Show people a visual. Give them a slogan. Let them touch, feel, test, or experience the benefit you’re offering—or the product or service that will deliver that benefit. The more senses you engage, the stronger the impact and the longer their retention.

Dianna Booher, an expert in executive communications, is the author of 46 books, published in 26 countries and 20 languages.  Her latest books include Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think, and Act Like a Leader and Communicate with Confidence, Revised Edition. As CEO of Booher Consultants and as a high-caliber keynote speaker, Dianna and her staff travel worldwide to deliver focused speeches and training programs to address specific communication challenges and increase effectiveness in oral, written, interpersonal, and organizational communication.   www.booher.com

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People can argue with facts all day. But they can’t argue with your experience or your story. When you present your case as information, statistics, or data to be digested, people move into analysis mode. Lights go on; wheels whir in an attempt to “take the other tack” and prove you wrong. But when you offer an illustration or personal experience, they relax and listen for the idea.

Like a scriptwriter, think in themes, scenes, and storylines. Instead of laying out platitudes, create a compelling story to get your point across. Stories include humorous anecdotes, slices of everyday life, success stories, or failure stories (use these to build trust and balance the picture about what you and your organization can and cannot do).

Think “theme.” Shakespeare had his 26 plot lines. Business storytellers have their favorite key themes and initiatives from year to year and decade to decade: “The Customer Is Always Right.” “Content Is King.” “Quality Is Our Number One Goal.” “Nothing Happens Until Somebody Sells Something!” “David Versus Goliath.” “People Are Our Most Valuable Asset.” “Change Never Ends.” “Great Leaders Are Made, Not Born.”

With the theme in mind, identify an appropriate story to illustrate that point. What customer incident can you relate to your executive team to persuade them to act on your recommendations? What happened at the industry meeting that underscores to your colleagues the need for competitive intelligence sharing among them? What personal experience can you tell that helps your staff know what you value most in their performance? What tidbit of conversation did you overhear last week in the cafeteria that illustrates the team spirit you feel in your division? What happened last with your most satisfied client?

Identify the punch line. It may be funny, dramatic, sad, shocking. That’s where you end the story. Everything needs to build up to that point. Say the punch word in that punch line last.

Set up the story in an intriguing way. Don’t wave a flag by saying, “Let me tell you a story that illustrates why I think blah, blah, blah.” Instead, try something like, “Honesty can kill your business. Last week I made the mistake of being honest with one of our suppliers about X. Tuesday of this week, I get a call from J.T. Wilbot there, who says to me,….” And you’re off into the story. Whatever setup you use should make people say, “Tell me more.”

Keep the details relevant. Just like the movie scriptwriter, use enough details so that your listener can visualize what’s happening. But omit details that contribute nothing to the setting, mood, or point.

Let us see the action. To make fullest impact, set your characters in motion. Let us hear them talk and see them act. As the storyteller, don’t get between the audience and the action, merely telling us what you heard and saw earlier. Let people see for themselves—just as they do when sitting in the theatre. Cast the characters, re-create the scene, and start the dialogue.

Transition to your point. So what’s your point? Never tell us what the story means. Interpreting the punch line kills a good joke, and it’ll also ruin a great story. Tell the story and stop—just like the movie screen fades to black. Be silent. Let the audience soak up its meaning. Then, and only then, bridge to your point in the presentation, conversation, or meeting.

Why tell a story rather than dump data or prepare platitudes? Storytellers hold mindshare longer than most people. A well-chosen story can help you deliver an emotional wallop that makes the point memorable and persuasive. That’s presence, and that’s staying power!

Dianna Booher, an expert in executive communications, is the author of 46 books, published in 26 countries and 20 languages.  Her latest books include Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think, and Act Like a Leader and Communicate with Confidence, Revised Edition. As CEO of Booher Consultants and as a high-caliber keynote speaker, Dianna and her staff travel worldwide to deliver focused speeches and training programs to address specific communication challenges and increase effectiveness in oral, written, interpersonal, and organizational communication.   www.booher.com

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The time to sell roofs is right after a tornado. The time to sell investment expertise is after the stock market takes a drastic upturn or downturn. The time to sell a quality process in your organization is after you’ve been removed from the bidder’s list because of the rising percentage of defects in your deliveries. The time to ask for a transfer is during a downturn, not during a peak period. Timing is crucial. Ask any politician.

Dianna Booher, an expert in executive communications, is the author of 46 books, published in 26 countries and 20 languages.  Her latest books include Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think, and Act Like a Leader and Communicate with Confidence, Revised Edition. As CEO of Booher Consultants and as a high-caliber keynote speaker, Dianna and her staff travel worldwide to deliver focused speeches and training programs to address specific communication challenges and increase effectiveness in oral, written, interpersonal, and organizational communication.   www.booher.com

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Hey, Mom,

Just thinking about this upcoming Mother’s Day. Funny thing: You and I never spent hours talking, but you said a lot before I left home.

What I mean is this: You were never one to come into my room, plop down on my bed, and say, “So tell me all about your day!” Instead, your habit was to do things together that provided gaps of time for us to share our thoughts with each other while doing something else “beside the point”:

• When we walked the country roads, we discussed the importance of an education.

• While we sloshed permanent solution on each other’s hair, we talked about “how money didn’t grow on trees” and why I had to earn my own for special things I wanted.

• As we folded clothes, we traded thoughts about how best to attack a demanding English assignment–– or to deal with the gossip of the girl down the street.

• When we walked the streets in search of size 5AA school shoes, we talked of essential qualities in a boyfriend or husband.

It was our chatter, scattered here and there in the gaps of day-to-day living that filled my life with great treasure. I guess you can say I feel “love stamped.”

I’m grateful to you for my own capacity to feel and receive love. With every word, touch, and action through all the routine chores of mothering, you set the pattern for unconditional love—concern, care, comfort, and compassion.

In turn, you know how to accept love. It came to you in the form of bouquets of wild flowers, burned toast “just the way you liked it” on Mother’s Day, cozy hugs when you had the flu, and cheap perfume from my teenager’s earnings.

As I look around my adult world, I see many men and women who have grown up without this emotional foundation and, therefore, have continuing difficulties with relationships of all kinds. The love you gave to me and still give enables me in turn to love my family, friends, . . . and my world.

That’s not to say things have always been perfect between us. After all, even great mothers like you do have feelings!

I’ve never felt so ashamed and irritated with myself as when I’ve said something insensitive that hurts your feelings. The look of both patience and humility on your face seeps from the deepest crevice in your heart. That expression of pain at once slices me with both regret and resolve to do better. Few offenses are more despicable than to wound a mother’s heart—yours particularly. I still regret those times when I’ve done so.

Fortunately, you have always forgiven me. From the time I was six and lied about spending my milk money for ice cream until now.

I don’t know when the concept of forgiveness and God seeped into my consciousness––possibly along with the fact that water tasted good on a hot summer day and that the sun rose each morning. I don’t remember when I did not know of God’s existence. But it was you who made faith personal. In short, you took God from a religious theory to a relationship right before my eyes.

As an author, I’ve read hundreds of books for pleasure and researched thousands of books for information. But you were the first book I read as a child, and I’ve checked you out of the library of my mind ever so many times during the intervening years of adulthood.

What a story you’ve created with your life! As Mother’s Day approaches, once again I want to communicate my gratitude and love.

Dianna

Dianna Booher, an expert in executive communications, is the author of 46 books, published in 26 countries and 20 languages.  Her latest books include Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think, and Act Like a Leader and Communicate with Confidence, Revised Edition. As CEO of Booher Consultants and as a high-caliber keynote speaker, Dianna and her staff travel worldwide to deliver focused speeches and training programs to address specific communication challenges and increase effectiveness in oral, written, interpersonal, and organizational communication.   www.booher.com

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Without a doubt, the most prevalent problem among business presenters is the monotone. When they speak for only 5-15 minutes, the audience survives, but longer than that and they escape via cell phones, tablet, or hallways. So what to do if you suspect you may be the presenter causing this distress?

Three tips to slay this monotone monster:

Improve Your Posture

Voice quality involves breathing properly. You can’t breathe properly if you don’t stand properly. Without standing properly, you can’t inhale to full lung capacity. Without taking enough air into your lungs, you can’t breathe out enough air to talk with the intensity needed to sound strong and energetic. So stand up straight, expand your lungs, and take in enough air so you can speak with energy and force behind your words. Make sure the surroundings (of your caved-in body) don’t force you into a low-energy monotone.

Become the Highlighter, If Not the Headliner

Have you ever had someone say to you, “I heard what you said. But I didn’t get your point”? If so, chances are that this is what they meant: “Everything you said was expressed with equal emphasis. I didn’t understand your real overriding concern (or issue).”

To make sure others understand where your emphasis falls, something has to pop out of the pack of words.

Consider the highlighter principle to increase your vocal presence. Imagine using a yellow highlighter (or pink, green, or orange maybe) to mark key ideas in a favorite book, article, or instruction manual so that they stand out for later review.

When speaking, your voice inflection acts as that highlighter for the listener. You punch (inflect, emphasize) those words harder with volume and intensity; you pause before and after them longer so that they stand out from the rest of the sentence. Because your listeners have neither a script nor a highlighter to follow along as you speak, your vocal variation has to mark key ideas for attention and recall.

Most people highlight well in casual conversations––about the movie they saw last weekend, their favorite sports team, or the current project that has them puzzled. That is, they raise or lower their volume. They speed up and slow down. They emphasize key words. Consider the following comment and how the meaning changes with each variation, depending on which word is highlighted or emphasized:

“The CLIENT didn’t say Robert was upset about the decision.”

“The client DIDN’T say Robert was upset about the decision.”

“The client didn’t SAY Robert was upset about the decision.”

“The client didn’t say ROBERT was upset about the decision.”

“The client didn’t say Robert was UPSET about the decision.”

“The client didn’t say Robert was upset about the DECISION.”

Highlighting—my term for vocal variety—conveys your meaning.

Recharge Your Vocal Energy with Movement

Your speaking pattern follows your physical movement—not the reverse.

When presenters stand in one spot to address a group, they often lose all sense of natural inflection, pacing, and pausing. Their voice pales to pathetic. Don’t let that happen to you.

Stay conscious of the link between your physical energy and your lips. Make others feel your energy as you drive home a key point. Move. Walk to a different spot in the room to deliver a different point. Use the entire conference room as your platform. When appropriate, gesture with your entire body. Become your own prop when you need one. Use your hands. Animate your face. Get the blood flowing.

Movement takes energy. The more energy you exert as you move, the more energetic and natural your voice will sound.

Modulate, modulate, modulate. A monotone voice projects a monochrome personality—one dimensional: low energy, mousey, uninteresting, timid.

Your voice can be a powerful tool to control a conversation, command a crowd, communicate a culture, and ultimately create a career. Don’t let the monotone monster defeat you.

Dianna Booher, an expert in executive communications, is the author of 46 books, published in 26 countries and 20 languages.  Her latest books include Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think, and Act Like a Leader and Communicate with Confidence, Revised Edition. As CEO of Booher Consultants and as a high-caliber keynote speaker, Dianna and her staff travel worldwide to deliver focused speeches and training programs to address specific communication challenges and increase effectiveness in oral, written, interpersonal, and organizational communication.   www.booher.com

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We rarely question our CPA, our neurologist, or our air-conditioner repair person when he tells us the cause of our difficulty and recommends a solution. Why? There’s power in the perception of specialized expertise. If you establish your credentials in a certain field early, people seldom question them. They’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on your facts and conclusions more often than not.

Dianna Booher, an expert in executive communications, is the author of 46 books, published in 26 countries and 20 languages.  Her latest books include Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think, and Act Like a Leader and Communicate with Confidence, Revised Edition. As CEO of Booher Consultants and as a high-caliber keynote speaker, Dianna and her staff travel worldwide to deliver focused speeches and training programs to address specific communication challenges and increase effectiveness in oral, written, interpersonal, and organizational communication.   www.booher.com

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Find a way to convey to the listener that you want to help him achieve his goals. Once the other person understands that you have his welfare at heart, he tends to trust you and believe your message.

Dianna Booher, an expert in executive communications, is the author of 46 books, published in 26 countries and 20 languages.  Her latest books include Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think, and Act Like a Leader and Communicate with Confidence, Revised Edition. As CEO of Booher Consultants and as a high-caliber keynote speaker, Dianna and her staff travel worldwide to deliver focused speeches and training programs to address specific communication challenges and increase effectiveness in oral, written, interpersonal, and organizational communication.   www.booher.com

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People have to trust you before they will lower their defenses and actually open their mind to your message. Make sure your tone and manner build trust rather than suspicion. Sift through your promises to make sure that they’re not “over the top.” Take a lesson from Sears’s promise of “satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.” Create a safety net for decisions. How can people “undo” a decision or action if they have a change of heart?

Dianna Booher, an expert in executive communications, is the author of 46 books, published in 26 countries and 20 languages.  Her latest books include Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think, and Act Like a Leader and Communicate with Confidence, Revised Edition. As CEO of Booher Consultants and as a high-caliber keynote speaker, Dianna and her staff travel worldwide to deliver focused speeches and training programs to address specific communication challenges and increase effectiveness in oral, written, interpersonal, and organizational communication.   www.booher.com

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Many things in life come in pairs: Shoes. Earrings. Salt and pepper shakers. Knife and fork. Chop sticks. Bookends. Ping-pong paddles. Pillowcases. Parentheses.

Commas. Not all commas. But some commas.

You’ll never see an open parenthesis alone—like this ( –unless someone has made a proofreading error and forgotten to add the closing parenthesis. But you’ll often see writers use the first enclosing comma and forget to add the last one of the pair.

Examples:

––James Jones, my mentor for the past decade has advised me to accept the job offer.

––The Baxter contract, the document that our lawyers consider iron-clad is now under review by the courts.

––Our project team has been overwhelmed with applicants, which often apply online but we have set a goal to respond to each of them within 24 hours.

In each case above, the second comma of the pair is missing.

Think of commas for this use as if they were bookends. A comma belongs both before and after the words you are enclosing:

Examples:

––James Jones, my mentor for the past decade, has advised me to accept the job offer.

––The Baxter contract, the document that our lawyers consider iron-clad, is now under review by the courts.

––Our project team has been overwhelmed with applicants, which often apply online, but we have set a goal to respond to each of them within 24 hours.

Examples: (The commas serve as bookends around the red information.)

––James Jones, my mentor for the past decade, has advised me to accept the job offer.

––The Baxter contract, the document that our lawyers consider iron-clad, is now under review by the courts.

––Our project team has been overwhelmed with applicants, which often apply online, but we have set a goal to respond to each of them within 24 hours.

Enclosing commas cut away nonessential (nondefining) clauses and phrases from the rest of the sentence. Do not use a comma if the clause or phrase in question is essential to the meaning of the sentence.

The Records Committee recommends that we implement a Vital Records Protection Program for all organizational units, especially those in the New York offices, and develop a procedures manual after the pilot effort. (Especially those in the New York offices is nonessential, additional information.)

Here are a few other frequent uses of enclosing commas: the abbreviations i.e. (that is) and e.g. (for example) and the abbreviations for academic degrees and titles.

Examples:

––They considered Francine Smith, J.D., to serve on the committee.
––Matt Frazier, Ph.D., presided at the meeting.
––The report referred to her negligence, e.g., drunkenness, unattended toddlers, unclean food.

When you forget to add that last comma of the enclosing pair, it’s as disconcerting to the reader as trying to balance several books on a shelf against one bookend.

Dianna Booher, an expert in executive communications, is the author of 46 books, published in 26 countries and 20 languages.  Her latest books include Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think, and Act Like a Leader and Communicate with Confidence, Revised Edition. As CEO of Booher Consultants and as a high-caliber keynote speaker, Dianna and her staff travel worldwide to deliver focused speeches and training programs to address specific communication challenges and increase effectiveness in oral, written, interpersonal, and organizational communication.   www.booher.com

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Secondhand testimonials are not nearly as effective as the words straight from the mouth of those already converted to your way of thinking. If possible, bring these satisfied users/buyers/believers/beneficiaries to the discussion with you—in person or by video or audio recorded endorsements on your social media sites, your website, or your webinar presentation.  Have them write their endorsement on LinkedIn or tweet it or blast it out in any number of ways. Unscripted and in their own unique way, let them speak to the effectiveness or truth of what you say.

Dianna Booher, an expert in executive communications, is the author of 46 books, published in 26 countries and 20 languages.  Her latest books include Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think, and Act Like a Leader and Communicate with Confidence, Revised Edition. As CEO of Booher Consultants and as a high-caliber keynote speaker, Dianna and her staff travel worldwide to deliver focused speeches and training programs to address specific communication challenges and increase effectiveness in oral, written, interpersonal, and organizational communication.   www.booher.com

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