The 18 Big Ideas:

• Don’t Equivocate

• 10 to 18 Minutes for a Speech

• Don’t Bury the Lead: Start with Your Best Material

• The Best Interviewers are Curious

• Record Yourself If You Really Want to Improve

• The First 30 Seconds are Critical

• Good Teases to Get Attention: Short, Suspenseful, Surprising

• You’ll Present Better if You Truly Believe Your Story

• Don’t Keep Elaborating and Explaining to Drive a Point Home: It Bores People

• Remain Quiet in a Meeting to Become Intriguing: Learn to be Comfortable with Silence

• Don’t Worry about Rearticulating Things You Just Said; Just Keep Moving Forward

• Pause After Someone Speaks

• Keys to Body Position

• Five Positions of Doubt

• Listen with Curiosity

• Why “Tell Me About Yourself” is such a Tough Question

• Practice the Beginning and the End: It’s the Most Critical

• Breathing Helps Calm Your Nerves

My Highlights From the Book:

Don’t Equivocate:

Show Crisp Conviction Good communicators don’t equivocate. They don’t start sentences with “I think that . . .” They also avoid wishy-washy language, such as sort of and kind of. They have the courage to say what they mean and confidently state their point.

10 to 18 Minutes for a Speech:

Keep It Short More is not more. Researchers at Saint Louis University have found that ten to eighteen minutes is the length of time past which you begin a game of diminishing returns on your listener’s attention. Take a guess how long President Obama’s 2013 inauguration speech was. That’s right: eighteen minutes. Coincidence? I doubt it.

Don’t Bury the Lead: Start with Your Best Material:

The Headline Principle Get attention by starting with your best material, especially a grabbing, thought-provoking line that makes listeners think, I want to know more. Don’t bury the lead. Don’t copy others. Don’t resort to clichéd formulas. Don’t ease into a point. Start with a concise and compelling statement.

The Buried Lead Nearly all presentations could be drastically improved with one quick and simple edit: lopping off the first two paragraphs. Try it. You’ll be amazed at how engaging an abrupt start can be. Why slowly build to making your point when providing an unexpected jolt to your audience works so much better?

Good journalists put their most compelling material in the first paragraph, known as the lead. This is the sentence or paragraph that grabs the readers or viewers, enticing them to want more. An effective lead is often surprising—even counterintuitive. It makes the reader think, What’s this about? I want to know more.

The Best Interviewers are Curious:

The Curiosity Principle The best broadcast interviewers earn trust by displaying genuine interest, as if there is nowhere else they’d rather be. They demonstrate this by maintaining an engaged facial expression.

Record Yourself If You Really Want to Improve:

Study yourself. I record video of my clients during sessions and play it back for them. Sure, some people cringe when they see themselves onscreen, but I’ve found that this is one of the most efficient ways for people to improve. So record your phone calls. Watch yourself as you conduct Skype sessions. Ask a trusted friend to record you during presentations. Use the video-recording feature on your smartphone.

The First 30 Seconds are Critical:

The first thirty seconds of any conversation or presentation are like the last two minutes of a football game. This is when victory or defeat is determined, the period of time when your audience is deciding whether you are interesting enough for them to continue paying attention. Say just the right thing, and the communication game is yours. Your audience gets hooked, and they’re enticed to hear what you will say next. Get it wrong, and your listeners start daydreaming, checking their smartphones, or plotting their conversational exit strategy.

Good Teases to Get Attention: Short, Suspenseful, Surprising:

Good teases generally have three characteristics: 1.  Short. Convey it quickly, in just a line or two. 2.  Suspenseful. Include an element of intrigue. Beginning your remarks with a story or some declarative, provocative statement works nicely. It gets your audience mentally chewing on something right away, which is what you want to accomplish. Make your audience wonder, “What does she mean by that?” 3.  Surprising. Make your tease the opposite of a cliché, something that makes your listeners think, this is new. I’ve never heard this before. Do the unexpected and employ a different style.

You’ll Present Better if You Truly Believe Your Story:

Psych Yourself Up If you truly believe your story merits telling and is interesting, you’ll naturally deliver it with a greater sense of importance. But if that evil inner critic tells you, “I’m sure they’ve heard this before” or “They are going to hate this,” then you’ll likely deliver it with a sense of apology and defeatism. Your audience absorbs what you project.

Don’t Keep Elaborating and Explaining to Drive a Point Home: It Bores People:

To Drive Home a Point People think that the more they elaborate and explain, the more convincing they will be. They confuse quantity with persuasiveness. So they often say the same thing over and over again, talk in circles, and even tell random stories that don’t support their message. This, however, doesn’t persuade people. Instead, it bores them.

Remain Quiet in a Meeting to Become Intriguing: Learn to be Comfortable with Silence:

To Seem Smart Abe Lincoln is alleged to have said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” The more you talk, the more you risk proving Honest Abe right. In reality, the quietest person in any room is often the most intriguing, as well as the most powerful. By remaining quiet, the person creates more conversational open space, which invariably gets filled by others who are more uncomfortable with silence. You don’t want to be the person filling the dead air. Strive to be the person in control.

Don’t Worry about Rearticulating Things You Just Said; Just Keep Moving Forward:

Constantly searching for a better way to articulate a thought while you’re in the middle of expressing it creates a halting and uncertain delivery that saps you of confidence and conviction. Whenever you feel the urge to verbally backspace, pause and relax into the notion that the first way you said it is now the best way.

Pause After Someone Speaks:

Pausing thoughtfully after the other person has completed a thought signals that you’ve heard what they’ve had to say, digested it, considered it, and are now basing your next contribution on what’s just been said, rather than careening off with a non sequitur. Your response will likely seem more genuine, sincere, engaged, and targeted.

Keys to Body Position:

To stand with confidence, do what your mother always told you: stand up straight. Use this head-to-toe guide. Shoulders DO Pull them back to open the chest. DON’T Shrug them toward your ears.

Arms: create a ninety-degree angle between your forearms and upper arms. Keep them out in front of you, with your arms and hands soft and relaxed. This allows you to easily gesture if needed. There’s never a long distance for them to travel, so your gestures don’t become distracting.

When you are not using your hands, bring them together right around where your belt buckle would be. Allow your fingers to lightly touch, almost as if the fingers of your right hand are gently touching a ring on your left ring finger. Your palms should be facing in toward you with the backs of your hands facing your audience.

Feet: shift your weight forward slightly onto the balls of your feet so you can feel a slight pressure in your toes. This will keep your weight forward so you are learning toward your audience.

Don’t get back on your heels. This position is not only more passive, it also makes it all too easy for you to get fidgety feet. When you’re speaking in a high-stakes situation, your body produces adrenaline, and while this provides a good energy spike, there’s a definite downside. Our bodies like to expel excess nervous energy, and the most common portal through which it escapes is our feet.

Five Positions of Doubt:

Behind Your Back: Though the pose works for speed skaters, it’s too passive and apologetic for public speakers. It sends a visual signal that you are undeserving of people’s attention.

Crossed over Your Chest: Also known as the Nikita Khrushchev pose, this comes across as defiant and judgmental, closes you off from your audience, and makes you seem less accessible.

In Your Pockets: Nuns in Catholic schools condemn this pose for boys for the obvious reason. There are two other reasons to avoid it. A client of mine struck this pose with loose change in his pockets, and the jittery movement of his hands (another energy-expelling portal) made it sound like the neighborhood ice cream truck was approaching. I’ve also witnessed numerous speakers reach for their pockets after they’re done gesticulating, only to fumble around for the opening. As my kids say, “Awkward.”

On Your Hips: It’s best to leave this pose to superheroes sporting tights and capes. Some people think that this position makes them appear authoritative and confident, but it’s usually perceived as arrogant.

At Your Sides: We all look uncomfortable with our arms just dangling by our sides. The weight of the arms gives a little droop to the shoulders. It presents a problem for gesticulating, too. When your arms are at your sides, your hands have a greater distance to travel upward if you want to use them to stress a point. They also have a long way to fall to get back down into a resting position.

Listen with Curiosity:

The more often you listen with curiosity, the more skilled you will be at reading people, an enormously valuable asset to develop and fine-tune…Many people never strengthen the muscle required to read others because, rather than listening, they’re too busy waiting for their turn to talk.

Being a good conversationalist requires attentiveness and enthusiasm. It doesn’t mean that you have to create a new BFF. The trick is to listen for some nugget of information that inspires you to want to know more about a particular topic.

To get a jump on where the question will go, pay close attention to the very beginning of what someone says. Before someone ever asks you a question, she or he gives you plenty of contextual cues that set up that question. You’ll hear opinion or observations that relate to the question someone is going to ask many sentences later.

Why “Tell Me About Yourself” is such a Tough Question:

Why do so many people destroy their chances on such a seemingly easy question? Because “Tell me about yourself” is deceptive. It doesn’t sound like a trick question, or even a thought-provoking one, so many people skip over it when preparing for an interview. Instead, they spend their time on seemingly tougher questions like, “What’s your biggest weakness?”

In reality, it’s the toughest question of the entire interview and also the most important one to get right. That’s because it’s often the very first question, so the Headline Principle applies. Get it right and you’ve increased your chances of being in the running for the job. Get it wrong and the interviewer starts thinking, “Next!”

Practice the Beginning and the End: It’s the Most Critical:

Practice the Beginning Over and Over Again The first two minutes of any presentation are when you’re most nervous. A strong, smooth opening is like a perfect triple axel at the start of an Olympic figure skater’s routine. Nailing it is a confidence builder and helps get rid of the butterflies.

Breathing Helps Calm Your Nerves:

Walk to the Lectern. Take a Breath. Then Talk. Many clients ask me, “How do I get rid of that shake and tremble in my voice? It’s a dead giveaway that I’m petrified.” That condition is caused by something as simple as breathing. When we’re anxious and panicked, we forget to breathe properly. We take short, shallow breaths that raise the heart rate (that’s why it feels like it’s about to pound out of your chest) and deplete our lungs of the air we need to project the voice.

Just before and during Your Talk Take long inhales through your nose, hold them for a beat or two, and then exhale long and slowly through your mouth. If you do yoga, you know how to do this already. This calms you down, slows your pulse, and replenishes your lungs, restoring a stable and confident sound to your voice.