1. If you got here from my newsletter and have already started reading Kate’s story, skip to Part 2.
2. And for those of you who’d like to avoid having your IP stolen (as hers was), here’s how to get ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude to not steal your input!

You Can’t Make this Stuff Up!

Imagine that you’re the third scheduled speaker at a graduation ceremony. And as you sit onstage, waiting to deliver your remarks, you suddenly realize that…

…the first two speakers are giving THE ACTUAL SPEECH you wrote for this occasion—VERBATIM!

Bizarre?? Yes, but It Happened!

Specifically, it happened to my client Kate, who’s a Professor of Occupational Therapy at a highly-regarded healthcare university.

When Kate was asked by her students to speak at their “white coat” graduation ceremony, she started writing her speech early. She wrote and revised, wrote and revised, and finally decided to do something she’d never done before:

She asked ChatGPT for advice on how to improve her talk!!

Here’s What Kate DIDN’T Do!

What Kate didn’t do, however, before seeking ChatGPT’s comments on her speech was to opt out of letting it use her “data” to “improve and train its models.” 

What does that mild-sounding sentence actually mean? It means that ChatGPT (and every other chatbot on the market) can use anything you ask or tell it in any way it wants, UNLESS YOU TELL IT “NO!“

So, have YOU told your favorite chatbot that it can’t use your input for “training”?

I’ll bet you haven’t (and I’m betting that because I hadn’t, either).

In fact, it hadn’t even occurred to me that a simple (but under-publicized) opt-out would protect my ideas and intellectual property from being plastered all over the internet until I heard Kate’s story.

And speaking of Kate’s story….

• How did her speech end up in two other people’s mouths? 
• What did she DO about it??
• And how did she feel???

Kate Takes Over the Story

Again, imagine that you’re sitting on stage, waiting to speak, and you suddenly realize that the speakers before you are saying the exact things YOU planned to say, using your exact words.

As Kate tells it,

It was shocking. I was horrified. I was… at first, I was dumbfounded that this could occur. It took me a moment to just figure out what was happening. And then I was feeling that it’s going to be an embarrassment to get up and say the same thing the dean and the provost had just said. 

But I also thought, these are my words! It’s my speech, and I’m going to own it!

So I gave my same speech and the students clapped with a lot of enthusiasm. They know me well, and they’re fond of me, so I knew that my words meant a lot to them. Whereas when the administrators spoke, it just felt rote. They were asked to give a speech, so they just did it and I thought, they must have ChatGPT write all their speeches.

How Did This Happen?

Again, in Kate’s words,

My guess is that the dean and the provost just put keywords into ChatGPT, and asked it to write their speeches. Words like “Occupational therapy program.” “Doctoral and masters students.” The name of the University. “White coat ceremony.”

And all of those elements were in my speech, which is probably why ChatGTP used it verbatim.

So Here’s Some Advice from a ChatGPT Survivor

Now I tell our students to make sure anything you put through ChatGPT that you are not sharing it widely with the world. Like your resumes, or anything else. Because once you put it out, it’s out there.

Want to Protect Yourself?

Here are OptOut directions for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude:

ChatGPT—

1. If you’re on the web (signed in), click your profile icon
2. Select Settings
3. Go to Data Controls
4. Turn off “Improve the model for everyone”

****

1. If you’re off the web (signed out), click the ? icon in the bottom-right corner
2. Select Settings
3. Turn off “Improve the model for everyone”

Perplexity—

1. Log into Perplexity in a browser.​
2. Click your profile avatar (top right) to open Account / Settings.
3. Go to the Preferences or Settings page (look for privacy or AI data usage).
4. Find the AI data retention or AI Data Usage toggle.
5. Turn this toggle off to opt out of having your searches and interactions used to improve AI models.

Claude—

1. Log into Claude and click your profile icon or name
2. Go to Settings
3. Navigate to Privacy → Privacy Settings
4. Find the toggle labeled “Help improve Claude”
5. Turn it Off

Be safe! Protect your ideas and intellectual property!

Image by Getty Images | Unsplash+

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But the one way in which public speaking shouldn’t be like a conversation is in it’s structure.

Why? Because conversations are usually a hot mess. By which I mean that, unless we’re following a plan for our conversation — we want to discuss a problem, offer support to a friend, etc. — we typically meander. We:

• Careen from topic to topic,
• Jump forward,
• Wind back to an earlier point,
• Leave thoughts unfinished, and
• Switch points on a dime, etc.

And none of that works for public speaking, because—in a successful speech—you can only talk about one thing at a time.

And you can only pull off that trick if your speech has a clear, non-conversational structure.

Why are conversations and speeches so different?

It has to do with the different functions of conversations and speeches.

• A conversation is usually about the relationship between participants. Whether we’re catching up on each other’s news; commiserating about bad luck; rejoicing over some glorious event; or sharing tips for dealing with all of the above, it doesn’t really matter what we talk about. The point is that we’re talking to each other, exploring areas of commonality and difference, and strengthening our relationship.

• Speeches are the opposite. Here, it matters quite a bit what we talk about, because the whole point of making a speech is to present your point of view, and hopefully sell the audience on it. If your idea, theory, position, or opinion is clear to your listeners, and rolls out in a logical way that they can easily follow, you’ve got a chance of persuading them. But if you’re jumping from points A to D and then back to B before telling a story about F, your chances of persuading them (let alone, of just being understood!) are much less.

What questions can you ask before you start creating your speech?

• What’s the most important point I want this audience to understand?
• How can I express that point in one sentence that they’ll remember?
• What topics will my discussion need to cover to be persuasive?
• What stories can I tell to reinforce the point; and finally,
• What do I want them to do differently after they’ve heard me speak?

That may sound very basic and obvious, but in point of fact, it’s not where most of us (often including me) start our thinking when we sit down to create a talk.

The question we usually start with is:

What do I know about this topic?

Begin by identifying what you want to communicate (not what you know)

“What do I know about this topic?” is actually a conversational approach—or rather, it’s the approach you would probably take if someone asked you, “Hey, what do you think about [your topic here].“

The problem is that, if you begin with a conversational structure—sharing things that you know in whatever order they occur to you—that’s what your whole discussion will sound like.

And while that may satisfy you and your listener in a casual conversation, it probably won’t work for an actual speech.

So begin by identifying not what you know, but what you want to communicate; and then make sure your points are laid out in a logical, persuasive order but delivered with a conversational tone and style.

That way you’re got the best of both worlds, and your speech will be easy to deliver, remember and understand!

For more on how to structure a speech that works…

I strongly recommend my public speaking workbook, Speak Like Yourself…No, Really! Follow Your Strengths and Skills to Great Public Speaking.

Chapters 3-6 are based on this diagram by the book’s illustrator, Carol Goldberg.

And once you understand this diagram, writing a speech that sounds conversational but isn’t structured conversationally becomes a whole lot easier!

The post The One Way that Public Speaking ISN’T Conversational appeared first on Speak Up For Success.

We’ve all had experiences of being in front of a public speaker who had all the right words, and even had compelling ideas, but just couldn’t command our attention. (In the political arena, think of Al Gore, or Mitt Romney.)

Why not?

Probably because they didn’t have rhythm (or rather, they had it—because we all do—but they didn’t bring it to their public speaking.

On the other hand, rhythm is a big part of a certain president’s rhetorical success.

How I Learned to Find My Own Rhythm

As a music student back in Boston, I worked to develop my own sense of rhythm by:

• Taking dance classes (loved those dance classes, and learned so much about music from them!).
• Taking improv classes (which I sucked at, being an overly cerebral control freak; but since improv is all about the rhythm you establish with your scene partners, it still helped).
• And tapping my foot in rhythm whenever I could.
  • While driving my car, I tapped my left foot “in time” to learn how to hold a steady “beat.”
  • And while standing in line or walking down the street, I tapped my toe, or timed my footsteps, to the rhythm of whatever song I was singing in my head. (There’s a great scene of this happening in the movie “The Full Monty,” which is about—among other things—a group of not-very-musical British guys teaching themselves to be strippers.)

You Don’t Have to Go That Far to Find Your Own Rhythm!

For those of us who can’t prioritize taking classes, here are three simple ways to work on connecting with your natural sense of rhythm:

1. Notice how your body moves when you’re listening to music that you love—and apply that to public speaking

Whether it’s Mozart or Megan Thee Stallion, the question you want to ask is: Which part of me is moving? Is it my head? My hips? My shoulders? My feet? All of the above, or something totally different?

Could you let that part of your body move a little when you’re delivering a speech?

Or better yet, for a fun exercise, can you practice your speech while playing the song or symphony that made your body move?

I know this might sound strange, but mentally associating a message or speech with music that you love is going to help you see (and hear) your speech’s rhythmic potential differently.

2. Change the pace when you’re talking, to find your rhythmic comfort zone

One characteristic of your natural rhythm is pace—whether you speak quickly, slowly, or in between.

By pushing yourself to speed up or slow down when you’re talking, you’ll notice something about how fast or slow your internal rhythm really wants to go. (And you don’t have to do this exercise with other people; you can talk out loud to yourself! :-))

3. Try this “25 x 25 in ’25” Nursery Rhyme exercise

As you may know, I’m a big fan of using inconsequential topics to practice public speaking. The idea is that, if the content is silly, you won’t be trying to “perfect” the content. Instead, you can think about the actual skill you’re practicing.

So…nursery rhymes, anyone?

The post Rhythm: You’ve Got It, Now Get in Touch with It! (A “25 x 25 in ’25” Public Speaking Exercise) appeared first on Speak Up For Success.

Most of us have learned to live with that—or at least, to navigate around it. But when it comes time for us to speak in public, do we actually treat our customers (a/k/a, our listeners, or audience members) the way we wish big companies were treating us?

Here are three things I believe we “owe” to our audiences—things that will make their audience experience good!

1. We owe them our best thinking

While a speechwriter or speaker coach can help you develop, organize, and refine your ideas, nobody but you can decide what you should be saying. So take ownership of your speech, and make sure that it says what YOU want to tell your audience.

Back in the day, I spent ten years as a corporate speechwriter, helping executives create presentations to give at internal (company only) conferences.

And it always astounded me how often top executives would often assign the job of working with a speechwriter (in this case, me) to some member of their team.

Yes, the job of telling me what the boss wanted to talk about would fall to a staff person who might not have a clue what the boss wanted to talk about!

As you can imagine, this never worked:

• At best, the boss revised their speech a few days before the conference.
• At worst, the boss and I were up all hours writing their speech from scratch the night before they gave it.

What’s the moral of this story?

You should be in charge of your content. That way, you’ll know that your audience is getting your best thinking.

2. We owe them our time

If you want your speech to flow well, make perfect sense, and be easy to deliver, that’s going to take more time than you probably hoped.

I totally understand that most people don’t have much time to devote to an upcoming speech, let alone to prep for a meeting or conversation. (I didn’t, either, when I was raising a four-year-old and working 80+ hours a week—and that was before we had the added distraction of cell phones! )

But typically, a good speech has been through several re-drafts (not touch-ups, but serious rewrites of at least some sections).

So what’s a public speaker to do? I recommend that you:

• Consult with a speechwriter, coach, or trusted adviser as soon as possible to make sure your ideas are solid, and fit the event you’ll be speaking at.
• Sketch out the bare bones (or outline) of what you’re going to say, starting with your key message (the most important point you want to make to this audience) and three sections of content that will support it.
• Only create as much content as you need. If you write down everything you know, and it takes 30 minutes to talk through it, you just did three times more work than was necessary for a 10-minute speech.

These tips will help you create your speech more efficiently. But there’s no way around it: making something good takes time!

3. We owe them our focus

When we focus on our audience’s experience, a whole new world of information opens up to us. We can notice (and maybe even take in) the fact that people are nodding their heads…smiling…or leaning forward to hear better.

If you want to create a great audience experience, it’s best to focus on what your audience is experiencing as you’re delivering your speech. That’s because, when someone is making a speech, there are two different realities going on:

• Theirs (the speaker’s), and
• Their audience’s.

(This blog post—written when my husband was playing electric bass and guitar with world-famous saxophonist Sonny Rollins—is about just how different those realities can be.)

Whose experience is more important? Theirs!

Understanding this can save you from a world of hurt, because if you’re prioritizing (or just stuck thinking about) your own experience, you’re more likely to:

• Trust the relentlessly nasty little voice in your head;
• Judge yourself by impossible standards;
• Believe that your audience is fixated on every little “mistake” you make; and
• Include every fact that you think needs to be covered rather than what your audience needs to (and can) hear.

Our brains are the ultimate “bubble,” and when we’re locked inside them, our perspective can get skewed in unpleasant ways.

But if our audience is having a good experience, it doesn’t matter that we may be feeling uncomfortable, self-critical, distracted, or whatever. Because their attention lifts us up, and their positive reactions are payback for the effort we’ve made.

So, what do we owe our audience?

Exactly what we owe ourselves!

Image by Getty+ for Unsplash

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First stop was Perplexity AI. (Why do I prefer Perplexity? It’s not an embodied Nazi fanboy, like Grok, and so far I haven’t caught it making things up.)

I asked it,

What metaphors are common in U.S. business speech?

True to form, Perplexity gave me a list of 28 phrases based on metaphors that are common in U.S. business English, such as:

• Low Hanging Fruit (The metaphor likens winning quickly and easily to picking the easiest-to-reach fruit of a tree.)
• Drill Down (When you “drill down” for insights, it’s like digging a deep well to uncover precious minerals.)
• Call the Shots (A sports metaphor! When you make a key decision, it’s like calling a sports team’s next play.)

Perplexity Steps Up to Help Me with Metaphors

And then, Perplexity topped it off by telling me,

If you’d like, I can provide examples of how these metaphors are used or organize them by theme.

Of course I wanted both, so I answered with the word “both.”

In response, I got a list of eight categories (“Starting and progressing,” “Challenges and navigation,” “Planning and strategy,” etc.) into which common business metaphors often fall.

But I need…

Cute though that was, what I needed was phrases that I could actually give to my client. And when I told Perplexity that, I got back a lot of sentences like this one:

“As CEO, it’s my job to steer the ship toward our long-term goals.”

OK, that example isn’t great—don’t use AI to actually write for you!—but it’s clear and easy to understand.

What I found more interesting, though, was the next suggestion that Perplexity made.

It said,

If you like, I can combine these into a flowing sample business conversation so you can hear how multiple metaphors fit naturally together in one discussion.
Do you want me to do that next?

Last but Not Least

Again, my answer was “yes,” and Perplexity produced a pedestrian but instructive dialogue, before asking,

If you’d like, I can add even more colorful business metaphors to make the dialogue feel like a high-energy startup meeting or a polished corporate boardroom discussion.

Do you want me to make it more informal and fast-paced, or more professional and polished?

Perplexity Could Have Gone Another Way

Here’s the interesting part (well, it was interesting to me ):

I actually ran this trial—looking for common business phrases that embody metaphors—twice, with slight variations in the wording. And while the lists of metaphors in both trials were very similar, the paths that Perplexity led me down (because, yes, it was leading me) were very different.

In Trial #1, Perplexity kept moving me toward production design, offering first to create a chart, then a PDF for letter-sized printing, then instructions for creating an infographic, etc.

In Trial #2, as you’ve seen, it moved me down a verbal path, from concepts to examples…to more conversational examples…to an offer to customize for my desired tone and role.

Is This a Good Thing? Or Not Such a Good Thing?

I don’t know.

We’re years away from knowing whether AI’s input into how we should do our work is beneficial, or not so much.

For now, all I can say is:

1. Use business phrases that derive from common metaphors sparingly;
2. Don’t ask a chatbot to write actual documents for you (though brainstorming or even drafting are OK); and
3. Don’t let AI lead you down the garden path.

Image by Aniston Grace | Unsplash

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In case you’re not already a fan of this pleasure, there are lots of good reasons to introduce people that you know to each other:

• When they have something in common—or can help each other—introducing two people is a good deed that keeps you on both of their radars.
• Being a connector of people builds opportunities for everyone (and just think of all the good karma you’re collecting! )
• We all need more community, and introducing people is a way to help build it.

When I was growing up, there were a lot of rules around introducing people. (This was before people could easily introduce themselves online. )

Today, introductions are more casual. But there’s still a lot to be said for being able to graciously and confidently introduce two people to each other—at networking or social events, or even at work.

The Good Old Days of Introducing People

Two hundred years ago, the custom was to present (introduce) a lower status person to the higher status person. (“Queen Elizabeth, may I present my friend Joe Shmoe?”) The implication was that the higher status person (in this case, Queen Elizabeth) was doing a gracious favor by acknowledging someone from the unwashed masses.

More recently—when I was growing up—people had higher status if they were older, wealthier, more established in business, or male. But male/female introductions were the exception to the high-status rule: men were introduced to women as a gesture of chivalry (i.e., let’s all pretend that the woman has superior status).

I hadn’t thought about this outdated code in ages, and my first thought on remembering it was, “Thank goodness we got rid of all that stuff!”

But then I realized that we haven’t totally gotten rid of it.

Does Status Still Count When Making Introductions?

Imagine that you’re at work and your partner (or spouse or main squeeze; let’s call them Avery) comes by to pick you up for lunch. As you’re leaving the building, you run into your company’s president (let’s call them Morgan) on the elevator.

Do you say,

“Morgan, I’d like you to meet my partner Avery.”

Or do you say,

“Avery, this is Morgan, the president of my company.”

The first one sounds more “right” to me, but that might just be an artifact of my status-conscious upbringing. If the two phrases sound equally appropriate to you, you can forget about the status thing and just learn a few all-purpose introduction phrases, like the two above.

And don’t forget to signify who these people are with words like “partner” and “president of my company.”

Kicking Off a New Relationship

The made-up meeting between Avery and Morgan is likely a one-off. That’s because—unless your office is very small and your partner drops by very often—they probably won’t meet again until the Christmas party.

But often, we introduce people in the hope that they’ll launch a separate relationship, independent of us.

In that case—when you want to encourage people to get to know each other—tell them why. For example, you might say:

Barry, I’d like you to meet my friend Jasper. I’ve known him for years, but he’s just moving back to New York after getting a masters in history. Jasper, Barry is my friend who works at the Department of Ed. He can tell you about substitute teaching.

(And yes, without thinking, I gave Barry the “higher status” position because he has information that Jasper wants.)

Or:

Sally and Mina, I’ve mentioned each of you to the other. You’re both big travelers—Sally just went to Tanzania, and Mina is going to Brazil next month—and I always thought you’d have a lot to talk about.

At this point, either Mina or Sally is probably going to ask the other about their trips…and in about two minutes, I’ll be able to slip away to refill my glass, meet some new people myself, or go play introvert by hiding in the bathroom.

OK, Let’s Practice!

With an open-ended scenario like making introductions, you can’t practice ahead of time for every situation. But verbalizing the types of things you might want to say will boost your comfort level and give you some ideas to start with.

The post How to Introduce People to Each Other: A “25 x 25 in ’25” Public Speaking Exercise appeared first on Speak Up For Success.

True Confession: I’m an unreformed interrupter.

That’s because I’m opinionated, impatient, a fast thinker, and a fast talker. I hate waiting for other people to get to the point. (Ask my husband.)

Now, do I want you to copy me, because interrupting is the greatest thing since sliced bread?

No, I do not!

But there are situations where you should feel free to interrupt with a totally clean conscience; for example when:

1. You’re saving someone from putting their foot in their mouth, or
2. The person who’s talking won’t stop, and everyone in the room is falling asleep, or
3. They interrupted YOU first!

Interrupt Like Yourself…No, Really!

When you interrupt someone who just interrupted you, make your own interruption as powerful as possible.

What does “as powerful as possible” mean? That’s going to depend in large part on you — on things like what your role is, who you’re interrupting, how you prefer to communicate, and how you want to come across in general. So, for example:

• Tactful and gracious: “John, I’m sorry, but I’m actually not finished.”

• Apologetic and regretful (because the other person has high status): “John, I’m SO SORRY to interrupt, but are you OK if I just wrap up that one point?”

• Smart and edgy (my first choice): “JOHN!” [unspoken: WTF do you think you’re doing???? ]

Any of these approaches can be powerful (yes, even the regretful, apologetic one) if your attitude includes a clear intention to take back the floor.

Now You Just Have to Open Up a Wedge

By definition, when you interrupt someone, you’ve got to grab their attention so that they stop talking. (That’s why you need to interrupt powerfully. If you interrupt with ambivalence, they may not even notice.)

This “25 x 25 in ’25” exercise will help you do both those things:

The post Do This When Someone Interrupts You: A “25 x 25 in ’25” Public Speaking Exercise appeared first on Speak Up For Success.

As a child, you may have been taught that it’s really rude to interrupt other people.

And sometimes it is.

But there are times when interrupting is necessary, or even kind—for example, when the other person is digging themselves into a verbal hole; or if everyone else has stopped listening to them.

How to Interrupt: What Not To Do

Two things that don’t work for interrupting are hesitating and being hesitant:

• Hesitating before you interrupt can cause you to miss the moment. That’s because the best time to interrupt someone else is when they’ve paused between ideas, or to take a breath. (This doesn’t work well in New York City, but use it in places where people actually pause between thoughts ).
• And being hesitant or tentative in how you interrupt looks like you’re not really committed to doing it. This tells the other person that they can just ignore your attempted interruption and keep going.

How to Interrupt: What Works

Conversely, the two things that lead to successful interrupting are firmness and friendliness.

• Firmness shows that you mean what you’re doing:
  • Look your “target” in the eye
  • Speak a bit more loudly than they are
  • State your “entrance line” (see below) clearly and strongly
• And friendliness takes the sting out of it. A smile and a little warmth or sincerity tells the other person, “Yes, I’m interrupting you, but I’m not attacking you.”

Two Interrupting Enhancements

To make your interruption stronger and friendlier (yes, at the same time!),

1. Say the other person’s name (clearly, firmly, with a little smile); and
2. Move toward then physically (lean in, and/or make a “stop”-type hand gesture)

Both of these things close the distance between you and the person you’re interrupting, so that the interruption becomes an exchange that you’re having, not something you’re imposing on them from on high.

Which leaves just one problem…

What Do You Actually Say?

Your entrance line is what you say to wedge yourself into someone else’s verbal flow.

Your entrance line can be positive, neutral, or mildly negative (“But wait, what happens if…?”), and it should fit both your personality and the situation.

Possibilities include:

Elsie, I’m sorry to interrupt, but…

Gregory, can I jump in here and… [Note that this is not really a question :-)]

Jennifer, hang on a second!

Julian, let me just add something…

Again, what matters here is your delivery. If you’re confident, calm, and friendly (but insistent), the other person will yield.

The floor is now yours, so try to make the next thing you say count.

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