Speak with Impact

by Allison Shapira

  PRAISE FOR

  SPEAK WITH IMPACT

  “Allison Shapira has become not only a master of public speaking but one of the best speech coaches in the US. In this new book, she provides a clear, practical roadmap for those who want to have an impact in today’s clamorous world. If you want to excel on your feet, read this, keep this, and read again.”

  —DAVID GERGEN,

  CNN senior political analyst, Harvard Kennedy School professor of public service, and former White House advisor to four presidents

  “Allison can prove and has proven that anyone can learn to lead; it all starts with your voice.”

  —JORDAN HEWSON,

  founder, Speakable

  “If you want to improve your public speaking, spend a few hours with Allison’s book. It’s loaded with good advice and tricks of the trade that will help you up your game.”

  —DAN HEATH,

  coauthor of Made to Stick and The Power of Moments

  “The brilliance of Speak with Impact is in its simple genius. Allison’s lessons are by nature specific, practical, and transferable. With Allison’s help, I was able to arm my team with the proper tools needed to enhance their presentations skills and build self-assurance in public speaking.”

  —DEBORAH DUGAN,

  CEO, (RED)

  “Allison has written a practical and thoughtful guide to public speaking that equips the reader with a powerful set of tools that are applicable to any presentation or speaking opportunity. Allison successfully blends her narrative voice with key takeaways that I found to be incredibly useful.”

  —BRUCE SOLL,

  senior VP and counsel of company affairs, L Brands

  “Allison Shapira’s new book is as much about leadership as it is about public speaking. She prods us to ask tough questions: what do we want to accomplish, who is our audience, why should they listen to us? And then she makes us critique ourselves and test our messages with the audience. I wish I had met her years ago.”

  —GERALDINE LAYBOURNE,

  media entrepreneur, first president, Nickelodeon, cofounder, Oxygen

  “Reading Speak with Impact is like having a one-on-one session with a master trainer in public speaking. Allison Shapira’s practical advice and well-hewn insights are captured on every page and will give novice speakers confidence and seasoned veterans a stronger voice.”

  —JEFFREY SEGLIN,

  director and senior lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School Communications Program

  “Allison skillfully commands the attention of her audiences with professionalism, grace, humor, and insight. Through Speak with Impact, she provides pragmatic tools, practical advice, and examples that will help readers build powerful public speaking skills.”

  —ZOË DEAN-SMITH,

  vice president, economic empowerment & entrepreneurship, Vital Voices Global Partnership

  Information about External Hyperlinks in this eBook

  Please note that footnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.

  © 2018 Allison Shapira

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins.

  Book design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates.

  Epub Edition September 2018 9780814439364

  978-0-8144-3936-4 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956212

  978-0-8144-3971-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  18 19 20 21 22 LSC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION: Confessions of a Former Opera Singer

  CHAPTER 1 Before You Speak:

  What Is Public Speaking, and Where Does It Happen?

  CHAPTER 2 Start with Strategy:

  The Three Most Important Questions to Ask Before a Speech or Presentation

  CHAPTER 3 Write the Speech:

  A Process to Write Any Speech or Presentation

  CHAPTER 4 Empower Your Audience:

  Critical Tools to Connect with Your Audience

  CHAPTER 5 Polish the Speech:

  The Final Steps Most People Neglect

  CHAPTER 6 Show What You Mean:

  The Three Movements That Make Your Speech Come Alive

  CHAPTER 7 Pause and Breathe:

  Calm Your Nerves and Strengthen Your Voice

  CHAPTER 8 Give the Speech:

  All Those Last-Minute Details

  CHAPTER 9 Illustrate the Speech:

  How to Use Visual Aids and Technology

  CHAPTER 10 Prepare for the Unexpected:

  How to Speak Off the Cuff and Answer Questions

  CHAPTER 11 Speak in Different Situations:

  On Calls, On Panels, or Across Borders

  CHAPTER 12 Build Your Executive Presence:

  Five Components to Bring Out Authority and Authenticity

  CHAPTER 13 Find Your Courage to Speak:

  How to Use This Book to Speak Up

  ENDNOTES

  INDEX

  Acknowledgments

  The act of writing may be a solitary process, but publishing a book takes a team. From conducting research to sharing advice to providing feedback, a significant number of people can be seen, felt, and heard in this book.

  Thank you to Anthony Mattero at CAA, whose expert advice guided me throughout the process, and to Ellen Kadin, who recognized the need for this book and took a chance on a new author. Thank you to Jeff Farr at Neuwirth & Associates and Timothy Burgard and the team at HarperCollins Leadership for their partnership and enthusiastic support.

  Friends and fellow authors Diane Mulcahy and Jennefer Witter readied me for the writing process and continue to model the way. Emily Adams sifted through pages of dense academic papers and left no digital stone unturned to verify a statistic or simplify a concept. Jeffrey Seglin was a constant source of wisdom and patience through my countless questions. David Gergen’s mentorship paved the way for many of the experiences in this book. Arthur and Barbara Bushkin have been incredible champions of both the book and my career.

  Friends, colleagues, and mentors spent hours reading and reviewing the manuscript and gave me honest and practical feedback: Paul Anghinetti, Margaux Bergen, Trudi Bresner, Marie Danziger, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, and Jeanine Turner.

  Dozens of people agreed to be interviewed or quoted, many of whom are friends or colleagues and a few of whom have never met me: Sidd Chopra, Roger Courville, Jacki Coyle, Glenn Croston, Marshall Ganz, Hadas Golan, Kristi Hedges, Stephen Krupin, Timothy Moffett, Helen Moses, Tim Murphey, Scott Perlo, Mike Rayburn, Matthew Rees, Tamara Elliott Rogers, Olivia Schofield, Annette Simmons, Patrick Pendleton Smith, Bruce Turkel, David Wells, and Gordon Whitman.

  Many others provided invaluable support along this journey: Morra Aarons-Mele, Sedrick Banks, Kimberly Berger, Bill Cates, Barbara Day, Zoë Dean-Smith, Greg Dinkin, Deborah Dugan, Rob Eager, Gregg Gregory, Dan Heath, Jordan Hewson, Sabra Horne, Dara Iserson, Jinnyn Jacob, Marcus Johnson, Geraldine Laybourne, Brian Mandell, Raegan Moya-Jones, Arnold Sanow, and Bruce Soll.

  To the stellar team at Global Public Speaking, especially Meghan Gonzalez and Brittan Stockert: thank you for making the business run so smoothly while I was sequestered throughout the writing process.

  To my parents, Bett
y and Richard Greenspan, and my brothers, Shaun, Peter, and Scott: thank you for trusting me six years ago when I took an enormous leap of faith.

  To the thousands of women and men whom I’ve worked with over the past fifteen years, thank you for confiding in me your challenges and goals, your fears and insecurities, your hopes and aspirations. Your willingness to be vulnerable showed me how similar we all are, and your experiences turned into powerful teaching lessons that will empower people around the world.

  Introduction

  Confessions of a Former Opera Singer

  It was 1996. I was an undergraduate music student at Boston University. A younger, eager sophomore in the vocal performance program, I was about to have a difficult conversation with my voice teacher. I just didn’t know it yet.

  We were in her office during one of our weekly voice lessons: she was sitting at her baby grand piano, one hand resting on the keys, one hand flipping absentmindedly through People magazine, as she sometimes did during our lessons. I was standing a few feet away, in the curve of the piano’s body, waiting for her to play a scale.

  After she finished playing one of those scales, in the middle of the lesson, my voice teacher casually said something that made my heart drop to the floor. She said, “You know, you might want to consider other avenues for a musical career besides performing.”

  I had wanted to be an opera singer since I was thirteen years old. I had studied in the Visual and Performing Arts program at Booker High School in Sarasota, Florida, and had spent my teenage years as an overachieving young vocalist: competing, singing, studying, performing. I had trained in the Tanglewood Young Artists Vocal Program in Lenox, Massachusetts, and I was about to spend my upcoming summer in Italy with the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music.

  Now here I was, an aspiring opera singer at Boston University, with my mentor and teacher—one of the most influential people in my life—telling me I wasn’t good enough to make it in the industry.

  To tell you the truth, a part of me had known it was coming. I had spent my whole life focused on performing. But when I arrived at college, something had happened: I started to lose my passion for singing. My music teachers said I became “distracted” by subjects like international relations, astrophysics, and foreign languages. Day after day, I felt confined to an underground practice room the size of a closet, playing the piano or singing while dreaming of traveling around the world. My mind was anywhere but in that tiny room; singing had become a chore.

  When my voice teacher suggested that I wasn’t good enough to be an opera singer, yes, I was devastated—but I was also set free. Liberated from the strict bonds of classical music, I could choose to be anything in life. The problem was, I had no idea what to choose. I changed majors and stopped singing for over a decade. It would take me that long to find my voice.

  From Singing to Speaking

  I graduated from college with a major in Italian Language and Literature. “What a practical degree,” I remember my father remarking dryly but lovingly. At the time, I never thought that I would use my vocal training again. I thought it would be relegated to a “fun fact” during corporate icebreakers, or my secret weapon at karaoke. I soon realized I was wrong.

  One of my first jobs after college was at the Consulate General of Israel in Boston. I was a local American employee working on the public affairs team of a foreign government. I soon found out that I would have to give speeches—and speak on behalf of a foreign government during a very turbulent time in the Middle East.

  I was terrified. I had never given a speech in my life—or, to be more correct, my first and last speech had been during my Bat Mitzvah, around the same time I started singing.

  It was a surprising contrast: I could confidently don a green, gem-studded ball gown and stand in front of two thousand people performing a Mozart aria. But the thought of standing onstage in a business suit, with no background music, performing something I had written, filled me with fear.

  Asking around, I found out about Toastmasters International, a global organization whose members come together to practice their public speaking and leadership skills in a safe, comfortable environment.1 I joined the Boston Toastmasters Club and started attending bimonthly meetings. As I learned certain techniques of public speaking—eye contact, body language, and vocal variety—I realized that I already had these skills. Because of my operatic training, I knew how to feel comfortable onstage. I knew how to create an emotional connection with my audience. I knew how to use my voice to project power, confidence, and authority. I had stage presence: I simply had to convert it into executive presence.

  Perhaps most importantly, I knew how to coach others. As aspiring opera singers, we spend much of our time coaching one another on pronunciation, posture, and breathing. Through years of training, I had developed a very critical eye and ear for observing others and a very diplomatic way of giving feedback. I knew how to listen patiently with laser-sharp focus and pick up on subtle vocal shifts and body movements that either enhanced or detracted from a performance.

  There were of course major differences between speaking and singing. When I sang, I was performing other people’s music: Mozart, Puccini, and Schubert. There was background music to keep me on track and a conductor interpreting the composer’s message.

  At the Israeli Consulate, I now needed to write and deliver my own speeches and then take public responsibility for those messages. And do it on behalf of a foreign government. In a time of conflict in the Middle East. At age twenty-three. I had never before worked in international relations and was unprepared for the visceral responses—both positive and negative—to my speeches. I was nervous before every speech and prepared for the worst.

  I had to learn speechwriting tools such as messaging, structure, and persuasion. I needed to prepare for difficult questions from a hostile audience. I may have been a “natural” on delivery, but I needed to overcome the steep learning curve of content creation.

  Through Toastmasters and on-the-job trial and error (a lot of error), my speaking rapidly improved. Soon, I was writing the diplomats’ speeches and coaching them on their public speaking skills. When a last-minute emergency prevented them from giving a speech, I’d give the speech in their place. I became the president of the Boston Toastmasters Club.

  One day, I received an email that would change the trajectory of my professional career. A woman reached out and said that her boss—a doctor who headed up a local nonprofit organization—had an important presentation coming up.

  She asked, “Could Toastmasters help him?”

  I replied, “Of course!” and I encouraged her boss to join the club, come to meetings, and give speeches every month. “Over time,” I said cheerily, “he will make great improvements!”

  She responded, “No, you don’t understand. His speech is on Tuesday. Do you know anyone who can come to his office and help him prepare?”

  I thought about it for a minute and then replied, “Well, for a small hourly fee, I guess I could come to your boss’s office and help him prepare. But it wouldn’t be through Toastmasters.”

  A week later, holding my very first coaching check, I had a major realization as an entrepreneur: I had very valuable knowledge that others would pay to learn. That night, I ordered business cards. I would slowly build that business over the next fifteen years.

  Finding My Voice

  For over a decade, singing did in fact become my fun fact during icebreakers and my secret weapon at karaoke. I even sang the National Anthem for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park in 2004. But I wanted to do more.

  I missed singing and missed performing. What I really wanted to sing, however, wasn’t opera—it was the folk revival music of the 1960s that my parents had listened to when I was growing up: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Judy Collins. When I let loose, I sang folk music.

  So in 2011, soon after graduating from the Harvard Kennedy School with a master of public administration, I started to sing folk songs at open m
ic nights around Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. I borrowed a guitar from a friend and took lessons online to accompany myself.

  Putting together voice and guitar turned into a magical combination: suddenly I could play and sing nearly any song in the world. And I was set free.

  Folk music wasn’t the structured, perfectionist opera that everyone else thought I should sing, where you were under the direction of the conductor or beholden to the composer, where you were evaluated on the perfect pitch of a single tone or the proper pronunciation of an Italian vowel.

  In folk music, I could sing any song I wanted, I could play it any way I wanted, and I didn’t need to be perfect. Nobody cared if I dropped a consonant here or there; in fact, folk audiences were impressed that they could understand the words at all. What they demanded was authenticity, not perfection. I felt empowered and inspired. Liberated from the bonds of opera, I started to write my own songs. One year after learning to play the guitar, I released an album of original music. I had found my voice.

  Helping Others Find Their Voice

  What I thought would be an interesting side career in folk music actually had a pivotal effect on my public speaking business. Once I found my own voice, I wanted to help others find their voice when they spoke in public. Instead of creating a false speaker persona based on who they thought they should be, I wanted to help people connect with their natural drive, and then harness that drive to speak with power and authenticity. I knew that’s how they would make an impact on others.

  In 2012, I took a leap of faith. After ten years of teaching public speaking on the side, I decided to move from Boston to Washington, DC, and launch the business full-time. I moved to DC without a single client but with a supportive network of friends, former classmates, and colleagues. Within the first year, I had over thirty clients. The business grew so quickly that I hired a team of coaches and trainers so we could help even more people.

  Over the years, I’ve had incredible opportunities to teach public speaking and presentation skills: at the Harvard Kennedy School and Georgetown University, for the United States government and foreign governments, and for global Fortune 500 companies. I’ve had the honor of working with the nonprofit organization Vital Voices Global Partnership, traveling around the world building communication skills in women leaders who are growing a business, running for office, or launching a nonprofit.