Podcast appearances and mentions of robin kermode

We're taking a short break ... A milestone moment calls for thoughtful reflection. After producing over 50 episodes and reaching more than one million downloads, we're taking a strategic pause to reimagine The Art of Communication podcast for you.Since launching our journey exploring the nuances of communication, we've been overwhelmed by your enthusiastic response. This podcast has grown beyond our expectations, creating a community of listeners passionate about improving how they connect with others. We want to maintain high standards, which is why we're stepping back during spring and summer 2025 to refresh our approach.In the meantime, we encourage you to explore any episodes you might have missed. And please, share your favorites with friends who might enjoy these conversations! We're excited about crafting something even more valuable when we return with a super modern take on communication lessons learned. You can connect with us directly via robinkermode.com with any ideas or feedback you have – we'd love to hear from you!

The Power of Silence.Silence isn't just the absence of sound - it's a secret weapon in communication. Whether you're delivering a speech, truly listening, or having a heartfelt conversation, knowing how to embrace silence can transform the way you connect with others.In this episode, Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen dive into the power of silence, exploring how mastering it can deepen your relationships, boost your confidence, and sharpen your communication skills. Tune in for another fun and insightful chat as they uncover why sometimes, saying nothing says it all.

The Importance of Energy. How important is energy when engaging an audience? What is the right level of energy? And how can we change our energy levels?Discover how physical and mental preparation can help you channel that "sweet spot" of energy for different situations — from meeting rooms to large gatherings.Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss how different types of energy can change our communication style in another fun episode of this podcast series.

Being Natural on Video.How can you appear natural in front of a camera, whether you're a shooting social media video or filming a company message for your team? We look at why authenticity and a conversational tone are crucial, even in formal settings, and learn practical tips for sound and lighting to produce a flattering and natural feel. Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen for another fun podcast episode as they unravel the secrets to producing authentic and engaging videos.

Executive Presence - Leadership Beyond Charisma.What is executive presence? And can you learn it?It's a crucial but often misunderstood quality in effective leadership. Discover how true executive presence builds a sense of security and respect rather than fear. We discuss real life examples, from Rafael Nadal to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and find the core elements that make up genuine executive presence. We look at how we can all become leaders with executive presence that our teams truly want to follow.Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen for another fun podcast episode as they discuss some of the secrets to boosting your executive presence.

The Importance of Memory in Communication.Why can you vividly remember some pitches and presentations while others fade away? We look at the role memory plays in effective communication. Is it better to memorize your speeches fully or rely on notes? And do specific memories help your storytelling to be more engaging and authentic?Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen for another fun podcast episode as they discuss some of the secrets to boosting your memory and unlocking the power of memory in your communication.

Asking for Money: The Art of Fundraising.Many people feel that asking for money is hard. They say it can be difficult and embarrassing. From fundraising for charitable causes to funding business ventures, we discuss some of the communication secrets to asking for money.Whether you're raising for personal causes, charities, or business investments, join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen for another episode of this fun podcast. 

The Power of Saying 'Thank You'.Discover how the simple act of saying 'Thank you' can radiate through your day, influencing not just your mood but those around you. We explore how this simple act can shape relationships, professional dynamics, and even the way we interact with technology. We discuss the mindset of gratitude, from the joy of beginning each day with a grateful heart to how the unexpected impact of appreciation in leadership can rejuvenate spirits and strengthen bonds. We celebrate and revere the compelling power of those two little words.Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen for another episode of this fun podcast.

The Top Five Frequently Asked Communication Questions:  AI, Confidence, Cross-Culture Communication, Humour and Using Notes.How will AI and ChatGPT impact communication? How can we regain our confidence when we feel we've lost it? How can we speak to people in cross-cultural settings? How can we inject humour into our communication, especially if we feel we are just not funny? And should we feel bad about using notes when giving a speech or a presentation?Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss The Top Five Frequently Asked Communication Questions in another fun episode of this podcast. 

The Three Spaces of Communication: The Physical Space, The Space of the Senses, and the Virtual Space.How close should you sit or stand to someone? We explore the subtle art of Proxemics and its role in building trust. We explore cross-cultural variations and The Vertical Space that shapes  our classrooms and boardrooms.The Space of the Senses looks at all the personal senses, from your co-worker's strong-smelling office lunch to the volume levels required to be heard and to connect. And then we look at the Virtual Space and how we can easily feel that space being invaded online.Once we understand both these tangible and intangible shared spaces we can learn to build our human connection. We recorded this episode in the studio of our great friend Carlos Santana in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico. He has such a great energy and it was a pleasure to record in his studio once again. Thanks Carlos!  https://prosantana.com.mx/Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen for another fun episode of this podcast. 

The Art of Gift-Giving: Unwrapping the Emotions Behind Our Presents.Gift-giving is more than just handing over a wrapped present; it's a symbol of communication and connection. How can a simple gesture, like a bowl of homemade muffins, speak louder than the most lavish of presents? We look at the unspoken rules of giving. Can the pressure to pick out the perfect gift make us lose sight of what truly matters? And do we give out of obligation or from the heart? Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen for another fun podcast episode that celebrates the true spirit of giving and what we are communicating when we give.

Mastering your Tone of Voice: ChatGTP vs Humans?How important is your tone of voice in both spoken and written communication?  What can happen if you get your tone wrong?  AI understands that the tone of what you say really matters and it can suggest different tones for you. Let's make sure that we hit the right tone every time.Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss these and other questions about the importance of getting your tone right in another episode of this fun podcast series. 

How to become a really good Listener.We listen all the time, of course, but do we truly listen? Or do we just let things waft over us?  How important is active listening? And how can we learn to become really good listeners? Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss these and other questions around the importance of listening well in another episode of this fun podcast series. 

The Inner Voices in Our Head.All of us have inner voices in our heads - some of us have them louder than others. From the little demon that says we're not good enough to the imagined conversations we wish we could have instead of the ones that we have to have.Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss some interesting ways to listen to the inner voices in our heads so that they don't derail us unucessarily!  

To Rehearse or Not to Rehearse? It can feel odd rehearsing a speech or a presentation. Especially if you are rehearsing on your own. To some, rehearsing makes them feel safe and comfortable. To others, it can make them feel just plain awkward. But it would be foolish not to rehearse when the outcome of your pitch or presentation is really important. So how should we rehearse? How long should we rehearse for? And is there a correct way to rehearse? Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss some interesting ways to make sure that when you do rehearse, you rehearse in the right way knowing that you'll do yourself proud on the big day!  

How to Behave When You Meet One of Your Heroes.  It can feel awkward meeting one of your heroes - whether they're a movie star, an author, a public figure or an important person from your past. What do you say? How do you behave naturally? And is it OK to ask for a selfie? It's all a bit of a minefield. Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss some interesting ways to make sure that if you do meet one of your heroes, you feel you've behaved well and done yourself proud!  

How to be a Great Host at Home and at Work.We've all been to great events, whether it was a party or a video conference call. It was probably great because it was hosted well. What makes a great host? Can you learn to be a better host? What are the basics?Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss some interesting ways to become a great host in another fun episode of this podcast. 

Introduce Yourself in Any Situation.How can we best introduce ourselves in any situation, confidently and calmly?  How can we come across as being impressive without being arrogant? Should we give our job title? Or underplay our success and be a little humble? We do it every day, but there are many factors to keep in mind when introducing ourselves.Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss some interesting ways to introduce ourselves in another fun episode of this podcast. 

Final preparations.So, your big day has finally arrived. It may be a speech, a presentation, an important meeting, or a job interview. How should we prepare ourselves so we feel relaxed and confident?  How do we deal with any last-minute nerves? And are there specific things we should look out for so we don't get derailed?Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss some interesting and fun ways to help us feel confident and make sure we do ourselves proud on the big day.

Communication's Secret Weapon - Poetry.Reciting a poem can feel a little scary but it needn't be that way. How can we become more confident in using poetry in our speeches and in our everyday life? Poetry can build our connection with our audience and boost our communication power.  Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss some interesting ways to help us all feel confident when reciting poetry.

Keeping it Fresh. How can you deliver the same message over and over again and still keep it fresh? From presentations to pitches, from Town Halls to talks, it can be a real challenge. And, of course, actors face this problem every day when on stage or filming take after take. Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they find some interesting ways to keep it fresh in another fun episode. 

First Impressions. How important is it for us to make a good first impression? How harshly do we judge other people on the first impression they make on us?  And is it possible to reverse a bad first impression?  Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen for the 30th episode of this fun podcast. 

The Delicate Etiquette of Food at Work.Is it acceptable to eat on a Zoom call, to slurp spicy foods at your desk or to crunch crisps in a business meeting? And what about formal lunches with clients or your boss?  Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they tackle the delicate etiquette of food at work in another fun episode. 

Socially Awkward Moments.You know those socially awkward moments, when you just want the floor to open up so you can disappear. You're at a party and you forget someone's name. And then you have to introduce them to someone else. Whose name you also can't remember.  You bump into your ex, and you have to meet their glamorous new partner. You're in a restaurant and you discover you've left your wallet at home.  Then there's the awkward silence in a lift ...Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they tackle these and other awkward social moments, that we have all had,  in another fun episode. 

Robin Kermode reads this beautiful short story for children and adults by Oscar Wilde. It is the story of the Happy Prince. When he was alive he lived in the Palace of Sans Souci and did not know about human suffering. But now he has died, his statue is placed on a column, high above the city, where he can see the suffering of the poor. He develops a deep friendship with a little swallow, who flies around the city doing good deeds for the Happy Prince. It was first published in 1888 in the anthology 'The Happy Prince and Other Tales' which, in addition to its title story, also includes 'The Star Child', 'The Devoted Friend' and 'The Selfish Giant'.

Going blank. What happens when you're giving a speech or going for a job interview and your mind goes blank? It's a horrible feeling. You can't even remember your own name! How can we prepare ourselves so this doesn't happen and how do we deal with it when it does? Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss these and other questions in another fun episode. 

Difficult Conversations.We all have to have them. Most of us dread them and some of us put them off. How can we make them less difficult and less awkward? Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen answer these and other 'difficult' questions. The conclusion? More voice, less emoji! Join them for another fun episode. 

Successful Job Interviews.In this episode, we look at how to be successful at a job interview. What should we say? Or not say? And how should we say it? How do we sell ourselves without looking desperate?  How can we stay calm and relaxed? And can anyone become a successful interviewee? Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen answer these and other questions. Join them for another fun episode.  

The Power of Storytelling.In this episode, we look at storytelling. Why do we love stories and why do they help make our messages more memorable?  What's the best way to tell a story? Is there a magic formula? And can anyone tell a story? Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen answer these and other questions. Join them for another fun episode. 

Today The Brand Called You brings you one such leading communication coach. He is an extremely renowned coach as well as an actor! We are pleased to welcome Robin Kermode. Robin is a Communications Coach. Very interestingly, he has spent thirty years as an actor. He has acted in over 40 films and series. The most recent ones being very famous shows like The Crown, Iron Lady, and Close. Robin is a media commentator and an author. He is also a podcast host. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/tbcy/support

Random Acts of Kindness.In this episode, we look at why kindness, and especially random acts of kindness, help us connect with other human beings and communicate successfully with them. What can leaders do to build a 'kinder' culture?  Is kindness important and relevant for companies at this time? Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen answer these and other questions. Join them for this heartwarming episode. 

We're on summer break, but before we dive into the musicals of Lerner & Lowe in Season 2, we're so excited to share this conversation with the one & only Robin Kermode, renowned English actor, writer, and communications coach.   We chat about about Broadway overtures, code switching, what acting has to teach us about spirituality, and finding your authentic voice.   Find Robin's own podcast (with occasional guest the Very Rev'd Peter Elliott!) at https://robinkermode.com/podcast/   You'll Hear: - The Overture to “The King and I” (Original Broadway Cast recording, 1951) - Marni Nixon singing “I Could Have Danced All Night” from the 1964 film of “My Fair Lady” - Rex Harrison singing “Why Can't the English” from the 1964 film

The Communication Expert Series: Josh Salzmann, legendary fitness guru and founder of Super A. Robin Kermode talks to Josh Salzmann, legendary fitness guru. Josh has been a fitness instructor for over 40 years. He is a published author and popular media commentator working with senior executives and leading entrepreneurs, members of the Royal family, sports personalities and actors such as Sir Kenneth Branagh, Kate Winslet, Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson, Pierce Brosnan. Together with John Cleese, Sir Paul McCartney and ... me! He is co-founder of Super A (supera.uk)

Robin Kermode reads this wonderful short story for children and adults by Oscar Wilde. The story is about Little Hans and his best friend Big Hugh, the miller, The story is told by a linnet to a water-rat following a conversation about what it means to be a devoted friend.  It was first published in 1888 in the anthology 'The Happy Prince and Other Tales' which, in addition to its title story, also includes "The Star Child" and "The Selfish Giant".

How to tell a joke.Can anyone be funny? What about timing?  What if no one laughs?! When should you tell a joke? Should you laugh at your own jokes?! Is it best to tell jokes or funny stories?  In this episode, we take a look at how to tell jokes and funny stories. Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen for this fun episode.

Adapting your Style. Communication has dramatically adapted over the last year. How can we take advantage of this to make sure that our message lands with every audience, every time? Why might we need to adapt our communication style anyway? In which circumstances? In which ways? And how? In this episode, Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen discuss the subtleties of adapting your style.

What is Confidence?Almost all of us will feel a lack of confidence at some stage in our lives. It's a real and very human worry.  Animals don't seem to have this doubt. It's unlikely that a leopard gets up in the morning asking, 'Am I a good leopard or a bad leopard?' Unless they sense an immediate threat, they just go, 'I'm a leopard!' Join us for this fun episode where we discuss what confidence looks and sounds like from a human point of view. And how we can start to build our confidence - even when we might not totally feel it?!

The Communication Expert Series: The Very Rev. Peter Elliott, former Rector of Christ Church Cathedral and Dean of New Westminster.In this episode, Robin Kermode talks with The Very Rev. Peter Elliott, former Rector of Christ Church Cathedral, Vancouver and Dean of New Westminster in the Anglican Church of Canada. Peter is a wonderful speaker and he shares his thoughts about confidence, engaging an audience, and how to speak with authenticity and humanity. 

Pitch Perfect.  How you can make a pitch work for you so that it lands with your audience, every time - whether you are speaking face to face or via video conference? It's about the structure and the delivery. It's about making your client or your customer feel important. And it starts by making your pitch 'not sound like a pitch'!

Robin Kermode reads this wonderful short story for children and adults by Oscar Wilde. A beautiful child is found in the forest and brought up by a shepherd. He grows into a cruel and selfish boy.  When he rejects his true mother, his beauty vanishes and he becomes as ugly as a toad. It is a story that underlines the pitfalls of pride and vanity and the redeeming qualities of humility and love.It was first published in 1888 in the anthology 'The Happy Prince and Other Tales' which, in addition to its title story, also includes "The Devoted Friend" and "The Selfish Giant".

The Communication Expert Series: Gitikka Ganju Dhar, India's most awarded live event host.In this episode, Robin Kermode talks with Gitikka Ganju Dhar, India's most awarded TV and live event host. She's an actor, orator, TV Anchor, Moderator, Voice Over artist, Live events MC, and now India's most in-demand Virtual MC.  She has shared platforms with Prime Ministers and Heads of State, she has received the Best TV Host for her award-winning TV cookery show and has hosted literally thousands of live events across the globe. Her awards include Live Artist of the Decade at the WOW Awards Asia, Best Live Host India, Best Female Anchor India and has been named by India Today as one of the top 100 Nation Builders in India. 

Robin  Kermode reads the classic story of the emperor who is so vain that he finds himself totally exposed before all his subjects.

Robin Kermode reads this classic story is about a humble tailor who tricks several giants and a ruthless king into believing he has incredible feats of strength and bravery. He doesn't, of course, but because they believe him, he eventually wins the King's daughter.

Robin Kermode read this classic story by Hans Christian Anderson is about how we can be friends with people who are different from us and shows how we can all grow into graceful Swans! 

Robin Kermode reads The Crab that played with the Sea - by Rudyard Kipling, from the Just So Stories. This is the tale of Pau Amma, the King Crab of all Crabs, who played with the Sea and caused the earth to have two tides a day.

The Communication Expert Series: Joanna Trollope CBE, Best Selling Author.Robin Kermode talks to best selling author Joanna Trollope CBE. She's written 22 contemporary novels, 11 historical novels and an edited collection of poetry. Four of her novels became TV series. She has been translated into over 20 languages, sold almost 9 million books and was awarded the OBE in ‘96 and the CBE last year.

Robin Kermode reads How the Rhinoceros got his Skin, from Rudyard Kipling's classic book, JUST SO STORIES. It is a timeless story for children of all ages.

Robin Kermode reads the best Oscar Wilde short story for children and adults. This is a timeless and magical story of forgiveness and redemption.It was first published in 1888 in the anthology 'The Happy Prince and Other Tales' which, in addition to its title story, also includes "The Star Child" and "The Devoted Friend".

The Communication Expert Series: Philip Mould OBE, Art Expert and BBC TV presenter.Robin Kermode speaks with art expert and BBC broadcaster, Philip Mould OBE. His TV series, Fake or Fortune, is the BBC's most-watched arts programme. He talks about how art communicates to him and how he communicates art on the world stage. 

The Communication Expert Series: JoAnne Good, Award Winning BBC Radio Presenter.  Robin Kermode talks to JoAnne Good, award winning BBC Radio presenter, about how you connect and communicate on the radio. This is part of our Communication Expert series.

How to Ace a Video Call.   Many of us will be working from home and might well be using video conferencing for the first time. Here, Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen discuss how to ace a video call. It might well be a new skill for us but if we're going to have to use this medium to communicate - let's try to be really good at it! 

On this edition of The Audiobook show, Chris Lintott discusses ‘The Sky at Night’ and the astronomical power of The Zooniverse. (Starts at 0.57)   Jane Clarke introduces Red Szell to some awesome egg-speriments! (22.25)   Actor Robin Kermode has some surprising advice for Robert Kirkwood on improving your public speaking (41.52) And we return to Chris Lintott for the Books of His Life (50.52)

Robin Kermode is an actor, presenter, keynote speaker and one of Europe's leading communication coaches - working with politicians, CEOs and media personalities. He is also a respected media commentator on all aspects of public speaking and communication. In this episode, he tells Mike the secrets of good speeches, how CEOs prepare and why it's so important to clench the buttocks when presenting!

Matt Foley: I am 35 years old. I am divorced and I live in a van down by the river. Intro: Kelly Coughlin is a CPA and CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm helping bank C Level Officers navigate risk and discover reward. He is the host of the syndicated audio podcast, BankBosun.com. Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyds Bank, and Merrill Lynch. On the podcast Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem to provide bank C suite officers, risk management, technology, and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risks and discover rewards. And now your host, Kelly Coughlin. Greetings, this is Kelly Coughlin, CPA and CEO of BankBosun, helping bank C suite execs navigate risk and discover reward a sea of risk, regulation and revenue opportunities. One of the benefits, perhaps the only benefit, of getting older, is having a huge portfolio of …mistakes. Some wise person said, “Many times what we perceive as an error or failure is actually a gift. And eventually we find that lessons learned from that experience prove to be of great worth.” I say baloney to that. The mistakes I have made cost me and my company money. So, I reject that idea. And another wise man, Alexander Pope, an 18th century British poet, said “A man should never be ashamed to admit he has been wrong, because he is wiser today than he was yesterday” I say, forget that idea too. Wrong is wrong. And yes, I might be wiser, but I certainly am irritated and embarrassed at a few of my own mistakes. And one of the BIGGEST mistakes I have made over my 25 illustrious years in the business world is with presentations. And my weapon of choice was Powerpoint presentations. And for all you prospects, clients, and conference attendees who have had to endure one or more of my busy, complex, unclear, and lengthy PowerPoint presentations, I now herewith formally apologize for the harm that was done to you through boredom, confusion, and frankly lousy theater. As many of you know, I am a huge fan of using audio…the human voice as a great tool to communicate your mission, message, and mechanics (that’s my term for product features and benefits) of your company and your products and services. Your spoken word is so much more powerful than the written word. With your voice you can communicate with energy, emotion, empathy, excitement… coincidentally they all begin with the letter E. I don’t know about your writing skills, but if I try to communicate my value proposition using words that communicate energy, emotion, excitement…they just don’t work in business writing. This is why live presentations are great. They allow you to communicate your mission, message and mechancs of your company and value proposition with emotion and energy…those E words…That said, if that message is not clear, concise and credible then you should just keep your mouth shut…take the advice of Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker, “I wish you could just shut your big yapper.” God, I love Matt Foley. Many of the mistakes we make with presentations are easily controllable…and I certainly have made my fair share of these, even before we talk about non-verbal mistakes we make…by the way, I encourage you to listen to my two-part interview with Robin Kermode, where he talked about a couple non-verbal tips like squeezing your butt together to lower your center of gravity, and what to do with your hands and how to stand. In my mind, after having made dozens of miserable presentations, there are five things that can dramatically improve our Powerpoint presentations. Number One: Direct the audience to yourself…not the screen or the handout. My actor friend Chris Carlson, CEO of NarrativePros in an interview said only we stupid business people, communicate this way: Hey audience, listen to what I am going to say, because I am so brilliant, but, by the way, don’t look at me, look at the screen over there. Cause I am not worth looking at. Don’t do that. And it starts with don’t give them content on the slide that encourages them to study and read it and not watch and listen to you. You want them focusing on YOU! Number two…Get comfortable with white space on the slide. We tend to have too much content on our slides and too many ideas or concepts on each slide. Get comfortable with clean and open white space. You fill that white space with your brilliant words that you speak and not the words that you write. And be aware of the Rule of Thirds on your slides. Your slide can be divided up into nine boxes…resembling a tic tac toe grid. Generally speaking, you want your key messages on a slide where two lines intersect, that is just outside the four corners of the center box. Number three: Get Your presentation down to less than 18 minutes. Frequently, presentations are too long and Q&A is too short. By capping it at 18 minutes, it forces you to distill your message into its critical and core elements. Audience cognitive learning…that is thinking and listening, is draining. There is this concept of cognitive backlog where your audience can handle up to a max of about 15 - 18 minutes of cognitive learning. If you exceed that they go into a backlog mode, where learning and listening starts to shut down. Research shows that you have about two minutes to get your audiences’ attention; five more minutes to keep it; and if they like it you get another seven to ten more minutes. So that is a total of no more than 18 minutes. The rest should be about them…no more about you. So to accomplish the mission to hold their attention, we need to carefully prepare and rehears our presentation. It takes more time to prepare a 15-minute presentation than a 50-minute presentation. Why? With both of them, you can only hold their attention for 18 minutes. With the longer presentation you are simply throwing more words at the wall and hoping something will stick. With the shorter one, you are carefully crafting your words to ensure that each message on each slide sticks with the audience. Number Four: We use text too much and images not enough images. Use images either alone or to guide the viewer to the important message…again no more than two, ideally one, message per slide. I want to expand on this a bit. I had a client of mine say, but if I don’t put more detail and content on the slide, it won’t mean anything when I leave it behind. Very, very true. But that is resolved in my fifth and final point.And I really can’t emphasize this enough. Because if you do this, many of the flaws and weaknesses in the previous four points will magically be uncovered and discovered. Number Five Write your complete and total speech out verbatim. Read it out loud. And record it. Write, Read, Record…the three Rs…oh wait, write is a W word…you get the idea. To Write it, you can use an outline or a mind map or whatever works for you. I personally like the mind map approach, whatever works for you…write it out literally. Tell your story in an interesting way. If you haven’t listened to Paul Smith’s audio interview Sell with a Story or Joanne Black’s interview Pick Up the Damn Phone, you should. I interviewed both of them over the past six months. Their ideas can help you in writing your speech. So you write and rewrite your speech and then you need to connect it to your Powerpoint images. Copy and paste your script into your Powerpoint slide notes at the bottom of the slide page….What I like to do is copy the entire speech into the first slide…and then start cutting and pasting into the subsequent slides from this first one. If you haven’t created the slides, then this text will help you with the theme and message and image you want in that particular slide. Keep editing and reading aloud and rewriting and reading aloud again. This process is terrific for creating your talk and also, by the way, recalling the talk. And then once you have it and the slides are pretty good, record your voice making the presentation. You can either record this in Powerpoint or in another audio recording application. If you have someone else helping you with the Powerpoint slides, having this audio content will be incredibly helpful for them in creating the slideshow. So, back to the client that complained about lack of detail and content, when you provide your slide deck to interested clients or prospects, you also provide them the slide deck with the transcript AND you provide them the recorded presentation with the slides advancing with your audio overlay. It’s a great repurposing of the presentation and it offers you a way to repeat it and deliver it again and again with other prospects or clients throughout the company for those who couldn’t attend, liked it so much they wanted to hear it again or perhaps they had a martini at lunch and fell asleep…   So to summarize, it goes like this: Direct the audience to you, the speaker, not the screen or the handout. Get comfortable with white space on your slide. Divide the slide into a tic tac toe grid and place your key message…remember only one or two…in close proximity to the corners of the center box. Get your presentation down to less than 18 minutes. There are some tips and tricks on getting Q&A going, because frequently nobody wants to be the first one to ask a question. Use more images and pictures and less text. And no more than two points per slide. And finally, the most important one, write, read, record, and rehearse…darn that pesky W in write…About six years ago, a couple of my sales people were making a big presentation…they came to me with a 50 slide Powerpoint deck they intended to present…I just about puked. I told them to get it down to 15 slides including opening slide. I also told them I wanted to see their script in the notes on each slide so I knew what they intended to say. They pushed back saying, they didn’t want to memorize a script rather would just use notes…I said fine. But I want a script for each slide as if you WERE going to read it verbatim…this process forced them to fine tune their presentation. Cut out the noise. And forced them to create a very good, well rehearsed, repeatable presentation that they could use again, fine tune again and allow others to make a similar presentation. So record it while you are still in production mode, and then re-record a finished version. The recording process will really help you get it right….that’s right with an R… To get some help and guidance the non-verbal stuff listen to my interviews with Robin Kermode and Chris Carlson, both actors. To get some help on how to write it listen to Joanne Black and Paul Smith…you can find all of them on our website or just google bankbosun.com and their name: Robin Kermode, Chris Carlson, Joanne Black and Paul Smith. Most bank executives have to make presentation all the time..to their board, shareholders, employees, regulators, cucstomers, prospects…I personally lover working on these presentations. To me it’s like writing poetry for business. You have a limited number of lines, words and time to communicate a powerful impactful and memorable message. So if you want help, give me a call. Thanks for listening. Outro: We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com The audio content is produced by Kelly Coughlin, Chief Executive Officer of BankBosun, LLC;  and syndicated by Seth Greene, Market Domination LLC, with the help of Kevin Boyle. Video content is produced by The Guildmaster Studio, Keenan Bobson Boyle. The voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli. The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin. If you like this program, please tell us. If you don’t, please tell us how we can improve it. Now, some disclaimers. Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota State Board of Accountancy as a Certified Public Accountant. The views expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guests in their private capacity and do not in any other way represent the views of any other agent, principal, employer, employee, vendor or supplier.

There are always three speeches for everyone that you give.  The one you practiced, the one you actually gave and the one you wish you gave, Dale Carnegie. Kelly Coughlin is CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm, helping bank C-Level officers navigate risk and discover rewards.  He is the host of the syndicated audio podcast, BankBosun.com.  Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyds Bank and Merrill Lynch.  On the podcast, Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem, provide bank C-Suite officers, risk management, technology and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risk and discover rewards, and now your host, Kelly Coughlin. Greetings, this is Kelly Coughlin, CEO of BankBosun, helping bank C- suite execs navigate risks and discover reward in a sea of threats and opportunities.  You know, I don’t think there is any bank executive that is exempt from giving some sort of public presentation on a recurring basis, whether it’s small groups, medium sized or large audiences, whether it’s motivating staff to be productive, informing your Board of your financial results, persuading the big commercial loan or wealth management prospect to trust you, your bank and your people.  As much as we all wish we could have competed in the NFL or NHL and use our athletic skill to compete, we executives use our brains, words and voice to compete. And if we are terrible at it and hate it, it’s a curse but if we like it and are good at it, it’s a huge benefit. My goal is to help you love it, or at least not hate it. And that leads me to two somewhat opposing quotes.  The first, from Dionysius of Halicarnassus who taught rhetoric, that speech in Greece during the reign of Caesar Augustus, and the second quote from Mark Twain, I think you all know him.  First, Dionysius, “Let thy speech be better than silence or be silent.” I’m going to repeat that, “Let thy speech be better than silence or be silent.”  And then Mark Twain said, “There are only two types of speakers in the world, one, the nervous, and, two, liars.”  I don’t think I need to restate that.  These two quotes plus my intro lay the foundation for the importance of good public speaking.  Everyone is nervous, every exec must do it and you best be good at it, if you want to compete and win. I recently read a great book awhile back titled, Speak: So, Your Audience Will Listen - 7 Steps to Confident and Authentic Public Speaking.  I also listen to the audio book.  I suggest you all get both the audio book and the written book.  The author is Robin Kermode.  I encourage all of you to sign up on his website at zone2, that’s the number two, zone2.co.uk, zone2.co.uk.  Robin is also a professional actor.  Interestingly, he overcame his public speaking fear, one time, by appearing totally nude on a stage in England.  One word comes to my mind, shrinkage.  In his book Robin refers to the Greeks in Aristotle, the Romans in the Cicero, and the Irish with Joyce and Yeats. My four daughters will attest that the Greeks, Romans and Irish are my three favorite topics and Joyce and Yates are my two favorite writers.  In fact, Robin even referenced my favorite poems by Yeats, The Stolen Child.   And since this might be the only time I can use that poem in business I’m going to use it now.   “To and fro we leap and chase the frothy bubbles, whilst the world is full of troubles, is anxious in its sleep.  Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild, with a faery, hand in hand, for the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”   So there it is, after 25 years in business I finally was able to use Yeats.  So, when I read a book whose author used Yeats in The Stolen Child and appeared naked on the stage to overcome his fear in public speaking, I decided I need to speak with that man.  So, with that in mind, I hope I have Robin on the phone.  Robin, are you there? Robin:  I am right here. As long as you can hear me Kelly, I can hear you great. Kelly:  I can hear you terrific.  So, how are you doing today? Robin: Very good indeed.  It’s a lovely sunny day here in London so all is good. Kelly: Great.  So, Robin, really! Naked on the stage to overcome fear of public speaking?  Never use that as the opening to introduce yourself, give us a brief bio with a keen focus on your unique tactics to overcome fear of public speaking. Robin: [Laughs] Well, this is a slight misconception there.  I wasn’t appearing nude on a western stage to overcome my fear of public speaking. I had to appear nude on a western stage because that was contractual as part of the show that I was staring in at the time, but it was interesting what it does when you stand there being that vulnerable.  And, obviously, all the men listening and probably the women listening as well could understand, you couldn’t feel more exposed if you tried.  And I felt that once I had done that that nothing, in terms of standing up in front of an audience doing anything, really, is going to be that difficult.  I talked to a lot of people who had done it before and they came up with various suggestions, put it that way, as to how to feel comfortable, some of which worked and some of it didn’t.  In the end I decided that the best thing to do was actually just to be there because ultimately, you are who you are and most of the people in the audience you are seeing there, you know, are saying, thank God it’s not me up there.  That got me through that one but I got into the public speaking arena about 15 years ago when a friend of mine who is a CEO said, would you help me on my big AGM speech?  I said, of course.  I said, run it by me.  So, I helped him and afterwards he said, this is really useful stuff.  And I said, but I am only teaching you things that actors know instinctively.  He said, yes but you seem to have an ability to be able to explain to somebody who is not a performer how to hold an audience and how to connect with an audience.  So, for the last 15 years I have been coaching, the last probably five years, I suppose, I have been working with senior CEOs and Boards across the world and with senior politicians and things.  I was on Virgin radio recently in London, I was talking about body language, and particularly in relation to Trump, actually just before the election, and they said, So, Robin, you work with these politicians, what is it you teach them? I said, well, of course, if I am allowed to say it on air, I teach them not to be a dick.  And by that what I mean is, I teach them to be authentic.  In other words, is the person that we are hearing or listening to or seeing on stage, if we met them afterwards would they be exactly the same or would they be slightly different?  And if they are being exactly the same then there is an authenticity and a congruence into what they are doing and what they are saying.  Kelly: Great, that’s terrific.  The first question I have relates to nerves.  Robin in your book you talk about the body signals that appear before many people give a talk, dry mouth, shaking, fast heart beat, and you describe that many of these signals are related to the seven flight responses to threats and fears the body goes through.  Tell us about the top five internal fears and five external fears and then your top tip of the day related to dealing with those. Robin: Okay, well nerves affect our body, as you say, on a fight or flight basis.  The body feels under attack and the subconscious brain is saying run, because you can’t run because you have to give the talk.  And so what the brain does is it prepares you to run, and obviously then, it sends adrenaline through the blood and oxygen to the legs and the arms so that you can run.  But that takes the blood away from your head. It tends to make your eyes a bit starey and a dry mouth, as you say and the normal shaking in all the list of things. Now, I will be very surprised if anyone says they don’t have any nerves at all.  And actually, a little nerve can be quite good actually because they can help to focus you.  But as you alluded to there, the common internal fears are, fear of forgetting our words.  So obviously, that is the fear of completely blanking out.  And partly, that’s because the blood is being sent to the legs and the arms so that you can run, which means you have less blood in your head. So, that’s partly why when we are at job interviews or in pressured situations it seems to go blank.  The fear of being judged is another.  There is a fear of large audiences for some people.  Some people say they are fine around the board room table if they can see everybody but once they get to a point where they can’t actually focus on people’s eyes it feels like one mass.  There is also a fear of panicking. If it happened last time there is a fear that well, maybe, it’s going to happen again.   So, I think that if people have had a bad experience, I think that sometimes stays with them.  Then there is also the fear of looking nervous, so if we feel that we are shaking or we are showing any nerves by blushing or our voice is slightly cracking, all the things that happen when we fight or flight responses, then I think people worry that people will be able to see the nerves.  So, we don’t look quite as in control, quite as much as a leader as we would like to look.  And then there are, obviously, external affairs that really are outside of our control, things like, the importance of the outcome of the speech, the size of the audience, even the venue.  Is it somewhere that you know or is it is a venue you don’t know at all? And that’s another fear.  There is also the fear of how the audience will react.  And if we see one person yawing off and we think everybody is bored and so we start speeding up.  If I see somebody is yawing in the audience I tend to think, well, they probably had a late night or maybe they had a new born baby or something.  If I see 30 people yawning I probably think it’s too hot and the room maybe all set out for lunch, and I would think if I see everybody yawning then I would change my plan. Kelly: External affairs are really externally triggered but they are all internally real. Robin: Yeah, absolutely.  Yeah.  And obviously, you know, we have fear of something going wrong and all these things.  And then  if you plan something meticulously and then the...for example, I was working with a friend of mine on his wedding speech last year and we wrote this wonderful speech, it was just...it was really beautiful and it was exactly what he wanted in a wedding speech. It had all the right balance of humor and pathos and emotion and everything, and love, as you would expect.  On the day, unfortunately, on the evening, he hadn’t checked out the lights so that he wasn’t able to read the speech  because the light wasn’t there and so he slightly went to pieces because this perfect speech that he had practiced didn’t go quite as he expect.  And then, of course, the panic takes over on the night, you know.  And I always say to people, check out the space beforehand.  Check out how long it takes you from the side of the stage to the podium, the size of the auditorium, what it looks like when you are there, does the microphone work, do the lights work, all these sort of things.     Kelly: Give us your top tip of the day to deal with these. Robin: Okay, ultimately, the fight or flight response is basically saying run.  Now obviously, as we have established, we can’t run.  This is going to sound very off but I promise you, it works, and I have given this to so many politicians and I can see them doing this.  It is physically impossible to shake if you squeeze your buttocks or your thighs.  I don’t mean squeeze them with your hands, obviously, I mean clenching.  So, clench the muscles.  And there is a science behind this, the reason it works is the muscles have been told to move, the big muscle Group, the buttocks and the thighs.  If you contract the muscles, the brain says, hah, okay, you are doing what I want you to do, which is to run, so it stops producing adrenaline. Now, if it stops producing adrenaline, of course, the whole cycle tends to stop.  You don’t shake anymore.  The reason we shake is that the muscles are overloaded with oxygen and they are not doing what you want them to do but if you actually contract them all that tension is used up and you stop shaking.  So, it’s physically impossible to shake.  You also by squeezing the big muscle groups there, you squeeze blood back up to the brain so you have much less chance of going blank.  And one other thing it does as well, which I am very keen on, this is how we can look confident and how confident people look.  There is confidence in charisma and there is confidence in arrogance, and there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance.  People think that confidence is a possibly slightly old fashioned, you know, shoulders back, head up, walk into the room, you know, talk deep, talk strong, this type of thing.  And that is, of course, it’s a confident way of behaving.  It’s not necessarily the best way to connect with an audience or to make an audience feel special, and that’s where charisma comes in.  So, confidence, ultimately, is about you and charisma is about the audience, is about what they feel about you.  Charisma is about making the audience feel special.  And the definition of charisma is actually gift of grace.  So, it’s actually about making other people feel special.  And if you think of the people that we would call charismatic, like Obama or Clinton, all of the wealthy famous people who they are most, you know, charismatic people are, they would probably come up with those two actually. I have never met Bill Clinton but friends of mine you have said that he makes you feel incredibly special when you are with him.  And I am sure Mandela did the same, I am sure these wonderfully charismatic people, they have a way of making you feel very very special.  In a way that they don’t have to make it about them, they are so confident in who they are themselves they don’t have to make it about them.  I was working with the CEO of one of the big four supermarkets in the UK recently and the head of HR phone me up and said, Can we have a pre-meeting?  And I said, to what outcome?  And she said, well, we need to decide what you are going to do and then you will have time to do it.   You have only got this guy for two hours, he is very busy.   And I said, okay, then I will meet him and I will decide then what I am going to do with him.  And she said but by the time you have decided what to do there will be no time to do it.   And I said, how long do you think it’s going to take me to work out what I am going to do?  And she said, well, probably 40 minutes or 45 minutes maybe by the time you have a chat with him, which only leaves you to stay for an hour.  I said, it will only take me exactly eight seconds to work out what the problem is.  And that’s the amount of time it takes for somebody to walk into the door, cross the room, shake your hand and sit down. And the issues normally are how comfortable somebody is in their own skin.  If we want to look comfortable in our own skin, that’s how we look confident.  If we feel we are trying too hard, we are trying to make a point, we are trying to justify, these are people who want to look confident, at least the wannabes, the  really confident people are just confident in their own skin. One of the simplest ways to look confident in your own skin when you don’t feel it, weirdly, is to squeeze your buttocks or your thighs because it lowers your center of gravity.  And I worked out a few years ago that really confident people have a low center of gravity.  When I first meet someone I look at a couple of things, but one of the first things I look at is where is their center of gravity because that will tell me how comfortable they are.  And so the center of gravity should be in the lower gut, that’s below the belly button, in the lower gut.  And if people have a center of gravity there they look comfortable in their own skin and they will therefore look more confident.  What they then have to do is to structure their message in such a way that they make it about the audience and then make the audience feel incredibly special, and that’s where charisma comes in. Kelly: That kind of connects to authenticity, an interesting concept, being your authentic true self in private is easy for all of us, I would say, but being ourselves in public or in a business environment where we are either informing or selling or motivating or persuading or creating controversy, and it goes through the main reasons to be speaking, that’s a whole different ball game. I would assume you are going to advise us all to be our authentic self all the time but how do we do that when our authentic self isn’t always to be informing, selling, motivating etc., to people we don’t know very well or who don’t know us very well?  Isn’t the absence of that relationship causing this inauthentic self to rear its ugly head? Robin: It’s possible, it can be, Kelly, but sometimes it is simple as actually not quite knowing what your authentic self is. And that sounds like one third of the suggestions, which I don’t like in particular with clients, but there is something about finding your own voice and I think when people find their own voice suddenly they can connect to their own authenticity and they suddenly feel like they believe what they are saying. I mean, they might believe it but they actually...they can hear themselves saying something in a particular way.  And it has to do with where their voice is placed, interesting enough now. Kelly:  You don’t mean literal voice, do you?  Find your own literal voice? Robin:  And I do actually mean the literal voice, yeah.  I mean it’s where the voice is coming from.  It’s not about having a perfect accent.  It’s not about anything like that, it’s about the tamber of the voice and where the voice is placed.  We were taught, as young actors, if you want an audience to believe you, whatever you are saying, you have to speak from your emotional center.  And the emotional center is the same place as I referred to earlier, which is the center of gravity which is actually your core.  So, anything like yoga, martial arts, pilates, all that stuff, comes from a strong core, your lower gut, below the belly button, and if your thoughts come from there, if you can speak from your lower gut, so very relaxed, with an open throat and it sounds like you believe what you are saying. And interestingly enough, people’s nerve tend to disappear when they find they speak from their emotional center.  Most people speak from their throat, which is what I call the power point voice.  And if I could show you the difference now, so this voice here is fairly relaxed voice. I’m speaking..Obviously, the throat is making the sound because the air goes over the vocal chords like a reed on a clarinet but the power comes from lower down, from the gut.  And actually the emotions come from the gut there.  So, the throat itself is not actually manufacturing the sound, it’s just allowing the sound to come out. If I manufacture the sound on my throat like that, that’s the sound that is now emotionally disconnected because I am now speaking on my throat. And most people when they present speak in this tone here, which is a slightly teacher sound and most people will say, if they are looking at the power point screen, they would say, so if you could look at the screen, if you look at the bottom left hand side of the screen, and this now is rather a tight controlling sound.  It’s not anywhere like the sound that is authentic.  So, I would say to people, if you can speak to your children like this then you can speak to your customers like this, you can speak to your clients like this. This sound is much less controlling.  Audiences don’t want to be controlled, they might want to be led but they don’t want to be controlled.  And I think it starts, for me, with where people’s voices are placed. I do quite a lot of exercises in the book around this and obviously when I am working with clients one-to-one I would work very much on, first of all, on where their voice is.  And I think if you get the voice right actually people start to feel much less nervous because they can hear that their voice sounds authentic and it sounds real, and that’s what we are after. Kelly: Yeah, I will put a plug in for your book.  I think you have some really good tips and exercises to go through that we obviously can’t go over here.  One of the thoughts that you have is on this concept of the connection, you talked about the three zones of communication and you maintained that all of us, speaker and audiences, each have their own zone one and two and then there is this zone three, tell us about these three zones and why is it important for a speaker to be aware of their zone one and two, and I suppose, when they enter into this zone three that I think we don’t want people to go in, correct? Robin: I think that’s correct, yeah.  I mean, it’s a very simple concept I came up with a few years ago.   My wife said to me, she is a CEO, and I used to come back to her after getting to initial meetings to get new clients when I was starting up as a coach, and as an actor you imagine you have an agent do these things for you and I suddenly had to learn a new skill. And I would come back to her at the end of these meetings and I would say, you know, it’s really interesting because some meetings go well and some meetings don’t go well.  And I can’t quite seem to shift some of them.  And I couldn’t work it out and eventually I came up with this concept of the three zones of communication, very very simple but it has absolutely changed my life.  And since coming up with this, which was about 15 years ago, I promise you I have not had one bad meeting in that time, simply by using this very very simple technique.  So, if you can imagine that you have three circles around your body, the closest circle around your body is your zone one,  This is your personal space where you choose not to connect with someone else.  Zone is a slightly wider zone.  This is where you choose to connect with somebody. Now, these zones of course are metaphorical, they don’t exist but it’s like an image in your head.  Am I actually trying consciously not to connect with somebody or am I trying to connect with them?  So, in a shop scenario, the easiest example is, you know, you go into a clothes shop and the salesman then goes into zone two to connect with the customer and says, you know, can I help you?  And the customer probably says, Actually, I just want to browse.  I want to look around, leave me alone.  What they are saying is, they want to stay in zone one.  In other words, I don’t want to connect with you at this moment.  So, a good salesman, of course, physically backs away at that point and then say, oh no, no problem, I’ll be over here, give me a shout if you want me, and that type of thing, but they pull away.  In other words, they are not pressurizing the zone one person.  And I think that this is one of the fundamental mistakes that speakers make.  They try to push too hard with an audience that’s not ready to connect with them.  So, there are stages to how you win an audience around.  When I was a young actor doing stage plays in London, if on a wet Friday night when the audience weren’t particularly responsive on a comedy, and it’s very obvious on a comedy, if you don’t get your laughs you can see it’s not working, the intention is to go louder and faster because you’ll think, I’m going to wake this audience up.  But actually it’s the worst thing you can do. And what you have to do with those zone one audience who are choosing, for whatever reason, not connecting with you, and they are allowed to, you have to take your pace down and your energy level down and basically make it more real and allow them to come to you. So, that’s the zone one.  So, in the shop scenario, the salesman says, can I help you?   And the customer says, no, leave me alone.  That’s what they do.  If the customer says, yeah, I’m looking for a blue jacket in size whatever then the salesman knows that they are in zone two because they chose to connect with them.  So, when the customer zone two and the salesman zone two is overlapped then, of course, that’s where we want to be.  So, ideally, when we are talking to people we want to get them to choose to connect with us.  But there is a zone three, and the zone three is a wider zone.  And the zone three is basically where you invade their space.  So, the customer’s zone one is actually the same as the salesman zone three.  So, the salesman that says, Can I help you, and the customer says, No, leave me alone, and the salesman then invades the space and says, no, no, come on, try this jacket on now.  It’s quite annoying when that happens because you said very clearly, I want just to be left alone, and they don’t; they invade your space.  So, that’s the zone three.  The reason this is useful in your public speaking or presenting it is that you have got an audience and there will be a mixture of zone one, twos and threes.  So, there are some people in the audience who for whatever reason are there but they are not particularly connected with you yet.  There are the zone two people who are up for it and they are sitting on the front of their seats and you know they are interested.  And then you have the zone three people who think they know it all.  They are the ones who are going, why?  I didn’t really know why I am here because I know the stuff anyway.  This is...who is this, who is this moppet?  So, there is a bit of that.    What we have to do is we have got to encourage all of them to come to zone two but we have to treat them differently.  The zone one people, we have to take our energy down a little bit. The zone two people are easy because we have a little bit of banter with them, it’s fine, and I would suggest, with the zone three people, a guy who was coaching, he phoned me up actually,  and I won’t do it too loud on the microphone, but he had a very very loud voice, and I answered the phone and I said, “Hello” and I happened to be in zone two, and zone two is a calm open space and, you know, I answer my telephone, of course it is my business friend and I said, “Hello” and he said, “Is that Robin?” And so I said yes, and he said, I promised you, these are the exact words he used, he said, “The thing is Robin, I am an entrepreneur, I just sold my business for 45 million pounds. I have 45 million pounds in the bank.  And he said, I want to go on the speaking circuit because the world needs to know how much money I have made.  So I said, okay, well we could look at the message around that maybe, but we booked him in the session and he came in and he was so loud, his handshake was over firm, he was sort of trying to dominate the whole situation.  This is classic zone three controlling behavior. Now, my job, of course, is to try to get him into zone two.  I had to try to encourage him into zone two, you can’t push anyone.  And I thought, why this man who has, apparently, 45 million pounds in the bank, why does he feel the need to tell me that he is selling his [inaudible – 21:21] and control the meeting in this room.  Why does he need to do that?  So I thought, well, he is probably doing this because he needs some sort of affirmation from me.  It’s rather like a seven year old child who said to their parents, you know, look at me mama, I’m diving up the diving board, you know, it’s the same thing. And he said look at me, look how successful I am.  So I thought, I better just basically go, wow!  But I thought, what’s the cleverest way to go after this particular man?  And I suddenly, without thinking about it, these words came out of my mouth, and actually it worked.  So he said, the thing is Robin, he said, you know, I’m putting all this money in the bank, I’m selling my [inaudible – 21:48], and I am I’m going to leave my phone on the whole time, and I am running this meeting.  And I said, oh my God!  I said, I’m sitting here with James Bond.  And he said, yeah, and then he said, the thing is Robin, I am a bit nervous about making a speech.  So you could see the psychology, it’s very clear.  He thinks I am a very important man, and he said,  but I don’t really like to ask for help but I have to ask for help with this man because I feel I need some help but I  am only going to ask for help when he knows that I am really important.  And I went, oh my God, you are really important!  So he went, okay, now you know that, now I’ll show you some vulnerability.  So the psychology is very simple but basically, if I meet zone three people I flatter them.  I was at dinner the other night and there was a man who was going on and on about himself, I mean real zone three behavior, and after a while, I thought, I wonder how I could flatter this man to try to encourage him into two.  This man was short, fat and bald.  He didn’t look like James Bond, he looked like a sort of Bond Villain, so he is talking and I stopped him mid sentence and I said, I said to him,  I’m sorry to interrupt, but has anyone ever said it, you have got a bit of a look of James Bond about you?  He said, you have seen the real me, haven’t you?   Now, the interesting thing is, zone three people have no level of self irony.  If you flatter a zone one person they will hate it.  If you flatter a zone two person you are going to get some banter back. If you flatter a zone three person in the right way they will always take it.  When we have a mixed audience we have to make sure we have a mixture of flattery, a mixture of taking the energy down a little bit so we don’t frighten the horses with the zone one people and a little bit of banter with the zone two people.   So we have that mixture of that.  And if I am at  a business meeting around say a board room table with maybe half a dozen people, I look around and I think, okay, the zone one man there, there is a zone two lady there, a couple of zone three is over there, and I make sure a little bit of flatter goes towards the threes, a little bit of gentleness goes towards the ones, I won’t sort of eyeball them too much but I will maybe finish an idea with them but I won’t hold their eye contact too long to frighten them.  And the zone two people I will probably have a little bit more banter a bit with.  And that way you can help encourage everyone in the meeting to come into their zone two.  And if you can get everyone into zone two, including the whole of your audience, you are home and dry.  Kelly: Is empathy and trying to move people to equal status, is that what you are doing there? Robin: It is part of that.  I said to my kids the other day, look, I said, they are in their, you know, late teens, so I said, if you go through life making other people feel special, life is so easy.  I said, but if you go through life saying, look at me, I am important, they just want you to fall on the banana skin.   That’s what it is about, a bit of empathy, a bit of kindness, a bit of noticing other people, will get you a long way. And I always think, with an audience for example, one of the flattering ways with the zone three audience is, if you are going to explain a concept, there are some people in the audience who may know that concept and there are some who possibly don’t. I would favor a phrase like, of course, as you know, and then you go on to tell them anyway.   So the ones who do know are flattered that you have told them that you know and the ones who don’t know are pleased that you have told them. So you somehow get all levels on that but if you stand there and you say, I have seen speakers stand in front of quite an important audience and, you know, say things like, you probably don’t know this but.   And I thought, you have just alienated half the audience who did know that.  It’s much better to say, of course, as you know, and flatter the audience into assuming that they might know, even if they don’t.  So I think equal status is very very important and I think that also comes with tone of voice.  I sit quite often watching speakers with my wife and she finds it quite annoying but a speaker would actually come one stage and they will literally say, Good evening or whatever the time of day is.  From those two words I would go, oh no, it’s going to be terrible or I’m going to go, this is going to be good.  And I can tell from the first two words how it is.  And in those two words it has to do with where their voice is placed, where their status is or how much charisma they have.  In other words, are they saying genuinely good evening or are they actually concerned that I am there?  It’s what I call, how you show up. It’s literally what you bring to the table, what you walk on with.  And audiences, even if they are not qualified or specialized in reading body language, on a gut level they will know I like this person or I don’t or I trust this person.  And that’s what we are trying to do and that’s what I work with with clients, it is to get them to a point where they are comfortable in their own skin and they come across with equal status and they speak from their emotional center with authenticity. Kelly: Okay, I want to explore this empathy and equal status just a bit more.  Tell me if I have this right, empathy requires us to at least acknowledge and recognize that we have people in zone one and zone three. Zone two we are fine with. And then we have these different tactics that helps us try to get them moved from zone one and three to zone two to bring them to equal status with us. Robin: That’s absolutely true.  And we have to get them to choose to do that.  You can’t hurt anyone.  You can’t push them, they have to choose to do that.  If they got themselves into zone three, and often, by the way, they are not bad people it’s often nerves that make people into zone three.  So when these networking events that many people say they don’t like they walk into a room full of people with badges on and  glasses of wine and they go, it’s a whole room of people I don’t know and I somehow have to make an impression.  The reason those networking events don’t work is you have got an entire room of zone threes. Everyone has become zone three.  They aren’t necessarily bad people, they’ve just gotten themselves in this position where they think to hand out cards and make contact and whatever.   I walk into a networking room now and I look at the room and I think, okay, here is a lot of very un-centered people who are not really very comfortable with being in this place so if I can go in and make, say, five people this evening feel really comfortable then in a sense I have done my job and I have probably connected with them.  So I will basically go up to someone and I will say, if they are in zone three, I will find something that I can flatter them about and maybe, for example, it might be something like if I discovered they are a CEO of a company or they are an entrepreneur, I would say, you know you are incredible young to have done that, it’s amazing, you know.  So, whatever it might be, whatever is appropriate, I will say something, I’ll say, what is it, with the word love in the second sentence, always.  I’ll say, what is it you love about being an entrepreneur?  What is it you love about starting your own company?  And by putting in the word love there, what happen is, their voice changes immediately and they would say, do you know, actually, and whatever their answer is.  And suddenly then I am having a normal conversation as opposed to, of course, networking conversation, because what we are doing is, we are having a proper conversation.  The implication is, I could see being in zone three, not being very comfortable in zone three, when you are with me I am so impressed, you don’t have to impress me anymore we can just have a normal conversation, and it’s so relaxing for them because very few people do that.   What most people do is, they join them in zone three so you have a zone three person saying, I am important. And the other person who is also at the networking event feels they should big themselves up and at the same time say, yes, well it’s very good, so I am quite important too, you know.  And it’s a bit like these conversations where you see somebody has got a sun tan and then you say, oh, you just come back from holiday and they say, yes, I have just come back from the Bahamas or somewhere.   And they say, alright, we just came back from Jamaica or whatever.  And what they are doing is, they are not really asking you questions about their holiday, they are almost looking for an excuse to get their holiday and to make themselves feel important. But I think if we fight that urge and we just go, wow, it’s amazing. So, you know, you would laugh about the Bahamas.  Suddenly you can have a proper conversation with these people and then they choose to join you in zone two.  So it’s about noticing them ultimately in the zone three.  Now, you are going to ask about the zone one, what we want to do with the zone one is just literally, it’s not frightening the horses, it’s treating them like somebody in a shop who is saying I just want to browse. So what you do is, you tease them with the carrot.  So, I’ll maybe have a thought and  I’ll finish my thought on them, actually, I turn to them,  right, towards the end of the thought and I’ll have eye contact with them, just on the end of it, so it lands and then I’ll move away.  I’m not waiting long enough for a response, so they don’t feel under attack but they do feel included, and gradually they will come to join you.  You can’t ignore them because that doesn’t work and you don’t want to eyeball them too much.   So you can probably hold eye contact longer with the zone two person because they will probably be smiling away, you know.  And often, I don’t know if you have had this Kelly, but when you are giving a talk it’s very easy to give an entire talk to three people because towards the front of the hall you can find three very open faces who are nodding and smiling and you think, oh, they are nice, I will come back to them.  I’m feeling a little bit vulnerable, so I get back to these nice people.  And I used to think these are people that are loving it but I have shortly now discovered that those people are just people pleasers so they love everyone.  But I don’t spend my time with those people, I think, okay, I want to try and win around the zone ones and the zone twos and then I’ll know actually. Kelly: Great, exactly.   Great stuff!  Robin that’s terrific.  I really appreciate your time.  How should people get in touch with you? Give us your, I presume your website, email address, how would you like to do that? Robin: Well it would be very lovely to hear from any of your listeners, of course, you can buy the book on Amazon which is, Speak: So Your Audience Will Listen.  You can contact me by the website which is zone2, that’s z o n e the number 2, zone2.co.uk and my email is robin@zone2.co.uk.  I look forward to hearing from you and hearing how you are getting on with your presentations and your speeches.  Kelly: Great Robin, thank you very much, cheers! Robin: Thank you so much Kelly for having me.  I really appreciate it. Kelly: Well, that concludes part 1 of my interview with Robin Kermode.  I strongly encourage you to get his printed book and the audio book entitled Speak So Your Audience Will Listen: 7 Steps To Confident and Authentic Public Speaking.  They are terrific.  In a week, we will have part two of my interview with Robin and we will discuss things like where to put your hands, how to stand, the importance of smiling, and a really interesting five-step checklist you need to do before each of your presentations, to up your game in public speaking.  Thanks for listening. We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com.  The audio content is produced and syndicated by Seth Greene, Market Domination, with the help of Kevin Boyle.  Video content is produced by the Guildmaster Studio, Keenan, Bobson Boyle. Voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli.  The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin.  If you like    this program, please tell us.  If you don’t please tell us how we can improve it. And now some disclaimers, Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota Board of Accountancy as a certified public accountant.  The views expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guest in their private capacity and do not in any way represents the views of any other agent, principal, employee, vendor or supplier.

This is the second of my three-part interview with Robin Kermode, actor and author or the terrific book, Speak: So Your Audience Will Listen. I love this book and the audio book that you can also order. Public speaking is something all execs have to do. And honestly, his book has done more to help me in my public speaking self-confidence than any other book or class I have read or attended. And this podcast series, especially designed for BankBosun audiences will hopefully do the same for you. And if you like it, buy his book and consider his company to help you and your team. Kelly Coughlin is CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm, helping bank C-Level officers navigate risk and discover rewards.  He is the host of the syndicated audio podcast, BankBosun.com.  Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyds Bank and Merrill Lynch.  On the podcast, Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem, provide bank C-Suite officers, risk management, technology and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risk and discover rewards, and now your host, Kelly Coughlin. In part one, we covered five of the seven steps, nerves, confidence, connection, voice and body language.  In part two, we will cover structure and delivery with some focus on PowerPoint type presentations.  If you listened to part one you will recall Robin overcame his fear of public speaking by once appearing totally naked on the stage.  Robin, are you on the line, and tell us where you are right now, and are you on the stage, and do you have all your clothes on now? Robin: [Laughs] Hello Kelly.   Yes, I am in sunny London and I am fully clothed.   Although it’s audio only, I am fully clothed. Kelly: Excellent.  So, for a minute, let’s talk about eye contact. Give us a couple tips on using eye contact to enhance the connection with an audience.   And are there different techniques for large groups or medium groups and small audiences? Robin: Yeah, okay, eye contact is really instinct.  I maintain that if you can be authentic with a small group you can also be authentic in a large group.  Of course, it feels much more exposed, you know, when you are on a big stage, like the sort of TED talk type of thing.  I write quite a lot of articles for the newspapers and I wanted to write an article about TED talks, under the title of something like, How to Give Good TED talk without looking completely smug and overconfident and self-satisfied.  Because there is something about the style of those TED talk deliveries which have become a bit ubiquitous now.  And I think even CEOs feel they have to be a bit like that, you know, with the radio and mike around the head and everything and they have to have this very, very long pauses and very stylishly over-rehearsed deliveries, and I am not sure how authentic that is actually. I think it looks very, very rehearsed.  There are some people who can pull it off, you know, the Steve Jobs type of approach when he was launching a new Apple product.  There was a big buzz around that, you know, but I think for a CEO to come and do that it just looks a bit odd, I think, you know, in our internal conference environment.  But what we want to do is, we want to connect with everyone.  And the way we connect with them is to make sure that we look at them.  You can’t look at everyone but you can look individually at people.   Now, in a large hall, of course, you can’t see their eyes because you can maybe see the first five, ten rows but you can’t see beyond that very clearly. So, the trick is to look as if you are looking at one person, which means you choose a spot in an auditorium. You maybe look at somebody, maybe three rows back.   You look straight at them in the eye and then maybe you look about 40 rows back at a slightly different point as if you are looking at somebody.  And what it does is, by choosing different areas of the room it looks like you are talking specifically to an individual person.  So, if you look at about 20 people around the area you are looking at toward the back of the hall they will all think you are looking directly at them because of the angle of the width of the projection.  I worked at how to do eye contact when I went to see Hamlet a few years ago at the national theater in London.  And I was sitting on the front row, I was very lucky to be sitting bang on the front row, and the actor playing Hamlet was about to do the famous speech, To Be or Not to Be.  I’m sitting down in the front row and there is a long pause and Hamlet came right down to the front of the stage, I mean, I could almost touch him, I was that close, and it is 1700 people behind me, big auditorium, and Hamlet’s there looking up and I am so close to him thinking this is... what a wonderful chance to see this famous actor playing Hamlet so close up.  And then he suddenly looked straight down at me and said, “To Be or Not to Be.” It was sort of electric, that was amazing because he was doing it to me, and then he carried on, and he said, “That’s the question.”  And I met a friend of mine afterwards and I said, it’s amazing, he is doing the whole play to me.  And she said, he is not doing the whole play to you because I’m sitting in the dress circle and he is doing the whole play to me.  And of course, he didn’t do the whole play to me but that’s what it felt like.  He only did two lines to me and he did two lines to my friend in the dress circle but both of us said he did the whole play to us.  So, the secret of eye contact is to have one thought with one person and one thought with another.  And in a large hall you have one thought with one area of the auditorium and another thought with another area.  As long as you connect with everyone, at some point they will feel they have been with you, they have actually connected with you.  What a lot of people do is they sweep the room with their eyes.  They sweep from back side, left to right and up to down. They are almost defocusing, they are not really focusing on anyone in particular.  But much better, I think, to come out to an audience and look at a particular spot in the audience and say, good evening, and then look at another spot and say, really nice to see you, as opposed to, good evening, nice to see you, in a sort of scatter gun way, right across everybody.  In the audience, we want to feel special.  We want to feel the speaker is actually, at some point, talking to us, and that’s the way to do it. Kelly: That’s excellent.  Since you mention TED talks, I am a fan of the TED talks 20 minute presenting and then 40 minutes listening versus the traditional business presentation of 40 minutes talking and then 15 minutes Q &A.  Do you like that idea? Robin: I totally agree with that. Kelly: Any tips or tricks, once you have opened it up for Q &A, how to get it going, how to get that first question asked? Robin: I think one of the things is to have a prepared question.  I think one of the hardest things to do, actually, is to ask a question from the audience.  It’s much easier to be on a panel on stage than it is being in the audience asking a question.   Because often what happens is, you think of a question and then by the time the microphone is passed down the line to you and previous questions finished, partly, they possibly answered the question in some way anyway or you can’t quite remember what you had said so the nerves kick in, and so I think it’s quite difficult.  So, I always have a question up my sleeve. Maybe the moderator would say, you know, do we have any questions? And if there isn’t one straightaway, I’d say, excuse me, but I was talking to someone earlier, just before this, and they asked me, of course they didn’t, that didn’t happen but what I am doing is I am posing a question that they might well want to ask or the people have asked in the  past. I’ll frame it as if I was talking to somebody just before and that makes the feeling that it is much more collegiate and then that normally starts the ball rolling. Kelly: So, you pose that question and then you answer it yourself.  Okay, I got it. Robin: I actually answer myself, yeah, yeah.   The other thing I have done before is, any question is a great question.  “That’s a great question” sets it off in that way. Kelly: Yeah, I think Socrates or one of these guys said, Confucius said, “He who asks a question is a fool for a minute.  He who never asks a question is a fool all his life.” Robin: You know, you’ll regret it as well, you know.   You would also think, I wish I had asked that person.  I applaud people for asking questions because I think it takes a lot of bottle when you are in an audience.  You know, when you are on stage with the microphone you have much more power than you do when you are in the audience.  I really feel it for people asking questions and I am very very grateful when they do.  And I always thank them afterwards, I go up to them afterwards and thank them for asking the questions.  Kelly: Okay, I want to get to a couple of the really kind of mechanical things that aren’t that exciting but I think they’ll be helpful.  Tell us your thoughts on standing and what to do with our hands. Robin: Okay.   So, you have basically got about five choices with what to do with your hands.  You’ve got hands behind your back, which is a bit military.  You’ve got hands down by your side, which is an interesting one.  So, if you stand there open very much, open body language, you know, with your hands standing by your side, it’s what actors call actors neutral.  And the reason that actors do it, the next time you go to see a theater play watch out for it.  Actors do it because it’s very very easy for the audience to go between the two characters having a conversation on stage.  Because physically they are quite still but mentally and emotionally it’s quite cut off and quite fiery.  Physically they might be quite still and in life very very few people do it.  The people who carried off best normally are world leaders making big pronouncements on the world stage, and they quite often do it, and they look very very open but it’s quite hard to do.  And often it looks a bit grand, I think, in many situations.  Some people like it but I would say it’s quite hard.  And hands in pocket, obviously, is just a cultural thing but also on an animal level you don’t show your hands it’s the sign of hiding something, maybe nerves or a gun or whatever but I think the ones that most professional speakers use, most politicians, most TV presenters.   I have my hands held lightly together around the line of my belt, so just below the belly button.  And the reason that works is that’s your emotional center so you feel protected in that position but it looks open. Obviously, if you cross your arms you look closed but this looks open in that position.  I use my hands a lot so my hands are moving around all the time but when they finish, whatever the move is, then like a magnet they are drawn together level with the belt. Kelly: Excellent, and feet are shoulder width apart.  Robin: Yeah, hip width apart is the best way.   And the reason feet even weight is good because it tends to make your spine straight, and if your spine is straight your ribs will breathe better and so you have more air.   You look more centered but also actually physically you are more centered.  And if they’re too wide it looks inappropriately, you know, like a wild west cowboy, just got off your horse. Kelly: You talk about five types of body language, four variations of closed which are aggressive, defensive, nervous and bored, I don’t want to spend any time on those, I want us to focus on the one version that you recommend is open and interested.  Talk about that and include smiling in that, because I think that’s part of the key part of body language that makes one open and interesting. Robin: It is.  The closed ones, obviously, are, you know, crossing your hands and rubbing your face and shifting the weight and the yawning and all that sort of stuff.  But the open interesting body language, this is where we meet somebody who genuinely looks like they want to connect with us.  They will probably have a reasonably firm handshake, but not too firm.  They will have good eye contact; they won’t be embarrassed to hold our eye contact so they will actually look us in the eye.  They will have a confidence stance but they will have a low center of gravity if they get it right.   Their gestures will be quite relaxed but smiling is instinct because it changes the sound of our voice as much as anything else.  And the other thing about smiling is, it’s easier than frowning because actually it takes 42 muscles to frown and 17 to smile.  So, it’s far fewer muscles to smile.  I do voiceovers for TV commercials and stadium events and things and if you have a little twinkle in your eye it changes the sound of your voice, literally changes the sound of your voice.  If you have a cheesy grin, like sort of a cheesy toothpaste commercial salesman, that will tighten your voice, and you can feel it tightening your throat if you try it. But just a little twinkle in the eye, absolutely softens the voice and changes the voice a bit.  And of course, we can tell on a gut level, even if we are not experience in this, we can tell whether someone’s smile is genuine or not.   And the answer is, does the smile reach the eyes?  You can tell when someone’s eyes are really smiling.  And actually, if you want to spot an insincere smile, you want to spot a sincere smile, you look at someone’s eyelid.  You look at the outside corners of the top eyelid, and when you are genuinely smiling that comes down, and it’s almost impossible to fake that one.  So, if you want to see if somebody is really smiling look at the top outside corner of their top eyelid. Kelly: Interesting.  Let’s get to the last question I have in this part one segment on presentations, is presenting while sitting down. What are your thoughts on that? Robin: Well, presenting when sitting down requires energy.  It’s hard because you want to look relaxed and calm.  There are basically two ways to sitting, actually, in a meeting if you are presenting.  The best way actually is to sit forward on your chair.  It is to push your chair slightly further back than you would think away from the table and sit on the front edge of the chair and have both feet flat on the ground.  I was coaching a lady the other day who is the CEO of a big company and she was trying to raise 100 million or whatever for her company and we were rehearsing her pitch to the financial institutions.  And after about 15 minutes of this rehearsal pitch she started coughing and so she asked for some water and I just looked under the table and I just said to her, okay, could you just put both feet on the ground, because what she had been doing was having her feet crossed, so they weren’t flat on the ground they were crossed.   And I said, just try that, and interestingly enough, once you put both feet flat on the ground she didn’t cough for another forty minutes.  So, what that does, by having both feet flat on the ground and sit forward on your chair, both feet flat on the ground, it tends to make your spine a little bit more straighter and it brings your voice more forward, and you get more air out and therefore you don’t tend to hurt your throat.  The second way of sitting is what I call the high-status CEO position which is sitting further back in the chair, often with your legs crossed, maybe with weight on one arm.   So, it’s quite a sort of senior politician TV interview type position.  And I see a lot of CEOs do that at boards, they sit slightly away from the table, giving themselves quite high status. It can work, and it just depends on the situation, but those are basically the two ways of sitting when you are presenting ourselves. Kelly: Exactly.   So, to summarize, I’ve got, number one, feet are hip with the part.  Number two, thighs or buttocks clenched.  Number three, hands held together close to the stomach. Number four, speak from the gut.  And then five, smile.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Robin: Definitely. Kelly:  You indicated in your book that there are three essential questions that needed to be asked and answered in your talk, what are they and why are they important? Robin: Okay, well the first one is, why are you giving this talk?  And it seems a very obvious question, why are you giving this talk? The reason I have to ask people this often is, I sit, I would say maybe two or three times a week, in an audience listening to a talk and I think, I am not quite sure why that speaker who is giving the talk. They are giving me lots of information but I am not quite sure what they want out of it.  So, I think the speaker always needs to know what is their reason for giving the talk and what do they want successful talk look like to them at the end of it.  What are they trying to do?  And there are basically two types of talk.   Of course, there is a talk to sell or to motivate.  And those are basically the only two types of talks.  So, even family talks like at a wedding or even a eulogy at a   funeral, they are ultimately motivational talks, otherwise they are sales.  And sales talk will always require an ask at the end of it. You are giving this talk so that the audience thinks differently, behave differently, buys your product, does something differently.  So, those are selling and motivating talks.   We need to be very clear what we are trying to do.  I was coaching a guy recently and he has got a big company and he was going to give a speech to two and a half thousand employees and I said to him, okay, so before you rehearse your speech with me, what are the reason you are giving this talk? Why are you giving this talk?  And he said, well, I am sort of giving an update.  I said, do you know what, with greatest respect, nobody wants an update.  Why are you really giving this talk?  And he said, well, you know, I have got various things to say.  I said, no, no, we’re not really clear what the point is.  I said, but I tell you what, can I make a bet with you?  I am in the UK so I said, I took out a 10-pound note and I put it on the table and I said, I put 10 pounds down so I am going to make you a bet.  And I am not really a betting man but I’ll make you a bet.  About three minutes into our talk I bet you will say something like, so I suppose the real point is.   And he said, yes.  And I said, fantastic, thank you, I’ll take your money.  I said, can we start with the real point?  So, it is so much better for him to stand up there and go, I suppose the real point is this.  If that’s the question that the audience wants answering, then of course you are home and dry.  So, it’s about, why are you giving this talk?  And the second one is, why should the audience care?  And that’s the bit we just did up top there.  Why should the audience care?  You have got to get into the audience’s head, they have given up their time, they have given up 40 minutes of their time or whatever an hour of their time to come and hear you speak so what value are you going to add? Why are you giving them some information?  Why is that relevant to them? And if we construct the talk from that point of view, being aware also of why we are giving it but ultimately, why they should care.  And then the final question is, what are you really saying?  What are you really saying?  So, we are clear, why do we want to give it, we care with the audience, what’s the benefit they can get from it, and what are we really saying.  And I think if you can say it in one or two sentences then you are really clear.  If you can’t say it in one or two sentences, you don’t really know what your speech is about.  I wonder if I could share something incredibly personal.  It might be interesting. Kelly: Yes. Robin: My father died recently. We have five children in the family, and my sister said, could she speak at the funeral? I said of course you can.  I said, you know, how long are you going to speak for?  She said, well I thought about it, I am going to speak for about 14 minutes.  And I said, Okay.  I said, that’s quite long, and also there are five of us. So, I said, you know, do you think you can cut it down at all?  And she said, well, it’s quite hard, isn’t it, and I have got lots of things to say about my father. So, are you going to speak?  And I said, yes.  She said, well, how long are you going to speak for?  And I said, well, I thought about it very carefully and I am going to speak for exactly 60 seconds. And she said, well, you can’t say everything you want to say about your father in 60 seconds.  You can’t do that.  I said, you can but it’s harder than 14 minutes because you have to know what you are really saying.  And I ended up my 60 seconds, I spoke a little and then at the end I said, but what I really want to say ultimately is just six words, thank you for being my father, and I sat down.   That was the essence of my message.  So that’s what I was really saying.  I could have given lots of anecdotes and talked about lots of things and said how kind he was but ultimately, that’s what I wanted to say.  And it took me funny enough to write that 60 seconds it took me two days. And it sounds odd but it takes longer to write a 60 second speech that it does to write a 14 minute one. Kelly:  That’s wonderful, wonderful, thank you very much for sharing that.  In these three questions, these three essential questions, why am I giving this?  Why should the audience care? And then what’s the third one? Robin: The third one is, what are you really saying?  And that’s what we just covered there.   What are you really saying? Kelly:  In a nutshell, what are you going to say?  Okay. Should that be introduced at the beginning?  Because it leads to one of your early points of, know how to start a presentation. Robin: Well, I think so.  I think all audience’s attention, well, we all know, audience’s attention spans are shortened.  I love it when a speaker comes on and ask a provocative question or somehow nails it right at the beginning.  And I use something call the headline sandwich which you may well be familiar with under a different name but I call it the headline sandwich which means you start your talk with your headline and you give your talk and at the end you hit the headline again. So, for example, a friend of mine who was asked to speak at a wedding, he was the best-man and he said, could you give me some tips?  And I said, yes.  And I said, before you even start thinking about humor or anything, tell me about your friend who is getting married.  And he got a little bit emotional about this friend and he said, Oh, Peter.  And he said, Pete, he is probably the kindest man I have ever met in my life.  And I said, but you have written your speech there, really.  You have written your speech.  So, at the wedding he stood up and he said, Peter is probably the kindest man I have ever met in my life.  Let me tell you why.  And then he added a couple of anecdotes as to why that was the case and then he ended up by saying, so, can we now drink a toast to one of the kindest man you will ever meet.  And it works in almost every situation.  It works in eulogies, it works at weddings, it works in business speaking.  Kelly: Tell us why ethos, logos and pathos have been so important all these years.  They are kind of never changing and why are they still so important. Robin: Ethos, logos and pathos, in that order, so, it is trust, persuade, motivate.  And they have to come in that order, interestingly.  So, ethos is about building rapport and credibility. So, building trust, in a sense.  So, in other words, trust me I know what I am talking about.  Then there is the logos which is the logical argument.  So, the audience can follow your argument very clearly.  And then pathos is then engaging with them on an emotional level, on an empathetic level. So, we can inspire and motivate.  So, we want to say, you can trust me.  These are my credentials. My persuasion is this.  This is my argument and then now I am now going to emotionally motivate you.  It is a wonderful expression from the 60s advertising guru which is, sell the sizzle, not the sausage.  It’s about selling the excitement of the product not just the product itself.  But you don’t want to sell the emotional stuff before you have done the logic because then if it doesn’t work.  So, we need to go, okay, I’m a car salesman, I mean, I obviously know about cars.  This is a logical reason why this is a good car for you based on what you have told me.  And these are now the emotional reasons why I think you really love this car.  You go in that order and it tends to work. And the same way the speech as well. Kelly: Excellent.  You have introduced the five classic starts of a speech, what are they? Robin: Okay, the five classic starts, the most common one, actually, is the benefit, and that’s what sales people do, which is, I’m going to tell you how you can make more money. Here’s a great product for these reasons.    This is the benefit to you.  So, benefit is a classic one, and be very clear what benefit is.  The second one, people in talks do, it is, somewhat, radio stations do it.  It is what they call the tease.   So, you say, I am going to tell you how you can double your money in the next 10 minutes, but first of all, I am going to do something else.  So, you tease them with something that’s coming out, that’s the tease.  The question is the other one which is, it can be the same as benefit, it’s just in a question form. So, it can be, grabbing the audience’s attention, you know, who here wants to double their money in the next 10 minutes, just that.  Who here wants to look after their retirement planning better? I do a talk on charisma, one of my talks is the opening question which is, can you teach charisma?  Very simple question but what it does is, it absolutely frames the talk.  Can you teach it or is it something that you are born with?  Right up front and the audience know exactly what is there.  The shock is the other one.  And this is quite often used internally in business meetings where you say, if we don’t do this, we are toast.  If we don’t change our behavior we are going to lose all our customers.  There is a real call to action in the shock.  And then this is what politicians love, which is what’s called the three-way opening, you give three things, but actually you talk about things you say you are not going to but actually you do.  Tell you about the current state of the world’s economy.  I could tell you how ill-prepared we are about our retirement planning but instead what I am actually going to tell you about is how you could do this.  They get three points in one but actually they are only really talking about one but they get the others in at the same time.   Kelly: So, I sell consulting services to a community and regional bank so would a classic start be something like this, if I pose it as a question, can a sleepy community bank compete effectively with big brokers and big banks and achieve double digit growth rate, or would it be how can? Robin:  Good point.  The answer to that, it depends on your audience. Both of those questions are great because they are questions that the audience would actually be interested in hearing the answers to.   What’s tempting for people when they are selling their services or their products is, you say, we are the best. There was a wonderful advertising campaign in the 60s for lawn seed.   Their original campaign ran the best lawn seed in the world, and interestingly enough, they didn’t sell very much lawn seed because the audience doesn’t want lawn seed.  What the audience wants is a good lawn.  So, they changed the campaign to the best lawns in the world.  So, customers don’t want lawn seed, what they want is a lovely lawn.  What a customer doesn’t want is your services or my services, they don’t want the services, what they want is the outcome which is, we want to be a more effective team. We want to communicate better. We want to increase our margins, whatever services you are selling.  They are not actually interested in your services.  They are interested in what your services can do for them, which is why your question was in the right way, which is, how can a small bank do this or can a small bank do this?  It doesn’t really matter which way you do it but it’s about...it’s the relevance to the audience that’s important.  And I think if you get the first question relevant to the audience that’s when you get them, but normally, when I see speakers they make the first sentence about themselves and that is where it goes wrong, right from the first sentence.   Kelly: That concludes part 2 of my interview with Robin Kermode, actor and author of Speak: So Your Audience Will Listen. In part 3 we will cover some guidelines on Powerpoint type presentations and why a speech is like a love affair. Any fool can start one. But to end it requires considerable skill. We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com.  The audio content is produced and syndicated by Seth Greene, Market Domination, with the help of Kevin Boyle.  Video content is produced by the Guildmaster Studio, Keenan, Bobson Boyle. Voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli.  The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin.  If you like    this program, please tell us.  If you don’t please tell us how we can improve it. And now some disclaimers, Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota Board of Accountancy as a certified public accountant.  The views expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guest in their private capacity and do not in any way represents the views of any other agent, principal, employee, vendor or supplier.

This is the 3rd and final interview of Robin Kermode, actor and author of the print and audio book, Speak: So Your Audience Will Listen. A great book. Coupled with this three-part podcast series customized for BankBosun audience, will give your great confidence in public speaking. If you listen to this series and buy his book, it will save you from having to appear naked on the stage to gain public speaking confidence…like he did. Listen to part one, if you missed it. Kelly Coughlin is CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm, helping bank C-Level officers navigate risk and discover rewards.  He is the host of the syndicated audio podcast, BankBosun.com.  Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyds Bank and Merrill Lynch.  On the podcast, Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem, provide bank C-Suite officers, risk management, technology and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risk and discover rewards, and now your host, Kelly Coughlin. Kelly:  I’m a big fan of Shakespeare and you mentioned that it’s effective to use the iambic pentameter which is Shakespeare’s preferred rhythm in the speech, I have never tried to write a speech using that let alone deliberate in this format.  Are you seriously recommending that we try to write our speeches like Shakespeare? Robin: I’m certainly not, what I’m saying is that if you can find, it can be useful exercise, if you write your main points in iambic pentameter, interestingly enough, it will actually have a natural rhythm that will just flow because   iambic pentameter, which is ti-dum ti-dum ti-dum ti-dum, which is the five human heart beats.   The reason it’s worked so long is it has a natural rhythm.  So, one of the classic Henry the Fifth line is, “Now all the youths of England are on fire.”  In the rhythm of Shakespeare, which is ti-dum ti-dum ti-dum, in that rhythm, it sounds like, now all the youths of England are on fire. You can feel this, there is a momentum behind it.  It’s not always appropriate, of course.   In the book, I use a phrase that you could tell to your sales team, for example, which was in the line I came up with here to explain this was, “just care and they will want to buy from you.”  But if you say it in the rhythm of the iambic pentameter, which is tidum ti-dum ti-dum, you have, just care and they will want to buy from us.  So, if you are going to end a speech with your main point, if you just try and write it in those five human heartbeat, fondly enough, you will find it will have a natural rhythm and a natural gravitas and a natural authority, and a natural drama, just purely in the way it is constructed. Kelly:  So you will give us a pass, we can use iambic pentameter at the beginning and the end but in-between we can get by without it.         Robin: None of us are as good as Shakespeare, and to be honest, it wouldn’t land. Kelly:  Okay.  I love the quote, “A speech is like a love affair. Any fool can start it but to end it requires considerable skill”   Robin: [Laughs] that’s great, a great quote isn’t it.  If you can see a theatre play, you love the whole play, it’s been like two hours long or something, the curtain comes down at the end and the curtain gets stuck about one foot off the ground.  What you see now is the actors behind, you see their feet.  And there you can see them, you can see the body language because there is about a foot at the bottom, and you can see they begin, what do we do now? Do we go off or do we stay?  And you can see them starting to go one way or the other way.  And it leaves a very odd feeling about it and then they can’t do their bows properly so now they have to come through the side of the auditorium and, you know, in front of the curtain and all the rest of it.   So, when you go into the office the next day and you saw this theatre play last night, the curtain got stuck.  That’s what you are going to remember.  You are not going to remember two hours of great before that, you are just going to remember when it all went wrong at the end.  And similarly with the speech, you can do a really good speech and just slightly fall apart at the end and it’s just terrible.  And the reason I like the headline sandwich is that even if in your mind you think, oh, it’s all slightly going a bit pear shaped.  What you do is, you think, okay, I am just going to repeat the opening headline absolutely clearly, so, that’s why Peter is the kindest man I have ever met in my life.   No one is going to think, but you missed out a section, because they don’t even know what you plan to say. But at least you finish really really well, and I would say, finish strongly but interestingly enough, on a timeline.   Someone, a few years ago, did a wonderful survey on when the peak of great works of art, great speeches, great music, great films, great book even where they reach their emotional peak.  And most people would think that you reach your peak at 100 percent on the timeline. Interestingly enough it is about 95 percent on the timeline.  So it’s best what we are trying to sell in our product we want the audience to feel they have made the decision to buy it and we then pull back and let them feel they have make their choice.  We don’t want to end on the big sell, we want to get to about 90, 95 percent of the timeline and then just pull back a little bit so the audience go, yeah, I think we will buy this, and this is my choice to buy it.  And then, salesman, very much calmer, and they are not desperate to sell, because I think if he looks desperate to sell it will end up at 100 percent energy and 100 percent on the timeline. Kelly:  Excellent.  I told the audience we will cover briefly some things on PowerPoint presentations.  I have a business policy now that requires more or less four things in a power point presentation.  Number one, few or no words on the slide.  Two, only images if possible.  Three, total deck less than 12 and then presentation less than 20 minutes, as we had discussed before, and then the script printed at the bottom of the PowerPoint notes.  Tell us about your PowerPoint policy generally and what you refer to as your five by five rule.  Robin: Yeah, the five by five rule is quite common actually but basically it’s no more than five bullets per slide and then more than five words per bullet.  And I think that is the discipline, I think, is really good.  I think also, fonts are too small, quite often there are too many sections to a slide.  So, you can have graphs, series of words, you can have a chart, So, you can have a pie chart, a bar chart, a photograph.  It’s just too much on a slide.  If I was going to give one piece of advice on PowerPoint it would be each slide should have an emotion connected to it.   And the best example of this is the company I was working with in the north of England and it had a sales team of about 100 guys and they had to go out obviously and give this presentation to all their new potential customers.  One of the slides was the history of their company.  And then it went from about 1900 right through to 2017.  And it had, but each one, each one of the...well almost every single, not every single year but I mean, it felt like...certainly every five years it was something else.   It was like, you know, they moved their office to a different town or they opened an account somewhere else or they opened a branch here. And as a customer, of course, I was watching this, a potential customer, and I said look, I am going to stop you now. I said, this slide is going on for about a minute and a half and it’s really boring because it’s all about your company and I, frankly, I want to buy your products, I am not really interested in the company and where you have your offices and where you have your warehouses.  It’s not really relevant to me.  And he said, oh, we’ll cut the slide out.  And I said, no, no, no don’t cut the slide out because there is a point to the slide but you have to know the emotional results that you want every slide to have.  So every slide in your deck has to make the audience feel something, so what is this slide making the audience feel?  And he said, oh, but we are giving the history of our company.  I said, no, that’s boredom.  What do you want the audience to feel?  And one of them said trust.   I said, absolutely, spot on. The only reason you are telling us about the history of your company is so that you trust us, right?  So, I said, now you know that, I said do the slide again.  And the guy said, so, look, as you can see here, we have been going over 117 years.  We know what we are doing.  We are really established. Trust us. Click.  And he went on to the next slide.  So, it took under 10 seconds but it did the job, which is to make us feel we can trust this company.  We don’t have to go through everything necessarily, it wasn’t relevant but to see it all there was useful.  But the point of the slide was to make us feel trust.  So, I think that in every single slide I get my clients to write the emotion at the top of the slide that they want the audience to feel as a result of giving this slide. And if you do that, then the audience will care and if you don’t have the emotion connected to PowerPoint slides, that’s when they become boring and that’s when they become just information.  We don’t want information, we want to know why we are been given the information.  And if you tell them the emotion connected to each slide then your audiences will care. Kelly:  Great stuff!  Robin that’s terrific.  I really appreciate your time.  How should people get in touch with you?  Give us your, I presume your website, email address, how would you like to do that?                                                                                                                               Robin: Well it would be very lovely to hear from any of your listeners, of course, you can buy the book on Amazon which is, Speak: So Your Audience Will Listen.  You can contact me by the website which is zone2, that’s ZONE the number 2, zone2.co.uk and my email is robin@zone2.co.uk.  I look forward to hearing from you and hearing how you are getting on with your presentations and your speeches.  Kelly:  Great Robin, thank you very much, cheers! Robin: Thank you so much Kelly for having me.  I really appreciate it. Well that concludes my three-part series with Robin Kermode. I hope you liked it. His book Speak: So Your Audience Will Listen has some further tips, tricks and practice techniques that will help you continue to upgrade your public speaking skills and confidence. Thanks for listening. We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com.  The audio content is produced and syndicated by Seth Greene, Market Domination, with the help of Kevin Boyle.  Video content is produced by the Guildmaster Studio, Keenan, Bobson Boyle. Voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli.  The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin.  If you like    this program, please tell us.  If you don’t please tell us how we can improve it. And now some disclaimers, Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota Board of Accountancy as a certified public accountant.  The views expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guest in their private capacity and do not in any way represents the views of any other agent, principal, employee, vendor or supplier.