How Anyone Can Tell to Win, Hollywood-Style

Blog, Books — December 28, 2011 at 18:52

Whether your job is to encourage employees to perform a task, shareholders or business partners to believe in your vision or customers to buy your product, Hollywood executive Peter Gruber says we’re all in the emotional transportation business.

In his new book, Tell To Win, Gruber demonstrates how purposeful and emotional storytelling is the catalyst to propel people to act.

Gruber has a very colorful past, having produced blockbuster films (i.e. – Batman, Flashdance, The Color Purple, among others) for the past three decades and his films have earned more than 50 Academy Award nominations.

Developing these films along with some of the biggest egos in the movie industry serve as a backdrop to many of the stories he uses to vividly show rather than tell in this book. The basic screenwriting formula can be used to tell an inspiring story in a business setting:

Story building blocks:
1. Open with a challenge for the main character
2. Show how the character struggles through this challenge
3. Resolution: What was the result of the character overcoming this challenge

Gruber also outlines five core points in telling a great story:
1. Motivation: Contrary to what you may think, this point doesn’t center around motivating your audience, but rather knowing what motivates you, as the storyteller, moments before you speak to your audience. Gruber says you need to “get in state” before speaking the first word.
2. Audience: Render an experience to move them
3. Goal: All storytelling is purposeful. You are trying to create a relationship with the audience, not a transaction.
4. Interactive: A speech is not a monologue, it’s a dialogue. You want the audience to be a participant, not just a passenger.
5. Content: A story puts all key facts into an emotional context

This is part of a series of blog post running until the end of the year on business books in 2011 that can enhance the way you do presentations, improve the way you tell stories, engage with your audience, or market your business through social media or other channels.

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Books Worth Reading

Blog, Books, Social Media — November 27, 2011 at 23:40

In the coming weeks, I will be posting reviews of business books I’ve read in the past year that can enhance the way you do presentations, improve the way you tell stories, engage with your audience, or market your business through social media or other channels.

I’m kicking off this series with Scott Berkun’s hilarious and highly practical Confessions of a Public Speaker (O’Reilly Media), in which this best-selling author and speaker reveals techniques great communicators use to connect with their audiences.

Many of the practical tips he outlines for presenting are hard learned lessons from falling flat on his face in his own public presentations over the years – hence the title of the book.

Here are some of the many areas of topics he covered and I found particularly fascinating or useful in today’s speaking arena:

1. How to keep an audience engaged in the era of tweeting, texting and mobile phone games.
2. Social Media: How to monitor what people say on Twitter, while you are actually presenting on stage.
3. The importance of speaking not just to a live audience, but also to the camera (since your presentation will likely end up on Youtube)
4. How to deal with hostile audiences

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Advanced Toastmasters, Protoasties, Moves to Burlingame

Blog — April 4, 2010 at 23:48

April 4, 2010

Protoasties, an Advanced Toastmasters for Professionals Who Speak, has settled on a stable new home at Trapeze Restaurant in Burlingame, Calif. Meetings resumed in February, following a rocky 2009, stemming partly from the closure of the Portofino Grill, the club’s former longtime meeting location in Foster City.

Many of the 2009 regulars have returned and a rejuvenated leadership team is in place, including myself as president, Robert Tang as treasurer, Jeffrey Bruno (vice president of education) and Kimi Ziemski (vice president of public relations).

The club meets on the same day and time as before: the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month, from 6:30 pm – 9 pm.

Professionals join Protoasties because they are driven to make their presentations and speaking engagements stand out. They know that this is the fast-track to increasing their sales, raising venture capital money, motivating their employees, and getting an edge on their competition.

Members of Protoasties are professional speakers, presentation skills trainers or people who present in a professional capacity. They serve as CEO’s, corporate board members, entrepreneurs, published authors, sales/marketing executives, among other disciplines.

Protoasties was launched in 1998 as a platform for members of the Northern California chapter of the National Speakers Association to sharpen their speeches and presentations through peer feedback before hitting the road. Protoasties was founded by NSA Hall of Fame speaker Patricia Fripp and Craig Harrison, founding board president of Pro-Trac, NSA/NC’s speaker college.

As an advanced Toastmasters club, most Protoasties members have earned at least CC status (completed the Competent Communicator manual), through another Toastmasters club, or have already mastered certain public speaking fundamentals. Although you may not yet qualify for membership, if you are aspiring to join some day, you are welcome to come as a guest.

Meeting Format: Unlike the traditional Toastmasters club, which splits time evenly between prepared speeches and table topics, Protoasties allows its members to rehearse longer than the typical 6-8 minute speech. In addition, a roundtable of members may verbally critique the speech, rather than a single evaluator, which is the norm at most Toastmasters chapters. This often reduces the amount of time available for table topics, a two-minute impromptu speaking exercise, designed to sharpen skills in communicating under pressure.

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