Life Is a Series of Presentations

8 Ways to Punch Up Your People Skills at Work, at Home, Anytime, Anywhere

Tony Jeary, Kim Dower, J.E. Fishman

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780743265652
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Meetings & Presentations
• Index: Business

Presentation Mastery Is the Key to Professional and Personal Success.
As presentation coach to America's top CEOs, Tony Jeary has become known as Mr. Presentation™. In his work with more than 500 world-class organizations in 35 countries, he has found a common denominator in every situation: Your success in life depends upon how you approach the millions of opportunities before you. And in this insightful and compelling book, Jeary reveals the eight simple secrets that you can put to work immediately to achieve dramatic results both at work and at home -- and everywhere else!
Unless you're a hermit living on a mountaintop, your life largely consists of your interactions with the people around you. Whether you call them presentation skills or people skills, these eight essential practices will allow you to master any interaction, whether it involves a roomful of colleagues, a small group, or just one other person. You will learn to understand both why the eight essentials work as well as how they work, including:

• the single word that will convince 93 percent of your listeners every time
• the big question presenters consistently forget to ask themselves
• the 10 personality types you must be able to recognize and handle
• the firepower of your own Presentation Arsenal
• the magic behind the mnemonic I P R E S E N T.

Engaging, informative, and loaded with useful anecdotes, this book will teach you easy-to-use skills that change the way you approach every situation and that will have an immediate impact on you, both professionally and personally. Because your life is a series of presentations.

Part I

Why It Works

Understanding Before Action

Chapter 1

What Bill Clinton Has
That Gary Condit Doesn’t

The Difference between a Good Presenter and a Poor One

Take two Democrats of the same generation with similar political views and similar character issues. One becomes the first man in his party to win reelection in fifty years—despite a sex scandal that later leads to his impeachment trial. The other, after two terms in Congress, can’t get elected dogcatcher. Whatever you think of the politics of Bill Clinton and Gary Condit, most people would agree that both behaved inappropriately during crucial moments in their professional lives. Yet Clinton, despite years of jokes and innuendo, managed to walk the fine line between political success and historical infamy (at least while he was in office). By contrast, in the course of one short year, Condit transformed himself before the entire world from a respected congressman to a walking synonym for “unredeemable cad.” As is the case for us all, their presentations made a big difference.

Earlier, Clinton’s defeat of President George H. W. Bush may have been mostly about “the economy, stupid,” but it also seemed obvious to me at the time that Bush did not present himself or his ideas in a completely effective manner. Remember the “town hall” debate of that campaign? Clinton was completely engaged with his audience, hanging on every word, while Bush kept checking his watch—as if he had an appointment that was more important than getting reelected president. Here’s a hint that you don’t need to read a whole book to learn: If you blatantly peek at your watch during your own presentation, you may have instantly jeopardized any rapport you already established with your audience. History shows that Clinton “won” that debate—and that single sub-par performance on Bush’s part might well have sealed his own one-term fate.

Clinton might have been more of a natural with people, but you can’t tell me that a man who was as capable as Bush was in other respects had to look at his watch or do the many other things he did to alienate his audience. Despite Bush’s excellent qualifications for reelection, if you review that tape you’ll see a man who often speaks at his audience, not to them; who looks uncomfortable in their presence; who rarely involves his audience by redirecting attention to them and taking it off himself; who is not “up” for the moment; and who makes very few adjustments to his approach in order to retain his audience’s focus. Somebody failed to sharpen this candidate’s presentation skills.

As president, Ronald Reagan became known as the “Great Communicator.” He earned this reputation by being the first president in modern times to stay relentlessly “on message” whenever he spoke, in public or in private. You may or may not have agreed with his political views (or, for that matter, with those of Clinton or Bush), but unlike our experience with most other politicians, we always knew where Reagan stood.

Bill Clinton was something different altogether. To the great frustration of his opponents, Clinton proved to be an excellent presenter, even if at times he quite intentionally was not very communicative. How can that be? Because communication and presentation may frequently overlap, but they are not necessarily the same thing. For the purpose of my work and this book, I define presentation as the act of working to change the content of another person’s mind at a particular time and place. Note that I said “to change the content of another person’s mind,” not “to change another person’s mind.” The latter has the connotation of getting a person or persons to alter their opinion. But a presentation might do the opposite. It might reinforce someone’s opinion. Or it might have nothing to do with your audience’s beliefs and simply impart information. Or it might spur your audience to take action. In any case, if successfully executed, presentations fulfill desired outcomes in the presenter’s audience—by enhancing a skill, changing or reinforcing an attitude, or imparting information.

The upshot of all this is that, on some level, any time we have contact with another individual—on the phone, in person, via e-mail or voice mail, etc.—we are making a presentation, whether we like it or not. And Bill Clinton, for all his flaws, liked the presentation process and so became very good at it. George H. W. Bush, for all his strengths, clearly didn’t enjoy making presentations. And here’s the most important point to keep in mind: because Bush managed for so many years to succeed in life without achieving Presentation Mastery, he never felt compelled to build those skills. So when the necessity arose for him to step it up a notch, he had neither the time nor the inclination to do so. And the result for him was a less than satisfactory conclusion to his long political career.

Most of us are more like George H.W. Bush than we are like Bill Clinton. We were probably not born with natural charisma or the gift of gab. The very ubiquity of our presentation opportunities often makes us unaware that they exist as opportunities at all. They’re just a part of our day that we don’t think about, like walking or talking. Our walking has always gotten us to where we want to go, so why bother to work on improving it? We have areas of mastery in our lives—perhaps the kinds of things we’ve learned in graduate school or in business training—but when it comes to interpersonal skills we just presume that mere competence is enough. In a very real sense, then, the great opportunities we have to improve our lives through Presentation Mastery continually pass us by.

A lot of the people I know who are Master Presenters have achieved that status either by chance or because at some point they were forced to do so. In many cases they were corporate executives who learned—before it was too late—that their lack of presentation skills was holding them back. So they went for training or coaching. In some instances, as with many of my coauthor Kim’s clients, they were requested to refine their presentation skills by a superior or a business partner who needed them to meet an important challenge. But the best story of this kind that I ever heard is about a man who had to learn how to present, literally in order to survive. His name is Bill Porter.

Presentation Is an Art

On a recent plane trip I sat next to a man who happened to be a professional chef. When we exchanged pleasantries and he learned how I make my living, he became excited to remark that a big part of what he does also involves presentation. From the compilation of colors and shapes on a diner’s plate to the dress of the staff to the lighting and decoration, he noted, the quality of any restaurant patron’s experience depends greatly on how well the chef has mastered the art of presentation. My plane companion had become so conversant in the art of restaurant presentation that he told me he could predict half of an unknown restaurant’s menu simply by looking at the presentation of their parking lot and front entrance.

Art requires both skill and creativity. For the chef, creativity without skill might result in something beautiful to look at but not very appealing to eat. Skill without creativity could result in a well-executed dish that didn’t make for a very interesting dining experience. But when he was able to elevate his vocation to an art, it meant that the chef’s skill and creativity had joined forces. Beautiful things resulted.

Like the chef, a man named Bill Porter came to understand early on that the presentations in his life would require equal parts inspiration, skill, and hard work. And—guess what?—beautiful things resulted.

When he was still an infant in the early 1930s, Bill Porter was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Though he later proved to be a man of normal intelligence, the doctor predicted that he would be mentally retarded and urged Bill’s mother to have him institutionalized. In a pattern that would be repeated over many decades by Bill’s parents and then by Bill himself, they ignored the doctor’s advice and refused to accept defeat.

As related in the book Ten Things I Learned from Bill Porter (written by his longtime friend and employee, Shelly Brady), Porter would go on to graduate from the Grout School for Handicapped Children in Portland, Oregon. More important, he then graduated from the mainstream Lincoln High School, an extremely unusual accomplishment for a physically challenged person of that era. But none of that could change the fact that Porter struggled with a very real and visible disability. At a particularly poignant stage in his life, Porter began looking for a career with the help of a counselor. This effort resulted in little more than a series of humiliations. A job as a pharmacy store clerk lasted less than a day because Porter’s trembling hands would not allow him to stock the shelves neatly. A job as a Goodwill Industries cashier lasted three days because Porter’s palsied fingers kept hitting the wrong keys. His physical limitations also brought a job at the Salvation Army docks to a prompt end. And his slurred speech soon lost him his job answering phones at the Veterans Rehabilitation Center. After five months of this kind of thing the counselor told Porter that the state considered him unemployable. He suggested that Porter stay home and collect disability payments.

Another person in Porter’s position may have taken this advice to heart, but Porter knew deep down inside that he could be a productive member of society—even if he couldn’t tie his own shoes without difficulty or button his own shirt cuffs. A few years before, Porter had had some success as a door-to-door salesman for United Cerebral Palsy. He quit that job when he realized he couldn’t make a living at it, though. The products were too limited and Porter got the impression that repeat customers were buying as much out of charity as for any other reason. He then tried to freelance for a while, purchasing gift items from a catalog and reselling them door-to-door for a marked-up price. In order to do that, Porter realized he had to create a unique presentation that would compensate for his communication disability. So he meticulously built his own catalog by cutting and pasting, then typing descriptions himself. As Shelly Brady notes: “He wanted to make sure that if verbal communication broke down between himself and his clients due to his speech impediment, the illustrated catalog would do the explaining for him.” In other words, Porter—like any good presenter—had put a great deal of stock in preparation. Although that preparation paid off in a degree of success, Porter had begun looking for steadier work with a big employer when he met the string of failures mentioned above. When he realized that his physical limitations were too much to overcome in the field of manual labor, he again set his sights on becoming a salesman.

Having exhausted his patience with state counselors, Porter began combing the want ads himself. Naturally, this met with more rejection. Most times he didn’t even get past the initial phone call. Then, one day, Porter landed an interview with a company called Watkins Products. “I know I can do this job,” Porter confidently told the interviewer. “I’ve been successfully selling for the past ten years. It’s in my blood. My father is a successful salesman. It almost doesn’t matter what product I sell, customers enjoy buying from me.”

I’ve never met Bill Porter. I can only imagine how difficult it was for him to deliver this speech at the end of a year of rejection and frustration and while trying to do the things that a non-handicapped person might take for granted: sitting still and upright, allowing his muscles to relax, and forming the words with his lips and tongue. All of these things require incredible amounts of effort for a person with cerebral palsy. Yet in this short speech Porter employed several techniques that are the hallmark of the Master Presenter, which we’ll explore in later chapters. He put himself in a positive psychological state by opening with a statement that projected self-confidence: “I know I can do this job.” Then he lent authority to that assertion by offering bona fides that the interviewer had to respect: “I’ve been successfully selling for the past ten years. It’s in my blood. My father is a successful salesman.” Finally, he used a technique called Future Pacing, essentially leading his audience to a picture of the outcome Porter intended to generate: “It almost doesn’t matter what product I sell, customers enjoy buying from me.”

Don’t forget, we’re talking about an event that happened in 1961, decades before disability laws, when tolerance for people who were “different” ebbed very low. Porter got his break, but prejudice being what it is, the sales manager assigned Porter to the worst, most hopeless territory in Portland, where people lived in dire poverty and the houses were falling down. And the poor man was working on commission! But more important to Bill Porter, he had himself a job. He packed his briefcase full of color brochures, hit the street at 9 A.M., and hasn’t looked back since. Porter didn’t sell a single item his first day on the job. But he took time to learn all he could about the Watkins product line and understood human nature enough to use Watkins’s money-back guarantee as a major selling point. Eventually, he went on to become one of the top salesmen in the history of Watkins Products, and their top salesman ever in the Northwest. None of his colleagues, so far as I know, had to struggle with Porter’s physical challenges. On the other hand, I’ll bet that none of them made presentations as masterfully, either.

A Master Presenter

Bill Porter was an only child. When it became clear that, in the natural order of things, his father and mother would predecease him—and that he was not capable of performing work that required manual dexterity—he realized that becoming a Master Presenter was the only chance he had to live a dignified and independent life. What makes me so sure that Porter is a Master Presenter? I’ll answer with another question. Tell me, what choice did a man in his position have? Bill Porter never went to college, so he couldn’t become a professional. He might, I suppose, have become an office clerk of some kind. But having chosen to be a salesman, how could he possibly succeed if he allowed his presentation ability to cruise along at an average level? People with disabilities usually have to compensate somehow. Like the blind person who listens more attentively, Porter compensated for his weaknesses by building other strengths.

Amazingly, in order to succeed Bill Porter had to overcome one of the most powerful principles that help people connect with one another. As you’ll learn in the next chapter, people overwhelmingly like folks who are like themselves and tend to distrust those who are different. Porter—who walks hunched over, has limited use of his hands, and slurs his words—was like very few people upon whose doors he knocked. To achieve success as a commissioned door-to-door salesman in this position required both monumental effort and complete mastery of presentation techniques.

This assertion is confirmed by some of the other elements of Porter’s story. I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction Live and Learn…and Share It All
• Part I Why It Works: Understanding Before Action
• Part II How It Works: Everyday Essentials of Successful Interaction
• Part III Making It Work: Presentations in Your Life
• Resources
• Glossary
• Recommended Reading
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors