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

You didn't want to start from here.

"Our house is right in front of it.  You'll see a big tree. Go to the end of the road and turn left."

It's nonsense, but not complete nonsense.  If you reverse the order of the three sentences, you'll find it makes complete sense.

The words are identical, the instructions are the same.  But instead of giving directions from the end point, now you're giving them from the start point.  Much better.

Scarcely rocket science, you may be thinking. Pretty obvious that's the only logical way to give directions.

And so it is. But if it's so obvious and logical, why don't people use the same approach when explaining other topics, so they don't lose the audience?

Topics like, say, how our new technology will change the world. Or what next year's market looks like. Or why staff need to work harder for less pay.

Here's why.  Because on the surface, these topics don't look as simple to explain as how to get from A to B.

Assumptions.  Giving directions, you know exactly where the audience is now.  With other explanations, you have to make assumptions about audience knowledge.  That can be difficult, especially where the audience is diverse.  How much do they already know about the new technology? Will I patronize half the audience and leave the rest behind?

Structure. Giving directions, there is a ready-made structure for the explanation.  In fact, there's only one way of doing it: a sequence of instructions in a specific order.  But there are myriad ways of explaining other things. What's the best way to structure my presentation about next year's market?

Common ground. Giving directions, there is perfect accord about the end point of the explanation: getting to your house.  It's non-controversial. You have a shared purpose and a common goal: they want to get to your house and you're going to tell them how.  But what if there is a perceived conflict of interest between you and your audience?  Or between one part of it and another?  My plan for staff to work harder for less pay may appeal to investors.  But in the lamp-light of that extra midnight oil I'm asking staff to burn, it's going to look a bit dim.

Topics like these don't seem simple to explain, but you can make them so, if you choose.

Never assume

'Assume' makes an 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me'.  (Doncha love it?)

Don't assume audience knowledge about the topic.  Much safer to assume zero knowledge. Work out the lowest common denominator of knowledge in your audience and plan from there.  To avoid patronizing those who think they do have knowledge, preface your explanation with the magic words 'as you know'.

"As you know, cloud technology is now one of the top three determiners of competitive advantage"

If they knew, they're not offended by your telling them, because you've acknowledged they knew.  And if they didn't know, they do now.

By the way, as well as zero knowledge, much safer also to assume zero interest.  Command interest with a dramatic opening.

"You're probably very happy with the technology you're using at the moment and if you want an easy life, that's fine.  If on the other hand you still want to be in business tomorrow, you're going to have to throw it all out.  Let me explain..."

Structure everything from the audience view-point

Explain the topic from the audience viewpoint, not your own, as you do when giving directions.

So instead of...

"Let's begin with some key features of next year's market..."

Try...

"Let's begin with where the market is today and then look at where it's going next year..."

Find common ground

If there are differences and conflicts, search for the common ground to bring people together.  Build a boat and then put everyone into it.  A bit like Noah.

So instead of...

"There's no easy way to put this, I'm afraid.  You're all going to have to work harder for less pay."

Try...

"I know we all love this business.  I know we're all worried about whether it will pull through these difficult times.  All of us have worked really hard and we've all felt the strain of the past few months.  So what I'm going to ask of you is not asked lightly...."

Or even...

"I have today cut management salaries by 10 per cent until further notice -  including my own - and I will personally be working every weekend until we get through this difficult period.  In return, what I'm going to ask of you..."

Hmmm...

Whatever you do, you won't go far wrong if you plan the explanation as a journey from one point to another and make sure everyone follows you every step of the way.

Why it's wonderful no-one cares about you.

Fear of addressing an audience is one of those enduring things like death, taxes and the UK's unpreparedness for weather.  It passes from generation to generation like a malicious gene.

And indeed there are many good reasons to be fearful.  I have identified 10, ranging from fear of being judged ('Doesn't know what he's talking about') to fear of letting the side down ('Thanks to you, we lost the pitch') to fear of people seeing that huge pimple on your nose ('Doesn't she have a mirror?')

When you feel fear, positive thinking is of no use to you.  There's little comfort in mantras like 'I am a powerful and totally amazing individual' when your tongue has become bonded to the roof of your mouth and your brain has shut up shop and gone fishing.  Denying the reality of what you so evidently feel is pointless. It just makes you more confused.

What to do about it?  PG Wodehouse advised nervous speakers to imagine the audience sitting there in their underpants. I have to say it has never worked for me: too much to think about already without that.  And does he mean M&S, or are we talking Rigby & Peller?

If it's the shakes you've got, that's because of excess adrenalin coursing through your body.  So you can dissipate the adrenalin by physical exertion. Finding somewhere private and running on the spot often does the trick.  But you can't do that when you're already on stage.

I used to get very nervous before presentations until one day I woke up with a wonderful realisation: a eureka moment that came with a surge of relief.  It was this: who the hell cares about me?

For years I had been slave to the preposterous notion that my audience were actually interested in me. And therefore interested in how I performed.  Whereas in point of fact they weren't.  They, not I, were at the centre of their individual universes.  All they were interested in, quite properly, was themselves: their own hopes, fears, problems and pimples.

So because they didn't care about me, I didn't need to care about me.  And that left me free to care about them, which is a lot easier.

Not convinced? Think about what goes through your mind when you're on the receiving end of a presentation.  I'll bet your thoughts and feelings are more focused on yourself than on the speaker.

Hope I get something out of this.  Hope it's not a waste of time.  Hope it helps with my problem.  Hope it's worth the effort of listening.  And so on.

If you like this little nugget gleaned from nights of insomnia, then next time you feel the fear before a presentation, stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about the people in front of you.  They're the ones that matter, not you.

Where do I begin? Try the middle.

Your name is Melvyn/Melvynetta Parrott.  You're a health and safety consultant.  And you're about to do a presentation to a bunch of people who don't give a damn.  They're fiddling with their smartphones as you stand up to speak.

How do you start?

Some say you should begin by introducing yourself, saying what you’re there to speak about, how long you’re going to speak, what you’re going to cover, the order in which you’ll cover it, and so on.  Here’s an example.  Read it in your best nerdy voice:

"Good morning.  My name is Parrott and I am delighted to be here with you today.  My topic 'Health & Safety in the Workplace' is one of significant importance as I hope to demonstrate to you.  I have restricted myself to one hour, which will allow plenty of time for the many questions I'm sure you will have.  I have divided my presentation into just 17 parts.  First I will consider why health and safety is important. Then I will give instances of..." and so on.

Well, it's safe.  And methodical.  So it shows the speaker is...safe and methodical.  But as an opener, it's not especially electrifying.  How about this, instead?

“Last year, 500 people died at work.  Of these 149 were electrocuted, 81 were burned, 153 were mangled in machinery, 57 fell off buildings and 60 died from stress-related disease.”

Or this?

"You'll notice that my left arm has been amputated.  It happened in an industrial accident 10 years ago.  That's why I became a health and safety consultant and that's why I'm here today."

Now get back into role and read that last opener again in a nerdy voice.  Still much more engaging, eh?

So the moral is: find the drama at the heart of your topic and begin there.  Time for introductions later.