SPEAKING WITH IMPACT
Each week, speech coach and leadership mentor James Rosebush will answer a question on how to improve your public speaking.

Justin McKinney, CEO of Ivani, LLC asks: When talking about sophisticated technologies, is there a rule of thumb on how to best to strike a balance between being too high-level vs. too in the weeds? 

Dear Justin,

Great question. The first rule is to know your audience. You could be easily embarrassed or discredited if you do not. If you were invited, for example, to speak for my friend, David Edelman’s, Advanced Technology Security Policy class at MIT, you want to be sure your talk is rigorous and carefully vetted. When you present technology solutions you want to make sure they are tested and that you can back them up through quotations from experts brighter and more generally acknowledged than you are.

So, in the case of David’s course you want to clear your message with the person who has invited you to lecture and try out your presentation on a critical friend or two. This is high-stakes communication.

You get one chance to make it right. Any intellectual laziness will be picked up right away, and you may even find people walking out. In between presenting technical data, pause, and check in with your audience and ask “Is any of this making sense with you?” That will make you human and approachable.

On the other hand, with a more generally educated audience, you could risk losing their interest if you are too technical. Let’s say you want to convey the same data but in a less academic way. Then tell a story about how the application works, when it will be available in the marketplace, and how it will improve people’s lives. Then tell a story about how its use could affect the people present in the audience.

Make sure they know the impact on them and make sure you do not use a vocabulary containing words generally unknown to them. If you do, you will be thought haughty and will quickly torpedo that bridge to the audience we always talk about. I would love to hear your next talk!  Good luck.

Have a question you’ve always wanted to ask about public speaking? Email James at JSRosebush@impactspeakercoach.com and your answer may feature here.

SPEAKING WITH IMPACT
Each week, speech coach and leadership mentor James Rosebush will answer a question on how to improve your public speaking.

James Wolf, CEO of CurioCapital asks: “Are there any techniques you prefer to make the entire audience pay attention?”

Dear James,

The most important thing you must do is to make sure people can hear you! Almost 100% of all speakers I coach are not innately aware that they must take charge of the amplification system.  There may be a team of sound technicians assigned to your speech, but you alone are responsible for the audience hearing you. There is no excuse for a lack of responsibility in this area of work. I often host panel discussions. There has never been a panel where I have not had to go over to them and place the mic up closer to the mouth of the one speaking — and much to my frustration they often move it away! 

If you have something important to say, for heaven’s sake make sure your audience can hear it!  You will have a sense if you can be heard by listening yourself!  Speak up — loudly enough to reach the audience even without amplification. Rarely is there ever a speaker who speaks too loudly as to draw complaints. Sound technicians can lower your voice, but they cannot always raise it. 

Few people know this but the more your voice has to rely on artificial amplification, the more inauthentic and thin your voice sounds. In the extreme you get that irritating feedback because the amplification has reached its limits or is in conflict with its own system.  Before you go on stage go to your car or a secluded space and sing your favorite song (even you think you cannot sing) to warm the vocal chords. Never ever drink ice water before you speak. That will tighten the vocal cords.  Open and breathe deeply to warm up the chest area and then have an expansive thought about your message and be glad to have this opportunity to share a message. 

Next time we will talk more about this subject of getting the audience to pay attention and I will tell you a story about how I got a teenage audience to get off their phones and listen! Good luck!

Have a question you’ve always wanted to ask about public speaking? Email James at JSRosebush@impactspeakercoach.com and your answer may feature here.

On a hot and muggy July afternoon, just as I was just settling into work at my first job in the foundation world, I was shaken by the sound of machine gun fire blasting through the front door of our office.

Like the rest of my startled colleagues, I grabbed my phone and dove under a desk. It was the only thing I could think to do. Although Detroit, Washington DC, and LA were burning, and race riots were dominating the news, no one expected our quiet Midwestern city to be the subject of extreme violence.

The target that day was not any of us on the staff. It was a kidnapping attempt for ransom, and the target was our CEO, the eldest son of the founder of General Motors. As a preventative measure, he escaped into a room-sized safe, and, after several hours, a swat team led the staff down the fire escape and released us unharmed. Although the terrorists were arrested and did not get their target, it was a day that changed everything for the office, the targeted official, and for me. It ushered me into the age of impact in its earliest stages, and ultimately led to me being asked, years later, to start and manage the first White House office on social impact investing and philanthropy.

Our CEO, the target of the kidnappers, approached me a few weeks after the incident with a request. I had noticed a change in his demeanor. His calm personality had become more lively, enthusiastic, and I sensed he had even gained a higher purpose. He asked me to begin a strategic planning process for the organization that focused on measuring the impact we were having. This was the beginning. We started to assess the social and community impact of our investments using detailed demographic assessment data. It super-charged the organization and gave me a focus for my professional life.

Today, we are driving at light speed toward human progress. Impact has become the standard bearer and rallying cry of the future, and within a decade, will be commonplace rather than the exception. This phenomenon I call the New Age of Enlightenment because of its potential for significant human progress – surpassing the first, the 18th century period of progress.

Although we don’t know how much money is being allocated to impact investing today, we do know that it’s rising quickly and will appear as an avalanche of capital-seeking products and strategies within this decade. New investment structures like Green Bonds, Enterprise Zones, Cryptocurrency economic aid to developing nations, side-by-side philanthropic and investment co-ventures, and more are all underway. There are hundreds of social-impact incubators at work, turning out new solutions to virtually every problem we know. The main shared feature of all these new strategies is urgency. Patience with failing education, healthcare solutions, and environmental degradation is at an end. There is a drive of human capital, AI, and tech pouncing on virtually every problem we face.

Investors are actively pursuing solutions to clean fuels and water, saving the oceans, advancing nutrition and health, and many other worthy causes. This is the private sector at work and at its best. Letting market forces drive improvements in health care, personal safety, and the reduction in carbon footprints may be one way that sustainability could have the most lasting and significant effect. Some restless investors have also spawned the rise of impatient capital being put to use in these directions through political and corporate activism.

The creative genius Peter Diamandis, along with co-author Steven Kotler, wrote in their 2012 groundbreaking book Abundance, “Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is actually within our grasp.”

What this means is that if abundance is within our grasp, then by strategically working backward we can know the obstacles to reaching it. We can begin to create the solutions to surmount them. As the development of policy shifts to the private sector, we must integrate industry, innovation, philanthropy, and the social sciences to work as partners, or we will never reach what Diamandis, the X-Prize Founder, has laid out as our goal. We are talking fetterless opportunity and solutions beyond our present imagination. Only fear, political constraint, or lack of dreaming can eclipse this New Age of Enlightenment.