Viv Groskop - How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking

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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Bantam Press

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright Viv Groskop, 2018

Cover Design and illustration by Jo Thomson, TW

Viv Groskop has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473562691

ISBN 9781787631120

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For the three most brilliant women in my life:
Anna, Trudy and Vera

A womans preaching is like a dogs walking on its hind legs its not done well; but youre surprised to find its done at all.

Samuel Johnson

Women dont need to find a voice. They have a voice. They need to feel empowered to use it and people need to be encouraged to listen.

Meghan Markle

There is a wonderful scene with Meryl Streep in The Post. She plays Katherine Graham, the first female publisher of a major American newspaper. Its 1963 and Graham is an uneasy leader of a business with revenues of $84 million. She has inherited the newspaper from her late husband, who in turn inherited it from Grahams father. Everyone knows that she is running a company her father didnt want her to run. And shes only running it because her husband is dead. Next time you have a crisis at work, think about how she must have felt, wafting around her mansion in a Halston kaftan, wondering how she was ever going to get anyone to take her seriously. This, my friends, is a leadership challenge.

As the film begins, the company is facing a crisis and needs to raise cash urgently. Privately, and especially in moments of solitude, Graham is cool, calm and collected. She knows what she wants to happen and has rehearsed a plan. All she has to do is convince the board, which consists of her and about twenty men. Shes ready. Shes armed with all the facts. Except in the meeting she cant get the words out. She knows exactly what she wants to say. She even has it written down in a notebook in front of her. She has memorized every statistic, every financial detail, every argument. But nothing will come out of her mouth at the crucial moment. Instead she has to listen to a man parroting the exact words she has prepared while she sits there mute, unable to say the one thing that would make a difference: Wait. I would like to speak. Yes, she owns the company. But when it counts, she cannot own the room.

How many of us have experienced that moment, even without the Halston maxi-dress and multi-million-dollar newspaper company? We all know what that feels like, the split second when words fail us and we know weve lost the opportunity.

There are lots of books on the great art of speech-making. They tend to focus on what to say in your speech. They dont tell you what to do when nothing will come out of your mouth. And they dont tell you how to get over the general anxiety about speaking that most people very naturally have. They dont tell you what to do in the moments youre made, as a woman, to feel small. They dont tell you how to own the room.

Instead these books will warn you not to make a joke at the beginning of a speech because your audience will think the whole thing is stand-up comedy. (I think its fine to take a risk.) They will teach you rhetorical devices on how to group ideas in threes because thats easier to remember and easier for the audience to focus on. (This is good advice.) And they will tell you to use quotes from well-known figures to punctuate your thoughts or illustrate a conclusion. (This is not bad advice. Also: see how in this last paragraph Ive just made three points? Thats a good structure to follow in speeches. Three things in succession is pleasing.)

We all know, though, that this kind of advice is for Cloud Cuckoo Land. There is no point in knowing what youre going to say in this fictitious brilliant speech if youre too nervous to make it in the first place. This is really advice for people who are never actually going to give a speech: they just want to fantasize about what it would be like if they did. Oh, the amazing things they would say! Oh, the rhetorical flourishes they would add! Oh, how the crowd would marvel and sigh! Its exactly like Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham in that scene. She would have given them a piece of her mind, those boardroom men! She would have wowed them with her plan! She would have aced it! Yes. Except she didnt. And she couldnt. Why not? Because, I would argue, she didnt want to do it badly enough to let go of her nerves and leap.

What the traditional advice does not focus on is (a) how to get yourself into the frame of mind where you think you actually can give a speech in reality and not just in your imagination, and (b) how to make that speech happen, while accepting that nerves and anxiety are a part of life. In this book, were going to focus not on the speech itself but on you as a speaker. Who do you want to emulate? Who inspires you? How can you channel that person? How can you get a piece of what theyve got? What do they do that makes them so good? To be the speaker you want to be is much more important than the actual speech. Because without your own belief that you can own the room and your desire to own it the room is already lost.

Too often when we discuss public speaking, we talk about the content. What exactly did the speaker say that made this particular speech so memorable? How did they phrase that fantastic quote just so? How did they make those points so succinctly and cleverly? This is all well and good. And we should analyse brilliant speeches for their content. Whenever a memorable speech pops up, particularly one that resonates for decades, someone generally spent a long time writing it. But when Im talking to people in presentation workshops especially, I have to say, women they are not worried about the content of their speech. They are worried about talking in public. How should they stand? Where should they look? What if theyre nervous? What if they should have recommended someone else to give the speech? What if, like Katherine Graham, they bottle it at the last moment?

We are right to have these anxieties as we know the truth about speaking. Just as anyone who has ever been on television knows the truth about television. No one who sees you on television cares about the clever (or incredibly stupid) things you say: they are much more interested in what you were wearing and how relaxed you looked. Please learn from my painful example and never go on Sky News wearing a too-tight leopard-print sweater that strains over your bosom. For indeed, whether we like it or not, we human beings are visual creatures and we love reading others (fun and low effort) much more than concentrating on the words theyre speaking (boring and hard work). We all know that we could have the most blisteringly brilliant speech of all time written by Jane Austen, with contributions from Charles Dickens and edited by the TED committee. But unless we look the part in our gestures, our attitude and how we carry ourselves, no one will listen to a goddamn word of it. The more we can master the fun part (how we come across), the more likely people are to focus on the boring part (our message).