Improving Your Vocabulary

As a speaker, teacher, or leader, it’s important to be eloquent. It’s important to always have exactly the right word to explain the emotion or thought you are trying to convey. Here are some tips for improving your vocabulary. As a speaker, when it comes to language, you need to have the biggest arsenal. Remember that it takes more than learning a word to remember it. Language is built through repetition and use. Once you find new words, you’ve got to get into the habit of using them. Otherwise they’ll never truly “stick.” Also remember not to “flaunt” your newfound knowledge. Everyone likes speaking with someone who is knowledgeable and well-spoken, but no one likes someone who comes across as pompous or a show-off.

Read. This is important. Be it trade publications, novels, newspapers, or online… the more you read, and the wider the scope of genre, the more words you will be exposed to in your day-to-day life. Reading is processed very differently by the brain than listening is, so I recommend you steer away from podcasts or audiobooks in favor of the written word. Make sure to use a dictionary if you need to. Also keep a keen eye on the context of the words surrounding the words you learn. It’s as important to know how to use the words as it is to learn them.

Use a journal or blog. This doesn’t need to be expensive or time consuming, but writing down a few of your thoughts daily is a great way to capture thoughts and ideas, but can also allow you to try out new words you learn, to work them into your regular vocabulary, and to get used to using them.

Write letters or emails to friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances. Keep the words fresh in your mind as you reach out to important people in your life. It will be as good for your social life as it is for your vocabulary!

Learn a word a day. Either via app, website, calendar, or dictionary, this is a great technique, and very effective. To make it part of your routine, try tying it in with something else you do every day. Like learning the word while brushing your teeth.

Spend time with a thesaurus. Look up your favorite words, or the words you use the most often, and there you will find synonyms, similar words that can be used in many of the same circumstances.

Learn a language, or study root languages. Latin and Greek are the basis of many words in English. Once you understand the root words, it’s easier to make connections between words and use them yourself. The history is important. Language for English-speakers in influenced by many cultures, so learning another language can also be beneficial.
Play games. Crossword puzzles on the train, Scrabble with friends, or even games you can download to your phone or computer are great ways to unwind and pass the time, while still strengthening the muscle of your vocabulary. This is having fun and working at the same time! Challenge your peers, find new games, stretch your limits.

The Speaker’s Dictionary A – H

This is the first in a series of quick, no-nonsense tips and how-tos for being a better speaker, leader, and teacher. The alphabet of professional speaking.

Audience – It’s fitting that this comes first, as this is the most important thing to remember in any speech or workshop or lecture you give. What matters isn’t you, what matters is your ability to connect with people. To get them to understand what you’re trying to convey. Make sure that you always keep your audience at the forefront of every decision.

Blocking – This is a theater term that is also useful for presentations. It’s your movement on stage, how you use the space. This is also the position of equipment on stage, like microphones or podiums. Make sure you know the blocking ahead of time, or a least a good idea of what your space is like and how you intend to use it.

Concise – Make sure to keep you lecture, presentation, or speech short, sweet, and to the point. Keep in mind that the simple ways of speaking often allow for more emotion and power in what you say.

Data – Information you use to build your speech and present to back up your words. Make sure you know how to use this properly. The best way to handle data is to use as little of it as possible. Stories are better than facts. Eye contact is better than slides. Sometimes you need data, but try to keep it to one slide per three minutes of speaking.

Eloquence – It’s not always about using the most obscure words, or having the largest vocabulary. Sometimes, paring down a thought to it’s bare bones poetically is the most eloquent a speaker can be.

Focus – Always make sure you know what your core message is, and always make sure that you know why your audience will care about your core message. If you keep your focus on those two questions, and you keep your on-stage focus on the audience and connecting with them, making eye-contact with them, you’ll never veer off course.

Gestures – Make sure that you use them powerfully, but in moderation. Don’t be a “hand-talker” because that is distracting, and don’t keep your hands stiff at your sides, or you’ll seem cold and closed off. Keep a balance and be mindful of it.

Heckler – Sometimes, depending on your crowd, you will get someone who is angry or tired or who thinks they are funnier or smarter than you. These people may sometimes yell out in the middle of your speech. Like schoolyard bullies, it’s usually best to ignore them. Responding could set you off course and make you lose the thread of your speech, and joking and being mean back will undoubtedly backfire. Just don’t let them change your demeanor.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts with the rest of the alphabet!

Effective Body Language in Front of a Crowd

Standing in front of a group, on stage, or leading a workshop, requires not just language to be commanding. It also requires a presence. It requires the command of the room. It requires body language.

 Here are some tips for effective speaking in front of others, but not with your voice, but rather with what you are conveying with your body:

Use your gestures.

 Begin with a neutral position of standing tall with your hands at your sides. When you think about hand placement it will start to feel unnatural and strange, but just let them hang at your sides to begin with. Keep yourself open to the audience, don’t turn your back to them to view a slide. Keep your shoulders at a straight or very narrow angle to the back wall of the room. Make sure that the gestures you use are sparing, and defined. Think of how many presidents comedians can imitate just using the hand gestures that the president favored. That definition and decisive gesture can drive home the impact of your words. If you are a natural “hand-talker” (someone who illustrates their conversation with many hand gestures) don’t try to fight your nature and keep your hands still, because you will look unnatural, but do try to pare it down to the core gestures you use to make your point.

Manage your stress.

No one likes speaking to a crowd, but those that do it professional have learned to turn it into energy. To funnel the nervousness and loop it around into exhilaration. Energy is a good thing and keeps your presentation alive and engaging, but letting stress get the best of you will lead to vocal tics and other nonverbal behaviors that might undermine your words. Sports players are often known for jumping a little in place before going out to field, stadium, or court, and turning nervousness into excitement. Clench and release your fists to relieve tension, bounce a little on your toes, breathe deeply from your belly, look at a wall straight ahead of you. Exhale slowly and feel all of your muscles relax in a wave. Concentrate on your toes, then your feet, then your ankles, and relax your muscles with your mind all the way up your body. Think about being excited rather than nervous.

Use your space.

Ditch the podium, forget the chair. Walk around the stage and fill it with your presence. Don’t pace around in circles, but do use what you have to keep the energy going and to keep eyes following you. Humans are drawn to movement and are more likely to be engaged with you if you use the space you have. But when you key to a key point, stop and face the audience, stand still and possessively, and really drive your point home.

Power poses.

The most viewed TED Talk of all time is Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk about body language. It talked about how body language doesn’t just shape how other people perceive you, it can also shape you you perceive yourself. Puting energy and dynamic movement into posing and standing in a way that can convey power doesn’t just make others look at you differently, it can make you actually feel more powerful.

Watch the video here:

Shifting Your Perspective

Part of being a creative problem solver, and effective communicator, and a revolutionary thinker, is being able to shift your perspective from your own current perspective. But how do you get out from underneath your current mentality and into a new perspective? How to do instigate inspiration?

Literally shift your perspective.

Is there a chair in your home you never sit in? Do you stand on the same spot on the platform every day because you know where the doors to the train car will be? Have you spent your last eight days off  from work running errands in the city? Change your view. Seeing your home, your commute, your city differently can refresh your brain. We grow stale with time and repetition, and getting out into nature, taking a different route home in your car, or shopping at a different grocery store can liven up your brain, and introduce you to new experiences.

Widen your scope.

In a story of animal abuse, a puppy was thrown from a moving car, to what one can only assume was it’s death. Looking at the event in a small scale focuses on the precipitating event, which is mired in cruelty towards an animal. Looking at the event from a larger scale, instead of seeing the violence of the act, you see motorists stopping other cars for safety, someone going onto the highway to wrap the puppy up safely, and taking it to a humane shelter where a volunteer veterinarian patched it up for free. From this perspective you see the work of many, the selflessness of the story, and how each individual act of kindness far outweighs the one singular act of cruelty. The stock market is a wonderful place to get a shift in perspective as well. Commodities of pork bellies don’t just raise in price overnight. When you trace the product, you find that too much rain made the grain moldy and the moldy grain meant the pigs were underweight, and the underweight pigs didn’t bear any piglets, and the next generation of pigs is a greatly reduced population, raising the scarcity. The further back you trace the reasoning, the bigger the scope gets.

Your thoughts don’t define you, your behavior does.

Being in a rut of unique thought or a spiral of thinking negative things does not discount your creativity or ingenuity or the good thoughts that you think. We all have thoughts we wish we didn’t have, but the actions that we take with those thoughts is what defines us.

From the book The Art of Happiness: “Once there was a disciple of a Greek philosopher who was commanded by his Master for three years to give money to everyone who insulted him. When this period of trial was over the Master said to him, “Now you can go to Athens and learn Wisdom.” When the disciple was entering Athens, he met a certain wise man who sat at the gate insulting everybody who came and went. He also insulted the disciple, who burst out laughing. “Why do you laugh when I insult you?” said the wise man. “Because,” said the disciple, “for three years I have been paying for this kind of thing and now you give it to me for nothing.” “Enter the city,” said the wise man, “it is all yours…”

How to be Persuasive

Part of being a motivational speaker, keynote speaker, or workshop leader is being persuasive. It is also important in being a successful entrepreneur, a positive leader, and a good networker.  Motivational speaking is not just “speaking”, it requires convincing people to open their minds and see things from a different perspective. And so how does one become a persuasive person? How do you change minds, open up possibilities, and positively influence the people around you?

Use powerful words. People are primed to react more viscerally to certain words. Adding the word “because” to a request made people 33% more likely to let someone cut in line, for example. When talking about an incident you hear the word “accident” very differently than you hear the word “death”. No matter if they have negative or positive associations, words that evoke deep feeling like “fascist” or “ascend“ are more like to get people emotionally involved in what you are saying.

Amplification: If someone already has set opinions, forceful language and certainty -either in favor of or against- will amplify those opinions. If you express uncertainty you will soften those opinions. Using an emotional attack on a fact-based thought attitude will increase resistance, so a cognitive attack will be more effective. The same effect happens in reverse. Using a logical argument has little impact on a person who is emotional whilst an emotional argument is more powerful. Use this to your advantage. A little research on your client, audience, or the attitude of a boardroom can allow you to shape your words in a way that they will be more receptive to.

Talk about them. Ask about them. Don’t talk about “this company” or “the world” talk about “you.” Even if you don’t expect or want audience participation from a keynote speech, ask questions as part of the speech. Ask questions while preparing your ideas. Ask people about themselves before you leave. The more that others feel listened to and understood the more likely they are to listen to you, to give you more information about themselves, and to take what you have to say to heart.

Learn to explain simply, but without condescension. This one takes practice, but it is imperative for every person who wants to be influential. You may be explaining concepts to people who have no background knowledge of your field, or teaching someone new how to accomplish a certain process. To be truly persuasive you need to teach yourself the language of teaching and breaking down concepts in a way that makes the listener feel engaged and intelligent, not belittled and spoken down to. This is either an innate talent or requires lots of trial and error. One easy beginning is to explain how you learned this process, and the pitfalls you encountered and the mistakes you made, even if you make those situations up. Putting the onus on you, and not on them, can be very persuasive indeed.

In the end it’s about putting yourself into the perspectives of others and speaking from that vantage point. The better you are at understanding human nature, the more persuasive a speaker you can be.

Nurture Your Business Relationships

No matter how many connections you have, people you have dated, or how good at networking you are, without nurturing your business or personal relationships continuously, you cannot succeed long-term with those connections.

People are inherently self-focused. This is not negative in any way, it’s a survival instinct that allowed humans to live and evolve over time the way that we have. It is how we succeed and thrive in the modern world. But it does make it hard for people to connect and empathize as instinct. It takes a conscious effort to nurture your relationships.

The biggest question to ask yourself is a question of participation. Are you engaged in what you do? Do you show up on time? Do you respect the needs of others and the demands that their workloads and personal lives place on them? Is this relationship better off because you are in it? If the answer to that last question is no, then you are not participating in the relationship. If you are not bringing something specific to the table, then you cannot count on this relationship to have a solid foundation.

Collaborate with others. Ask for input. Everyone wants to feel both valued and heard. The more that you ask for help, listen to input, and recognize talent and hard work, the more likely it is that people are going to want to keep working with you. Empathize with others. Everyone has bad days and a behind-the-scenes story that helps define the decisions they make. If you can’t look at a problem or a relationship from the perspective of someone else, then it makes it much more difficult to be an asset in the relationship. You have to create less stress and nurture creativity in any relationship to strengthen it, and without empathy you’ll be hard-pressed to find ways to achieve that.

Treat everyone the same. This is one of the most undervalued relationship nurturing techniques. Sure, show deference to your CEO or your venture capitalists, but also treat them just as well as you treat the customers, the employees, and your vendors. The guy that comes in to fix the copier is just as human and just as valuable as the woman in the corner office. They can all be loyal to you, they can all provide you with social benefits, just as you can equally enrich and be vital to all of their lives in return. People often forget the people lower on the ladder, but if there is a plumber who has sixteen buildings all in need of toilet repair, the first visit that plumber will make is to the office where they are welcomed warmly, treated professionally, and where there has been a relationship nurtured. That intern that makes copies has valuable input and may well be in a powerful position that could help you later on in your career if they remember the way you helped them with a technical issue or encouraged them to take thier good idea directly to the boss.

It is an easy thing in any business to turn work into a numerical, analytical landscape that loses the focus of what all of us are here to do. Without people, there is no business of any kind. Without humanity, there cannot be success. Focus on providing resources and value to your relationships, and in turn accepting help and value from the other parties in those relationships, and you will always have a leg up, personally and professionally.

Steps to Becoming a Motivational Speaker

There are many people out there who look at keynote and motivational speaking, and think that it is a great job. Travel, interesting events, brilliant people, notoriety… all of this sounds great, but how does one actually begin to do that for a living? Read on for advice:

Have Passion:

Motivational and keynote speaking is not just getting up in front of a crowd and talking. It is about convincing every person listening. The idea is to open minds, to change them, to shift their perspectives. You can’t do that by just speaking alone. You have to be an expert. You have to be passionate. You have to know deep down in your bones that what you know is right, and possibly being overlooked, and others need to hear about what you know.

Be Yourself:

There are a lot of people with a lot of opinions in this world. You cannot get anywhere by telling people things that they have already heard. It needs to be creative, and unique. It also has to be better.

Be Better:

The way to get better is to reach out to professionals and colleagues, and give them your talk. Do not ask friends and family, who will want to be nice to you. You need to know, honestly, if you cough when you are nervous, or if you fidget with your sleeves. Seek out people smarter than you who can challenge the things you say, who can tell you what is spurious or in need of clarification. You need to know what is working and what is not working to improve it. Film it and watch it back yourself.

Start Small:

Once you have perfected your brilliant, insightful, expressive, consequential talk over hours of refining… Give it away. Find relevant groups. Deserving groups. Groups who would love your talk at their event but do not have the resources. Start local and in your area of expertise. This is where you get your crowd feedback. Where the pauses are. Does your joke get a laugh?

Keep it Free:

It is said in the industry that you can’t be paid to speak until you have given 300 free talks. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, maybe for you it’s 50 talks, maybe it’s 500. Maybe you have a low fee to cover the gas you used to get to their location. Find professionals in your circle that would like you to give a small workshop to their team. Tech startups love to have experts come into the office to speak. Go to university professors teaching your subject and guest lecture.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job:

Eventually, after a time, you will have someone come up to you and ask “How much would you charge to give that talk at my event?” That is when you become a professional. Word of mouth takes time to spread, and in the meantime the passion you have will carry you through. Do it because you believe in it, not to make a living off of it. Some speaking careers never become lucrative. Some are just lucrative enough to pay the bills. Some pay very, very well. It is up to you and the time you devote to motivational speaking. It will happen, but not passively.

Be Professional:

Once you are being paid, you have to be a value to those paying you. Show up early and prepared. Be courteous and quick. Be the kindest, the most hassle-free, the most insightful in the business. You are selling yourself in the keynote and motivational speaking industries, not any other product. You have to be committed to being the best of the best, every day.