How to be an Alien

One day a little green man lands on Earth, gets out of his spaceship, comes up to you and says: "Take me to your leader".

"Aha", you think.  "An Alien."

Actually he's not totally alien.  He may appear to have more ears than you.  But he's looking at you, speaking to you and expecting a response from you.

Not so the human Alien.  This is the presenter who, after just a few moments on-stage, is able to convey the mind-boggling distances in space between one thing and another.  In this case the distance between you and him.

He achieves this alienation by talking to his feet.  To the ceiling.  Talking to the notes in his hand. To the screen. In fact talking to anything, except to you.

You know this because he isn't looking at you.  He may glance furtively in your general direction from time to time, pretending to look at you, in the same way that he’s pretending to talk to you.  But he isn't.

Because to look into someone’s eyes is to acknowledge their existence.  And that is the last thing the human Alien wants to do.

If you’re in a crowded carriage, pressed against another person like two sardines in a can, how do you cope with the invasion of your personal space?

You’re standing close enough to have a sexual encounter with a stranger who is neither attractive nor especially fragrant.  You can't get away.  This is intolerable.

There is only one thing you can do: avoid eye contact.  If you don’t look at them and they don’t look at you, you can pretend they’re not really there.

Mutual alienation – the denial of each other’s humanity – makes the journey in the crowded carriage unpleasant, but possible.

The human Alien doesn’t look at you and so denies your existence.  Whatever his ethnicity, his colour is green.

I once met a little green man in the form of a lecturer at a university.  We were talking about presentation nerves and he said: “Oh, I have no problem with that at all.  What I do is focus my attention on the ceiling at the back of the room.  There’s a little bit in the left-hand corner where the plaster has dropped off.  I talk to that.”

For the learned professor, his students didn’t really exist.  If, while he looked at the ceiling and banged on for fifty minutes, one of them had died – possibly from self-strangulation in a desperate attempt to escape – he wouldn’t have noticed. 

There are university lecturers who would see nothing odd about this approach.  "Students being what they are", they would say, "you may as well talk to a wall."

But it’s not a strategy that makes for an engaging presentation, because people want to be talked to.  As a minimum, they expect to be looked at.

Some say that when you have a large audience, it’s impossible to look at every person.  Not true.

It takes about a second to look at someone.  Let’s say you have an audience of 300 people, and five minutes. In that time you can look at each individual once.

In a 20-minute presentation to the same number of people, you can make eye contact with each individual four times.

I’m not suggesting you should scan mechanically around the room back and forth like a light-house.  That would be most disturbing.

I’m saying that the reason why the human Alien avoids eye contact has nothing to do with logistics.

Instead it has a lot to do with the philosophy of the ostrich, rooted in fear.  If I can’t see you, then you don’t exist, so you can't be a threat.

The human Alien doesn’t really want to talk to you.  So instead, he talks to an object.  The trouble is, objects can’t hear.  So as no-one is listening, he ends up talking to himself. 

Smiling on television: mere lip-service?

So you're miked-up, ready to go, having a laugh with the interviewer.

Then the red light goes on.  And with it the transformation of your personality.

Where there was natural human spontaneity, now there's a Soviet-era bruiser in an oversized fur hat with a red star in the middle, handing out one-way cattle-class tickets to Siberia.  Gordon Brown has taken over your face.

Unless we're American, we tend to find the business of smiling to order challenging.  And distasteful, too.  There's nothing more cringe-worthy than a false smile, we think, so best not smile at all.

And of course, as Americans delight in pointing out, the British have bad teeth.  (Although the new obsession with cosmetic dentistry over here means US grins are more widespread.)

The trouble is, when you're on telly, not smiling is not an option.  Not smiling doesn't make you look professional.  It makes you look unfriendly.  This is because smiling on television has nothing to do with humour.

A TV smile is the same smile of greeting, which, accompanied by a raised eye-brow or two, you give someone when meeting them for the first time.

It's a visual hand-shake with the viewer, who is indeed meeting you for the first time.  Or, if you're famous, seeing you again after an interval, which amounts to the same thing.

Smiling is not a pretence.  It's a courtesy.  Looking happy to see someone is as much a greeting as the words you use. Think of it in this way and you may find it easier to smile to order.

But crucially, it's got to be a proper smile, and this means more than mere lip-service.  If you think smiling is something you do with your mouth, then I'm afraid you've got it wrong.

I'm sure you're aware that on either side of your mouth you have a set of two muscles called Zygomaticus Major.  You use these to lift your lips into a smile.  But as any decent smilologist will tell you, if you only use these, your smile will be perceived as bogus.

The muscles you really want to be focusing on are the Orbicularis Oculi.  As their name suggests, they're around your eyes.  They're the ones that make your eyes crinkle into crow's feet.  And the ones that turn a fake smile into a genuine one.

You can see them in action in the pic below of sultan-of-suave George Clooney.

A man who knows his Orbicularis Oculi from his Zygomaticus Major

Now I don't know about you, but I'm not one of those body-builder blokes who's able to locate, isolate and twitch individual muscle groups to music.

So how to co-ordinate your mouth and eye muscles so you can produce a genuine smile to order?

Having spent far too long grinning at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that the raison d'etre of the Clooney Zygomaticus could simply be to help push up the Clooney cheeks so that they in turn lift the Clooney Orbicularis to produce the eye-crinkling that makes feminine hearts throb the world over.  (You may have detected I'm not a physiologist.)

Add to this the raising of the eyebrows, (using another pair of muscles, the Occipitalis-Frontalis) and you have a general upwards movement from your mouth, through your cheeks, to your eyes and above into your forehead.

So could thinking 'up' help you produce a genuine pleased-to-see-you face to order?  Get into that bathroom and give it a try.

Because in the deeply superficial world of television, your face is worth a thousand words.

Pace: the final frontier.

Have you ever had a Scotty moment?

There you are, giving your presentation and doing your best to keep it on the straight and narrow as, boldly, you go.  But an irresistible force is taking over the ship.  A black hole?  The Klingons?

As the engine whine reaches screaming point, and bits of your presentation start breaking off, the engine-room sweat runs into your eyes.  Then, a crackle on the intercom.  A clipped command from the Bridge. ''Steady as she goes, Scotty."

"I canna hold her, Captain", you mutter through clenched teeth. "I'm giving her everything I've got.  But I canna hold her!"

What's happening here is that you've lost control of your presentation. You're rushing it. Your rate of words per second has exceeded the pace at which the ship's computer that is your brain is able to process what's supposed to be coming out of your mouth.

To keep control of your presentation, what you need is time.

Time to think.  Time to choose your words.  Time to remember where you've got to and where you're going next.  Time to look at the audience and check they're still engaged.  Still awake.  Still there?

If you go too fast, you don't have time to do these things.  And then, indeed, you canna hold her.

But if you speak slowly and calmly, the pace of time itself seems to slow down.  You now have plenty of time for things that were impossible a moment ago.  Control is restored.  The engine quietens down to a comfortable hum.

So a slow pace gives you time to think.  Which makes you sound more intelligent.

It also actually improves your voice, in two ways.

Firstly, having time to breathe properly means your voice is well-supported.  This makes it deeper and more resonant.

Secondly, it makes your voice more engaging.  A monotonous voice is one in which there is no contrast, none of the ups-and-downs that make for an interesting landscape.  To add contrast, you need to add emphasis.

Emphasis isn't a shouty thing.  It's not about saying one word louder than other words.  It simply means pausing before and after the word to be emphasized.  Leaving white space around it.

Does all this seem logical, Captain?  If so, here's an earth-bound metaphor to help put theory into practice.

On a German motorway, you're driving a Ferrari in a straight line at 180 mph.  No problem - everything under control.  But now you're coming off the motorway and into a town.  What do you do?  You slow down. You have to slow down to create time to react.  And the slower you go, the more control you have.

So if you ever feel you're about to lose control of the presentation, try taking your foot off the accelerator.

Does the world need the sound of your voice?

Are you worthy of attention? Is it fair to expect an audience to listen to you banging on for half an hour?

If your answer is a modest 'umm, well, not really', then you're not alone.  Many of us fear speaking in public or appearing on TV and being unmasked for the charlatans we suspect we are.  And we know the world will survive quite happily with or without our contribution.

The trouble is if you don't appear to think you're worth listening to, then your audience will most likely agree with you and switch off.  Or switch over to someone who does appear to think they're worth listening to.

So how to build your self-confidence to a level that makes people think you're worthy of attention?

You could sign up for some assertiveness therapy.  But if you haven't time because you're on in five minutes, how about a quick fudge exploiting the fuzzy logic of human reasoning?

What we tend to do when we don't believe we're worth listening to - but have to do the interview all the same -  is rush it.  We try and get it over and done with as quickly as possible.  We reason something like this:

'I'm not worthy of attention, so if I speak really, really quickly, the audience will forgive me for wasting their time and I'll be OK.'

Sounds silly, I know, but it's human.

Meanwhile, your audience is also human.  Their fuzzy logic goes something like this:

'This person is speaking really, really quickly.  So she doesn't think she's worth listening to.  If she doesn't think she's worth listening to, she probably isn't.  So I won't bother.'

Now the good news is that by speaking really, really slowly, you can harness the same fuzzy logic to create a magical transformation.

If you speak slowly - holding your pauses - it shows you're comfortable with silence.  If you're comfortable with silence, it's because you expect people to listen.  If you expect people to listen, you're confident you have something to say.

By behaving like a confident person, you become a confident person.  In the eyes of the audience, that is, which is what matters when you're on TV.

The audience reasoning changes to something like this:

'This person is confident, so she knows what she's talking about.  If she knows what she's talking about, she's probably worth listening to.  So I'll listen.'

I am indebted to the Reverend Ian Paisley for the following quote, which is great for practising slow delivery.

'Today was to be the day when the gun was to be finally taken out of Irish politics.'

To say those simple words quickly is to kill them dead, removing their terrible significance.

But say them slowly and you feel the power.

Now this is a bit of a leap, but to test my suggestion, let's think of something really banal and give it the Paisley treatment.  For example:

'This (long, long pause) is a great (long, long pause) cup of tea.'

See?  It works.  The words are about the topic.   The silence is about you.  That's where the power lies.

You are not a sponge

Whatever you think of Barrack Obama, you'll probably agree he's a first-class public speaker.  Let me suggest why.

It's not so much about the content of his speeches - superbly-written as they are - but about the pace at which he delivers the content.  That's all his own work.

Here's the opening of his State of the Union speech on 28th January 2014.  It will take you about 15 seconds to read.

 "Mr Speaker.  Mr Vice-President.  Members of Congress.  My fellow-Americans.
Today in America a teacher spent extra time with a student who needed it and did her part to lift America's graduation rate to its highest levels in more than three decades.  An entrepreneur flipped on the lights in her tech start-up and did her part to add to the more than eight million new jobs our businesses have created over the past four years. An auto worker fine-tuned some of the best, most fuel-efficient curves in the world and did his part to help America wean itself off foreign oil..."

If you read it aloud, it will probably take you twice as long as reading it to yourself. There's about 30 seconds of content here.  Difficult to do it any quicker, but you can try.

With his long pauses, though, Obama doubles that to a full minute.  Effectively, his speech is 50 per cent content and 50 per cent silence.  And I believe it's the silence that makes him a first-class public speaker. Because that's where you come in.

By creating silence, Obama's giving you a place in his speech. Those pauses for thought are pauses for your own thought as much as for his.   You're not a sponge.  As you process what he's saying, you're not passively absorbing content.  You're actively, albeit silently, providing your own internal commentary on it.

If you're not given time to do this, your voice will not be heard and you will not be engaged.  But when you're given space and time to think, the monologue becomes a dialogue.  The speech turns into a conversation: he's not talking at you, but with you.

So in fact it's not him that's doing the persuading, it's you.  If you're persuaded by what he says, it's because you have been given time to persuade yourself.

That's what Obama's long pauses are for and you can enjoy them at http://www.obamadownloads.com/mp3s/state-of-union-speech5.mp3