Nothing sells like expertise.  

 As an expert and knowledge entrepreneur, your expertise sells your products or services.

 But you need to clear through marketplace clutter to reach customers and prospects about your expertise. If you don’t, others will.

 Building your business and growing your margin dollars is good. But that’s not enough in the new economy. Now, you need to do more.

You have to market and sell your expertise. By wrapping value-adding content around what you sell.  If you don’t, then others define you and what you sell through traditional and social media.

 To fill this gap, Hank Walshak, Founder and CEO of Walshak Communications, Inc. uses his 25-plus years experience working with experts to help you plan and implement a program to communicate your expertise and deliver product- or service-supporting content to clients and prospects.  

Hank assesses how you convey your expertise to add value to customers and prospects. He provides a detailed, objective assessment of your traditional and social-media communications and how they support your vision and margin-dollar growth.

 Hank works with you to design and implement a program to deliver expertise-related content. With his help, your program creates and sustains tailored communications about your expertise to clients and prospects.

Hank Walshak

Professional Profile

Hank Walshak, founder, owner, and CEO of Walshak Communications, Inc., is a communications consultant, executive presentation coach, and author. He focuses on helping knowledge entrepreneurs in small and mid-sized businesses and their owners create expertise-related content to differentiate themselves as experts.

 He is recognized for his ability to empower experts to creatively articulate themselves and to stand out vis-à-vis their competitors in the markets they serve. He is adept at helping executives and business owners articulate their ideas in ways that energize and stay with their audiences.

 In the last 25-plus years, Hank has helped hundreds of clients at start ups, small, and mid-size companies develop the three R’s of cogent communications – recognition, resonance, and receptivity among their clients, customers, and prospects. Creativity and conceptual prowess drives his ability to listen deeply to clients and to elaborate stand-out communications for them.

Since 1984, he has consulted with, coached, and implemented programs for business experts across a number of industries, from start ups, pharmaceuticals, energy, high technology, manufacturing, and advanced materials to health care, law to petrochemicals, sales, accounting, and higher education.

 As part of his work for clients, Hank has written three books, the most recent being Driven: A How-to Strategy for Unlocking Your Greatest Potential, a work of creative nonfiction, written with Razi Imam and published by John Wiley & Sons (www.drivennation.com).

Earlier, he authored two histories — Meeting the Challenge: The Wesley College Story 1873-2003, and Elmira College: Still Ahead of Its Time. He is currently at work on a new book about gender fairness in the workplace. He is a contributing author to Top Ten Tips for Lasting Happiness and 29 Perspectives: Success Strategies for Business and Life. 

He writes on issues in business, healthcare, higher education, and psychology. His work, under his bylines and the bylines of clients, has appeared in the Pittsburgh Business Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette TEQ Magazine, New Home, Pittsburgh Metroguide, The Strip Magazine, The Presidency, Convene, Oncology Times, Hematology Oncology News & Issues, Western Pennsylvania Hospital News, Chicago Hospital News, and South Florida Hospital News.

 From time to time, Hank lectures on communications at institutions of higher learning. He has taught graduate and undergraduate level courses at Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University, Point Park University, Chatham University, and Carlow University.

 Before starting his own communications consulting and coaching firm in 1984, Hank excelled as a public relations executive at the world’s leading agencies in New York at Burson Marsteller Public Relations and in Pittsburgh at Ketchum Public Relations where he served as vice president and director of media training.

 He received his higher education in the United States and abroad. After completing his B.A. degree in languages from St. Bernard’s College, stateside, he transferred to the Universite de Louvain in Belgium, where he received the B.A. degree in education and completed work toward his Master’s Degree. He also completed graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh Katz School of Business. In studying abroad he developed the ability to relate cross culturally to businesses and to speak and read French and German.

Who can forget Simon and Garfunkel’s lyrical masterpiece? Listening to this song recently, I thought about how silence relates to effective presentations.

Silence means many things to different people. But when you’re presenting, silence in the form the pause is your friend.

When I coach executives on their presentations, I often find they have a difficult time mastering the art of the pause. They may be good at talking and filling air time, but using silence to build in pauses escapes many. We’re great at filling space with words, but not as adept at using the other side of the coin – periodic silence in the form of the pause — to recapture audience attention.

Talking without pauses is like writing sentences without punctuation. If we leave out the commas, periods, and dashes, words on the page become a jumbled mass, and we don’t know where the separations and transitions should come in. When I listen to presenters talk straight through their presentations, it’s like listening to an orchestra play a piece with no lulls in the score simply to reach the end of the composition.

Consider these tips for building in pauses in your next presentation:

Think of the pause as a pattern break. A well placed pause can be as effective as a change of position during your presentation. Consider that the members of your audience are always going somewhere else in their heads as they listen to, and observe, you. Strategic pauses enable you to re-anchor their attention on you and what you’re saying.

Pause before you begin and before you introduce a key word or concept. At the beginning of your presentation, pause for about five seconds to survey audience members and establish eye contact with them. Nothing rivets audience attention more strongly than standing before them momentarily in silence when they expect you to say something right away. When you pause instead of starting right away, you bring them to what I call the brink of attention.

Pause before and after stating a major point. This gives your audience time to catch up and to take in your point. If you state a major point and then immediately move on, it can seem not like a major point at all, because you haven’t verbally isolated the point from the rest of your running narrative.

Pause just before making a transition in your presentation. In this way, your pause becomes a way for you to regain audience attention. Your pause helps to bring them back to the brink of attention once again.

The next time you prepare a presentation, take a moment to think of silence as your old friend who can help you gather and regather audience attention as you speak.

In my speaking coaching with executives, I find that they are often surprised when I show them how diaphragm breathing can help to allay presentation anxiety and preserve their vocal quality. 

Actually, babies know how to breathe this way naturally. If you look at a baby sleeping on its back, you’ll see its little belly going up and down – a good example of diaphragm breathing.

Diaphragm breathing helps to manage anxiety because it slows our breathing apparatus and our physical and mental systems.  When we get nervous, stress rises in the body, and breathing moves up into the higher chest. We tend to hyperventilate and may breathe up to 18 or 24 times a minute. The voice lightens and we can easily run out of breath when speaking.

In contrast, diaphragm breathing relaxes us, and we breathe normally, about eight to ten times a minute. This slows our systems down, helps to keep the voice in its normal tone and range, and gives us the breath we need to project properly when presenting.

Here are two ways to learn and to practice diaphragm, breathing:

Two-Hand Method

Sit upright and at ease in a chair and place one hand on the lower abdomen. Keep the small finger of this hand about one inch above the navel. Place your upper hand on the upper chest.

Visualize yourself breathing down into a pipe through your nose and into a baloon in your lower abdomen. Breathe normally and allow the baloon to inflate as you gently let your breath to enter your lower abdomen. Count as you breathe — “one” as you inhale and “two” as you exhale. Count up to ten in this way. Then, repeat the process as often as needed.

Two Book Method

Lie down on the floor on your back. Place a small, paperback book on your lower abdomen and another paperback book on your upper chest. Breathe naturally and count your breaths as you let air in to move the book you’ve placed on your lower abdomen.

As you breathe from your diaphragm, the book on your lower abdomen will rise and fall. The book on your chest will remain still.

Practice these two breathing exercises until your diaphragm breathing becomes as natural as breathing itself. As you do, you’ll find that you can breathe from the diaphragm while presenting. And you’ll breathe your way to anxiety-free presentations. 

Oh my god! Sitting down to make a presentation? You’ve got to be kidding me. I know, I know. As a rule, I recommend standing up, because standing makes you taller and enhances your stature. But there may be times when standing to present may be out of place, say at a sit down business meeting.  What to do then?

In that case, you still have your upper body to move in various ways. You have your arms to move. You can use different facial expressions. And equally important, you have your voice. When sitting to make a presentation, modulating your voice to fit your presentation is just as important sitting as when you stand to present.

Because your motor movements are restricted when sitting — you can’t walk around — your voice and how you modulate it takes on even greater importance. As always, stable sameness is never your friend when you’re presenting. This holds true whether you’re standing to present or sitting down.

Jonathan Darman’s cover story “Spitzer in Exile” in the April 20, 2009 issue of Newsweek caught my eye the other day while I was in Barnes & Noble sipping a decaf Cafe Mocha. Quite a challenge Darman took on to profile a man in the throes of revisiting his life amid the scandal.

At one point, Darman asked Spitzer if he, Spitzer, had read any of the theories about why he was so reckless with Ashley Dupre. Up to then, the interview had been fairly on track. But then Spitzer is quoted in part, “…The human mind does, and permits people to do things that they rationally know are wrong, outrageous … We succumb to temptations that we know are wrong and foolish when we do it and then in hindsight we say, ‘How could I have?’”

Nice side stepping through three different subjects .. the human mind, people, we. Instead of saying, “My mind permitted me to do something I rationally knew was wrong, outrageous … I succumbed to temptations I knew were wrong and foolish when I did it and then in hindsight, I said, ‘How could I have.’”

Why, when asked a direct question about the theories regarding his venture with a prostitute, did Spitzer move into talking about the human mind, people, and using the editorial “we”? Was it to respond to the question? Was it to admit his own guilt? Was it the politician’s way of answering a question without answering a question? Hard to tell. Perhaps all of these.

That’s what ambiguity in language does. It makes it difficult to ascertain clarity relying on someone’s verbals, what we might know in our guts and in our hearts. Or that we think we know. Ambiguity sure can breed cloudiness in the mental apparatus. And in the brain work of those, like Spitzer, who have a way of answering questions with an ersatz, ambiguous answer.

Well, what do I think of Spitzer’s response? My guess, is that it emerged as his out-and- out avoidance of dealing with a painful issue directly. Verbal ambiguity in this instance seemed better suited to this professional politician than coming up with the shield of “no comment.”  Or maybe, the man just hasn’t come to grips with his own moral vacuum.

Whatever you think of President Obama’s politics, the man has honed his oratorical qualities to a sparkling finish. When he approaches the lectern, he walks at a steady pace that bespeaks confidence. At the lectern, he stands straight and poised, a factor that adds to his perceived stature and 6 1/2-foot height.

His maintains steady eye contact with his audiences that reflects straight forward candor that’s hard to match. And he breathes from the diaphragm. This gives him the air he needs to finish his sentences on a strong note.

He uses the politician’s gesturing of emphasizing points with the tips of his forefinger and thumb together to emphasize certain points. This may prompt some to consider him apodictic, but I don’t mind it.

Please let me know what you think.