find us on Facebook and more

This morning, the Eloquent Woman's Facebook page reached 250 fans--not bad for a little under a week. It's just the latest of several places you can access this blog's ideas, information and inspiration on women and public speaking. Check out these easy ways to get your Eloquent Woman tips--and become a fan:

• Want to post a mini-Eloquent Woman on your website? Lots of libraries, speaker coaches, universities and companies do--it's an easy way to make sure your readers see our updates. Just go to the Eloquent Woman widget and follow the easy download instructions.
• Read posts by email or in your favorite feed-reader. Enter your email in the box at right, or go to our Feedburner feed for email and reader options galore. You'll get the blog posts delivered where you want to read them.
• Become a Facebook fan and get extra updates and discussions--plus see our posts in your Facebook feed.
• Become a follower on Google by scrolling down and to the right. Click on the button that says "follow with Google Friend Connect" and get your Google profile posted to the blog--and our posts in your Google Reader. Or go here to do the same.

While you're at it, don't forget to enter our contest 15 Weeks to Step Up Your Speaking by July 31--and share the information with other female colleagues. It's a great chance for one lucky would-be speaker to win a Flip Mino HD camera and 15 weeks of coaching right here on the blog!

you always wanted to be a secretary?

Telling stories from your personal experience adds dimension to your presence as a speaker, particularly when you can inspire as well as share your depth. And it's best of all when you can work in a verbal twist to tie it all up and make a memorable phrase. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, the first Hispanic woman to serve in the cabinet, told that kind of tale in a recent speech, according to today's New York Times. She told how a high school guidance counselor advised her mother that Hilda was better cut out to be a secretary than to go to college.

Telling that story recently at the Hunter College commencement in Manhattan, Ms. Solis roared into the microphone that she, the daughter of immigrants, did become a secretary — the nation’s labor secretary. The crowd thundered with applause.

That line--admittedly usable only by women who reach state or national cabinet posts--does one more thing only a woman speaker can do, and that's to underscore a disparity in titles that sometimes makes a secretary someone you address as "Madam Secretary." Do you have a similar laugh line that makes a point about women, their careers and aspirations? Share it in the comments!

vocalize your independence

Here's a great way to practice vocalizing, the art of varying your voice's tone, pitch and pace to create variety for the listener's ear: Follow along as NPR hosts and reporters read the Declaration of Indpendence, an annual ritual. Reading a familiar text that's not written by you allows you to focus not on your own writing, but on the words to emphasize. You may want to print out the text and mark it up with notes on which words to emphasize, or just try varying your reading of each line. And try these tips from an NPR intern on how to vocalize, using lessons she learned from watching the pros in action.

Ruth Ginsberg on speaking up in meetings

Ever wonder whether more famous women manage to avoid the pitfalls women face when they speak up in meetings? The short answer: They don't. In this USA Today interview, Ruth Bader Ginsburg gives a rare insight into the inner workings of the Supreme Court, focusing on whether women are heard in meetings. She:

recalled that as a young, female lawyer her voice often was ignored by male peers. "I don't know how many meetings I attended in the '60s and the '70s, where I would say something, and I thought it was a pretty good idea. … Then somebody else would say exactly what I said. Then people would become alert to it, respond to it'....Even after 16 years as a justice, she said, that still sometimes occurs. 'It can happen even in the conferences in the court. When I will say something — and I don't think I'm a confused speaker — and it isn't until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point."

Ginsburg found herself--as the lone female justice--speaking up in discussions about the case involving the strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona girl during a school's search for drugs. The court recently decided in favor of the girl, but the interview appeared before the decision, which made it highly unusual. And it was an important time to hear a woman justice's voice, coming as the court awaits another female justice's confirmation.

Related posts: How speaking up in meetings affects your image

A book on speaking up in meetings for women

Signaling "let's get down to business" in a meeting

Photo of Ginsburg by Compton & Wright on Flickr

Jump into June's top tips

Summer got off to a great start with these, our top 10 tips on the Eloquent Woman blog for June. Readers jumped into posts about speaking as a tour guide, research for blushing speakers, great storytelling, and our new contest. Check out this winning team of tips from June:

1. You love a contest: Hands down, the new Eloquent Woman contest, 15 Weeks to Step Up Your Speaking, topped our most popular posts this month. You have till July 31 to enter yourself (or a colleague) to win free speaker coaching and a great Flip camera!
2. The tour guide as speaker intrigued dozens of readers this month, with a post focusing on a woman sander at the Martin Guitar Factory who served as my tour guide in June. Read about her training and what worked for her audience.
3. Our top current women speakers series continued to draw a large audience--it features video examples nominated by readers. In June, a guest post added thoughts about women commencement speakers.
4. Developing a message by using the rule of three--from a post on the SixMinutes blog--
   attracted lots of readers looking to put their eloquent content together.
5. Storytelling's a basic speaker skill. But telling a story on yourself is tough. Learn from a master storyteller in this popular post.
6. Inspiration from learning the guitar helped one speaker get over her fear of public speaking--and led to a new web site for music makers, too.
7. The blushing speaker is the focus of new research. It may send a helpful signal to your audience--or distract you.
8. Dance helped inspire another speaker, who once worked as a bellydancer and shares two posts with us about what it taught her as a speaker. Go here and here to see her insights.
9. Will you speak as a moderator? Before you start that panel, check our tips on "everything in moderation."
10. A radio tour survivor shares her tips with us for what speakers can do to get through lots of successive interviews in a short time period.

help teenage girls with an eloquent video

UPDATE: Submit your videos to Nina Simon at nina[at]museumtwo[dot]com. I know I've already asked you to make a short video of yourself to enter the Eloquent Woman's contest to win 15 weeks of free coaching to step up your public speaking. But while you're at it, make another video -- this one to help a camp for young girls interested in technology. I'll let Nina Simon, who created Museum 2.0, tell you more about what she's looking for in these videos:

I'm developing a camp for teenage girls (rising 9th graders) with the Girls Math and Science Partnership about expressing yourself through technology. It's a weeklong camp, with the pilot happening this summer at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh and then spreading next year to several science museums around the country.

As part of the camp, we want to give the girls access to videos by inspiring women who express themselves uniquely through technology. I'm particularly looking for women from diverse backgrounds (a lot of the girls in these camps are immigrants, African-American, and Hispanic, and we want to reflect that women like them can be successful in tech). These girls are at the point where they don't even know the range of possibilities of where tech can take them professionally, and while we'll be introducing them to several cool avenues in camp (electric fashion, codebreaking, circuit-bending, game design), we also want to expose them to real adults doing this stuff every day.

Would you consider making a short (3-5 min video) for us? It would be internal to the camp website and would not be publicly available. I'd want you to share your name, city, and age, and cover some subset of these topics:

- what career do you consider yourself? how do you name it?
- where did you start?
- how do you express yourself through technology?
- what do you use as inspiration?
- how do you solve tough problems?
- what are your big dreams
- how do you think differently?

What do you think? I know the girls would love to hear about your work. I'd be hoping to receive final videos by July 10.

Please contribute if you can to this important project...a wonderful way to show young girls how eloquent women use technology to express themselves.

many interviews at one blow

Editor's note: Seven at One Blow is an old Brothers Grimm fairy tale about a tailor who killed seven flies in a single strike...and went on to be king. Nowadays, in order to rule her own publicity, an eloquent woman might well find herself doing something like a lot of live radio interviews in a morning or over a week...a true test of her speaking skills. I asked Sarah Milstein, reader of this blog and co-author of a popular new book about Twitter, to share tips from her recent "radio tour" of interviews with you. Keep in mind that on radio, you'll need to describe what might otherwise be seen. Here it is.)

I recently wrote a book, and to help promote it, my publisher sent me on a "radio tour." Set up by Newman Communications, the tour involved approximately 30 radio interviews over the course of a week. Most of the interviews were jammed into two marathon days, and they were all conducted on the phone, in calls that ranged from three to 30 minutes.

In doing so many interviews, I've hit on a few tips that eloquent women may find useful:

* If your interviews start early in the morning, as many do, make sure you wake up in plenty of time to make coffee and exercise your voice. I chatted with my dog and read the headlines out loud to warm up.

* To give your voice more energy, sit up straight on the edge of your chair or stand.

* Practice answering likely questions and end your statements with a tone of voice that suggests you've concluded that answer. That usually means bringing the your intonation down (the opposite of upspeak).

* Radio moves fast: keep your answers short but don't speak too quickly (practice helps!).

* Do spell out any oddball URLs or search terms you share.

* For most interviews, the station calls you at a prearranged time.
There's a slim chance you'll be going on live when you answer, so I trained myself to pause before saying anything, and then if there was no sound, I simply said, "This is Sarah."

* Be prepared to promote your book/site/show/whatever. Often, at the end of the interview, the DJ will ask where listeners can go for more info. In my case, the answer was, "Head to Amazon and search for 'The Twitter Book.'"

What tips have you hit on for interviews?

Improve speaking skills with improv

Editor's note: I'm delighted to repost with permission this guest post from the excellent blog of speaker coach Angela DeFinis, who works in California's Silicon Valley and Bay Area. When I read this post, I thought, "That's just exactly what I wanted to say about improv skills!" (I've added links and some boldfacing to emphasize a few points.) So here it is. You can find out more about Angela here--please do check out her blog, full of great ideas and inspiration:

You show up to your speaking engagement only to realize that your PowerPoint presentation isn’t opening, the A/V system is down, and there’s a car alarm blaring right outside the window. There’s a full room of people eagerly waiting for you to begin and there is no turning back now. So what are you going to do?

Situations like this one happen all too often, and they require quick thinking and creative problem solving with little or no guidance. Improvisation is a must-have tool in the public speaker’s repertoire. Without it, speakers often find themselves in what I call “The Big Freeze”—that paralyzing moment of fear, physical immobility and mental shut down that leaves them unable to act. But if speakers utilize the teachings and techniques of improv, they can learn to overcome this fear and actually enjoy flying by the seat of their pants.

In his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, author Malcom Gladwell explains that improv requires split-second, spontaneous decisions and hours of highly repetitive, structured practice. Think of a play in basketball. The players on the court all have defined positions, and they’ve spent hours practicing in order to execute properly. But often the play breaks down. Maybe the defense switched a match-up or there is an injury. Do they just stand there, paralyzed? Of course not! Now the play becomes an adaptation. Because they’ve practiced so much, they’ve experienced the variables and can alter the play. The point-guard thinks on his toes, makes an extra pass, and the team ends up with a jump shot instead of a layup. As Gladwell puts it, “How good people’s decisions are [made] under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.”

The paramount improv rule, according to Gladwell, is the notion of agreement. As you can see in the video above, the comedians accept everything that comes their way. The key to their hilarity is the speed at which they “go with the flow.” There is a full commitment to agreement. All of a sudden, the issues that would normally hold a situation hostage due to incompatibility are accepted and incorporated. The answer is always “yes.” Gladwell notes, “Bad improvisers block action…Good improvisers develop action.”

So envision yourself as a basketball team or comedy troupe of one. When you find yourself presented with a public speaking distraction, limitation or challenge, think of it as just one more tool to make your presentation stand out.

With these lessons in mind, what would you do if the PowerPoint is down for the count, the microphone is on the fritz, and the Jeep outside your window just won’t quit?