■ Bookends ■

The first exemplary speaker you read about was Ronald Reagan. I reprise him here to culminate the book, and to serve as a lasting role model for you and any person who presents. The conversational style that Reagan developed as the host of General Electric Theater gave rise to his success as the Great Communicator. Develop and polish your own conversational style so that every time you stand in front of any audience you can present to win.

Whenever your Yikes! Moment arrives, default to what you do naturally and effectively: deliver your presentation as a series of person-to-person conversations.

That shift in your approach, along with a shift in your thinking from yourself to the person with whom you are conversing, is the essence of Audience Advocacy^®. These shifts will evoke empathy from your audiences instinctively. In turn, when you perceive their positive responses, your fear of public speaking will diminish. You will find your comfort zone.

Once you have established that foundation, you can then deploy the Suasive Master Skills Cycle (Figure c.1) as the vehicle for your conversation.

■ The Master Skills in Action ■

Vlad Shmunis is a seasoned and successful Silicon Valley technology executive. He founded Ring Zero Systems, a business communications software company, and built it to a level attractive enough to be acquired by Motorola. In 1999, he founded RingCentral, a cloud-based communications company and, as its CEO, helped escalate its business and technology. As a result, Vlad was honored with the Technology Pioneer Award at the prestigious World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, in 2010. In an interview at the Forum, he sat back, crossed his fingers, cast his eyes down, and described RingCentral’s business in a rambling statement punctuated by multiple Unwords:

RingCentral’s growth continued to accelerate, and before long, the company started planning a public offering. That’s when I met Vlad. He retained me to help him and his senior team prepare for their IPO roadshow, and I coached them in the same skills you’ve learned in this book. The public offering finally took place in 2013. As a public company, RingCentral’s upward climb continued to a market cap of more than $20 billion in 2020.²

Vlad is still the company’s principal spokesman. In an appearance on CNBC’s Mad Money, when host Jim Cramer asked him to describe what RingCentral does, Vlad smiled, leaned forward, looked Cramer straight in the eye, and, punctuating his words with animated gestures, described RingCentral’s business succinctly.

The RingCentral message remained essentially unchanged from the World Economic Forum to Mad Money; the messenger, however, by deploying EyeConnect and animated gestures, made his voice more dynamic. And by using succinct phrasing and clear pausing (to eliminate Unwords), Vlad made his already strong message even stronger.

■ The Best Compliment ■

In closing, allow me a moment of immodesty to share with you the best compliment I ever received in all my years as a presentations coach. It came from Cindy Burgdorf, the former CFO of SanDisk Corporation, now the world’s largest supplier of flash memory data storage products. At the time of the company’s IPO, Cindy and Eli Harari, the CEO and founder of the company, engaged me to coach them for their roadshow. As we were wrapping up the last day of our program, Cindy turned to me and said, “This isn’t just about presentations, is it? This is about communicating in any situation. It all applies everywhere.”³

I hope Cindy’s words are meaningful to you, too. Every communication exchange you make—whether a meeting, an interview, a conference, a discussion, or a one-on-one engagement; whether business or social—involves the same key elements and dynamics that are in a presentation. They vary only slightly, and only by degree. If you want your communication to be successful, you must manage all the elements and dynamics of every interpersonal exchange effectively. If you want a positive audience perception, you must present with positive behavior.

Good luck.