Speakers, like executives, salespeople, managers, trainers, consultants, advisors, engineers – the whole information society, in fact – are terribly afraid of losing the attention that audiences seem to be increasingly unwilling to give them these days, and certainly not for long. Whether large or small, audiences are now objects of great fear for anyone who […]
How important is it for audiences to like their speakers? Most speakers won’t admit it, but a big part of why they get into the business of professional public speaking, like acting, or politics, is that they want to be liked. But, as I’ve blogged before, if you want to change the world, and change […]
Every single human voice has a slightly different mix of its basic pitch, undertones and overtones. Added together and they give each voice a distinctive quality – what musicians call the timbre of an instrument, only for the voice. You are so good at hearing the timbre of human voices that you can identify every […]
We live half our lives in the virtual world, half in the real, so that many of our communications are wholly virtual, and that’s a human disaster. The ongoing human emotional train wreck that is the digital era began, arguably, with email and the attempt to solve two particular problems with older forms of communication: […]
I wish I could say that the 21st Century, while giving rise to technological wonders, artisan coffee, and Uber, has also seen the dawn of a new age of public speaking, and the voice. Sadly, that’s not the case, and voices are getting worse. Mobile phones, headsets, and open cube-style offices have corrupted our ability […]
You’re standing in the wings, getting ready to go on stage to give an important speech. If you’re like most people, you’re just a little nervous at this point. Well, OK, maybe more than a little nervous. Maybe you’re terrified. And maybe you’re asking yourself, how do I sound more intelligent, confident, dominant, and attractive […]
Human interaction begins with the face – in the cradle. It’s the aspect of our fellow human beings we study the most because it’s where we get the most important emotional cues and signals about what the other person is intending. As infants, we start studying our mamas’ and papas’ faces for cues about life, […]
There’s a good deal of nonsense written about body language. The idea most often expressed is that experts in the field can give a stranger a quick glance or two and instantly decode their innermost secrets. There was a TV show a few years back, Lie To Me, which popularized this idea, with a clever […]
It’s time for the 2018 update on what a speaker should wear for an important speech. And they’re all important, right? I was inspired to re-visit this topic by a recent study that found that the more clothing you’re wearing, the smarter we’re going to think you are. And conversely, the less clothing you have […]
Edward T. Hall virtually single-handedly invented the science of proxemics a generation ago, studying how humans handle the distances between us. The word never caught on, but his insights have been extraordinarily valuable to those of us who are fascinated with body language and the ways in which humans communicate with one another. As I’ve mentioned […]
