TJ’s Insights

Most adults in the work world can write reasonably well because they received constant feedback throughout school on their writing. Even today, if you write a document with spelling and grammar errors, most word processing programs will underline or mark your errors. It might not be easy to write great literature, but it’s not hard to write a simple letter that can be understood by others.

But most adults in the work world are horrible speakers. Why? Is speaking inherently more difficult than writing? No. The difference is receiving feedback and criticism; with writing most people get it, with speaking, most don’t.

Here are three fundamental rules when dealing with the press: 1. Reporters get to pick the questions. 2. You get to choose your answers. 3. Reporters get to pick which part of your answers to put in quotes.

Even a media veteran as savvy as White House Press Secretary Tony Snow occasionally forgets this. Here is a quote from an October, 2006 New York Times:

“In an interview in his West Wing office, Snow readily acknowledges that ‘naughty e-mails’ did not capture the gravity of Foley’s graphic exchanges with teenage boys. ‘I shouldn’t have used the words,’ Snow says. ‘I’m not going to defend having used the words.’ But, he says, ‘I did six interviews that morning and people picked on one-half of one line.’”

I love using technology during presentations. I use projectors, laptops, TVs, wireless microphones, speakers, and video cameras. But the one thing I always try to avoid is using some gizmo or gadget for the first time in front of an audience.

Why? Because learning a new tool or piece of machinery, requires concentration, and your concentration has to be on your audience, not your gadget.

When I have broken my own rules I have failed miserable. One time I began a media training seminar with a brand new Sony Handycam DVD camera. The 2006 HandyCam was exactly like the 2004 HandyCam I had been using regularly for two years—or so I thought.

Would you like to be a best-selling author like Tom Peters, Suze Orman, Gore Vidal, Anthony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki, Wayne Dwyer, and Mark Victor Hansen? If only you could write well enough to make the list. But is writing the characteristic that drove them to the top of the list?

Robert Kiyosaki of “Rich Dad Poor Dad” openly admits that he isn’t a very good writer. He points out that he is on the best-selling lists, not the best-writing lists. I think there is something else all of these fabulously successful people have in common, and it isn’t literary flair.

I have talked in the past about the need for speakers to avoid drinking alcohol or even coffee and tea before speaking. Any drug that can alter your normal state, even by 1%, can hurt your abilities to communicate effectively with your audience.

To many people, this advice is so obvious as to seem less than insightful. But here’s something that might surprise you, you should also avoid cold medicines, antihistamines and many other over the counter medications as well. You don’t want to put anything in your mouth that will change the natural moisture levels in your mouth or your nose.

You have a world-renowned author/expert/guru coming to your organization for a lecture. Everyone is excited; his/her fame is well established. There’s only one little problem: you saw the expert give a speech at a different convention two months ago and he was deadly dull. In fact, no one was awake by the end of the hour.

What’s my advice?

Cancel the Speech!

At the risk of sounding self-serving, nothing irks me and others in my profession more than to hear some executive say “oh ya, I was media trained several years ago, so I know all about how to handle myself in the media.”

Oh really?

Imagine if Tiger Woods had the attitude of “Oh I had a golf lesson in 1986, so I don’t need any more golf lessons.” At a more mundane level, imagined anyone in your office saying, “I had writing instruction for one day in First Grade, so I don’t need any more lessons on how to
write.” That person would be laughed at, and would probably not last long in the job because of the inability to write an email or a sentence that people could understand.

When it comes to job interviews, there is a lot of advice floating around regarding several areas: 1.How to be interviewed in order to get the job. 2. How to conduct interviews without getting yourself in trouble or inviting a lawsuit from the interviewee, and 3. How to interview in a fair and systematized manner where all of the questions are consistent.

A lot of speakers like to pride themselves in being “all substance and no fluff.” At first blush, this seems ideal. After all, no one is so frivolous as to endorse “fluff.”

But here’s the reality, most speakers who pride themselves as super substantive are guilty of data dumping. And audiences don’t remember data dumped on them during a speech.

I love public speaking and I think it is the ultimate form of
communication, but it simply is not the best way to communicate lots and lots of substance. It is a good way to communicate SOME substance, when packaged the right way.

If you send sample questions to a New York Times reporter in advance of an interview, you will be laughed out of the room. A Times reporter would consider you offensive, unsophisticated and insulting.

Fortunately or unfortunately, this is not the case with talk show hosts around the US and the world. Many of them will read questions that you include in your press kit. And I mean they will read them word-for-word. Once I sent a bio with a spelling/grammar blunder in it. Sure enough, the talk show host announcer read the bio with the blunder in it and it sounded awful.