Emily Stringer: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's Master Class webinar. We'll give everyone a few moments here to get in and get settled and we will begin our presentation shortly. I see our numbers are going up, so we will give you just a few more moments here. Alright, looks like everyone is in the webinar, so hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Master Class webinar, Winning Your Audience Expert Tips to Improve Your Public Speaking, featuring James Rosebush, founder, and CEO of Growth Strategy Inc. My name is Emily Stringer and I would be your moderator this afternoon. A little background on me. I work as an ambassador to the MBA Advantage Program and as one of our compliance officers. I've been with MBO partners for 10 years. Next slide, please. Here at MBO Partners, we are contractor engagement and compliance specialists and are the chosen compliance partner for over a third of the Fortune one hundred. Our mission is to make it easier for large enterprises and top independent talent to work together. For more than 20 years, we have been leading the charge to keep the independent economy moving forward, building a unique, dual-sided ecosystem featuring many of the world's most prominent country companies and Intiman professionals. MBO has always been committed to advancing the next wave (of) working and we are far from done. We will continue to drive change on (the) ground, delivering innovative solutions that enable both organizations and talent to thrive in a constantly changing workplace. MBO Partners has several upcoming events, including our third and final segment of building your online presence. For more information (on) this and other events, please visit us on the web at www.mbopartners.com/events. Before we get started, I have a few housekeeping items and friendly reminders for today's presentation. Please ensure that you're muted. At the end of today's presentation, we will host a formal Q&A session. Please use the Q&A function to send us any questions you would like James to answer. We will also be emailing a slide deck and a recorded copy of the entire webinar to all registrants within the next week. And this time, it is my pleasure to introduce you to our speaker. James Rosebush is a widely recognized public speaking and executive coach, a leader in building and growing corporate family offices and philanthropic organizations. As an adviser to the White House, James was President Ronald Reagan's point man on philanthropy and public-private partnerships. Mr. Rosebush was also the longest-serving chief of staff to First Lady Nancy Reagan. He recently published his third book and number one bestseller and the public speaking category, Winning Your Audience delivers a message with the confidence of a president. This follows his bestseller, True Reagan. What Made Ronald Reagan Great and Why It Matters. A rare insight into the fortieth president's mysterious character. James is a frequently requested public speaker, presenting to various audiences and the media on leadership, politics, and philanthropy. His weekly columns on leadership and public speaking appear on businessinsider.com and Real Leaders magazine. He co-created Deal Ring, a platform to train investment managers to make the perfect pitch and compete successfully for investment dollars. He also coaches business leaders to become impact speakers through his website www.impactspeakercoach.com. James, at this time, the stage is yours. 

James Rosebush: Thank you so much, Emily, and shout out to Matthew Small, as well and all my friends in MBO for inviting me to come into your offices and wherever they are and share with you what I call my power up masterclass in 14 points in 40 minutes. I'm going to be speaking to you in an accelerated delivery. We'll talk a little bit about that, because I want to cram in as much information as I can possibly get to you in 40 minutes. It's going to be divided into two sections, all of it storytelling. Speaking is all persuasion. Storytelling is what people want to hear. The second section is building a bridge to your audience. Seven points in each section. But my mind is really been focused on the testimony from the four tech titans in Congress yesterday. How many of you watched this or observed any of the analysis after they finished their testimony? It's fascinating to me that the cost of not being able to communicate well goes on and on. These people didn't possibly recognize the fact that not only were they testifying in a smaller to a smaller group of people on Capitol Hill, they were really speaking to millions and millions of people around the globe, customers, shareholders and analysts who are parsing the words that they were presenting. To me, I don't know how you felt, but they really weren't connecting to their audience. They didn't have the highest degree of authenticity and they certainly were not rehearsed. Those three critical features, which we're going to talk about today, is a tremendous and cost associated with not being able to speak effectively. Most of our colleges and even MBA programs, only twenty two schools out of all MBA programs across the country offer and require public speaking class to be taken. I think it's more important to learn how to speak in public than to take an accounting course. And as evidence that the CEO showed us yesterday. This is what I want to do, and I'm terribly impressed with the fact that you all do recognize how important it is to gain your voice and your ability to convince, persuade and to unify yourself with your audience. Thank you for recognizing that in joining with this class and with this group today, we have an impressive number of people who've signed up for our discussion, and I love that because it's saying to me that people are getting this message that you have to learn how to speak. This can range from speaking to your kids, telling them to try to do their homework, which is, of course, a big problem today, or to eat their dinner or to get to bed or if you're negotiating, buying an apartment or buying a house, things that are personal. The ability to communicate is tantamount to everything. In this course, doesn't mean that I'm training you necessarily to be speakers to a million people, although that could be a part of your role and responsibility coming up, it's just as important to learn how to speak correctly and powerfully and effectively to one other person as it is to a million people, as my boss, Ronald Reagan did. I saw him become an evangelist for freedom around the world and had the great opportunity to travel with him wherever we went. He believed if he could only communicate effectively, directly to the people, that he could win over through his voice and through his content and through his conviction related to his beliefs, he could win over his audience. So I learned a million lessons from him. So let's plunge right into this power of masterclass in 14 points over 40 minutes, and then we'll have an opportunity to discuss some of the things that our greatest concern to you. So I want you to learn how to speak as if your life depends upon it, because it really does. Think about this, if you were tossed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, you have to learn how you'd have to have the ability to communicate and make a distress call. You'd have to get that message through to the right people. You have to make the connection to someone who's going to save you. That's your audience. But you have to throw out that call for help. You have to learn how to communicate. Communication skills are begin, of course, when we're born. But the way we gain them is we mimic our parents. We listen to how our parents are speaking, their inflection, their if they may have a particular slant on the language, depending on what country they're coming from or how hey've been trained to speak or what kind of accent they might have. As children, we pick all of this up. These are things that we might have to correct later on as speakers because we're really going to be judged on our ability to communicate. So first and foremost, we're focusing on section one, remember right now. Storytelling, all speaking is persuasion and selling. So the first point I'd like to talk to you briefly about is the history of public speaking, the origins of it. So in the early days of the Greek empire, joining together in the earliest form of democracy, all the scattered Greek islands came together to form this nation, which we now call Greece. Why did they do that? Because they had to defend themselves against the conquering armies, and so they thought we would be stronger together. They also recognized that to be stronger together meant that they had to be able to communicate. So they created the laws of rhetoric which are put together by Aristotle, and he had five different laws that he felt were critical to not only an individual's ability to speak to their family or to their tribe, but most importantly, to uphold the pillars of democracy. And I think this is why I like to talk about the origins of it because what is it that really powers us and gives us this incentive to be important and powerful and effective public speakers because we are upholding the pillars of could be our own family, our business, our businesses, our companies that we work for. We are upholding these pillars by learning and practicing proper rhetoric, by storytelling and by focusing on content. These are all things that are critically important. This is what the early Greeks did. So they trained and they created the first actual speaking coach whose name was Corax and Corax opened up, put a single out and he started training and actually charging people to be trained because the Greek economy, the Greek political economy, as this early democracy knew that in order to sustain their freedoms and their democratic way of life, they had to be able to communicate about it. Later as we shift to the early Roman Empire, they had no lawyers and you had to go to court individually to plead your case and to seek your property rights or anything else that you had to go to court for. And I often think if we didn't have lawyers today, everyone would have to be an eloquent public speaker. So why is this this so important to know about the roots of speaking? Because I think it helps imbue us and inspire us with the responsibility to do this. Every single one of us, especially those that believe in and support a democratic way of life and individual freedoms, we have this important role to learn how to speak effectively and convince people through storytelling how important it is. That's number one. Number two, today we have a journalistic style of speaking. So what does that mean? So you find that if you open up any blog or if you open up any newspaper today, every single article you'll see, look at The Wall Street Journal today. So there was an article about obviously an article about Cohen. It would naturally start with. Well, James Smith, who lives in Nashville, opened his door yesterday and he found out that five members of his family had COVID-19, and why did this happen? So you find out any story is going to open with a vignette about an individual or group of people or an accident that happened or some incident. So this is the way we always want to open up our own remarks. And I always like to tell the story of how I learned that I had to become an effective public speaker. So when I was 20 years old, I joined the family office of the founder of General Motors. And the first day in the first week that I was on the job, I was sitting behind my desk and I heard machine gun fire coming through the front door of our office, which is a big glass door, and all the glass were shattered. There were 60 masked gunmen who came to take us hostage. So all of us drove under our desks, grabbed our phones, and they were aiming not for us because we were not a high value target, but they were aiming for the gentleman who ran the office, the son of the wealth creator. He was thrown into a room sized safe and he was kept without harm. Five hours later, we were led down the fire escape by the SWAT team. We were safe, but what happened was transformative for the organization and for this gentleman as a leader. He asked me to begin a strategic planning process that would focus on whether or not we were having impact. That led me 10 years later to be asked to run the White House office on impact. But before I leave that, I tell you that I was also invited to be a Rotary International scholar. They sent me to the Soviet Union and this was right after I had started my first job. So for two months, I go to the Soviet Union and I'm assigned to meet with Politburo leaders who were four times my age and five times my girls. So it was a fascinating experience. But everywhere I went, I was told by intelligence officers. So at the same time, I wanted an intelligence dossier because they thought I was a spy. Again, 10 years later, I find myself negotiating on behalf of the Reagan White House, with the Soviet leaders on a different platform. So but when I go back to again, when I was at age 20 and I had this experience in the Soviet Union, when I returned to the U.S., I had a big requirement that was put on me as a result of earning this fellowship from Rotary. Now that I had to speak to Rotary Clubs all over the country. Well, I thought this is interesting because had been trained by my dad, who was a Dale Carnegie, a public speaking coach, and he'd always just drill all of these Dale Carnegie rules into me, which is great to learn, but, I now recognize that I had stories to tell, and this was critical for me to be able to stand up in front of these important business leaders in the local communities where I was speaking and tell stories that illustrated points I was trying to make, that gave me my content, that gave me the ability to tell stories. We're going to talk a little bit about how you could do that as well. But I want to finish up on point number two, and that is that accelerated delivery. This is journalistic style of speaking, telling stories and using a journalistic style of delivery, which I call now accelerated delivery. If you ever watch David Muir on the evening news or now some of the others are picking this up as well. They want you to hear it's a fast delivery. They want you to hear as much information within their 22 minutes that is allotted for them to be news readers, and you feel two things as a result of this, that they're smarter because they're speaking fast, and number two, that they're efficient and using your time. So you're attracted to listening to them. And as speakers, I want you to remember this as well. It is important to move your message along and not to be deliberate, but at the same time, be mindful of your audience because most audiences suffer a degree, significant degree of hearing loss. So you also want to be thoughtful of your audience. But I think accelerated delivery, journalistic style of storytelling is definitely the way that we're doing this now. That's point number two. We did number one was historic or just number two is journalistic style of speaking. Number three, the mind grabs hold and remembers what? It remembers pictures. So would you want to do is you want to paint pictures by telling metaphor, by creating metaphors. One of the great examples is my friend, who is the recently retired curator of Northern European and Dutch painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. When he gives a lecture about a painting, he may put the painting up in front of him. But what he tells is the story of the political economy at a time of war when all these great paintings were being done in Amsterdam. He depicts the life that was there was around these artists and why it was important that they were painting these pictures and what they were conveying. You are taken into you're transported to Holland at that time and you can relive this. You can see it with your own eyes the way he is picturing it, telling a picture, painting a picture is a very effective way to be able to communicate it and leave a message. Think about what Arthur Wheelock does in describing those Dutch paintings. Number four. So that's number three. The mind grabs hold and remembers pictures, use visualization to help people remember what you're saying. Number four, collecting and retelling your own stories. So we have this big phenomenon today that all of you are familiar with, which is through podcasts and bloggers and webinars, people basically everywhere and influencers because it's an entire industry, they are bent on telling their stories. Now, I find this can be tremendously tedious and I think it can be also a way to really manipulate people. But at the same time, it's very popular. People want to hear what other people have struggled with and hopefully have come out as the victor. So you have to starting out with Oprah, Suze Orman, Wayne Dyer, people who have made vast fortunes not just influencing, but telling their own stories. Now, you might say, well, my life is not interesting. I don't really have any stories to tell, but that's not really true. You do have interesting stories to tell. And it could be a conversation that you had with one of your kids. It could be a conversation you had with someone you work with. It could be a traffic stop where you were getting a ticket. It could be the mundane things of life. And you watch these people that you think are convincing and telling their own stories, a lot of what they're sharing with you is everyday. Why? Because people relate to the everyday experiences that we are all having. They don't want to see you as a speaker removed from their  aura or from their connection. They want to see you as a fellow traveler. They want to see you as a fellow sufferer, but they want to get something out of it that you have learned. So this requires what I call living in an interpretive life. This is what I'm asking you to do here in point four, collecting and retelling your own stories. The way you can do this is to live in interpretive light. So every day and a lot of us, we can do journaling, think about the day you live every life and make notes about it. It can be as I say, it could be a conversation with a friend. It could be a conversation with a child. It could be a conversation with a parent. It can be an incident that happened to you at the gym or anything that is going on in your life or your observations of life, even the things that you read that's living in interpretive curious light. And to be an effective speaker, you really need to be curious. I started out by talking about how I felt about it and asking you how you felt about the testimony that these technology company CEOs gave yesterday on Capitol Hill. I'm curious about that. I wonder what you think about that. That's a way for me to connect with you, because if you've seen it or you've even read about it, you probably the chances you probably have an opinion about it. This is living in interpretively. One time I was giving a talk in San Francisco and a woman stood up afterwards and she said, "I'm a millennial, we have a terrible time connecting with other people. Do you have any advice for us?" I said yes, as a matter of fact, I do because I hear this complaint all the time. How do I connect with other people? This is a part of living interpretively. And I'll give you this clue. I said to her, "go up to someone who's at the other end of the bar and say, where are you born? They will inevitably say, "well, I live here in in the Bay Area." And then you say, "no, no, no, no, no. I really want to know where you were born." And then that person may say, "well, I was born in Mexico City." "Oh, that's really interesting. I went to Mexico one time. And what do you bluh bluh bluh..." That I assure you would begin a bridge to your audience of one person. It will begin to open up a relationship for you because it means that you're curious. People are flattered when you ask them a question and you had to be sincerely interested. But it is a way to cause a bond and open up a relationship with another person that will also help give you something to talk about because you've learned something from this person,, As a millenial, a lot of what is not true of all, of course, but a lot of millennials are just have not been trained or they don't have the natural instinct to do this. But it's causing them a lot of problems in their jobs because they're not connecting. Be curious. Live an interpretive life. Number five. You can also tell the stories of others. You don't have to talk about yourself. I think it's a terrible idea to talk about yourself, although it's a huge phenomenon today. There's no question about that. So how do you do that? You read about, you can read obituaries. Now, that sounds sort of dark, but I can tell you that obituaries are like reading living history. So when a person passes away and someone writes an obituary even about a person who maybe not even great accomplishment, they're fascinating stories to read. You can you can report on this. You can retell the stories that you learn by reading obituaries. The Times of London has a fabulous page, long obituaries of people. You find interesting things about people that have survived World War II, survived concentration camps, have built companies, have written music, all of these things are stories that you can retell. You can say yesterday I learned about this Iron Man who was eight-- he been in five Ironman competitions. And the way he got there was which is one of my coaching students rowed his boat from without any power from Laguna to Hawaii. And en route to Hawaii, he got a call offering him three point two dollars billion to buy his company. So he made his transaction in this small boat that he was rowing from Laguna to Hawaii. I mean, this is astounding, right? So these are interesting, to me I find that a terribly interesting story about him. Now, I can use that to make a point. And I never talked about myself, but I did reveal the fact that I was curious about that. And I wanted to find out what exactly made this guy. Why could he be on here on the cover of Men's Today magazine?Because he's a great Ironman athlete and on the cover of Fortune magazine, because he's an extraordinary business person. So I think these are telling the stories of other people and you get to it by being curious and living in interpretive light. You can also do fictionalized stories. So very often in TED talks or like Briney Brown, if you know about her. These are things that, again, you can create stories. You can say, you know, I mean, you can you can pattern it after a real story, but you can change the facts. You can certainly change the name. You can change the place. The point is you're actually molding words that you're trying to get across by giving example. Now, isn't that the the best way to teach a child? So I was having a conversation last night with someone and they said, well, you know, I didn't like the way my my kid was sitting at the dinner table is making too much noise. So I said, you know, if you went to the White House today and you were invited there for lunch, a time to a little kid, would you make all of that noise? Wouldn't you be more polite about speaking in public? So, again, this is using examples as storytelling to make a point critically important to be able to do this, that so that's fictionalized stories. That's point number six. Seven, employing stories and metaphors to support a point. So, again, you can go into historical accounts of people who have endured tremendous heartache or endure the collapse of government, and I think very much about my friend Aniko, who at age six in 1954 when the Soviets were marching into Hungary, she escaped and she walked over the fields of bristles and barbed wire and her bare feet to get on a freight train and eventually took her to Spain, that eventually got her to Canada, where she lived and then eventually came to America to live a free and successful life. But did she ever forget that? No, she always remembered the cost of freedom to her and to her family. And she's been a champion of freedom ever since. As a matter of fact, she can't as she is chairing an initiative to bring to the world's attention the terrible effect of the signing of the Treaty of Trianon, which was one hundred years ago, and how it dispersed the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe and especially the Hungarians. So there's a story about a person that you can use as an example. Reagan did this all the time, and if I had more time, I would I would share that with you. We may come back to... So here this first section is complete storytelling. All speaking is persuasion in seven points, the historic origins of storytelling using the journalistic style and advanced or speed presentation. Three, The mind grabs hold and takes takes these images and remembers them images that you're talking about the paintings are the willott. Four, collecting and retelling your own stories, being and living in interpretive light, being curious. Five, using the stories of others. Six using fictionalized stories that you make up. And seven, employing stories and metaphors to support and appoint and paint a picture. Those are seven points of storytelling. Now we're moving quickly on to building a bridge to your audience. Now, this is critically important to understand that, at least 65 percent of all communication is nonverbal. So what do I mean by that? So in 1971, Dr. Mooradian explored this consciousness communication and he said that is a matter of fact. He assigned a high percentage of communication associated with nonverbal but consciousness, communication. So I will tell you that before you even utter a word, your consciousness or your thought about your message and yourself is communicating itself. So when you go out to an audience, either physically or virtually like most of our presentations are today, people will hear I say that could be silently or they're catching your authenticity, they're catching or they're making a determination about what you're thinking and how you are presenting and the importance of what you think about things. It is communicated nonverbally. So why and why do we even, why is this critically important? Because most people miss this and they don't understand the fact that, you know, you can and we all know this phenomenon. Oh, I was thinking about Carrie and she called me on the phone five minutes later. So we all have these experiences, right? So you have to recognize that it's the mental connection with your audience. It's the mental connection that's more powerful than the physical or the verbal connection with your audience. So it's important to at least value this and understand where that's coming from and to recognize that. So what do you do about it? Well, you imbue yourself with the importance of your subject. You think about that and the degree to which you're thinking about it will reflect can reflect on your whole audience to the degree that they're receptive to it. That's your responsibility. A lot of people think that getting up to speak or talk to anyone or no matter the size of the crowd is just something that is mechanical. It's not, you have to take responsibility for it. And it's not just a matter of writing a speech, and some people say to me, well, is it okay if I use notes or if I speak? A prepared from a prepared document? It's fine to do that as long as you deliver it in a conversational way or a journalistic way. So really, the best way to put together a speech and this is a whole other part of a course that I do, but it's called the architecture of a great speech. But what you really have to do is you have to build your speech or your remarks around what we just cover stories. And you can really conquer your fear of our concern about making a coherent presentation by just saying, I want to tell you four stories. I want to tell you three stories, never more than three or four, by the way. But I want to tell you three or four stories now. These are things that illustrate the points that I'm trying to make. And you know what they'll remember when they walk away? They'll remember the stories and they're going to search the stories with the points that you were making. So this is number one, nonverbal communication and defeating fear are terribly important. So one time I said to Margaret Thatcher, you know, you're such an accomplished speaker. Are you ever fearful? She said, Oh, Jimma, of course I'm fearful all the time. And I said, You are. I mean, you're called the Iron Lady, all this. And she said to me and I said, What do you do about it? And she said, When every time I get on a podium, she said, I have to talk to myself. And I say, look, look here, old guy, you can do this. You're not afraid, you can conquer this fear. And then she said, What happens is my message takes over and I get so devoted to and so committed to and so inspired by my message that the fear disappeared. Why? Because the ego quiets. Fear is the big disconnect with your audience. Fear is operating to disconnect you and to say we they it's not, it's we are together, the audience and you are together as one. Fear tries to say you're separate. This is where the ego is speaking to you. Let your content take over. I saw this time and time again, if you see, for example, president's giving a State of the Union address, especially President Reagan started having heroes come in. So every president has heroes come in and the visitors gallery. So I can see the president get so inspired by those heroes that it makes his speech glisten. So put things in your speech that inspire you because the audience wants to hear you excited and you inspired about your message as well. That's one way to defeat fear. Second, bring down the fourth wall. This is critically important. You know what the fourth call is? So let's say you're a performer, you're a musician, or you're giving a speech and you go on stage, you have general you have a wall behind you. You have walls to right or left. But what's what's in front of you? What's in front of you? That's the wall dividing you from your audience. You must bring down the fourth wall. You absolutely have to bring that fourth wall of division down. In order to build a bridge to your audience. You have to build a bridge so your words can go cross the bridge and show your audience can come back across the bridge. So you have to tear that down. So one time I took Nancy. Reagan to a graduation of a drug abuse center. It was a huge, massive gymnasium, there were hundreds, maybe over a thousand parents and students. And in the middle of the room, they had this platform and they would announce the name of a kid and they would say, okay, you're clean, you're going home. So that kid would run to the middle, meet the parents. They devolved into tears. The whole audience was crying. So we're sitting there, the Secret Service is crying. The Secret Service is not allowed to cry. The White House Press Corps cry. They would want you to know that they were crying. So I'm sitting next to Nancy Reagan and we had prepared remarks. She was like, okay, we have to tear those up, absolutely right. So she goes after this two and a half hours, they thrust a microphone in her face and she starts to talk. Well, we tore up her prepared remarks. So she turns to the parents. She tells them how much she loves them, how much she understands the hurt that they've just gone through. And she turns to the kids and she says, I love you. You have a great life ahead of you. I'm here to support you. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so forth. So I think when she entered the hall, people thought this could be a political stunt. Afterward, they carried her out on their shoulders. The kids in the White House press of course, saying to me, what happened to her? What happened to her that night? She had to speak from her heart. This is what brought down the fourth wall, a partition between her and her audience. And I said to her in the car in the back on the way back to the hotel that night, I said, this is one of my favorite quotes, whenever the heart speaks, no matter how simple the words, they're always acceptable to those who have hearts, that is really what happened. That's bringing down the fourth wall. Three, we had to fire through these being fully briefed and doing your research. I tell you that those tech CEOs I didn't feel were fully briefed. I didn't think they really knew their audience. They certainly know their their topic. But you have to relate the topic to your audience. So I remember, for example, one time I'm going to speak at the University of Michigan at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library and I thought I was going to be speaking to university students, college students. So that's how I prepared my well, bad for me. I didn't do a sufficient amount of research on what the audience was going to entail. So when I get up there to speak at the podium, I look out and there was standing room only, but they were all retirees. Well, that was great but I had to pivot my remarks. Now, if I had given the remarks I plan to to a college audience, they would have missed the mark. You want to hit the mark? How do you do that? By understanding and doing the research about who your audience is. Again, going back to those texts, they didn't realize that they weren't just speaking to members of Congress. They were speaking to their shareholders and stakeholders and analysts around the world, as I said. So you have to be fully briefed. You have to understand who your audience is. Fourth point, where you look your body language and your voice pitch help build this bridge to your audience. Now, how is it that they do that? So I once worked with and not too long ago with the gentleman, mature guy who had a very high pitched voice, he was embarrassed by it. So he never wanted to give a presentation. And yet he was ahead of a company and he's saying to me, do I have to do this? Am I going to do it? And I said, I took a basketball and I pushed it into its stomach. And I said, take in the hot air from your gut, move that air up through your vocal cords. Because he had said to me, there's no way I can change my voice, I can tell you that right now." And I said, you absolutely can change your voice. Why do you want to have a deeper and more resonant voice? Because the human ear hears deeper sounds better than high pitched sound. That is the way it reaches. And it also grabs their mentality and makes them pay attention. The high pitched right now. It's very interesting also that over the past four decades, women's voices, their pitch has gone down. The more powerful women have become in the workplace and in corporate settings, the lower their pitch that that's important because people generally take a lower pitched voice more seriously, because no one that can hear it better. And number two, it sounds more powerful. So this is all part of your body language. There's a lot to talk about this. We can cover this in Q&A and your voice pitch and your body language. You certainly want to make a presentation that you are comfortable and pay attention to what you wear. Pay attention to all of these details which you could get by by reading my blog, too. Last three points here. Are you-- is your material? I would say, have you re ally prepared material that your audience really wants to hear? So in the White House, we had a man named Peter Robinson and he was a speechwriter and he went to East Berlin and he asked the East Berliners, he said, what would you like the president to say when he comes to Reagan was going to celebrate the anniversary of the historic city of Berlin. And they said, oh, we want him to say to Gorbachev to tear down our wall, tear down this wall. And he comes back to the Oval Office, he tells the press the president gets very excited about this and writes it in his speech. Everyone else takes that out of his speech. When they edit his his prepared remarks, he puts it back in when he gets to the Berlin Wall, where they when he goes to Berlin and he is making this at the Brandenburg Gate, he's making the speech. And he says to his aide, he said that the voice of the State Department, I'm going to like this. He put it back in and he says that those famous iconic words, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Now, that resonated because he knew his audience is and his intended audience, of course, was Gorbachev. He had established enough of a relationship with him to know that as his audience, he wanted Gorbachev to let that wall come down. That's what he used in it, in his inflection and emphasis. He said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It wasn't Mr. Gorbachev. Tear down this wall, this Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. He had already been talking about walls. He was directing Gorbachev to do something. So he had the credibility to do it. This is understanding what your audience wants to hear. I implore you to think about that. Don't make remarks that you want to to to hear for yourself. Make sure that what your audience wants to hear the last two points. What is what you say? What is her? That you follow me here-- we usually think that when we hear ourselves say something that another person is hearing it the same way. I would say 90 percent of the cases, that is not true. You could say, for example, I want to know I don't want to eat a hamburger or you could say I want to eat a hamburger, and someone could say, well, maybe in two weeks he wants to eat a hamburger. Or when I was negotiating with the Chinese, for example, at one time, I kept asking for things and they kept saying no. And finally, when we got back to The Situation Room in the White House, we thought we had to completely fail. It was going to be a global news story, a complete failure. They had acceded to all of our demands, but they couldn't say it to us. They couldn't really take what we were saying, what we thought we were saying. You have to think about how what you're saying the word you're saying are being received by your audience. Again, this is this section of really understanding building bridge with your audience. Last, before we just get to Q&A here for a few minutes, the last point again, one of the most important is to make your audience feel that you're together with them. You're not separate. You're not a person who's either so important because you know your subject or you don't think are important enough to warrant they're listening to it. So I have two examples where I had a conversation on the South Lawn of the White House with Barry Martin, who is this famous film actress and stage actress. And I said to her, I said, what makes you so successful with your audience? And she threw her arms around me and she said, Jim, two things. I was born in Texas. And second, I was born loving people and they loved me back. I'll never forget that as long as I live. She loves her audience and they loved her back. Your audience wants to feel your love and your affection and your interest and your care. If you give them that, they're going to give it back to you. And lastly, I don't know if any of you ever watched reruns. Probably I'm going to say that now for this audience. I can't see all of you, but I'm assuming certain things that the audience from Carol Burnett shows, which were absolutely hysterical and entertaining over a 13 season. She had a song that she sang at the close of every one of those shows and the words that were, It's been so nice to be together. And to me, that is a capstone and sort of a way to summarize the best kind of relationship that you want to end up with, with your audience. It's been so nice to be together. That is a way that really can symbolize a way, a relationship between a speaker and an audience. It's been so nice to be together, and I feel that way about you all today. And again, just to summarize, these two points we power through here, storytelling, building a bridge to your audience in 14 points. It's been nice to be together, and now I'm going to turn it over to Emily and try to answer a few of your questions. Can't hear you, Emily. 

Emily Stringer: Alright. Sorry about the mutes. James, thank you for such a wonderful and informative presentation on a topic that many of us are curious about and where we all want to improve. Folks, for those of you who would like more information on James, please feel free to visit him on LinkedIn, drop him an email, visit his website or purchase his book, which is an incredible read. With that said, before we jump to our Q&A session, we are going to put a quick pull up on the screen for each of you so that we can get you any information that you would like after the presentation. Are you interested in learning more about MBO Advantage or MBO Marketplace?MBO Advantage is our subscription program for independent consultants who are looking to get a competitive edge on their competition, work on their public positioning and have the opportunity to network with other elite consultants. MBO Marketplace is our platform where you can post a profile to bid on independent contractor work. Let us know if you would like information on either of these two topics and we will get that out to you as quickly as possible. With that said, James, we will go ahead and jump into our Q&A session. We have several hot topics here that I've seen pop up quite a few times. So first, we will cover Zoom. We've had several questions about Zoom that said, do you have any tips that you can share with our audience when it comes to public speaking on a virtual platform such as Zoom? 

James Rosebush: So that is obviously a very frequent question that I get today, and as I every day I'm giving masterclasses on Zoom and we are all having all of us having meetings with groups and individuals on Zoom. So I think it is tough. I think it's different. I think it's weird that you're speaking to people sometimes that mostly I'm speaking to people that I don't ever see or that I don't know. I think that the point I made about loving your audience, though, is something that emanates from your own heart. So even though you can't see the images of the people that you're necessarily communicating or negotiating with, I think you can still feel an appreciation for your audience, even though you're not seeing them. And you have to work through that. You have to admit to yourself, look, this is how I feel about my audience, because, again, remember, I talked about that important point of the non-verbal communication or it also works for not being able to see your audience as well. They can still feel when you're thinking about them. So be watchful of that. I think also to be careful about your appearance, I have to say maybe in the beginning of COVID, I was having an awful lot of meetings with people who were sitting up against their bed, had, you know, or there, you know, what I considered to be sort of random and too casual situations and I recognize that everyone's under pressure to actually a lot of people are speaking and meeting from their bedrooms. But I think you have to be conscious of when you do see people on Zoom, the backdrop, the lighting, these are all things that you need to take into consideration as a speaker. 

 Emily Stringer: Great, James. I think that's wonderful advice, and especially in the current climate, we can all benefit from those tips so thank you very much for sharing. The next hot topic that we have had come up several times is stage fright and anxiety around public speaking. Can you share with us your best tips on how to overcome that stage fright? 

James Rosebush: So, of course. Seventy five percent of all people in the world suffer from what's called glossophobia, which is a fear of public speaking. So this is remedy in, well, I have a whole chapter on my book, so it's remedied by maybe five or six different steps, which we won't go into in tremendous detail. But I think, first of all, it is like I mentioned in the story I told you about, that it's being more interested in your content and your message and getting that really being inspired by it than you are in yourself, because fear really comes in when the ego takes over. That's something that you have to really be down. And I'll tell you the story of the first time. And Ronald Reagan having been ultimately called the great communicator when he was a sophomore in college, was the first time he ever gave a public speech. I went to years later, I went to that stage and gave a speech myself. But this is what happened to Reagan. So Reagan is actually leading a charge of students to get the president of the college fire. You can think of Ronald Reagan as the person doing that, right? So they want to get in. You pull all the students together to get this president, college president fired. He said to him and he said to himself, I'll never forget that speech is the most important one I ever gave because I overcame fear because I was getting a response from my audience. That's the fastest way to get rid of fear is to get-- he said. Every comment I made was met with an uproarious response and enthusiasm. So put yourself in your remarks. Tell a story that gets a response from your audience and gets them really in a groove with you. And then you will become relaxed and you'll say, well, you know what? Maybe I'm not doing so bad. But again, becoming more interested in your subject and your content than you are with yourself or thinking about what you look like. Also, I mean, there are a million little tips, but when you get up to speak or make a presentation, wear clothing that you like, feel good about yourself, overcome the fact that you might be thinking, oh, I shouldn't have won this shirt, I should have won this jacket or, you know, I didn't shave today or maybe you don't want to shave, but whatever it is, put yourself in a position where you feel good about yourself and that I think it's a part of winning the fear. But it's a big battle. You know, Martin Luther King said the only way to defeat fear is through faith, faith in something more powerful than you. 

Emily Stringer: That's excellent advice, James, and something that I think many of us can use, wow. Seventy five percent of people have some sort of anxiety around public speaking. That's really astounding. No wonder this topic came up several times. Next, let's jump to how do you go about researching your audience?

James Rosebush: So as I mentioned to you, this is so important and there's no excuse for not doing this work, by the way. Absolutely no excuse. So you know that if you're let's say you have a small audience and you're you're making a sales pitch to these people who are even making a phone call people. And I should add that, you know, fear of public speaking isn't just people who stand up and talk to millions of people. There are people who actually have a fear of picking up a phone, making a sales call. And these are things that we're really fearful of and lack of confidence about. Either our subject or our ability to make the pitch or presentation is at every level of society. So I think that knowing your audience and doing the research about who your audience really is, you don't have to be aggressive. The United States with a full staff of people doing that research, I mentioned that one example. You need to find out yourself a good example, so Emily and Matthew and your whole team and MBO, we talked about who this audience be today. What kinds of people are signing up for this class today? So I was very interested to learn a little bit about you. You didn't know exactly who all would be signing up, but you had some ideas. We talked about it. And I think those avenues are available to anyone who's making a pitch. I think just as if you were making if you were selling a product or service and you were making that pitch to someone else and you were speaking to them, it's important that you know something about them before you do that, because, of course, the best way to sell is not to force a product on someone, but to ask them, how can I be of help to you? Well, you have to know who the you is, right? 

Emily Stringer: That's great advice, James, and something we can all learn a bit from. For our next question, can you review Aristotle's laws of rhetoric? 

James Rosebush: You know, I knew I do have it here, but it has to do with you can look it up yourself, but it has to do with cadence, you know, a cadence is? Cadence, rhythm, elocution, presentation, and diction. So these are those are the five things. So and one of the things related to rhetoric, which I think is so critically important and is just not ever really taught or rarely ever taught by anyone. And that is emphasis. We talk about this in this book, winning your audience. But how you I gave you the example of Reagan saying, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. So there are clues where you and their laws, a proper emphasis and cadence and rhythm. These are all fascinating. And if you I think one of the big lessons that people use to do teach rhythm and cadence is to have people learn how to speak Shakespearean sonnets because it takes tremendous skill to bring through them, bring out the meaning. When you are actually speaking and repeating Shakespearean sonnets or reading the Bible, you have to do it in a way that is picturesque and has the right cadence and rhythm and also taking breaks in what you're saying. Some people will say to me, well, what if I get to the end of a sentence and I don't have another sentence to say that will say to yourself, first of all, the little word "um" is no longer permissible. So you don't have to say "um", but you can get to the end of a sentence like this and stop for a split second before you go on to the next one, because the way the human mind is thinking is basically it's going to take bracketed material. And you also want to be able to understand the right, the words that are correctly emphasized, because that brings out the right meaning. So that's basically what a lot of Aristotle's laws of rhetoric rhetoric are about. And if we only learn more of those laws, we would be more successful in sales people more have a greater ability to get along with people, because we would recognize that what we're saying is not always what is heard. And we would we would win more business. 

Emily Stringer: Great advice, James, the pause is very powerful, and I think sometimes we lose sight of that. One quick note and we will jump to two more questions and then wrap this up. Several folks have asked whether they will be receiving a copy of this recording. We will get that out to each of you who have registered for this webinar within the next week. There are no sites that will be coming. It is a master class and you will receive a copy of the master class. James, two more questions before we get this wrapped up. How do you engage an audience that has different age groups? 

James Rosebush: Very good point. I think that what you have to do, I think I think that's a big, big challenge. But let's talk about one thing that is related to this. So you've seen me at times doing this. During this up, I use my hands or use my arms. And I'm getting the answer to your question. But it strikes me that we should talk about this from a lot of people are very concerned about hands. What happens to them? You know, should I put my hands in my pockets? Should I put my hands behind my back? Should I have to have a chair here that I'm leaning on? Put my hands on the podium. So this is a basic rule about hand. Use hand as if they were exclamation point or grammatical. So let's say today I'm going to cover two points, see storytelling and building a bridge to your audience or we're going to have a seven points that we're going to cover. So I'm using my my fingers to indicate these numbers or I am so happy to see all of you. Do you see what I'm doing here? So I'm just using my hands as gestures to support what I'm saying verbally. Otherwise I keep my hands down. And if it's difficult to to do that, as I said, rest your hands on this chair, which I have here, resting hands on the desk, you can put a hand in the pocket, but do not overuse your hands in hand gestures. That is something that will take energy away from what you're presenting and it will distract the audience, keep your hands away from but use them to support. It could be an exclamation point like this. It could be a gesture to include everyone. And getting back to your question, it made me think about you want to make sure that everyone in the audience is included. So if you had children or you have elderly people or you have a mix of people, I think you have to throw in things that are going to be interesting to everyone. And that is probably one of the most challenging types of audiences to speak to. But I think storytelling, again, is the way to conquer that. And you might have to tell stories that would be of interest to if your audience is of mixed ages and mixed generations, you can be careful about the stories that you're telling, relating to the not only interests of the people that are coming in the audience, but the ages as well. 

Emily Stringer: That's wonderful advice, James, and much appreciated for our last question here to kind of add on to that, how do you recover or re engage your audience when they quit on you?

James Rosebush: Oh, that's, of course, everyone's great fear. Are you talking about if someone is losing interest, obviously loses interest in what you're saying? Okay, so I tell you that at the beginning when people were saying when phones were really ubiquitous, they would say, oh, turn off your phones, you can't bring your phone in if you're giving a lecture or giving a talk. And then, of course, that kind of went away because wherever one where anyone is, they had their phone and it's usually on. So what happens in the beginning when I saw people on their phone, I thought, oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. What? I've lost their interest. They're not paying attention to what I'm saying now. I've seen in my speeches over the past maybe two years, three years, that people are actually taking notes on their phone so that that's that's a confirming kind of feeling that you get from that. So I think that might be my best answer for that is to say don't despair because people are going to sleep or they're yawning or they're talking to someone or they're on their phone or they just don't look interested. I think the way to conquer that, though, is perhaps to raise the level of your voice against storytelling throughout a story that's of interest. Or ask a question now to go back to that architecture of a great speech, which we talk about and probably never leave your audience without asking them questions. So you want to have a takeaway. So a way to, I think, awaken someone who's in your audience is to throw out a rhetorical question like what do you think about or who do you think is going to win the World Series? Or what do you think about when is Major League Baseball really going to come back in full force, throw those questions out. Now, that doesn't mean you're waiting for a verbal answer, but it challenges people in the audience to start thinking and to wake up, throw out a question and get them bring them in, reel them back in to your content and your presentation. Again, I say this is work as a speaker, as a communicator. This is not in TV. You can be lazy and relaxed about it. Is your responsibility to deliver the pitch and to make sure that it reaches its intended audience and that it has an impact that is your responsibility. No one else is going to do it for you, but there are tools to that you can engage and that you can adopt for yourself and where you can be tremendously successful. You can conquer fear, you can become the great communicator. You can have a home run for anything that you need to pitch, sell, persuade or communicate today. I have confidence in all of you can do this. 

Emily Stringer: James, thank you so much for the presentation and the informative Q&A. This was wonderful and a topic that resonates with so many folks who do have that fear of public speaking or want to improve now that we're all in situations where we need to present ourselves, even if it's as simple as on a zoom meeting with our teams at work. So thank you very much for joining us today. This was wonderful. On behalf of the team, thank you for the production to those who have joined us today. We appreciate having you on the line. We will get you a copy of today's presentation out to you within the next seven days. And we look forward to seeing everyone online very soon.