PITCH PERFECT by Bill McGowan

• Speak little, do much. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
• From here on, accept every invitation you get to do public speaking. Be the first one with your hand in the air when someone asks, “Would anybody like to say a few words?”
• Whether at work or at home, great communication skills are your secret to holding someone’s attention, making a persuasive point, being remembered, and appearing smart and confident. Every time you speak, it’s an opportunity to inform, influence, and inspire.
• During pivotal moments of our lives, results are often determined not by what we do, but instead by what we say.
• Communication skills make you more promotable.
• People who communicate effectively are flat out more productive.
• Great communicators are not genetically predetermined. They are made.
• The more accomplished you become at public speaking, the more you will be tempted to shortchange your preparation. If you succumb to that urge, you will live to regret it.
• The beauty of communication: it’s easy to practice.
• Good communicators don’t equivocate.
• More is not more.
• be warm and welcoming in your delivery to the camera and show almost childlike enthusiasm for the value of the product you’re talking about.
• Research commissioned by Lloyds TSB Insurance shows that ten years ago, the average person could easily pay close attention for roughly twelve minutes. Now five minutes is more realistic.
• Distraction and mental multitasking are now a way of life.
• The wealth of alternative communication options has drastically curtailed the amount of time we devote each day to actually speaking.
• There’s no magic switch you flip in your back to suddenly turn on oratorical greatness.
• Everyone communicates differently.
• The first way things come out of your mouth is usually the best. Resist the urge to self-edit to make the less-vital information 100 percent precise.
• Many people tend to get caught up in the minutiae of what they’ve built rather than explaining what the consumer can do with this wonderful invention.
• Get attention by starting with your best material, especially a grabbing, thought-provoking line that makes listeners think, I want to know more.
• Start with a concise and compelling statement.
• Hold attention with visual images that illustrate a story.
• Cure boredom by boiling down your message, making it as rich and brief as possible. When in doubt, cut more out. If people want more, they’ll ask for seconds.
• The speed with which you talk should be directly proportional to how certain you are about the next sentence coming out of your mouth. The more certain you are, the more briskly you can choose to speak.
• Convey certainty with words, eye contact, posture, and tone of voice.
• The best broadcast interviewers earn trust by displaying genuine interest, as if there is nowhere else they’d rather be. They demonstrate this by maintaining an engaged facial expression.
• The best way to stay on point is to make sure the flow and focus of the discussion plays to your strengths.
• The first thirty seconds of any conversation or presentation are like the last two minutes of a football game. This is when victory or defeat is determined, the period of time when your audience is deciding whether you are interesting enough for them to continue paying attention.
• If you start off sounding like everyone else, your audience immediately assumes there’s nothing fresh and original in your presentation—same ol’, same ol’.
• Nearly all presentations could be drastically improved with one quick and simple edit: lopping off the first two paragraphs. Try it. You’ll be amazed at how engaging an abrupt start can be.
• Unless it has gotten laughs every single one of the twenty times you’ve told it, leave jokes to professional comedians, especially if they have nothing to do with your presentation.
• As a general rule, if everyone else is doing it, you don’t want to do it.
• An effective lead is often surprising—even counterintuitive. It makes the reader think, What’s this about? I want to know more.
• Good teases generally have three characteristics:
• Short. Convey it quickly, in just a line or two.
• Suspenseful. Include an element of intrigue.
• Surprising. Make your tease the opposite of a cliché, something that makes your listeners think, This is new. I’ve never heard this before.
• you must grab your listener’s attention more than once.
• Simply put, your headline is your best material.
• Many people make the mistake of building up to a provocative statement rather than leading with it.
• Visual storytelling is the sweet spot of good communication.
• That’s because humans are visual creatures.
• Weave stories into your presentations, but don’t make them feel like an appendage, an afterthought that got shoehorned in after the fact to an otherwise bland presentation.
• Don’t assume your audience knows everything. Assuming that your listener already knows the who, where, and why is a quick way to kill a story.
• Analogies do more than hold attention. They contextualize the data to help your listener understand it better.
• Don’t include statistics just for the sake of fattening up your presentation with gratuitous data. Know why you are using each one—and use it well.
• When in doubt, err on the side of brevity.
• Don’t assume your political, religious, or personal opinions are the same as your listeners.
• The rules of a dinner party apply to all work situations: indulging in discussions about sex, politics, or religion is like handling a loaded grenade.
• Each time you tell the same story to a new audience, you create another opportunity to find places to trim it.
• It’s more important to keep the story moving than it is to get every last tiny detail 100 percent accurate.
• less is more and simpler is better.
• People think that the more they elaborate and explain, the more convincing they will be. They confuse quantity with persuasiveness.
• In reality, the quietest person in any room is often the most intriguing, as well as the most powerful. By remaining quiet, the person creates more conversational open space, which invariably gets filled by others who are more uncomfortable with silence. You don’t want to be the person filling the dead air. Strive to be the person in control.
• Being concise is hard to do. It takes practice. If you struggle to boil things down, try this: Develop Decisive Starts and Finishes
• Rarely do I come across a client’s presentation that isn’t improved by cutting it by about 25 percent.
• Get to your point immediately. Don’t slowly build up to it.
• Don’t succumb to the overused technique of recapping or summarizing everything you just said.
• The amount of time you dedicate to listening to your clients and discussing their challenges should be three times what you spend talking about yourself.
• If you’re miserable at work, you have two choices: work to fix what’s wrong with the place or leave. Bringing as many people down with you as you can is not a third option.
• Your listener craves a discernible structure to what you’re telling them, complete with a beginning, middle, and end. When the ear registers one steady, unbroken stream of chatter, it gets overwhelmed and gives up.
• Confident people characteristically take things slowly, firm in their belief that there’s no need to rush because every single word they say matters.
• To be an effective speaker, you must absolutely psych yourself up to think that you are imparting tremendous value to your listeners.
• You probably think you talk more slowly and pause more often than you really do.
• The more uncertain you are about your next words, the more slowly you should speak, even coming to a dead stop if needed.
• Focus on What You Want to Say, Not on What You Think the Audience Is Thinking Many people pay too much attention to how others perceive them, and this puts too much power in the hands of the listener and not enough in the head of the speaker.
• Listening is one of the most effective compliments we have to offer.
• Attentive listening is becoming an increasingly rare commodity, which is why it is so easy to stand out and make a great impression by demonstrating that the art is not lost on you.
• When you speak, you want to sound filled with relentless conviction, exuding enthusiasm for the value of the information you’re sharing. Your words, eye movement, posture, pitch, and tone of voice must convey certainty.
• People mistakenly think that equivocation is a way of playing it safe, that by not demonstrating absolute certainty, they leave themselves less vulnerable to challenge and disagreement from their audience. Watering down your conviction, though, signals to your listener, This is a weak idea.
• More important than your handshake is how you stand. Our posture affects more than the way others perceive us.
• To stand with confidence, do what your mother always told you: stand up straight.
• Standing to speak commands more attention than sitting, but there are two scenarios in which standing seems inappropriate.
• 1.  Fewer than eight people are sitting around a conference table.
• 2.  You are speaking to an audience of work colleagues that is smaller than a standing-room-only crowd.
• If you are sitting down, your jacket is better left open, especially if you’re sitting on a panel without the benefit of a conference table in front of you.
• Let’s face it, relentless self-improvement is not for sissies. It can be hard work.
• Behavior is one of the hardest things to change.
• Your chances of improvement are far greater if you’re the type of person who listens to trusted advice, takes it seriously, and recognizes that sometimes other people know what’s best. At the other end of the spectrum are those who nod their heads, pretend to hear, and forget advice almost as soon as they’ve heard it.
• Great conversationalists are seldom the raconteurs holding court in front of a group of adoring fans. Instead, they’re the ones who are as interested as they are interesting. They pay attention to what you have to say and are intrigued to want to know more. And they wear this engagement not on their sleeves but on their faces, signaling through their expressiveness their delight in the give-and-take of such social interactions.
• People respond better when you look and act mentally involved and intrigued.
• Giving someone your undivided attention is the new pinnacle of customer service.
• The more often you listen with curiosity, the more skilled you will be at reading people, an enormously valuable asset to develop and fine-tune.
• Being a good conversationalist requires attentiveness and enthusiasm.
• The trick is to listen for some nugget of information that inspires you to want to know more about a particular topic.
• Your likability is central to your success; people will seek you out if you are a generous conversationalist.
• Self-promotion and modesty are not mutually exclusive.
• In a business setting where everyone is talking, it’s the person who listens with curiosity who becomes the most noticeable.
• Learn as much as you can about someone before your first conversation. That way you can ease into the conversation by asking someone about his or her hobbies, family, or vacation plans.
• You want to leave people wanting more. You don’t want to leave them thinking, Thank goodness that’s over with.
• Without a keen ability to listen, we are at a loss for developing the most effective strategy for how to be persuasive with others.
• Developing the skill of subtly changing the conversation can help you keep meetings running smoothly, close more deals, and get your ideas heard during brainstorming sessions.
• Regardless of your interviewer’s demeanor, your number one priority is to stay in control of the conversation. This determination will dramatically increase your chance of success.
• The vast majority of people steer conversations poorly.
• curious listening allows you to better plan your response.
• Mirroring a little of the question in your answer can help you shift from one topic to another in just a sentence or two.
• Note to self: It’s a good idea never to talk about controversial or sensitive topics—including rape, pornography, ethnic groups, politics, and religion—unless you’ve carefully planned your remarks ahead of time.
• The more experienced and accomplished a public speaker you become, the more you’ll be tempted to shortchange your prep. But just about any high-level performer will tell you, “You play the way you practice.” If you bring an intensity and keen attention to detail in rehearsal, you’ll be better able to nail the actual performance.
• Practice, practice, practice. And when in doubt, practice one more time.
• Most of your conversational repertoire should come in the form of a story. And here’s the great part: stories are more enjoyable and natural for us to convey than the typical elevator pitch—and they also keep your listener far more engaged.
• A good story often recalls the exact moment when we made a crucial decision, experienced an important revelation, or decided to roll the dice and go for it.
• Spoiler alert: if you are giving a presentation from your own laptop, always turn off your airport or wireless function.
• If you can outwardly shrug off a mistake and make it look as though you’re not the slightest bit fazed, chances are your audience will not feel anxious for you.
• Ultimately, the more familiar you are with what you will say in both anticipated and unexpected situations, the more at ease you will be.
• Life’s low-key situations (and thank goodness there are plenty of them) are the perfect opportunities to try out new conversational material for the first
• The value of getting outside our own heads and understanding how a problem looks to the other person cannot be overestimated.
• Whatever the situation, no matter how tempting it may be to say exactly what’s on your mind, never part ways by eviscerating the other person.
• you always meet people twice in this business, once on the way up and again on the way down.
• People hate meetings for a very good reason: They often drag on too long and are so redundant that the only thing left to focus on is the poor etiquette of your colleagues.
• If you will be presenting, keep your delivery focused on only the content that is relevant to that meeting, and follow the Pasta-Sauce Principle. No one ever complained about a meeting that ran short.
• If you are pitching an idea, try to evenly distribute your eye contact around the room.
• When you come to your big points, then zero in on the main decision maker.
• Too often, when people apologize, they try to wiggle off the hook and shirk responsibility.
• Think of an apology as a three-part process:
• Part 1: Own the mistake.
• Part 2: Couch it as the rare exception—not the norm.
• Part 3: Forecast a positive result still ahead.
• One thing I learned early from my parents: no one wants to be asked for a favor they can’t make happen. It exposes their limitations and reminds them that they don’t have the power or the clout to help. So ask at your own risk. If they can’t deliver, you may end up harming a key relationship.
• Getting around this is simple: don’t ask for favors. Instead, ask for advice. Everyone has advice. When you ask for it, no one feels exposed or limited. To the contrary, seeking advice makes most people feel wise, important, and needed. It’s just plain flattering.
• Just because a panel discussion is a more casual setting, that does not lessen the importance of thorough preparation.
• Don’t ask for permission to speak and don’t sit on your hands and wait to be called on.
• Address the topic of the question rather than the question itself.
• Accelerating your pace in the wake of a mistake only increases the likelihood that you will make additional errors.
• Diction and enunciation improve measurably when your mouth is moist.
• Part of coming across authentic means that you shouldn’t read your speech from a script.
• The best communicators make it look spontaneous, but it isn’t. That said, don’t overrehearse what you plan to say. It can come out sounding recited and wooden.
• Provide some advance warning that you’re about to deliver an important point.
• Maintain good, meaningful eye contact with your audience, especially during your key points.
• If you are planning to use PowerPoint, follow these golden rules:
• Limit yourself to twelve slides.
• Put no more than four bullets on each slide.
• Use no more than five or six words in each bullet.
• See if it’s possible to have just imagery on the slides—no words.
• Never read the text on your slide.
• Do not hand out a printed copy of the deck in advance.
• Perhaps the most important point I can convey to you is this: never lose sight of the fact that you agreed to do this interview because there is something specific you need to get out of the experience.
• Even in the comfiest chair, sit leaning slightly forward in an engaged posture. At most, the base of your spine should be touching the back of the chair, never your shoulder blades.
• Try to maintain good eye contact with the interviewer when you’re beginning to speak. This is especially important if you are asked a challenging, overly personal, or aggressive question.
• Smiling can mean the difference between a viewer tuning you in and tuning you out.
• Begin your answers with short declarative positive statements.
• The most dangerous of human instincts is to speak longer when we’re on a topic that makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s better to keep your answer one sentence shorter rather than let it go one sentence longer.
• Keep in mind that good reporters know how to keep you talking. They know that the longer you talk, the more off-message you’ll get. Don’t be uncomfortable with silence in the room or over the phone after you complete your answer. Their silence should not be interpreted as an invitation to keep talking.
• Don’t accentuate what you cannot tell the reporter, the information you’re withholding. Stress what you can tell them. Exude a willingness and eagerness to share whatever you can with the reporter even though you may be sticking to a tightly controlled script.
• If you hear one particular question over and over from a print reporter, asked slightly differently each time, chances are the answer may represent the one and only quote they’re looking to get to fill a hole in a story that is already written.
• Win reporters over by convincing them that your message is valid. If you get interrupted near the very end of your answer, do not yield. Finish your thought. Never give the impression that someone’s questions are more vital than your answers.
• Often, the most memorable details are found among the mundane happenings of our day-to-day lives.
• the cornerstone of good conversational skills is empathy.
• Saying less is often a lot more comforting than saying more. Your silence could be one of the best gifts you ever give someone who is grieving.
• The most awkward conversations involve a combination of two of the three loaded grenades: sex, politics, and religion.
• Turning a conversation away from the big three takes patience, skill, and timing.
• Sometimes a conversation is made awkward not by the big three, but rather by sexism, racism, ageism, or some other off-color remark. When that happens, call the comment into question.
• With bigotry, I feel that you can and should be more blunt. Call people on their narrow-minded statements. If you offend them, no great loss. You shouldn’t be hanging with people like that anyway. To remain silent merely enables them.
• The more modern medicine advances, the more labels we give people.
• Framing something the right way often determines how people perceive you, especially when it comes to our personal strengths and weaknesses.
• IT NEVER CEASES to amaze me how many people in so many different industries can benefit from communication coaching.