Sample chapter from The Lighter Side
Experienced public speakers use many techniques to get their audience (and themselves) warmed up and ready for some full-on mind melting. But the one thing you don’t want to start with is the question “Hello, can everyone hear me?” Inevitably some Smart Alec will reply with “Yes, perfectly; but I’m happy to swap places with someone who can’t!” And don’t encourage non-native English speakers to ask this question – ever! I once had the embarrassment of witnessing a French account manager ask “can everyone hear me” during an important presentation to his customer. When the senior buyer said “No”, the account manager blushed and said, “I am zoo zoreee. I weel do my beest to ejaculate to zee back of ze room.”
I’ve tried other techniques, such as the ‘stand up if’ exercise, where you get people to stand up if they’ve done a certain thing, such as had a cup of coffee that morning, or walked the dog today, or poured milk all over the office carpet on the day they resigned from a job. Nowadays, and especially when training salesmen, I like to cut through the ‘I’ve got a Porsche’ swagger and get them to talk about something that their peers don’t know about them. I start off, usually by describing myself as someone who comes to work in a pinstripe ‘straightjacket’ and only really lives when he’s away from the office, when he wears tweeds and sits quietly amongst nature while writing his books. This sets the tone and, in response, I’ve had some great replies from butch salesman such as “I’m into all that Nature stuff. In fact, I once swam naked down the Amazon River” (which of course invited comments about piranhas’ poor eyesight and their inability to see tiny ‘worms’ dangling in front of them). But you have to be careful where you take this sort of conversation. A few months ago, when training a room full of female law graduates (the ultimate ‘FemDom’ experience), I decided to describe myself as a corporate trainer by day, and a bushcraft practitioner by night. One of the women (the one with impossibly long legs, a short skirt, and a way of speaking ‘just slowly enough’ while staring over the cherry-red rims of her glasses) said, “Oh, I love that! I’ve been into that for years. Keep up an image at work, but underneath… My personal favourite is ‘the flying peacock’. Takes some trimming, but trust me, you wanna be there when that starts flapping!”
If that’s not bad enough, recently I had the pleasure of training a group of senior managers in Germany. All was going well until one stood up and revealed – in monotone ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger’ way – his secret fact: “When I left school,” he said, “I spent three months serving seamen aboard the German Navy’s training ship. But I was young, so my discharge came quickly.”
What do you say to such things? How does one avoid such predicaments? For me it’s impossible. I blame The Curse. The Curse of the Scottish Bum Warbles.
When I first started training people, some 15 years ago, I was a junior marketing professional making my way into middle management. My career development plan stated that I needed to build my confidence in talking to others, and raise my profile with the senior managers of the business. The solution, said my manager, was to give a marketing master class to the Senior Leadership Team. “There’s an offsite conference coming up,” he said. “I could get you the opening slot if you like. You could be the warm up act to get them through their hangovers. So inject some humour, and keep it fast paced. They don’t want to see a shy young man. Instead, show them your personality. Bring your presentation to life with oodles of Hudson wit. Make them laugh, make them cry. It doesn’t matter, so long as they remember you.”
There’s a common understanding amongst trainers that says: “People will forget the details of what you say, but they’ll remember stories and how you made them feel.” So I understood why my manager had instructed me like this. But I hardly knew the leadership team and definitely wasn’t on good enough terms to assault them with my eccentric humour. On the night before the big event, I was pacing up and down in my hotel room trying to calm my nerves while figuring out what to talk about – and how to present it. I knew my subject, but feared that the managers knew more about it than me. Would they bother to listen to the young man whose brief was, in simple terms, to be the company jester?
2am came and I still hadn’t worked out my stories or jokes for the speech. In a moment of panic I decided to do something radical: I wouldn’t prepare anything at all. Instead, I would just talk about whatever came into my head. I’d start with a random fact and then cleverly link it to marketing methodology. This was what the great comics could do, right? Comedians like Ken Dodd and Bob Monkhouse could make up jokes on the spot and link them to their vast repertoire of anecdotes. They could get laugh after laugh until you couldn’t hear what they were saying because the laughter was so loud. So if they could do it (after fifty years in the trade) then I could do it after one night’s panic.
To prove that my talk was unprepared, and that I was oozing with confidence, I would take something with me onto the stage that would guarantee I got their attention. I’d refer to it and – with complete faith – introduce them to the first thing that came into my mind. I looked across the hotel bedroom (which was decorated like an Edwardian manor house) and saw just what I needed. There, on top of the wardrobe, was a line of old books – positioned to give the room some character and, apparently, to remind residents that all Edwardians stored books on top of wardrobes. I walked over, reached up and took the first book I felt. I placed it unopened into my briefcase. Then, as a feeling of complete relaxation came over me, I retired to bed.
The following morning came and I strode confidently onto the stage in the hotel’s conference centre. The room was filled with the company’s most senior managers, showing varying degrees of consciousness. In my hand was the book. An old, blue, dusty book. I held it aloft and said, “Good morning! I know you’re expecting a talk about marketing, but given that it’s early and that you have a long day ahead, I thought I’d talk to you about something less taxing than that. Last night in my hotel room I had a revelation: I discovered this book. It doesn’t look like much, but its contents – I guarantee – are way more interesting than the techniques I was billed to talk about. So listen up! I’m going to ‘blow your minds’ by sharing with you the key messages from…” I lowered the book, turned it so that I could read the title on the spine, and shouted, “Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland; Fifth Series, Volume 16, 1919. Published Annually.” My boss (who was sitting in the front row) put his head in his hands, the Sales Director’s mouth fell open, and the Company Accountant nearly fell off his seat with excitement. I felt a bead of sweat roll down my brow; the book in my hand started growling and my shoes started digging their way through the stage. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a sacking…
I continued my speech: “I am so confident that this book contains more wisdom than anything you’ll hear all day, that I’m going to turn to a random page and read aloud whatever it says. So, here goes.”
I opened the book, flicked to a page roughly in the middle, studied it, then read aloud: “The Ox Warble or Ox Bot Fly is a thick set, moderately large fly, generally more or less hairy with rudimentary or absent mouth parts…The females lay their eggs on mammals, usually around the nasal cavity or ‘other openings’ to the body…The larvae from these eggs have mouth hooks and spiny armature, suggesting power to burrow…they are parasitic on the mammal, working their way into and along the gullet, ultimately (over eight or nine months) along the spinal canal through to the back of the mammal…here they form cells or ‘warbles’ through which they break through the skin and drop to the ground where they pupate and later emerge as flies…The careful man who strives to get rid of Warbles finds himself penalised by the carelessness or indifference of others who adopt no treatment.”
I looked up from the book and out across a sea of gently shaking heads. There was plenty of movement, but no noise. The room was absolutely silent. I took a deep breath, then said, “…and of course, the moral of this story is that if you don’t give your ‘pipeline’ a good scrubbing once in a while, you might end up with an itch that no amount of sales or marketing effort will cure. And if you’re confident in what you do, don’t just warble; shout loudly about it! That, after all, is what marketing communications attempt to achieve. And before you ask, yes! I must go. I’ve got to fly!”
I walked briskly from the stage, leaving behind the embarrassing silence of a room devoid of applause. No laughter either, but I was pretty sure they’d remember me. Sure enough, when I came into work the next day, I was immediately summonsed to my manager’s office. “Young man,” said my boss, his eyebrows frowning and his fingers tapping his desk, “those flies you mentioned yesterday: they only attack cattle, right?”
And that was my baptism into the presenter’s world: a career that would lead me to give talks to thousands of people all over the globe. Until recently, I thought I’d mastered and seen everything that the job could throw at me. But I came undone when presenting to a group of young sales professionals in Hungary.
If you’ve not been to Hungary then you may not know that Hungarian women are outstandingly good looking. In fact, they’re ‘out-of-this-world’ beautiful. Which presents a challenge to the trainer who’s there to do a job and not lose his focus. Sticking to a script is near impossible, as is maintaining one’s train of thought. And of course, eye contact with the audience (a must for all presenters) can cause you to blush, stutter, sweat profusely, or – worst of all – swagger like George Clooney as you try to maintain your cool.
So there was I, standing at the front of a meeting room full of twenty drop-dead-gorgeous Hungarian beauties, thinking how I could begin the session. After much lip biting and brow mopping, I asked them to tell the class what job they wanted to do when they were younger. The first girl stood up, looked me directly in the eyes, and said, “When I was young, and I thought of being woman, all I wanted to be was – wet!”
My left leg stared to tremble, my top lip started wobbling, and I began making a faint gurgling sound.
“I’m sorry? What did you say?” I replied, doing my best to remain professional.
“Wet!” she exclaimed. “Are women in the UK not wet?”
“Eeeerrrrm….”
Another girl stood up and said, “Me too. All I wanted to be, when teenager, was wet!”
“What?” I whimpered, desperately attempting to slow my heartbeat.
“Wet!” the class shouted. “Working with animals!”