When I see the Mango Mussolini performing for one of his rallies and waving his hands and gesturing

[captain queeg]

I always think, well with Trump I think a lot of things: insane, liar, phony, druggy, criminal, tiny hands, disgusting excuse for a human and on and on. But what comes to mind for me when I see someone giving an animated speech: Dale Carnegie. I’m sure nowadays that push for being enthusiastic and animated is taught in all sorts of forums, but I got sent to a Carnegie class from work many years ago and when I see people doing that, the thought always comes to mind.

My company thought us engineers needed to learn the art of influencing people and sent several us. The amusing thing was they also sent several people from marketing/sales. Of course those guys were naturals at being phony and it seemed like overall the class was about half and half. I’d say Trump is a natural but I’d bet he had some guidance along the way. But you’d think they’d had given him some gestures that made sense. Him flashing that OK sign all the time is an example; it usually seems completely unrelated to me.

[Norbert]

1. KOKO KOKO KOKO

[drray23]

2. hehe i am a scientist and what you are describing I can relate.

As I got promoted to higher-level positions, I started having to do a lot more presentations and PR type stuff and less actual science. My team does that, I find them the money. Anyhow, we had a communication consultant that came in to train several of us.

Basically, the idea was that the perfect accuracy of the message matters not, its all in the delivery and flashiness. You can guess how that went with an audience of scientists who had been trained all their life to care about the exactness of the process and results. They taught us how to use voice inflexion, body posture etc..

One thing I really hated was that you are supposed to relax your audience by making a joke at the start of the talk. I don't subscribe to that, I hate it and of course the few times I attempted it, it went over like a lead balloon.