The Eloquent Woman's weekly speaker toolkit

I read a lot about women and public speaking, and post my finds first on The Eloquent Woman on Facebook. But I always collect them here for you on Mondays as well. Here's what I've been reading lately:

• Handy: Talking with your hands can help you learn--but also has great advantages for public speakers.
• Speaker's notes: Frequent speaker Michael Hyatt shares how he uses Evernote to keep his speaking resources, including his tags and topics.
• Did you miss? This week, the blog looked at 11 things you can do with a pause in your speech, and Famous Speech Friday looked at Rep. Maxine Waters's "reclaiming my time" approach to mansplaining.
• About the quote: Make your voices heard, eloquent women! Wisdom from Hillary Clinton.

Get involved in more conversations on public speaking with The Eloquent Woman. Follow our Facebook page, read great quotes from eloquent woman on Pinterest, or follow me as @dontgetcaught on Twitter. Learn how to be a better panel moderator with The Eloquent Woman's Guide to Moderating Panels.

Famous Speech Friday: Rep. Maxine Waters's "reclaiming my time"

In America, we started this year with a million women marching in Washington, DC, and yet more doing the same around the world. Now the same group behind the Women's March is convening a Women's Convention this weekend in Detroit, Michigan--and they're using a now-iconic line from U.S. Representative Maxine Waters as the theme, "Reclaiming my time."

The now-famous three-word phrase is part of the House of Representatives floor procedures, typically during a debate: "The gentleman who has yielded may at any time 'reclaim' his time and then the other Member must stop speaking and allow him to continue." But here, Waters was questioning a hearing witness, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, about why he had not responded to her and other members of Congress after a May 23 letter, and she didn't feel as if he was answering the question. Mnuchin objected, appealing to the committee chair, and noting that the chair had announced that Mnuchin, as a witness, was not to be interrupted.

"What he failed to tell you is that when you are on my time, I can reclaim it," Waters explained, and then asked again for the Treasury secretary to answer the question. Waters, who has served in Congress since 1991, used the rules to keep him from using up her time to speak with non-responsive answers. And as the secretary launched again into a long and not direct answer, Waters simply repeated, "Reclaiming my time. Reclaiming my time. Reclaiming my time," over and over--the implication being, "You're wasting my allotted time to speak, and I'm not having it." And her question never was answered. It's a great example of a common Washington tactic of obfuscating your non-answer by wrapping it in a lot of solid-sounding other details to one side of the point...and Waters saw right through it.

In the Washington Post, Christine Emba noted, "In a year studded with absurd examples of men interrupting their female colleagues, a dignified woman’s firm insistence on being heard and getting straight to business was a welcome and empowering surprise." The phrase was seized upon by women tired of mansplaining and interruptions, and took social media and traditional media coverage by storm. What can you learn from this famous speech?

• Know the rules and procedures: You don't have to be working by House rules or Robert's Rules of Order, but it's important to know, going into your public speaking gig, what's allowed and what isn't--from you and from your audience and other speakers. The only way to use the rules to your advantage is to know them.
• Repeat as needed: Waters kept it simple. She explained the rules to the witness, politely, and asked the question again. When he started another non-answer, she just repeated the phrase that was short and official--uttering "reclaiming my time" has actual meaning for how much time she has left to speak.
• Stand up for your time to speak: Whether you're on a panel or get interrupted while speaking in a meeting, this is a great phrase to add to your back-pocket arsenal. Whatever you do, don't let others derail the full amount of time you should be speaking.

Watch the video of the short exchange below.


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11 things you can do with a pause in your speech

I sometimes think the simple pause is among the most overlooked yet versatile tools in the public speaking arsenal. Short and silent, it's easy to overlook.

Pauses, if chosen and used wisely, can add much to your next speech, talk, or presentation. Here are 11 things you can do with a pause in your speech. How many have you tried?

1. Recall what you want to say, without blurting out "I forgot..." and breaking your and the audience's concentration.
2. Let us hear your lists and sentences. A brief one-beat pause every time your script has a comma between items in a list, and a two-beat pause when there's a hard stop to a sentence, will slow you down a little and let us hear what you are saying.
3. Replace an um or a word you overuse. There is nothing wrong with the totally normal um, but if you are trying to avoid using it too frequently, try a pause and a mental, not verbal, um. Ditto any word your listeners have pointed out is overused in your presentations.
4. Let your applause finish. If your talk is being recorded, this helps make sure your next line will be captured without claps drowning it out.
5. Ditto the audience's laughs. If you've landed a successful bit of humor and you get laughs, a pause lets them finish before you launch into the next bit.
6. Signal a switch in tone, topic, or direction. Pausing between two disparate parts of your talk can tell the audience something new is next.
7. Conquer dry mouth by gently biting your tongue a time or two to produce saliva. Try it--it's a tip from operatic soprano Luciano Pavarotti, which I got from a makeup artist who heard him sharing it.
8. Add emphasis. A pause before...during...or after something you wish to emphasize can be a powerful verbal tool in a talk. Try pauses at different intervals and plan them during your practice, not on the fly.
9. Stop yourself from crying. Shut your mouth--so you don't take in too much air and prompt a sob--and breath through your nose, and wait. If your talk is on an emotional topic, the audience will understand the pause, and they'll be with you.
10. Give the other person a break in the action (yours) so they can talk. If you rush to fill all available space--particularly in Q&A or in a conversation or negotiation--you'll never find out what the other person has to say. Pausing lets them get a word in edgewise. This is especially important in media interviews, but also when you are conversing with someone for whom your language is their second language--they need pauses to think and frame a response.
11. Start a thoughtful response to a question. There's a three-part formula to answering questions: Pause. Answer. Stop. The pause allows you to hear the complete question, rather than make assumptions before the questioner is done speaking, and buys you time to formulate an answer.

(Creative Commons licensed photo by Dr. Case)

Get involved in more conversations on public speaking with The Eloquent Woman. Follow our Facebook page, read great quotes from eloquent woman on Pinterest, or follow me as @dontgetcaught on Twitter. Learn how to be a better panel moderator with The Eloquent Woman's Guide to Moderating Panels.

The Eloquent Woman's weekly speaker toolkit

I read a lot about women and public speaking, and post my finds first on The Eloquent Woman on Facebook. But I always collect them here for you on Mondays as well. Here's what I've been reading lately:

• No: Refusing to answer questions about past salary--now considered a best practice for applicants--helps men, but hurts women.
• Ja: In a lovely speech about the benefits of knowing a second language. John le Carré quotes Charlemagne: “To have another language is to possess a second soul.”
• Did you miss? This week, the blog looked at Let it go: How to tell when your public speaking script should be frozen, and Famous Speech Friday shared Anita Sarkeesian's clap back at her trolls at VidCon. And an extra: I shared 10 lessons, 10 years into The Eloquent Woman blog.
• About the quote: Know your audience, but don't let them silence you. Wisdom from Michele Roberts.

Get involved in more conversations on public speaking with The Eloquent Woman. Follow our Facebook page, read great quotes from eloquent woman on Pinterest, or follow me as @dontgetcaught on Twitter. Learn how to be a better panel moderator with The Eloquent Woman's Guide to Moderating Panels.

Famous Speech Friday: Anita Sarkeesian tackles trolls at VidCon

You've read--here and elsewhere--about women  getting harassed on panels at conferences, particularly in the tech space. But if you haven't experienced what that looks and feels like at a real conference panel, it can be hard to imagine.

So let's use this VidCon panel from June that featured media and gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian, one of the most trolled women speakers on the planet. Sarkeesian spoke graphically about her harassment in a TED talk in 2013, but this panel offers a real example, captured in this article. And in this case, Sarkeesian called out her trolls:

The panel's first question drops. It’s about why feminism — online and in games — is an issue worthy of discussion. 

Sarkeesian notes Benjamin's presence and begins speaking. 

"If you Google my name on YouTube you get shitheads like this dude who are making these dumb-assed videos," she says. "They just say the same shit over and over again. I hate to give you attention because you're a garbage human. These dudes just making endless videos that go after every feminist over and over again is a part of the issue of why we have to have these conversations."

And to help you picture what Sarkeesian was seeing, here's what one of the harassers said in the article about how they set up their intimidation effort:

 "We carefully organized this so that on one side of the audience we would all make up the top three rows,” he says. “We would all be sitting there filming it," he adds, before naming several allies....It was such an adrenaline high to be there in the situation, to shit-post, in this trolling kind of way." He goes on to claim there was "no malice" in their actions and that it was “playful.”

Later, asked about the panel and calling out the harassers, Sarkeesian said, "As women, we're always told not to engage, not to 'stoke the fire,' and that forces us into silence, it forces us to be quiet in the face of harassment. That silence helps perpetuate a culture in which harassment is permissible or even accepted as 'normal.' And so I think that for some women who understand what I’ve been through or who have been through it themselves, it was cathartic to see me not stay silent, to see me call him out directly like that, to acknowledge in front of all those people what he’s done."

What can you learn from this panel from hell?

• It's important to show up and speak, anyway: I know a lot of women who just avoid speaking gigs due to this phenomenon of trolls in the audience. Sarkeesian gets trolled more than most, but she continues to show up and call out the bad behavior. It's a good model for you to follow to take back control of your speaking opportunities.
• Call them out directly: That wording is so important psychologically. Instead of responding with general complaints about harassment, get specific and direct. Don't use euphemisms. Call a troll a troll, and use your microphone and platform. Yes, that takes up time from your planned message, but it's important. As Sarkeesian said, "it was cathartic to see me not stay silent, to see me call him out directly like that, to acknowledge in front of all those people what he’s done." If it's the same guy or guys every time, borrow one of my all-time-favorite lines from Ronald Reagan: "there you go again." 
• Know and work the conference code of conduct, and security: If you expect this to happen, ask for a conference organizer and security to be present for your session to witness any infraction of the code. Be sure you know the code of conduct, and whom to call. And refusing to speak at conferences without codes also is a good start, though a code is no guarantee of good behavior. Also consider having your colleagues help out by making their own video documentation if need be, and let them know what to watch for.

RealBeal made this video with her own commentary after witnessing the panel from the front row. It's a good reminder that these practices are bad for the audience as well as the speakers:


Get involved in more conversations on public speaking with The Eloquent Woman. Follow our Facebook page, read great quotes from eloquent woman on Pinterest, or follow me as @dontgetcaught on Twitter. Learn how to be a better panel moderator with The Eloquent Woman's Guide to Moderating Panels.

Let it go: How to tell when your public speaking script should be frozen

When I'm coaching speakers who are preparing and then memorizing a script for a talk--often a talk in the style of TED--we invest a lot of time on the script early in the process. We discuss concepts, go through drafts, reorganize, restate, revise. And then we do it again, as much as is needed to make the talk work for both speaker and audience. By the time we're done, that talk is like a polished jewel. So how do I keep the speaker from revising it into oblivion, right up until the last minute?

I declare the script "frozen."

By that I mean no more major revisions, a key part of the process for the speaker who wants to have a prayer of knowing her talk when the time comes to deliver it. It's the opposite of the speaker who makes lots of tweaks and changes, right up until the moment of delivery. That keeps moving the goal posts on your goal of memorizing the talk, and even makes delivery with notes difficult.

Declaring your script frozen, and keeping it that way, takes a lot of self-control. But neither freezing the script, nor memorization, are perfect processes. So we allow for a couple of types of changes:

• Where you repeatedly stumble, make a change in the script, either omitting or replacing the word or words that are giving you trouble; and
• Where you repeatedly forget a word, group of words, or sentence, do the same: omit or replace.

Other than that, however, work on memorizing what you have so carefully crafted.

Engineer Lucy Rogers shared with this blog her experience experimenting a bit too much with when she froze her speech: "I froze [my script] on the Tuesday, before giving it on the Thursday...I wasn’t word perfect. I changed the first line and I missed out some of the jokes...Note to self: freeze the speech longer in advance to give yourself chance to learn it."

If you're still tempted to make change after change, it's a good opportunity to pull back and ask yourself why you're anxious about this speech. Too many changes can be a signal that you're in over-prepare mode. Take the time to work on your anxiety before the speech, rather than take it out on your script.

(Disney press kit image from the movie Frozen)

Get involved in more conversations on public speaking with The Eloquent Woman. Follow our Facebook page, read great quotes from eloquent woman on Pinterest, or follow me as @dontgetcaught on Twitter. Learn how to be a better panel moderator with The Eloquent Woman's Guide to Moderating Panels.

10 lessons,10 years into blogging The Eloquent Woman

You weren't looking, and apparently neither was I, but Monday last week was the 10th anniversary of this blog, The Eloquent Woman. I often miss my blogs' anniversaries, but managed to catch this one before it was quite past. And it prompted me to think about some lessons I've learned blogging about women and public speaking over the last (gulp) decade:

1. Readers start things: It was a client's experience ("your presentations aren't sexy enough") that got me curious about gender issues in public speaking--and sure enough, I found there was plenty to sustain a blog, from research to daily issues. Readers suggested our Famous Speech Friday series and scores of posts on public speaking. I'm forever grateful for these core contributions.
2. Readers help me find things: I can't thank enough the readers worldwide who send me pointers to speeches that catch their attention; offer to translate non-English speeches; share their experiences; or send me reference materials I wouldn't otherwise find. You've expanded the range and depth of the blog in this way.
3. Keeping one focus is key: Speeches are incendiary things, and so are speakers. But on this blog, I don't choose speakers or speeches for political or other issues, even though I'm often accused of doing so. If I get political about anything on this blog, it's about how women are silenced. 
4. That whole 'be the change you want to see' thing works. I was having trouble finding speeches by women to use as examples with my coaching clients. That started me on a path to learn that women have, over the course of history, been more banned from speaking than encouraged to do it...and that, even today, we do a poor job of preserving their talks. Big lists of "top speeches of the century" had so few women's speeches, they were easy to miss. That's why I created the weekly Famous Speech Friday posts, which look at all sorts of speeches by women, and began to collect them in The Eloquent Woman Index of Famous Speeches by Women, now nearing 300 speeches by women past and present. 
5. It's great to share my approach to coaching with you, which has evolved over the years. When I hear from a prospective client who's done a deep dive on the blog, I can tell. Often, when I ask, "What do you need to know about me?" they say, "I already know all I need to know," and that's great for a speaker coach to hear.
6. We can't have enough examples of women speaking. Once I started the blog, I heard from many speechwriters and speaker coaches also looking for examples of women speakers, as one put it, "more recent than Eleanor Roosevelt." I'm so pleased that speeches from the Index have been distributed by the Girl Scouts of America, professors, teachers, coaches ,and speechwriters, with their troops, classes, and clients.
7. Putting women speakers forward means getting pushback from time to time. I've had male speechwriters tell me "but these speeches just aren't very good" or "I don't see any really great speeches there," and I've been accused of doing all sorts of subversive things with the speeches I choose. That just tells me how uncomfortable and unused we are to hearing and featuring women's voices. The cure for all this? Persistence.
8. The variety matters to me. From the start, I wanted to feature not just stentorian keynote speeches in the male speaking style, but all sorts of public speech by women: testimony, PowerPoint presentations, interviews, short remarks, extemporaneous wonders, and more. I wanted women featured from all periods of history possible, all over the globe, all types of professions, all ages, all races. We're not quite there yet, but making strides. That variety of voices and types of speech matters, not just to me, but to readers looking for examples.
9. Regrets? The missing speeches. There are famous speeches by women that I know about, but can't find, because they weren't preserved, or the preserved copies just aren't accessible for legal, technological, or other reasons. And that's not just true of speeches from distant history, but from some transitional periods like the 1960s and 70s, when broadcast recordings weren't archival. Other speeches, like Rosa Parks's speeches, were tied up by legal disputes for decades (they're now in the Library of Congress). It's a sometimes inadvertent silencer of women that has me wishing I could find and share them all.
10. No, it doesn't feel like 10 years. This blog's a big part of every day for me, but often, I feel like I'm just getting started. And I learn as much from putting this together as you may from reading it. A decade also has shaped my perspective on women and speaking into something far more complex and, I hope, sophisticated--something that can't happen, except over time.

(Creative Commons licensed photo by Fortune Brainstorm Tech)

Get involved in more conversations on public speaking with The Eloquent Woman. Follow our Facebook page, read great quotes from eloquent woman on Pinterest, or follow me as @dontgetcaught on Twitter. Learn how to be a better panel moderator with The Eloquent Woman's Guide to Moderating Panels.