What inspired you to write Confessions of a Public Speaker? People have a lot of very powerful fears around public speaking. And I know that from my own studies that books on public speaking are really, really boring. They don’t talk about the important things that are not that hard to learn. So, I thought that I had an opportunity [to provide] a fresh and honest take on how to do it well from the perspec- tive of someone who does it all the time.
Is there any advice that you consider to be the most badly needed by speakers? It’s very clichéd [and] advice that people dismiss: Just go do it. Let’s say you wanted to learn how to play guitar.
Well, the first thing you do is pick up a guitar and start trying to learn. There’s no way around it. And public speaking is the same thing. If you’re afraid of it, or have concerns about it, but want to get better, well, go somewhere where you can do it for five minutes. And then you learn, and then you do it again. There is no way to develop a skill at any- thing without actually doing this thing. I joke in the book about this. I say, reading this
book isn’t going to make you a better speaker until you go and try to do a short talk or presentation, and try to apply this stuff. And then pay attention to how well you did and do it again.
For your 2007 book, The Myths of Innovation, you looked at the lives of the world’s great innovators. Did you do that with the world’s great speakers? There are lots of books about public speaking that talk about how great this speaker was, or how great that speaker was. And I found that was really the wrong approach. You have to listen to a speaker if you’re going to learn anything about why they’re good or bad. There’s a collection of CDs with the great, great
speeches from Western history from the last 50 years: Kennedy, Nixon, Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X.… When I was doing other work, I would always have that on in the background, and whenever I heard something that I connected with, I would pay attention and see who it was. And then I read about some of the methods that they used. I also read a lot about speakers who lived before there was recorded media, such as Lincoln, Emer- son, and Mark Twain. I tried to find out as much as I could about their preparation methods. I think that stand-up comedians are some
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‘I think that stand-up comedians are some of the best examples of good public speakers.’
of the best examples of good public speakers. I pay attention to George Carlin and Richard Pryor. There are plenty of legendary speakers and legendary comedians who really qualify as great speakers.
Have you noticed, over the course of your career, that conferences have changed? I think that, by and large, most conferences are very much the same. There are definitely some industries that have adopted more changes than others. Conferences around the web and technol- ogy tend to be a lot more open to change than most other fields. There are many events where they experiment and at least try different things. They will add one different thing to the agenda, and learn from it. They’ll keep it if it goes well, get rid of it if it doesn’t. I think the worst, in terms of change, is any-
thing academic or professional. I think it has a lot to do with the culture of whatever the industry is — some cultures are a lot more open to change than others.
How much difference do the physical attributes of a venue make in the success of your presentation? It’s definitely an important factor. I think that the most important thing is that I’m comfort- able in the room. I tell people this: I can be in a really bad room, but if I got there an hour ahead of time and I realized it was a bad room before I talked, I could still get comfortable and get used to it. I know what I have to deal with. But if I only discover that five minutes before I speak, then I’m still getting used to the room. And it’s going to affect me much more. The direct answer to your question is that it
matters a lot — if people are uncomfortable in their chairs, and the lighting is bad, and the tem- perature makes people uncomfortable. Then I’m at a disadvantage in the room.
What advice do you have for conference organizers about dealing with speakers? The first one is to give speakers demographics about who’s attending a talk — how old they are, the male/female ratio, what job titles they have — so I’m informed about who exactly is going to be filling the seats. And then I can have an image in my head as I’m working on my material as to who it is I’m going to speak to. And that might change the stories I use.