Your Public Best - Lillian Brown [2]
But Your Public Best is not about makeup alone. Far from it. It is about personal appearance; about dealing with the press, with radio, with television; about speaking publicly; and about, as she puts it, surviving life in public. There is a vast amount of good advice in her book, advice which may be broadly applied. For when you stop to think about it, the title Your Public Best lends itself to a broad interpretation. You might as well be at your best in small groups, too, or while going about your ordinary day-to-day affairs. After all, there is everything to gain.
INTRODUCTION
You, the Public Person
It is often said that people judge you during the first five seconds of simply looking at you, and again during the first five seconds after you begin to speak. These dual aspects of your person—your appearance and your voice and speaking ability—can make a crucial difference in your career and in your life.
Every time you stand up to speak at a business meeting, participate in a panel discussion, address students in a classroom, hold a press conference, talk to reporters, lobby an elected official, make a major or minor speech, or talk into a microphone, you are appearing in public. You are being sized up and judged by your bosses, your professional colleagues, an audience, members of the public who watch television or listen to the radio, reporters, or members of some other group. If your appearance doesn’t always inspire respect in those looking at you, or if you are a mediocre communicator, your audience will tune you out. In such a case, you will have failed to get across what you wanted to say not because your message was not a good one, but because there was something about you—your appearance or your delivery—that put up a barrier between you and your listeners.
In today’s fast-paced world—where men and women can hold very important professional positions at a very young age, where elected officials can rush into (and sometimes right out of) the public spotlight at an amazing speed, where entire careers can be made or broken by a chance (or intended) remark that ended up at the top of the evening news—you can’t afford to be someone from whom others turn away or whose message is unclear, for any reason.
The late Edward R. Murrow is an excellent example of someone who learned early in his career to project himself effectively to the public—first to radio listeners and ultimately to TV viewers. One of the pioneers of broadcast journalism (his protégés include Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood, and many others), his distinctive voice reached across the sea during the 1940s to millions of Americans hungry for news from war-torn Europe. Later he made a smooth, seemingly natural transition to TV news, where his image—along with the ubiquitous cigarette—was soon a familiar sight to viewers.
Although he was always known as an outstanding journalist, interviewer, and analyst, Mr. Murrow’s success as a broadcaster had just as much to do with his voice, appearance, and body language. While on radio, he developed a very deep and resonant voice and learned how to speak effectively into the primitive microphones of the 1940s. Likewise, his manner of speaking—the way he projected his personality through his voice—captured his listeners’ attention and imaginations. His spare and informal speaking style, the way he used short pauses, the thoughtful questions he asked during interviews all made his listeners want to hear more from him. After his transition to television, his simple, low-key gestures and relaxed-yet-alert body language communicated to his viewers a sincerity and earnestness that went along with the voice they knew so well.
Years later, in 1961, Murrow decided to leave TV journalism to become the director of the United States Information Agency in President Kennedy’s new administration. I was there in the studio when he gave his farewell speech over closed-circuit television to CBS and its affiliates. (I had done his makeup