What is a book about negotiation doing in a blog about public speaking?  Simple, really.  Every time you get up in front of an audience, it’s a negotiation.  I’m reminded of the first time I sold a car, to a Greek-American used car lot owner.  The car was ancient, and I didn’t expect to get much for it.  But I managed to negotiate my way to about half of what I should have received for it, thanks to my inexperience and his slick expertise.  After the humiliation was done, I asked him, ruefully, where he had learned his negotiation skills.  And he replied, “Nick, life is a negotiation.”  And grinned.  I felt like Alan Bates in Zorba the Greek. 

For those of you who fear your audiences or experience performance anxiety of any degree, thinking about your audience as someone to be negotiated with rather than a great beast to be feared, will help.  An audience wants a certain experience – a successful experience.  You hope to provide it.  A certain amount of negotiation is in order.  I always check, in the moment, for example, with my audience to determine if the plan for the hour or hours that we have together is OK with that audience.  I make it a real question. 

Asking that question near the top of the speech, for real, is a great way to find out if any audience member has a question or issue that she wants to talk about – and that she is afraid you’re not going to cover.  You might table the topic for later, or address it in the moment, but you win points for flexibility and connection. 

Successes and failures in public speaking turn on small moments like that.  If your negotiation with the audience is real, then it will respond with enthusiasm.  If it is fake or pro forma, the audience will rebel.  But thinking about the audience as a group of humans to be negotiated with will help make them real to you, as people, and therefore less frightening. 

If you’re only going to read one book on negotiation, Negotiation Genius is a good one.  It updates the Fisher classic, Getting to Yes, and provides step-by-step negotiations and stories about negotiations that bring the ideas to life. 

When I first read Getting to Yes, I was so inspired that I talked my way into the local post office — after it was closed for the day.  Having that confident negotiation mindset will help your public speaking, too. 

The central insight of Negotiation Genius is that you will be more successful in negotiations if you spend a good deal of time beforehand understanding the needs of the opposite party.  And this insight holds true for public speaking.  In fact, it’s probably the single most important insight for successful public speaking.  Your first job as a public speaker is to understand your audience – better than it does.  Everything you do, big and small, with your audience, should flow from that. 

If you understand your audience, you will know when to negotiate and when not to.  Just as a teacher might negotiate the terms of a final exam, but not the fact of one, so too a public speaker should be prepared to negotiate some things with an audience, but not the basic issues of topic and authority.  It’s your job to take the audience on a decision-making journey about the topic at hand, helping them to understand better – and to act on – the subject under discussion.  Everything else, like life, is a negotiation.  Public speakers need to be expert negotiators.