I'd like, but I think they, they really do practice. At least they get a group of their peers together. Because I tell them, look, the whole class is going to know if you rehearsed or not. We're going to be able to tell within the first 10 or 20 seconds if you practice this speech. And so just a little bit of peer pressure and hopefully by then the students are really inspired to kind of learn some of the material.

That begs my next question, though. Why not require them to send you a video in advance? Why not? And maybe you do in other lessons, but why not have homework for every single class? Send in a video of a new speech?

Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe I'll go to that at some point. Like I say, it's been extra credit so far and we get quite a bit of practice. One of the projects we do is the impromptu speech. And only about half of the class will volunteer because this is also in the extra credit category. It is equal to like one absence. So I tell them, you can take a day off. You know, if you're willing to do this, it's going to put you in the top 5 or 10% of, you know, tell them right away about the different studies that often rank death ahead of public speaking. And so I tell them, look, you know, you're in this very small minority of the people that are going to probably make the most out of your life. And so the impromptu speaking, what I do is have like 40 or 50 real common topics, like how do you, how do you prepare for a test? And then as they're walking up to the front of the class, I will pick one out. And so they have no idea exactly which one they'll get.

I used to do that in high school debate. I forget if they called that the Lincoln. I mean, I think they called it Lincoln Douglas, but it really has nothing to do with what Lincoln and Douglas did. But I did enjoy that because you weren't having to lug around at the time, shoeboxes full of three by five cards of facts. So that was actually my favorite. But I was a weird kid compared to most. Most kids don't want to go out of their way to find public speaking opportunities.

Oh, you know, talking about the videoing kind of reminded me. I went to the University of Kansas back in the 90s, well, late 80s, early 90s, and we actually used a black and white camera this was radio speed or. No, I'm sorry, it was television public speaking. And so the black and white really stripped out. You know, of course the color is gone, but you could really pick out a lot of mannerisms. With color, it wasn't quite as noticeable, but with the black and white, you could definitely tell if you had some kind of nervous habit, you know, if you overly waved your hands around, for example.

Well, just on that one point, how many students do you have where you and the other students thought they were waving their hands too much versus the student feeling he or she felt moved their hands too much? Because in my own practice, individuals, when looking at a video, often think they're moving their hands too much. And everyone else in the room, including myself, thinks that their hand motion looks good, that it looks comfortable and confident. So I spend a lot of my time telling people, don't freeze your hands. Don't put your hands in your pocket. Don't grab a pencil or pen or the lectern. Actually move your hands. But you may have a different school of thought.

No, you're exactly right. I try to teach them to, you know, gesture naturally if they feel passionate about something or if they feel like it's a key point to, you know, go ahead now to avoid the. The nervous tics where they're doing the constant, like, lateral motion with their hands, you know, circular. Something that's gonna distract. You know, I tell them that the audience is eventually gonna pick up on the mannerism. Not really hear what you have to say. But generally, you wanna maybe express yourself a little bit more than what you're doing, you know, to try to avoid the fig leaf position or the parade rest.

That's the worst. It looks like you have to go pee. Or the military at ease position. Looks like you've been arrested.

Yeah. Frankly, myself, when I'm giving a speech, a lot of times I just jam my hands in my pockets. That seems to work fairly well.

When you say it works well. Sorry to sound confrontational. What's your evidence? What do you mean by that? How do you know your audience perceives you better that way?

Well, I feel more relaxed, and I think that it takes away the, you know, over emphasis where I'm moving my hands constantly. And then I feel free to, you know, to get the hands in motion when there's a key point coming up. But otherwise, if I don't do that, a lot of times I will default to the fig leaf, or kind of what I call the Frankenstein position, where the hands are straight down, but it's got kind of a stiff look to it.

You know, I've never thought of it that way. I'm going to make a note of that. That's definitely a phrase I'm going to use. I always like at least one truly great nugget from every one of the shows, and that's the nugget there. I'm going to be telling people next week. In fact, in the next training I conduct, don't use the Frankenstein pose. Your hands are just straight down. That's an absolutely great image.

Oh, okay. I'll send you the address for my royalty check. Yes, please do.

Please do. The beauty of ideas, of course, you can't copyright the exact expression of an idea, but not the idea itself. So I urge our audience to steal that. And of course, you can give Rick Sheraton credit as well and you can always refer Back to him, ricksheriton.com We've placed a link to his website in the show notes as well, and he's put a few extra things for us there as well. You're listening to Speaking with TJ Walker. This is the show where we analyze public speaking communication skills, tips, tactics, especially in leaders and what they're doing differently from the rest of people to communicate more effectively. You mentioned, Rick, that you're telling your students that, hey, you're basically already in the top five, 10% of students because the rest are not taking public speaking class. What is your sense nationwide of the percentage of college students who take some public speaking class?

You know, actually the percentage is pretty high. A lot of universities and colleges require public speaking. Now, that being said, I don't think it necessarily benefits the students all that much. The typical routine is to do an informative, demonstrative and then a persuasive speech. And I think some individuals would really gain from that. But a lot of students will get through the class. They might get a C or B, but then they would drop it. They wouldn't continue to practice. So what I do is offer extra credit. If they want to show up at a Toastmasters meeting and participate, just bring me a business card from one of the directors. Or also if they want to deliver a speech to a student organization, I pretty much just take their word for it, you know, if they do that and then self report.

Now, first of all, I applaud you for encouraging them to go out and speak plenty of places. But I guess my only question is if you were doing that 20, 30 years ago like that, I would understand completely. When I got into this business did my first training 32 years ago. Video cameras were very large and expensive and I didn't know any student who had one. I didn't have one. But every single student has a video camera. Now why not ask them to just give you the video of the speech they gave? All they have to do is hand their cell phone to another student right on the front row and just say, capture my speech.

Oh yeah, that's a good point. I think I will start to do that. You know, at the very least they could do us and you can send.

Me the royalty check. No, just kidding. We're about the free exchange of ideas here. There's no monopoly on good ideas. Here's my big, I guess, beef with academia and you're on the right side of this, but also the thing that benefits me the most personally, and it is this. The vast majority of students who go to a four year college, get a degree, go out into the workforce, for the most part are not making their money based on how well they write. Everyone has to write a memo occasionally, everyone has to write email and text to a boss. But you have a basic level of competency. Unless you are a journalist or an ad copywriter, how well you write doesn't really affect your career most of the time, I would argue. And yet everyone has gotten 12 years of daily instruction on how to write. If they went to college, they had probably several semesters of how to write for all their other classes. They had formal feedback on writing of every history paper and term paper. And yet the vast majority of the graduates of your college and every other college, the skill that is going to have a huge impact on their career as they advance, whether it is as a salesperson, a teacher, a politician, an executive within a larger organization, the scale that often is going to help them advance the most is public speaking. And yet most students don't get any formal instruction K through 12, and an awful lot of them don't get any instruction at all in college. Why is it still seen as this huge black, black hole of yeah, everybody fears it, but everybody has to do it. And yet virtually no one is taught. And conflict of interest disclosure here. I benefit from that because that's why people hire me to teach them, because they're not taught in school. So there's a part of me that says I hope they never teach them in colleges or high schools.

Yeah, I think that a lot of universities will either offer up a choice of the fundamentals of public speaking, or they can take interpersonal communication, which is like group communication. I think I might have taken one of them. I can't remember really getting a whole lot of benefit out of it, but I'm sure it's better than nothing. And you're right though, I mean it should be required, just like basic English or math refresher classes.

And you're right, not all of them are good courses. But we don't say to someone, okay, your fifth grade English teacher wasn't very good, so don't ever take another English course, don't ever bother writing another paper. It's just assumed there will be good teachers, bad teachers, but it's such an important skill, you've got to stay on it. And yet speaking just sort of falls into this black hole. Tell us more about what you teach your students in the classes you're currently teaching in the communications field.

Well, you know, I follow that routine as far as the informative, the demonstrative and the persuasive speech. But I try to work in a number of different lectures. I'm really big on the non verbal communications and I tell them that the audience is going to size you up in the first five or ten seconds really as you're walking to the podium, you know, you've got to really project the idea that you're not wasting their time, that you're not going to be a boring speaker. Because once they tune out and you start seeing a lot of people checking their email or getting up and leaving, that's when you have that fear of public speaking is going to really kick in. You know, once you've lost the crowd, it's very hard to win them back over.

What's your advice to a student who feels like I've lost the crowd? And that instantly evokes the images to me of a very famous YouTube video of a classroom. It was since revealed it was a hoax, a put upon. But there's a teacher, a college professor lecturing, there's a student on a cell phone and the professor walks up, grabs the cell phone, throws it, smashes it under the wall into a million pieces and continues lecturing as if nothing happened. I saw that and I thought that was the greatest thing ever. And I had people criticize me. Tj, how dare you applaud someone for violating someone else's property. I said hey, I think the most obnoxious thing in the world you can do is be on a cell phone when someone is speaking. And it turns out that was, that was a put up job. It wasn't something from an actual live classroom. But I'm Curious. What is your teaching technique? What is your response to people if they see someone in the audience on a cell phone?

Oh, I figured that one out two or three years ago. I call it a texting targeting. See, the thing is, they sign in, they get a certain number of points just for being there as long as they pay attention. There's a usually a class project that we all do together, they have to participate in that, but they get usually ends up being about 15 points for each class they attend. Well, the thing is, if I catch them texting, I give them, I call it a tt you know, texting tardy. And so I give them a pre TT where there's no loss of points. But if they continue texting, then they get a TT or texting tardy and they would automatically lose half of the points for that class. Now that policy has been a little.

So I guess that means you can't rip it out of their hands and smash it to little pieces, unfortunately.

Oh, I'm not sure that would be the best solution.

But.

My technique actually works pretty well. I mean, some of the other faculty have adopted it.

Now that works for the teacher. But what is your advice to a student who's speaking and doesn't have that authority relationship with the audience that you do?

Yeah, that's true. Probably the main thing would just be to ignore it as much as you can, to not let it bug you. Like, you know, they say that a lot of times these public speakers, they'll land on the one person there that doesn't look like they're very happy to be there, is not very impressed. And so that will kind of wear down their confidence. It's much better to find that smiling face, you know, for the five or ten seconds and move on to the next smiling or at least a neutral expression. You know, a student that is reasonably happy to be there and not just spend your time worrying about the one or two people. So with the texting, you know, when I'm out in the community talking and I realize that I don't have that, that kind of authority to get them to put away the phone, I try not to let it tip me over the edge where I am upset about it, but maybe use that to inspire me to deliver even higher quality content.

I think you're absolutely right. You don't want to fixate on the one person texting. But I do think it is a mistake to simply ignore it because I've seen, I've done trainings before where one person was on a cell phone and I didn't comment or say anything or use any tactic. And the person next to it saw that person, and they got on it. And then the person on the other side says, hey, what do these two guys know that I don't know? If they can text, why can't I? And it switches spread like a virus throughout the room. So I do have several techniques. For starters, just move around if you're. Because I always stress with all my clients, unless you're the President of the United States or it's a news conference, don't stand behind a lectern. You should be moving when you speak and using every corner of the room. So just walking closely to the people who are on the phone is often enough to get them to put it away. Now, I don't walk over to them, hit them on the head and say, what the heck are you doing? But just walking closely to it. Another technique is going the other direction. Let's say there's 15 people on the first row, and, Rick, you're on the far right, and you're now texting on your cell phone. I don't want to be rude, because for all I know, you've got a family member in the hospital. Your wife is about to deliver a baby. It would be presumptuous of me to say, put your phone away. I'm more important. And it would make the audience possibly hate me. But what I would do is go to the other side of the room and say something like, you know, I was just talking about this point to Rick out in the hall before we started. And what happens when people hear their own name? Their head comes up.

Yeah.

Like, huh, huh. What gets them to pay attention? Another technique is to say something. We've all had this happen where we get a little nervous. We're not sure what to do with our hands. Rick, that's happened to you before, Right? And I keep going. And so I'm not putting you on the spot. I'm not embarrassing you because it's. I'm mentioning you by name. But it's also just kind of like a rhetorical question. If you just look up, it's like you're agreeing, but it brings you back in. Because I do think that if you've got audience members on their cell phone, they are communicating very clearly with you as the speaker. They are telling you, you are boring. You are failing. You're not able to engage me. There's something a lot more interesting on my cell phone. So I do think that good speakers are aware of that. And have to do things to bring it back. Now there's the issue of scale. If you're speaking at a major trade association convention and there's 5,000 people in the room, the lights are down, you can be the best speaker in the world, you can bring back Ronald Reagan from the dead, and 20% of the people are going to be on their cell phone. There's nothing you can do about that. But if your speaker speaking to a relatively small audience, 10, 20, 30, even 50 people, you can see them, you can look at them, you can walk around the room, you can ask them real questions, and I do believe you can engage them. What other tips do you give to your students, Rick, that they use the most and where they perceive that, okay, I hadn't thought of this. This is definitely valuable. I'm going to do this in my next classroom presentation or if I have to give a speech, running for the student council. What tips do they really latch onto the most?

That one that I mentioned before, trusting yourself to correct or to perform in the moment. It goes back to our pep talk. The thing is, these athletes can spend numerous hours studying the play playbook, but in the moment, you know, as they're sweeping around the, you know, the left end, they really don't know, you know, what kind of defensive player is going to be coming at them. And you know how they. So in other words, they trust themselves instead of going into a mechanical routine either as a player or as a speaker. You know, where I mean, you probably heard that story about some absent minded professor that got up there on podium or at the podium and he dropped his notes and he picked them up and somehow he already read page one, but somehow he managed to read page one over again. You know, it was just such a dreary experience, probably for both him and the audience. Instead of just trusting himself and just saying, hey, look, you know, accidents happen. Let me just make sure I'm not going over the same material twice. So he just got right back into the reading mode. And so he wasted maybe 10 or 12 minutes the audience's time reading the first page of notes again.

Wow, Just horrific. And as I always tell my students, the hardest thing you could ever do is read a speech. Unless your goal is to bore the heck out of your audience. Why would you, why would you try something like that? People feel erroneously that it's safer, but it really isn't, is it?

Well now my understanding with that is to avoid as much as possible where you want to, where you've memorized the intro, you Know, I tell students, you never want to read your own name and you should at the very least have the title of the speech memorized. And so anyway, try to, you know, ad lib as much as you can. Have the notes there as like a backup or kind of a security blanket. But then there may be some parts that you need to read, like if you had to get some economic statistics exactly correct or you're not winging it, so that part is okay, but kind of let the audience know, hey, I'm going to read this next part because I want to make sure you get the facts exactly correct.

Definitely don't guess on the numbers. You want to get it just right. My recommendation with notes with my clients is keep it to one page. If you can't narrow your notes down to one page, your problem isn't your notes. Your problem is you've done a horrible job of using your judgment and figuring out what does this audience truly need to know. Now, lecturing in a college environment is a little different, but if it's outside the college academic environment and it's a business audience, a political audience, people aren't taking notes. So you've got to spend your time making your ideas come alive and be memorable, not just going through more and more data.

Oh, yeah, you know, we have another policy or I have a policy, they can't use PowerPoint whatsoever. You know, I tell them, you know, you can't just get up here and hide behind PowerPoint. That would be like a minimum wage. You know, they could get somebody from Attempt Service to get up there and you know, just kind of read through a PowerPoint. And students are pretty upset. I mean, I've had one or two that just simply drop my class because they were hoping to find another professor that would let them use PowerPoint. The problem was when I was a rookie teacher, the first time I ever taught it, you know, I went ahead and said, sure, you can use PowerPoint. And the problem was that they couldn't get their flash drives to mount, or they had a, like, maybe an older or newer version of PowerPoint that wouldn't launch on our computer. And one of them got so desperate, he pulled the computer out, I think, so he could try to mount the flash drive on the back. He couldn't get it to work on the front. And so it disconnected the sound cable and, you know, it caused a bunch of havoc. And so I had a line of students nervously waiting to try to flash drive. And so at that point I just said, hey, no more. We're Just not going to do this.

Well, that's the beauty of being a teacher. You are the dictator of that classroom, and your students obviously like you, and you've been doing a good job and you're great at it. What I would do if I were a teacher is I would say, sure, by all means, if you want to use PowerPoint, use it. In fact, I would have some weeks where you have to use PowerPoint, but I would let them know if you use a single word of text on your PowerPoint, you probably going to go at least to a D minus right away, because there's absolutely no scientific evidence that putting text on a slide enhances the chances of your audience remembering it. And what I would do at the end of the class is just test all the students on what they remembered from a PowerPoint slide. If they didn't remember your slide, the slide is by definition a complete failure, and that slide gets an F. So once people realize that's the standard, they're not even tempted to put text on a slide because people just don't remember it. As far as the mechanical issues, again, I would say, by all means, use PowerPoint. Bring your thumbnail drives, whatever you want to do, but it is your responsibility to make sure it works. If you want to make sure it works, you better get to the room a half hour in advance, and you better test it, have a dry run, make sure it's compatible, bring it in a different couple different formats, email it to yourself so you can pull it off the server right on the computer if you want. You're never prepared to give a PowerPoint unless you've done a rehearsal on the actual computer and projector where you're going to be using it. So to me, it's a great opportunity for a learning lesson, because people screw up on that in real life all the time. They'll have staff spend six months creating PowerPoint slides. They'll spend $30,000 on experts creating imagery, animation. And yet they want to waltz in two minutes before their speech and not actually rehearse on the computer at the convention center. And what happens, you see them on the ground with their posterior in the air for the first five minutes making excuses. And it's a horrific way to start a presentation. All could be eliminated if people just got there early or even the night before and practiced.

Oh, that totally makes sense. Well, you know, I tell them there are going to be times that you're going to need to use PowerPoint, but I treat it like, you know, the metaphor of training wheels. On a bicycle. See, a lot of people never really need training wheels. You're really better off not having the training wheels on very long. And so it's better to learn how to give the speech. And then later, if you need to use PowerPoint, that's fine, but you don't want to have this dependency from the very beginning.

I do agree with you. One slight variation. I don't think a speaker should ever need a PowerPoint. I don't think a PowerPoint slide should ever be used because a speaker feels a need for it. In my mind, the only reason to ever use a PowerPoint slide is that there's some image you have that is going to make an idea that's important to you more understandable and more memorable than you simply saying it doesn't do both of those things, throw it away. But if you do have an image that makes those ideas come alive, then by all means, use it. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he said, why are we here today? He said, you know what this is? And he put up a picture of an ipod. He said, you know what this is? And he put up a picture of a flip phone. What are we doing today? The two images merged together into the iPhone. You could see it, get it. You knew what it was about, you knew what you were getting. And here it is 12 years later. I remember the image. I remember the message. He didn't need it to help him to remember what to say, but it made the idea more memorable for the audience.

Yeah, that's really true. Now, the compromise I've come up with is I let them bring a couple of eight by 11. You know, it can be a photograph, either color, black and white, and they can put it on a page protector and pass it around to other students, or they could, you know, just mount it up at the front. They can also use the sketchboard if they need to sketch something out. The main thing I'm trying to avoid is where they're reading the text from the PowerPoint, and once again, where they're totally dependent on the technology to be able to deliver the speech.

Wow, I would be the most unpopular professor ever on your campus, because I would just tell them, if you ever read a single word of text from a PowerPoint slide, you're telling everyone in the room you think they are complete idiots and you'll get an F. That's what I would tell the students, which maybe that's why I'm not invited to lecture at the university. I don't know. Rick, I really appreciate your time. Any final tips, words of wisdom you have for students or anyone else on how they can be a better speaker?

Well, I think to tie everything together, the idea that we really can learn a lot from these highly successful sports coaches. And I've been around ones that have incredibly high winning records, but I've also met several that weren't doing so well. It's just a matter of studying it and kind of adapting what works for you. If you're not naturally a screamer and you yeller, then just because your favorite coach uses that technique, it's probably not going to be right for you.

Rick Sheridan, thank you for being our guest today. For more of his insights and tips, go to his website, ricksheriton.com thanks for listening to speaking with TJ Walker, where the communication skills and practices of world class leaders are dissected.