If you have never spoken in front of an audience before and are concerned about how to present yourself, take a glance at long-time American expatriate Scott H. Lewis’ book “60 Seconds To ‘Wow!’”.This is a quick and basic introduction on how to speak to an audience. For those with any experience in public speaking, however, it's worth exploring titles further, because you will not find anything substantial to improve your performance.
The lessons that Lewis provides inside his short treatise are
easy to understand and quick to read. For new public speakers, this is
something that you can pick up at any time and get a quick answer. However,
don’t expect anything too profound from a book with the phrase “60 seconds” in
its title. True to the title of his book, Lewis provides a two or three pages
of information about each topic. This book is best utilized as an introduction
or quick fix, a sort of a band-aid until you are ready to move to the next
level.
For the most part, the tips Lewis provides are seemingly
obvious subjects like considering the listener, how to be funny or simply
standing up when speaking. For those who are less technically inclined, he also
gives tips on PowerPoint presentations. Advice such as succinctness on slides
is priceless for any presenter and certainly would have been useful to many
presenters at the June 2013 Pedestrian and Cyclist Conference in Kyiv I
attended recently. Presentations
contained paragraphs of information on each slide, and were impossible to read.
I hear this is still a common problem in Ukraine.
While some tips are easy to follow, others are puzzling. For
example, Lewis’s first chapter suggests how to tackle the general fear of
public speaking. His golden ticket answer is “identifying, confronting,
understanding and conquering the underlying fears.” While what he says is true,
if facing your fears were so simple, people would not spend top bucks on personal
coaches to figure them out.
In regard to aesthetics and functionality, this short book
is gimmicky and quick. There are 18 different lessons, each complemented with a
clever cartoon. The prose is very accessible and occasionally, Lewis throws in
a witty anecdote to further illustrate his point.
Lewis is an American who has lived in Ukraine for more than
10 years. A former Kyiv Post editor, he is an accomplished public speaker and
writer who has produced several other books, including business advice and even
short stories set in Ukraine. In the business world, he is the CIS region’s
managing director for the European division of Signature Worldwide, a customer
service training company.
For those interested in quick and easy basics to public
speaking, the book can be purchased from Amazon. The paperback is sold for
$11.69, and the eBook version for $6.99. It was first published on January 9.
Kyiv Post intern Jesse
Fleck can be reached at [email protected].
