First, the bad news. There are no shortcuts on the path to becoming an exceptional public-speaker. Now, the good news. Anyone who puts in the work can radically improve their communication skills.
In the now famous TED Talk, My Stroke of Insight, Harvard researcher Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor takes her audience on an 18-minute journey of her life before, during and after a stroke. It’s a mesmerizing performance and, like any good performer, Bolte-Taylor practiced endlessly for the talk of her life. When I asked Bolte-Taylor how much time she had practiced, her answer surprised me. She rehearsed her presentation not once, twice, or even 20 times. She rehearsed it 200 times! Inspiring presentations take practice—hours and hours of it.
Recently I wrote an article based on an interview with the world-famous pastor, Joel Osteen. Osteen told me that he rehearses each sermon for six hours before delivering it for the first time on Saturday nights. He then delivers it twice on Sunday. It’s the third sermon that’s recorded for the television audience, but Osteen has already rehearsed the sermon at least 12 times. Viewers see a polished performance; they don’t see the hours of practice that made it so.
From CEOs to pastors, and from TED speakers to famous leaders, great communicators are made, not born. We see this trend in America’s most famous speeches. For example, in 1964 Ronald Reagan gave a rousing speech to support then Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. Goldwater lost the election, but voters were inspired by Reagan, who went on to become California’s governor and the fortieth president of the United States. The audience saw a “great communicator” on the stage beginning in 1964, but they didn’t witness Reagan delivering hundreds of speeches to 250,000 General Electric employees over the course of eight years when GE sponsored a television show that Reagan hosted.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was on his high school debate team. He had been ordained a minister 16 years before delivering the ‘Dream Speech,’ one of the most iconic speeches in American history. King gave an estimated 2,500 speeches in his lifetime. King was honing his public speaking skills for at least 20 years before he delivered the words that would transform a nation. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a masterful communicator because he had put in the time to master his craft.
While researching one of my books on how to deliver presentations like Steve Jobs, I reviewed countless hours of videos, some as early as 1976. The Steve Jobs who delivered one of the most electrifying business presentations of our time—the 2007 introduction of the iPhone—was not the same performer who started Apple thirty years earlier. In one video, recorded in the 1970s, Jobs was visibly nervous ahead of a television interview. He even told an assistant standing off-camera that he felt sick. Jobs’ comfort as a television and stage personality developed over time.
In 1984 Jobs took the stage to introduce the first Macintosh. The performance was packed with suspense, drama and excitement. But Steve Jobs remained locked behind a lectern, clutching its sides and reading from prepared text. In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple after being forced out 12 years earlier. After years of delivering presentations for his other projects—Pixar and NeXT—he was much more polished and natural than he had been in the 1980s. The lectern was gone. Jobs roamed the stage comfortably. Jobs was obsessed with honing each and every presentation. In The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, NeXT executive Paul Vais described Jobs’ focus. “Every slide was written like a piece of poetry. We spent hours on what most people would consider low-level detail. Steve would labor over the presentation. We’d try to orchestrate and choreograph everything.”
Ten years later, at the 2007 Macworld, everything clicked when Jobs launched the iPhone. He was smooth, polished, humorous, entertaining, confident and captivating. Steve Jobs got better and better, every year, every decade.
Steve Jobs proves that there are few, if any, ‘naturals’ in communication. Nobody is born with a presentation clicker in their hands. Nobody is born knowing how to craft metaphorical symbolism abundant throughout King’s “Dream” speech. Nobody is born knowing how to give an 18-minute TED talk. The best communicators work at it. Great communicators make it look effortless because they put in a lot of effort to make themselves great.