A friend’s young daughter had an accident last weekend and doctors had to reattach the tip of her index finger. Fortunately, it looks like it will turn out well.
I was reflecting that the doctor must have gone home with a sense of satisfaction. He had done something that day that made a big difference in one little girl’s life. In his line of work, he probably has a lot of days like that.
Do you ever have days like that? Can you go home at the end of the day with that sense of fulfillment that comes from knowing you have made a real impact on someone’s life?
I do get a call or an email occasionally in which someone tells me that my coaching or my class made a big difference to them, and I treasure every single one. Last year, I taught a presentations class in Shanghai and at the end of it urged the participants to join a Toastmasters club if they were interested in continuing to work on their skills. One of the students went even further – he started a club, and judging from the occasional notes I get from him, it is making a huge impact on him personally.
Later today I will deliver a speech on presentation principles to a group of aspiring entrepreneurs. Maybe one or two will pick up an idea that gives them just that slight edge in their pitch to a venture capitalist. I hope I make a difference.
Will you make a difference today?
If you want others to believe you, you have to sound like you believe it yourself. That’s common sense, which is unfortunately not as common as it should be. A big reason is the near-ubiquity of three verbal habits that can make you sound as if you are unsure of yourself.
Let’s pick on the younger set first. It’s hard to sound like you mean what you’re saying when you question yourself at the end of every statement. That’s what you do when you engage in uptalk, which is a rising intonation at the end of a sentence that makes it sound like you’re asking a question? It used to be something I only heard in California, but now it seems to be everywhere?
Like is the next one. It has, like, replaced um as the universal, like, filler word. Don’t tell me what something is like, tell me what it is. The cliché is not, “it is what it is like”, or “it is like what it is”. You sound as if you don’t completely believe in the actual thing, so you want to float a trial balloon by telling the listener what something resembles and then seeing how they react.
The third one is you know, and ironically the people who use it the most are the least likely to know. It’s probably just coincidence, but I’ve heard this one more often recently in my coaching sessions. People are being told they need to communicate more credibly, and when they call me to talk about it, it’s one of the first things I notice. In every single case, when I ask them if they know what their crutch word is, every single person has been unaware of it.
Kids should sound different than their parents. It’s their way of expressing their own individuality and separating their generation from the one that came before. But when they enter the workforce, it’s time to put away childish things and fit in with the team.
But at least young people have the excuse that they pick up the habits early in life and haven’t yet made the effort to reform them. It’s the older folks who don’t have an excuse. I’m referring to people in their 40s and even 50s who sound like they’re channeling their inner child. Like some of the senior citizens you see on Fort Lauderdale beach wearing swimsuits that they might have borrowed from their grandchildren, it’s just not credible, to put it kindly.
Like, I think you should, you know, say it like you mean it?
You would think that a number is a number is a number, that it means the same thing regardless of how it’s presented. But that’s not true, as an example in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal shows.
If your reliability is 99.7% and your next best competitor’s is 99.4%, that doesn’t sound like a large enough difference to be worth touting. That’s because you’re starting from zero. But if you start from 100% and work backwards, the picture totally changes, as you can see in this explanation:
“Last year, Delta canceled just 0.3% of its flights, according to flight-tracking service FlightStats.com. That was twice as good as the next-best airlines, Southwest and Alaska, and five times better than the industry average of 1.7%.”
Seen in this light, Delta is 5 times better than the industry average. It is totally accurate and there is nothing underhanded about saying it this way. If you had to choose between two airlines for an important trip, would you pay a little extra for the one that has half the chance of being cancelled? Maybe the practical side of you says the chances of cancellation are so small in either case that you wouldn’t spend the premium, but what if the choice was between two surgical procedures, would that change your decision?
The point is that even something as objective as a number can mean different things to different people, depending on the context that it comes wrapped in. Think carefully about that when you use numbers in your next presentation.
Plain English is like common sense: it’s prized but not too common.
When was the last time you listened to a presentation and left wondering what the speaker just said, or scratched your head over a confusing email? Sadly, it seems like clear communication in plain English is a rare commodity these days. That’s a problem in business today because it slows down the exchange of useful information needed to make intelligent decisions. On the other hand, it offers an opportunity for clear speakers to stand out.
In researching for my book on Maximum Credibility, I came across a useful solution to this problem that I would like to tell you about. Surprisingly, it was put out by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it’s called, A Plain English Handbook: How to Create Clear SEC Disclosure Documents.
Reading annual reports and prospectuses[1] can be like wading into a swamp at night without a map: it’s slow going, and even if you get through to the other side you’re not sure where you’ve been. The net result is that investors can’t make informed investment decisions. So, if someone can make complex financial information easier to understand, there is hope for all of us.
The Handbook does this very well, with clear and simple rules for figuring out what the reader needs to make a good decision, eliminating unnecessary and confusing verbiage, and writing in a “user-friendly” style.
The Handbook says, “A plain English document is easy to read and looks like it’s meant to be read.” I believe you can extend that same idea to speaking: a plain English presentation is easy to understand and is a pleasure to hear. The same rules that apply to writing apply to speaking, so anyone who has to sell ideas can benefit from reading—and practicing—the ideas in A Plain English Handbook.
The Handbook is easy to read, of course, and even better, it’s free. They offer it here as a public service, and you will be doing yourself and your public a favor by reading it, even if only as a reminder. As Warren Buffett says in the introduction: “Write as this handbook instructs you and you will be amazed at how much smarter your readers will think you have become.”
