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Seven Public Speaking Tips

from Presence and Persuasion
Coach Gina Barnett
Susan Cain

When It Comes to Age Bias,

Tech Companies Dont Even
Bother to Lie
Dan Lyons

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Seven Public Speaking Tips from Presence and

Persuasion Coach Gina Barnett
Mar 24, 2016

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One of the steps in my Year of Speaking Dangerously was to make an

appointment with the lovely Gina Barnett, a respected consultant who works with
many CEOs and TED speakers. Gina is a former actor and playwright, whose goal
is to teach non-actors what actors know about the body and voice. I found my first

session with Gina to be surprisingly fun. Heres what I learned:

1) Its not about you. As a public speaker, youre in a service position:
a teacher, a giver, an enlightener. Your job is to take care of the audience,
not to be judged by it or even to entertain it. Young actors often make the same
mistake as nervous public speakers: they want approval, they want to be loved.
The minute they get into that head space, warns graceful, doe-eyed Gina,
theyre fucked.
2) Why do some TED talks work better than others? The speakers who
connect with the audience (1) are comfortable in their own skin, (2) are so present
that they feel moment-to-moment shifts in the audience, and (3) delight in
sharing what they have to offer. Great stage presence is the simple alignment of
voice, body, and intention. Not so easy? Go to Point 3.
3) Change your point of view about yourself. Adopt new points of view
outside your usual comfort zone that feel outrageous yet appealing. Gina gave me
the example of one of her clients, a successful executive who came from an
impoverished background and suffers from impostor syndromethe disabling
feeling that shes faking it and doesnt deserve her posh corner office. Gina asked
her to shift her point of view by thinking of herself, if only for a little while, as
imperious and queenly.
My own customary point of view is: I love connecting with people through oneon-one conversations, but being up on stage feels inauthentic.
So my new view, according to Gina, should be:

I LOVE being on stage.Piece of cake.This

is fun!

But what if these things arent true? I say.

Whats truth? Gina answers, narrowing her eyes at me playfully. Who knows
what truth youre capable of? I suspect its far more than you think.
4) Your body can change your thoughts and feelings. If you relax your
body, your head will follow suit. Heres how to do it yourself. Before you speak,
try these exercises:
Shake out every limb in your body. Wiggle it, shake it, dance it. This gets your
blood flowing and makes you tingle all over.
Stand up straight. Shift back and forth, putting your weight first on your heels,
then on the balls of your feet. Find the place thats evenly distributed between
both, then gently press your toes on the floor. This will give you the sensation of
forward momentum.
Yawn.
Talk with your tongue out. Youll sound ridiculous, but it will loosen you up
vocally.
5) Breathe correctly. When you inhale, your belly is supposed to expand like a
balloon, and when you exhale, the balloon should deflate. Apparently I do the

reverse, which is unusual and seemed to startle Gina.

If you think you might do the same, notice how you breathe while youre lying in
bed at night, just before you fall asleep. Guaranteed, youll be breathing correctly
then. Thats the relaxed you.
6) If your voice is soft or high, try this exercise. Inhale. Open your mouth
dentist-wide, and say ah in a low tone, holding your belly as if you expect it to
vibrate (it wont). Gina has to keep reminding me to keep my mouth wide open. I
have trouble doing it because it feels impolite to me. All of Ginas exercises feel
impolite, come to think of it, which is no doubt why Im sitting in her office in the
first place.
As I type this, Im listening to Fiona Apples Criminal (Fionas an introvert too)
and am struck by how unapologetically deep and low her voice is even as she
sings a song whose lyrics are one big apology.
7) Notwithstanding Point 3, this is not about training yourself away
from your true self. Its about letting your true self speak. Its about seeing
your voice as an instrumentyour own personal, idiosyncratic instrumentand
learning to play it right. Its an empowering viewpoint. Working with Gina, I feel
like a promising musician training to be a maestro. An introverted maestro!
How much time will it take to get to Carnegie Hall? I dont know. It doesnt
matter. As with all such things, the fun is in the attempt.

SUSAN CAIN is the co-founder of Quiet Revolution LLC, a company dedicated to

unlocking the power of introverts for

the benefit of us all. Susan is the
author of the award-winning New
York Times bestseller QUIET: The
Power of Introverts in A World That
Cant Stop Talking, and her recordsmashing TED talk has been viewed
over 10 million times. Sign up here to
receive updates about the Quiet
Revolution. Follow Susan on Twitter
@susancain, and on Facebook.
To receive a free ebook, The Power of
Introverts: 9 Best-Loved Stories by
Susan Cain, sign up for the Quiet Revolution email newsletter.

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Awaiting the Singularity.

When It Comes to Age Bias, Tech Companies Dont

Even Bother to Lie
Apr 5, 2016

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2,108 Likes

569 Comments

Imagine youre African-American and working at a 500-person technology

company where everyone else is white, and one day the CEO declares in a
national newspaper interview that his companys lack of diversity isnt an
accident. In fact he prefers to hire white people because when it comes to
technology white people simply make better employees.
That statement would be unthinkable. But what if a tech CEO made the same
comment about age?
In 2013, I went to work at a software company called HubSpot. I was 52 years old.
The average HubSpot employee was 26. Everyone seemed to be right out of
college. The place was like a frat house, with refrigerators stocked with cases of
beer and telemarketing sales bros drinking at their desks while hammering
away on the phones. Thirty-something employees were considered old people.

About nine months after I joined,

HubSpots CEO and co-founder, Brian
Halligan, explained to the New York
Times that this age imbalance was not
something he wanted to remedy, but
in fact something he had actively
cultivated. HubSpot was trying to
build a culture specifically to attract
and retain Gen Yers, because, in the
tech world, gray hair and experience
are really overrated, Halligan said.
I gasped when I read that. Could
anyone really believe this? Even if you
did believe this, what CEO would be
foolish enough to say it out loud? It
was akin to claiming that you prefer to
hire Christians, or heterosexuals, or white people. I assumed an uproar would
follow. As it turned out, nobody at HubSpot saw this as a problem. Halligan didnt
apologize for his comments or try to walk them back.
The lesson I learned is that when it comes to race and gender bias, the people
running Silicon Valley at least pay lip service to wanting to do better but with
age discrimination they dont even bother to lie.
Making hiring and firing decisions based on age is illegal, but age discrimination
is rampant in the tech industry, and everyone knows it, and everyone seems to
accept it. What other industry operates like this? What would the world be like if

doctors, lawyers, or airline pilots or anyone, really, other than professional

athletes had to accept the idea that their career would end at age 40, or 50?
One excuse for pushing out older workers is that technology changes so fast that
older people simply cant keep up. Veteran coders dont know the latest
programming languages, but young ones do. This is bunk. Theres no reason why
a 50-year-old engineer cant learn a new programming language. And frankly,
most coding work isnt rocket science.
Whats more, most jobs in tech companies dont actually involve technology.
During my time at HubSpot fewer than 100 of the companys 500 employees were
software developers. The vast majority worked in marketing, sales, and customer
support. Those jobs dont require any special degree or extensive training.
Anyone, at any age, could do them.
Also, over time, most people get better at what they do. They become wiser,
calmer, more self-aware. Theyve also put in the 10,000 hours of practice that
Malcolm Gladwell says are required to become expert in a skill. Why would
companies not want employees who have gained that expertise? In the past few
years, in addition to being a journalist and a novelist, Ive also started writing for
TV, on HBOs Silicon Valley. The 55-year-old version of me creates a much
wider range of material than the 35-year-old version did, and at a higher level.

A nap room at HubSpot. (Photo: David L. Ryan/Boston Globe via Getty)

People born after 1980 do not possess some special gene that the rest of us lack.
But Silicon Valley venture capitalists and founders somehow seem to believe this
is the case. I suspect the truth is that tech startups prefer young workers because
they will work longer hours and can be paid less.
Twenty years ago, when venture capitalists invested in young founders, they
usually insisted that founders team up with older, seasoned executives to provide
adult supervision. Lately the conventional wisdom has been that its better to let

young founders go it alone. The consequences have been predictably disastrous.

Young male founders hire young male employees, and spend huge money
building kooky office frat houses.
In the tech industry the practice of bros hiring bros is known as culture fit, and
its presented as a good thing. The problem with culture fit is that unless youre
a twenty-something white person, you dont fit. People of a certain age, people of
color, and women most of us, in other words are often unwelcome. This
huge, dynamic industry, which is generating so much wealth, has walled itself off
from most of the workforce, telling millions of people that they cannot
participate. This situation obviously shortchanges a lot of workers, but it also
hurts tech companies by depriving them of talent.
Age bias goes hand-in-hand with other forms of bias. HubSpot had many female
employees, but few in top management positions. The company was run (and still
is) mostly by white men. As far as I could tell, there were no African-American
employees. Once, after sitting through a company all-hands meeting and being
stunned by the ocean of white faces, I wrote to a woman in HR asking if the
company had any statistics on diversity. HubSpot prided itself on possessing
numbers for everything, and being a data-driven organization. I received a terse
reply: No. Why?
I spent three decades in newsrooms, working alongside colleagues of all ages,
from recent college graduates to people in their sixties and seventies. At Forbes I
wrote for an editor who was 78 years old. At Newsweek I reported to an editor-inchief who was nine years younger than I was. Age was never an issue. The
companies I worked for werent perfect, but they had a wider range of talent and
were better managed than most tech startups. They also didnt have the kind of

frat-house culture that has become common in Silicon Valley, and the lack of
oversight and corporate control that come with it.
I lasted 20 months at HubSpot. My time there was filled with incidents in which
colleagues demonstrated they shared Halligans low regard for older workers.
After I left the company, I announced I was writing a memoir about my
experience as a 50-something guy trying to work in startup land. Apparently
some of the companys executives freaked out about what might be in the book,
and they did something so crazy that I still almost can't believe it.
According to the FBI, which investigated, these executives tried to hack into
computers to steal the manuscript, and also tried to prevent publication of the
book by engaging in extortion. No criminal charges have been filed, but the
hacking, extortion, and ensuing cover-up raised questions about HubSpots
culture and the trustworthiness of its leadership. HubSpot's board fired the CMO,
and sanctioned Halligan, the CEO. A vice president resigned before the board
could decide whether to terminate him. The board still won't tell me what
happened.
It occurs to me that the fiasco might not have occurred if HubSpot were run by
more mature people people with the gray hair and experience that Halligan
derided. Embracing diversity isnt just a nice thing to do; its also smart business.
Dan Lyons is the author of the new book, "Disrupted: My Misadventure in the
Startup Bubble," on sale now from Hachette.

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