The Myth of Public Speaking: The Revolutionary Brain-Based System for Communicating in Business

By Danny Slomoff and John Colquhoun

The Myth of Public Speaking is full of new and scientific insights as you discover the Slomoff Method©, the unique brain-based system for communicating. 

Dr. Danny Slomoff has coached over 25,000 business leaders, creating powerful, engaged communicators. Unlocking the current research on the neurons in the b

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caruso Press
• Release date: Jan 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987289419

Danny Slomoff

Danny Slomoff is CEO of Slomoff Consulting Group and Founder of the Slomoff Method© which coaches CEOs and C-suite executives worldwide on their corporate communication. His programs are used by companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500 corporations to startups, including bio-tech, high-tech, financial services and healthcare.Danny earned a Ph.D. in both Clinical and Organizational Psychology. During his 35 years of executive leadership and organization coaching, he has worked with more than 25,000 business leaders and peak performers, including Olympic athletes, dancers, and musicians. His clients strive to attain the "edge" and share a relentless desire to achieve and be on the top of their game - always.Danny is the author of The Myth of Public Speaking: The Revolutionary Brain-Based System for Communicating in Business. He is the Speaking Coach for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Olympic team. He is also a renowned keynote speaker on the Neurology of Impact Communication and Storytelling. Danny enjoys stage performing as an amateur actor and concert singer and he brings a high level of creativity to his coaching. He lives in Mill Valley, CA with his wife. They have five adult children and five grandchildren.To learn more or to contact Dr. Danny Slomoff about speaking or coaching, visit www.slomoffgroup.com/book.

Book preview

As a business leader you know that communicating to your team, peers and customers is critical to your company’s success.

We’ve worked with thousands of executives who want to be great communicators. In addition, these leaders are constantly reviewing innovations in their business.

The technique model of speaking has been taught in the same way for many decades. However, the revolution in science and brain research has changed the way we can now achieve greatness.

When executives come for coaching, they often tell us that their job demands creating impact with all stakeholders. Whether it’s in front of one person or a room full of people, they have an idea in their head and want to let others know about it. If you are like most executives, your habit is to explain what you know.

Typically, the expository method of tell me what you’re going to tell me; tell it to me; and summarize what you just told me is used. If you are looking at your listeners’ faces, you may become aware of blank stares or people on their devices. While this is not a positive sign, most executives see these bored disinterested faces and don’t know what to do.

Since their intention is to convey information, they don’t know how to change their approach. To get better results, they would need to reorient from getting information out to impacting minds. This is the innovative revolutionary new brain-based method of speaking you will learn in this book.

Executives who have committed to excellence know from experience that there is no value in just getting through material. In fact, I often make the remark that if that is your goal, you can accomplish it in a room by yourself. This often results in laughter and an aha moment.

Our company’s innovative brain-based system begins with a different premise. You have an idea in your mind and through the act of talking you transfer that idea to the listeners’ minds. To do this it helps to know as much as possible about how the speaker’s mind and neurons work for talking and how the listener’s mind and neurons process information.

Several years ago, I began reviewing the research on how our neurons work. What immediately struck me was the fact that talking is a coordination system that every person is born with, just like walking, chewing, and swallowing. Our brains already have the neurons to do these activities. For talking, we only need to add language and personality to the coordination system, but the system is already there.

In this book I will reveal the current research and how this affects coaching. For example, there are no neurons for public speaking, presentations, or speeches. The neurons are ancient and designed for one-on-one conversations. I will show you how to use your strengths in a one-on-one conversation and apply it to a one-on-many conversations. In other words, drop the public speaking techniques, stop performing and have a conversation.

Great communicators agree that the only thing that matters is what your listeners leave thinking and feeling. They focus on impacting listeners’ minds. Instead of thinking about covering everything they want to share, they focus on what they want listeners to think and feel when they leave the conversation.

Being thorough and covering all the issues is about the speaker’s performance. Being focused on the listeners’ mind is 180 degrees different and is the right approach.

In this book you will discover how impact is achieved, how your mind and neurons work and how listeners’ minds and neurons work.

Business leaders spend hours attending monotonous sessions and universally decide within moments what level of listening a meeting requires. They think, I’ll be polite and sit here, but I’ll work on my email from my smartphone, so I don’t get behind. But I’ll listen for a cue that says this is relevant to me. At that moment, I’ll pay attention, add my comments, and then return to either my reverie or my obligations that are outside this room.

I didn’t start as a business leader, instead I was a psychologist. My first experience in corporate communication was difficult but worthwhile.

Years ago, one of my closest friends, Sandy Linver, an internationally recognized communications expert, invited me to attend her communication seminar. It was at the office of her company, Speakeasy, in Atlanta, Georgia. I was going to be part of a group of executives, and we would be filmed and receive feedback. I was a psychotherapist and was regularly giving lectures on my mind-body-spirit therapy system. The public talks were important to marketing and growing my practice. I was self-assured and comfortable in front of crowds. I had been singing and acting for audiences since I was four and I loved the stage, I loved performing, so by now it came easy.

At the Speakeasy office, I joined a group of senior executives from renowned brands in consumer goods and financial services. There were seven of them and me. It didn’t take long to discover that while I had no fear, I also had no sense of what it took to impact others in a business environment.

My first talk was filmed. It showed me roaming around talking to walls and ceilings. I was deep in thought, espousing different psychological theories and the unique methods I had learned from my mentor, Doris Breyer. I was completely unaware of my listeners.

When everyone finished, we watched the films for feedback. Sandy pointed out our strengths and weaknesses in her feedback. When it was my turn, I cringed at what was on the screen. I thought I was awful and felt deflated. She gave me several ideas for the choices I needed to make in order to project presence and gain control of myself—and my listeners.

The practice films in the seminar were a mirror. They demonstrated that I was the only one in love with my ideas. I was not asking the other executives to come along with me; to think whether they could love these ideas, too. It was as though I was talking to myself. I was not connected and didn’t seem to care whether the seven other business leaders heard me or not.

By the end of the second morning the other executives gave me the nickname of fuddy duddy professor. They reiterated that I was bright, and probably very good at what I did. However, I acted like a rambling university professor, only caring about my words, not about who was hearing them.

I realized that self-assuredness is a good thing, but self-confidence can be incredibly deceiving. It should not be confused with being a good, competent speaker. On the screen I saw a perfect example of someone who was fearlessly incompetent.

As a psychologist, I had devoted my life to helping others and caring about them. Yet, I came across as rambling, caught in my own web of ideas and ignoring my listeners. My aha moment came when I peered at the screen and realized that as I spoke, I didn’t demonstrate my inner truth: that I cared. My challenge was to control my rambling actions. I earnestly wanted to deliver a coherent message that was meaningful to these senior executives. But how?

After the session with Sandy, she asked me what I wanted for myself. I reiterated that I was humbled and had so much to learn. Being a wonderful friend who saw my potential, she offered to spend time each week helping me. We began individual coaching where I practiced and filmed my progress. I eventually got to a point where my films revealed a commanding, engaged communicator.

That was many years ago. Eventually, I changed professions, left my clinical psychology practice and started Slomoff Consulting Group, a company that specializes in corporate communication. Over the years we have been coaching executives, my work has evolved.

This book represents the newest innovative approach to speaking. It goes beyond the common methods in the field which are technique based. If you follow the scientific and brain-based practices in this book you will see tremendous progress. You will sharpen your edge and keep improving.

In this book you will learn about the Slomoff Method © of Brain-Based Communications and discover:

What the world’s best communicators do.

How to project presence in all conversations.

How to speak with power and engagement at the highest levels.

How to create impactful content.

How to tell a compelling story.

How to use creativity to make your points stick.

Iwas frustrated. I had been coaching Public Speaking for several years and clients still looked stiff and robotic. I blamed myself, or I blamed the client, but never did I question the methodology. As a sports psychologist for world-class athletes and two events in the 1984 Summer Olympics, I was aware that science had influenced coaching and made significant changes. You could measure tennis and golf swings, swimming strokes, and basketball shots with electronic systems. You could then show athletes, based on physics, how close or far they were from the ideal movements. Then the coach could help them eliminate errors in their habitual swing, stroke, or shot.

I reviewed many skills that had a coordination system as its foundation and realized science had deep applications to achieving excellence. But what about speaking? Surely, it too had an ideal coordination system as its foundation.

I started to review the research on the neurons for talking in the brain. These articles are difficult to read as the science is very intricate and technical. Yet there it was. We are all born with the same neurons for talking. On these pathways you add language and personality, but the coordination system is universal.

This was astounding. It meant we have other systems like this. For example, every human being is born to walk. Doesn’t matter what family, culture, or language, we all have the same neurological coordination system for walking.

So why aren’t we speaking perfectly and using the inherent neurological talking system? How did we bypass our coordination system and build habits full of errors? The answer is that we learned to talk by imitation. Parents shape infant sounds into words and then phrases. Each of us absorbed our parents’ speaking patterns including all their errors.

The child doesn’t know they are making mistakes. Then he or she goes to school, chooses a peer group, and mimics their friends’ patterns. Again, these imitation experiences mean that each of us learn mistakes, which become an unconscious speaking pattern. We are not taught how our neurons are designed to talk perfectly.

The Slomoff Method © starts with the science of speaking. Instead of coaching people with public speaking techniques creating robotic and stiff behaviors, we activate the neurons and let the brain’s perfect coordination system work.

I was coaching Andy, a successful young CEO who was a self-described serial entrepreneur. He had little expression when he spoke and was quiet. Yet he was intensely passionate about his current software company. He raised large sums from investors who believed in his product ideas and leadership. He shared that he had always been reserved and had limited emotional expression. Even his wife asked him to loosen up and express his joy, his fun side, his fears and sadness. He said he was so rational that he felt like Mr. Spock in Star Trek. I replied, "You are defining speaking as your personality. Yet if you study personality theories, speaking is not part of it. The reason is speaking is a neurological activity that has a neurological coordination system