Hades Called His Dog “Spot”: A Charming Story That is Almost Certainly False

In Greek mythology, Cerberus guards the entrance to Hades, the Lord of the Underworld, and the realm of the dead.  The claim is that the name “Cerberus” comes from the Indo-European word Karberos, which evolved into the Greek “Kerberos.”  “Karberos” supposedly means “spotted.”  In essence, Hades called his dog “Spot.”

Every major classical source, and the overwhelming consensus of modern mythology reference works, describes Cerberus as three-headed, the offspring of the monsters Echidna and Typhon, with a serpent for a tail and snakes protruding from his body across his back.  A minority of ancient depictions gave him varying head counts, occasionally two, occasionally considerably more, but “three-headed” is the standard description any serious classicist would use.

The “Spot” Story is a Nineteenth-Century Guess

Nineteenth-century philologists noticed the Sanskrit word karbura, meaning “speckled” or “spotted,” and the related term sabala, an epithet applied to one of the dogs of Yama, the Hindu god of death.  They hypothesised that both words descended from a common, entirely reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root, kerbero-, and speculated this root might also underlie the Greek Kerberos.  No speaker of Proto-Indo-European ever wrote anything down.  This root exists only as an educated guess, built backwards from surviving daughter languages centuries after the fact.

Prof. Robert Stephen Paul Beekes, of Leiden University, in his authoritative Etymological Dictionary of Greek, published by Brill in 2010, stated that the Sanskrit word has no connection to the Greek term.  Prof. Pierre Louis Chantraine, of the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, in his 1968 Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, listed the connection as “doubted for good reasons.”  Prof. Daniel Ogden, of the University of Exeter, a leading scholar on Cerberus specifically, described every attempt to establish a secure Indo-European etymology for the name as “not yet successful.”  The proposed Proto-Indo-European root also requires a reconstructed “b” sound, a phoneme so rare in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European that its presence here strikes most specialists as phonetically suspicious on its own.

Prof. Manfred Mayrhofer, of the University of Vienna, a specialist in Indo-Iranian linguistics best known for his etymological dictionary of Sanskrit, rejected the “spotted” theory outright.  He proposed instead that Cerberus may derive from a substrate origin, meaning the name could descend from a pre-Indo-European language spoken in the Aegean or Anatolian region before Greek speakers ever arrived there, rather than from any genuine Indo-European root at all.  This is not, however, a tidy replacement answer.  Substrate origins are notoriously difficult to verify, since by definition the source language usually leaves no written record behind for anyone to check.  Prof. Mayrhofer’s proposal is a serious scholarly hypothesis, not a confirmed correction.

Prof. Ogden’s own summary of the field remains the most honest position available: every attempt at a secure Indo-European etymology has failed.  The intellectually honest answer to where “Cerberus” comes from is that nobody actually knows, not that a correct alternative is sitting quietly in the footnotes waiting to replace “Spot.”

Why the Story Survives Anyway

None of these scholarly rejections has slowed the story's spread across the internet.  It survives for the same reason most charming false etymologies survive: it is funny, it is tidy, and it makes you sound clever at a dinner party without anyone checking the footnotes.  The theory is not a modern internet fabrication invented from nothing.  It genuinely appeared in nineteenth-century historical linguistics, which is precisely why it carries enough surface credibility to keep circulating, long after the scholars who study this properly moved on from it.

Hades certainly did not call his dog “Spot.”  The theory is a century-old academic guess, built on a reconstructed sound sequence most specialists now doubt, describing a creature the story itself cannot even count the heads of correctly.  The accurate answer is considerably less satisfying: nobody knows where the name Cerberus comes from, and every scholar who has looked seriously has had to admit as much.  It remains, admittedly, one of the better jokes in classical philology.  It is simply not one you should repeat as a fact, unless you enjoy being corrected by the next classicist unfortunate enough to be standing within earshot.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters

Deadly Serious About Being Funny: Why Humour is Engineering, Not Instinct

AIA Toastmasters held its first Member’s Bonding Day for the term on the 31^st August 2026.  As part of the programme, I was tasked with giving a short workshop on how to incorporate humour into speeches.  Funny is a skill, not a gift, and treating it as the latter is how otherwise competent speakers embarrass themselves at the lectern.

Why Funny is a Skill, Not a Gift

Humour is engineered, not innate.  It has architecture, in the same way any other rhetorical device does.  Being funny in conversation and being funny at a lectern are two entirely different disciplines, governed by two different rule sets, and conflating them is the single most common mistake in this room.  A speaker who attempts humour without structural understanding is not being brave.  He is being reckless, and an audience can always tell the difference between an engineered laugh and a hopeful one.

The distinction matters more than sentiment allows.  Accidental humour says, “I hope something funny happens up there.”  Engineered humour says, “I know exactly where the laugh lands, and why.”  Only one of those two speakers walks off stage with his credibility intact.

Researchers studying TED talk footage have built machine learning models specifically to predict, from the text and delivery of a presentation alone, which utterances will generate audience laughter, treating comic timing as a measurable, learnable pattern rather than an ineffable spark of personality.  If a laugh line is predictable enough for a neural network to learn, it is predictable enough for a Toastmaster to engineer deliberately.

The Architecture of Comic Delivery

Five components carry the same rigour as any other rhetorical tool, and each deserves individual scrutiny rather than vague enthusiasm.

The setup and the punchline do unequal work.  The setup carries the load.  A weak setup kills a strong punchline regardless of how clever the punchline itself is.  Consider: “Financial planning is a lot like marriage.  You commit for the long term, you make sacrifices for the future, and eventually you realise the other person has been quietly changing the beneficiary.”  Remove the setup’s careful, sincere framing, and the punchline lands as a throwaway line rather than a genuine reversal.  The setup is not filler leading toward the joke.  It is the joke’s entire foundation, and most amateur speakers rush it, treating it as a formality to clear before reaching the “real” content.

The pause is not about speed.  It is about silence, the exact beat where the audience performs the cognitive work that makes laughter possible at all.  “Toastmasters teaches you to think on your feet.  I once had a Table Topics question so bad I aged four years standing at that lectern.  [Pause.]  Four.  Not figuratively.  I checked my watch.”  Remove the pause, and the joke collapses into a single unbroken sentence with nowhere for the laugh to land.  A pause held a beat too short reads as nervousness.  Held a beat too long reads as uncertainty.  The correct length exists in a narrow window, and it is learned through repetition, not instinct.

The callback rewards attention.  Plant early, detonate late.  “My first year as a financial consultant, I had exactly one client.  My mother,” planted at minute two, pays off considerably later: “…and that is how the club went from twelve members to sixty.  My mother, incidentally, still has not upgraded her policy.”  The laugh here is disproportionate to the material, because the audience did half the work themselves by remembering the setup.  This is the single most underused technique among newer speakers, because it demands planning an entire speech’s structure rather than reacting moment to moment.

The rule of three subversion establishes a pattern convincingly across two beats, then breaks it at the third in a way that lands as both funny and true.  “A good financial consultant needs three things: patience, discipline, and a client who actually reads the policy document before signing it.  Two out of three, we can teach.”  The rule of three is one of the oldest structures in rhetoric, and subverting it works precisely because audiences have been conditioned, across a lifetime of stories and jokes, to expect the third item to complete the pattern rather than break it.

Strategic self-deprecation is the fifth, and the most misused.  The speaker who laughs at himself before the audience does is the speaker who controls the room, but only within precise boundaries.  “I have been in insurance long enough that when people ask what I do at parties, I have learned to say it quietly, once, and then immediately change the subject to something they will find more comforting.  Like taxes.”  Self-deprecation aimed at competence, rather than at circumstance, backfires.  The joke must undercut the situation the speaker was in, never the speaker’s capability to do his job.

A Real Anecdote Worth Studying

The clearest demonstration of status reversal and misdirection under genuine pressure, rather than in a Toastmasters meeting room, comes from the second 1984 United States presidential debate.  Ronald Wilson Reagan, then 73 and the oldest president in American history, had stumbled visibly through the first debate against Walter Frederick Mondale, reviving serious public doubt about his mental fitness for a second term.  At the second debate, moderator Henry Trewhitt asked Reagan directly whether he had any doubt he could function through a national security crisis without sleep, invoking President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s ordeal during the Cuban Missile Crisis by way of comparison.

Reagan’s answer, delivered with a deliberate pause and a scowl before the punchline landed, was this: “Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt.  And I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign.  I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”  The debate hall erupted in laughter and applause.  Mondale himself laughed.  He later told journalist James Charles Lehrer, in 1990, “I knew he had gotten me there,” and identified that single line as the moment his campaign effectively ended.  Reagan won 49 of 50 states.

That line is not a spontaneous quip.  It is textbook status reversal, built on misdirection: the setup, “I will not make age an issue,” promises reassurance, and the punchline delivers the opposite, reframing Reagan’s greatest vulnerability as Mondale’s weakness instead.  It was rehearsed, and Reagan’s team knew the age question was coming.  Engineered humour, deployed under maximum real-world pressure, won an election.  Accidental humour would not have survived the moment.

Four More Structures for the Toolkit

Beyond the five core techniques sit four further patterns worth holding in reserve.  Misdirection promises one destination and delivers another, exactly as Reagan’s line did.  Exaggeration by specificity understands that vague numbers are not funny, but oddly precise ones reliably are, precisely because specificity signals a story genuinely lived rather than invented on the spot.  The comparison that should not work but does collapses two unrelated worlds into one uncomfortable truth, as in, “Underwriting a policy is a lot like dating.  Everyone is healthy and reasonable until you ask them to fill out the form honestly.”  Status reversal punches up or punches inward, never at the room: “I have given feedback to dozens of speeches in this club.  I have delivered maybe three good ones myself.  Evaluators, like critics, have the extraordinary privilege of being right without ever having to prove it.”

None of this is decoration.  A 2008 study by Bergeron and Vachon, examining salesperson humour in a business-to-consumer context, found humour usage carried a measurable positive effect on customer trust, not merely on likability.  Separate research across 369 leader-employee dyads spanning twelve Taiwanese companies found that self-deprecating humour from a leader directly increased trust in that leader, and that trust, in turn, predicted measurable improvements in team performance.  A study using Lockheed Martin’s own “Ethics Challenge” training exercise, run on 148 business students, found self-effacing humour enhanced persuasion specifically by improving the perceived credibility of the source delivering the message.  A consultant who makes a sceptical prospect laugh, genuinely, has shortened the trust-building cycle by a margin the research now quantifies rather than merely assumes.

A leader who defuses tension in a difficult briefing through humour has demonstrated a form of emotional intelligence no technical training module teaches.  Consider the applied scenario workshopped in the room: a consultant opens a client review with self-deprecation about a market call that aged badly.  The client laughs.  The trust gap narrows.  The considerably harder conversation about portfolio losses that follows becomes survivable, precisely because the room's emotional temperature was managed before the difficult number appeared on screen.  Reagan’s line achieved the identical effect at infinitely higher stakes: it did not answer the security question directly at all.  It made the room like him enough that the question stopped mattering.

The Point of All of This

This was never about producing comedians.  It was about producing more complete, more persuasive communicators, equipped with tools most speakers stumble into by accident, if they stumble into them at all.  Reagan’s team did not leave the age question to chance, and neither should any speaker leave a joke to chance.  Funny, it turns out, is a skill.  This workshop treated it as exactly that.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters

The Prospecting Script: Why the First Ninety Seconds Decide Everything

The following is a sample script for prospecting.  When introducing yourself to a client, remember that your credibility depends on that initial introduction.  Aside from how you dress, how you carry yourself, and behave in front of the client, how you speak and address what is raised either gets you to the next stage of dealmaking or loses you the client.  Please note that this is how I speak to clients.  This may not necessarily be how you speak to clients.  Take the concepts but adjust them to make them your own, because a script recited without conviction is worse than no script at all, particularly when selling life insurance as a genuine financial instrument to high-net-worth individuals who have already heard every generic pitch in the market.

Opening Consent & Credibility (1 to 2 Minutes)

Introduce yourself clearly: State your full name, role, and affiliation with your principal.  State the referral source, if any.

For example: “I’m [Name], [Title] with [Principal].  [Name] referred us.”

When using pronouns, try to use collective pronouns, so you are viewed as a team or a group, not an individual.  This gives the client greater assurance.

Do not say:    “I can serve you.”

Say:               “We can serve you.”

A client trusts an institution with visible depth more readily than a single individual working alone, and the pronoun shift costs nothing while signalling exactly that depth.

Do not give your name card yet.  Hold the card until you are at the deal stage.  Early card exchange is low-value and often discarded.  The card must be given at the deal-making stage, once it actually represents something the client wants to keep.

Keep the social proof line short and factual.  You are introducing yourself, not applying for a job.

For example: “We work with family offices and entrepreneurs in Singapore on estate and liquidity planning.”

For example: “We specialise in serving the HNW market and politically exposed persons, with more than three decades of experience across the team.”

Then deploy the Benjamin Franklin Effect: Ask a tiny, non-threatening favour to trigger cognitive consistency.

For example: “Could I borrow your pen for a moment, please?”

For example: “Could you mark the top of the form?”

For example: “Could you pass me the cup, please?”

People who do a small favour are more likely to view you positively and help later.  This is not folklore.  Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, documented the exact mechanism in his own autobiography, describing how a rival legislator in the Pennsylvania legislature grew warmer toward him after Franklin asked to borrow a scarce book from his library, returning it promptly with a note of genuine appreciation.  The legislator, who had never previously spoken to Franklin with any civility, became a lasting ally.  Two centuries later, the psychologist Leon Festinger formalised the mechanism as cognitive dissonance: a person who has just done you a favour resolves the discomfort of having helped a stranger by deciding they must like you.  The mechanism has not aged a day.

Rapid Wealth Snapshot (3 to 5 Minutes)

Purpose: You need to establish the scale and urgency of your solution without deep probing.  You do this by citing similar anecdotal stories.

For example: “People always think they have time, when time is one thing we do not control.  Things happen, and dealing with them after the fact is costly.  It may be too late.”

For example: “No one predicted the Iran conflict.  The lesson here is that we should manage our risk and diversify out of banks to insurance.”

Handle that last line carefully, because precision protects your credibility more than rhetorical neatness ever will.  Insurers are not categorically immune to collapse.  American International Group required a US$182 billion federal bailout in September 2008, the largest single corporate rescue in American history at the time, after its Financial Products division wrote credit default swaps it could not honour.  The stronger, defensible version of the point is narrower: A properly regulated, adequately reserved life insurance policy, held for its intended purpose rather than deployed as a speculative derivatives book, has historically weathered banking crises considerably better than a bank’s own balance sheet, because insurers hold long-duration liabilities against long-duration assets, while banks fund long-duration loans with short-duration, flightable deposits, the mismatch that sank Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023 within 48 hours of the first depositor run.  Say the true version.  It survives scrutiny from a client sophisticated enough to have read about AIG.

Key factual prompts: Your questions need to be direct and crisp.  This makes you look professional and sets you up for the pitch.  Fact-finding is the foundation of any pitch.

For example: “What are your approximate investable assets?”

For example: “Do you have any concentrated business holdings?”

For example: “What is your exposure to debt instruments?”

Use ranges to anchor the client.  This anchoring sets realistic expectations.  It also subtly tests the limit of what you can sell.

For example: “My clients in your bracket typically hold S$2 million to S$10 million of investable assets, and target S$1 million to S$3 million of liquid estate funding.”

For example: “We need to plan for your retirement because my clients in similar situations typically need to plan for at least S$10 million to maintain their quality of life.  You retire at 65 years, but our life expectancy is 20 more years.”

Micro-commitment: After the snapshot, ask for a small commitment.  Small closes build to a final close.

For example: “We both agree that critical illness coverage is very important for you.”

For example: “As we have discussed, I understand you need at least S$5 million.”

Anecdote: Use real stories to frame the context.  It makes it personal.  If you do not have direct experience of this yet, use stories from your colleagues.

For example: “A client used an overfunded IUL to bridge a S$2.5 million family-home buy-out.  The liquidity provided by policy loans avoided a forced sale and preserved asset value.”

Draw on documented history here rather than folklore, because a client of this calibre can smell an unverified anecdote from across the table.  Walter Elias Disney and his wife Lillian took out a US$60,000 loan against his life insurance policy in 1954, at a moment banks had refused to finance the amusement park concept altogether, and that loan is genuinely the reason Disneyland exists.  Raymond Albert Kroc drew repeatedly on the cash value of his own life insurance policies to bridge cash flow gaps during McDonald’s early expansion, when the pace of growth he wanted outstripped what conventional lenders would support.  James Cash Penney borrowed against his life insurance during the Great Depression specifically to meet payroll and keep his stores operating, when the alternative was closure.  None of these men used insurance because they expected to die imminently.  They used it because the cash value functioned as a liquidity source no bank was willing to offer them at the moment it actually mattered.

Needs Probe with Commitment Framing (5 to 8 Minutes)

Liquidity timing: These are leading questions you use to quantify the size of the need.  Based on this micro-commitment, you further qualify this.  Give them a range and some specifics.  Do not give the client open-ended questions.

For example: “Do you expect a major cash need in the next 12 months to 36 months?  Based on our conversation, I think we are looking at the range of around S$1 million.”

For example: “Roughly how much would you need to access within a year?  Considering what you said, should we consider S$500,000 or S$1 million?”

For example: “Should you need sudden liquidity, are we looking at S$1 million or more than that?”

Legacy clarity: Use leading questions to set up the close.  The purpose of the questions is to prepare the client for the proposal and the close.  You transition the conversation from cost to value through reframing.

For example: “Who do you want to receive funds immediately on death?”

For example: “How important is probate avoidance?”

For example: “How much of your estate do you want to domicile in Singapore?”

This is where an irrevocable trust earns its place in the conversation, and a concrete illustration lands considerably harder than the abstract concept alone.  Consider a business owner whose estate faces a US$4.556 million tax liability with no liquid assets set aside to meet it.  Forced to sell the underlying business under time pressure, the estate typically absorbs a further discount of roughly 20% from fire-sale pricing, pushing total family loss toward US$5.456 million.  A survivorship policy held inside an ILIT, sized at roughly US$4.6 million in death benefit against a modest annual premium, delivers that liquidity tax-free at exactly the moment it is needed, preserving the business intact for the next generation rather than liquidating it under duress.  The mechanism is not theoretical.  It is the standard structure private wealth counsel builds around precisely this scenario, and the United States Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Connelly versus United States, concerning how a company-owned life insurance policy affects the valuation of a deceased shareholder’s stake in a buy-sell agreement, confirms the structure is still evolving and still worth getting right with proper counsel rather than assuming a template policy suffices.

Risk and return: Anchor risk tolerance through specific timelines.  Your questions must not have uncertainty because uncertainty makes a close more difficult.  The client must feel that urgency and time constraint.

For example: “What downside can you accept over a 5-to-10-year horizon?”

For example: “How much do you need at age 65 years, if we want to maintain a similar life quality?”

Commitment framing: Ask for a conditional close.  A verbal commitment increases your conversion probability.  This is the prelude to the close and paperwork to seal the deal.  Make it immediate, if possible, without sounding desperate.  Desperation kills the deal.

For example: “Since we have crafted a solution at an acceptable cost, shall we implement it?”

For example: “Since we understand the value of the proposition, do we sign this today, or should we reconvene in two days?”

For example: “This is an important decision.  That is a significant investment.  Take a moment to consider this and the risk of not addressing this.  I will get back to you in two days, and we will sign this remotely.”

Objection Handling Within the Pitch

Mirror and label: Repeat the objection and name the emotion.  This is a tool to shape the client narrative.  If you do not shape this narrative, the circle around your clients and other financial consultants, whether from the banks, insurers, or other financial institutions, will do that.  By demonstrating empathy, you have reduced resistance.  This is the first step to reframing.

For example: “You are worried about fees; that is understandable.”

For example: “The timeline is tight.  It is normal to feel a bit of stress.”

Reframe with anchoring: One of the key techniques for this is to refocus the contention on how it benefits the client.  A clear example is if a client objects to cost, anchor to value.

For example: “The annualised cost is X%, but it secures S$X of immediate estate liquidity and avoids a probate sale.”

For example: “The premium is high, but the cost of not covering this risk is higher.  You have put funds aside to establish a legacy.  How do we put a price on that?”

For example: “That is a significant commitment, but we are not doing this because you are going to leave this world someday.  We are doing this because the people you love are going to live on after you.”

Scarcity only when factual: Despite the need to close, integrity has no substitute value.  Do not manufacture a crisis that is not based on facts.  If a financing window or product feature is genuinely time-limited, state the facts and provide documentation.  Always avoid manufactured urgency.  A client of this calibre has advisors of their own, and a fabricated deadline discovered after the fact does not merely lose the deal.  It costs you every future referral that client’s network would otherwise have sent your way.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Toastmasters Speech Evaluations: Dissecting the Message

George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright and social activist, allegedly observed that the United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.  The same trap awaits any Toastmasters programme that skips its own vocabulary.  An evaluation is a judgement, an assessment.  In this context, it concerns a speech delivered.  The word itself traces to the mid-nineteenth century, from the French “évaluer”, a portmanteau built from the Latin “ex-”, meaning “out,” and the Old French “value”.  It means, quite literally, to draw the value out of something.  That etymology is not decoration.  It is the entire job description.

The Purpose of Evaluation

Project evaluation serves two functions, and most people only remember the first.  The obvious one is technical: assessing a speech’s structure, its points of acclamation, its points for improvement.  The second function is the actual reason Toastmasters exists in the first place.  The evaluator must ensure there is a next speech, and another after that.  He must encourage, educate, and inspire the speaker.  An evaluation that fails to accomplish this has failed, regardless of how technically accurate its criticism was.

What an Evaluator Does Not Do

Evaluators overstep their role constantly, and the mistakes are not confined to beginners.  Senior Toastmasters, ironically, commit several of these errors more often than newcomers, having grown comfortable enough to forget the boundaries of the job.

Recounting the speech is the first and most obvious error.  The audience already heard it.  Re-enacting or repeating the project speech entertains nobody and helps the speaker even less.

Duplicating the roles of the language evaluator and the ah counter is the second.  The language evaluator addresses grammar, morphology, and rhetorical devices, not the structure of the speech itself.  The ah counter tracks pauses and filler words, and a competent one explains where and why they occurred so the speaker can correct them.  Neither role belongs to the project evaluator, and folding their work into his own is redundant, not thorough.

Becoming personally involved in the speech is the third, and it afflicts senior Toastmasters and Distinguished Toastmasters with particular regularity.  The audience exists to be moved emotionally by the speaker.  The evaluator exists to notice that movement without being consumed by it.  Just as the speaker adopts a speaker persona, the evaluator must adopt an evaluator persona, remaining neutral, above the emotional current of the room.  An evaluator swayed by pathos cannot honestly assess whether the pathos actually worked.

Making the evaluation about oneself is the fourth, and perhaps the most self-indulgent.  Bringing knowledge to an evaluation is necessary.  Bringing the baggage of personal experience is not.  Even where the evaluator has walked the same road, eaten the same food, met the same people described in the speech, the story belongs to the speaker.  It is his hero’s journey, not an invitation for the evaluator to reminisce about his own.

The Structure of an Effective Speech

Evaluating a speech properly requires understanding what a good speech actually is.  A good speech is a complete journey.  It opens with a statement, sometimes framed as a rhetorical question.  It expands on that statement, carries the audience through development, and argues a cogent, coherent position designed to sway them toward it.  It then returns home, circling back to the opening statement, now transformed into a call to action, propelling the audience to continue the hero’s journey on their own terms.

Depending on the audience and material, the speech must balance logos, pathos, and ethos.  The speaker wears the mantle of the speaker persona, and his task is convincing the audience that he channels their own thoughts, hopes, and fears back at them.  That is what the evaluator is listening for.

Coherency

The first thing to assess is the logic of the argument, its coherency.  An incoherent speech loses the audience, and the spell breaks.  The evaluator’s job is identifying exactly where that incoherency occurred and addressing it directly.  Where the speech is cogent and contextual, the evaluator must say so, and explain why, because good work can always become better work, and both directions deserve equal attention.

Values

Next comes the ethical dimension of the hero’s journey: whether the speaker’s actions align with the story and the character he has presented.  A disconnect between stated belief and demonstrated action is the evaluator’s responsibility to flag.  Alignment deserves the same attention, highlighted specifically to reinforce what the speaker is already doing correctly.  There is always a reason people do what they do, and become who they become.  The evaluator’s task is understanding that reason well enough to name it.

The Emotional Rollercoaster

People are, ultimately, creatures of feeling, prisoners of their own history, their fears, their melancholy, their hatreds, their loves, their hopes.  Every listener searches for themselves inside every story told.  The evaluator’s job is noticing where the delivery and the story align, and where they diverge, and naming both honestly.

“Vocal Variety”

Few phrases in Toastmasters have been reduced to meaningless filler as thoroughly as “vocal variety.”  What does it actually mean?  How does it affect the speech in question?  Which direction, specifically, should the speaker move toward?  A speech is not a play.  It is not a re-enactment of a life event staged for dramatic effect.  It is a recounting of an event, carrying a message and an intent.  Nobody is performing Shakespeare in the Park.  Any recommendation involving vocal variety must be quantifiable and measurable, or it collapses into cliché, offering the speaker nothing he can actually act on.

“Use the Stage”

The instruction to “use the stage” suffers the identical fate.  Not every speech requires movement, and treating stage movement as a universal virtue ignores context entirely.  A speaker delivering remarks in the capacity of a public officeholder or policymaker should not be wandering the stage.  He is the focal point of the room, and his task is capturing that attention and holding it without dilution.  Movement, in that context, breaks the gravitas the moment demands.  At its worst, it signals indecision, incredulity, even a lack of credibility, precisely the opposite of what the speaker is trying to project.

Three Points, or You Are Nagging

The evaluation itself begins by addressing the speaker directly.  For the duration of that evaluation, he is the centre of the room, and the evaluator’s own presence becomes secondary to his hero’s journey.  My own preference runs to three points of acclamation and three points for improvement, no more.  There is frequently more worth saying, and resisting the urge to say all of it is the entire discipline.  Detailed analysis belongs to a mentor, working privately and at length.  The evaluator’s role is highlighting the good and the bad clearly enough for the whole room to learn from it, not producing an exhaustive breakdown nobody in the audience has the capacity to absorb in one sitting.  Exceed three points, and the lesson goes over everyone’s head, or worse, demoralises the speaker entirely.

What to Avoid

Newer evaluators frequently apologise for their own feedback.  This is a mistake.  Apologising for an honest assessment diminishes both the evaluator’s credibility and his own confidence, and the words a person hears himself say shape him as much as they shape his audience.

No evaluator should ever claim a speech was perfect.  That is a lie, and everyone in the room knows it.  No such speech exists.  However strong a speech is, another point of improvement is always available.

Some evaluators swing to the opposite extreme, denigrating the speaker outright.  This is equally wrong.  Nobody begins as a finished speaker.  That is the entire reason project speeches and evaluations exist in the first place.  Being trusted to evaluate someone’s hero’s journey is a privilege, not a licence to tear it down.

Summarising

Every evaluation must close with a statement of broad intent, one that inspires the speaker toward the next speech rather than away from public speaking altogether.  Watch for breadth versus depth, the credibility of the story, the veracity of sources and quotations, and the transition between points.  A credible speech rests on verified facts and properly attributed quotes.  I am particular, deliberately so, about quotation attribution and scientific accuracy.  Far too many speeches lean on cliché built from misconception, outright fabrication, or superstition.  A good speech educates.  It does not spread misinformation dressed up as inspiration.

Beating the Clock

Time management follows its own discipline.  A speech evaluation runs roughly three minutes for a reason.  Psychologically, tolerance for sustained criticism is limited, which makes diplomacy in delivery an art in itself, one that must still elevate and inspire the speaker rather than simply cushion the blow.  By the green light, the evaluator should have covered every point of acclamation and begun the recommendations.  By the yellow light, he should be transitioning toward the summary.  By the red light, that summary should already be underway.  Thirty seconds remains more than sufficient to close.

In Closing

Speech evaluations form one half of the Toastmasters journey, and a genuinely capable Toastmaster is proficient in both halves of effective communication: the ability to speak, honed through project speeches, and the ability to understand, honed through project evaluations.  Neglect either half, and the whole discipline remains unfinished.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters

Business Negotiation is Warfare in a Suit

Imam Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, the Persian philosopher and theologian, once observed that before we speak of a cup, it is important to know what a cup is.  I have always begun with definitions for the same reason.  Even when two parties share a language, misunderstanding remains entirely possible.  Everyone arrives at a conversation carrying the baggage of their own experience, viewing the exchange through a prism shaped by history, education, and whatever role they occupy in the relationship.

“Negotiation” refers here to any discussion undertaken with the intent of reaching an agreement.  The word entered English in the late fifteenth century, denoting the act of dealing with another person, derived from the Latin “negotiation”, itself from the verb “negotiari”.

“Culture” entered English somewhat later, in the mid-nineteenth century, from the Latin “cultura”, meaning tillage.  Culture was originally tied to the practices of people working the land.  Today it refers to the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a society, encompassing its arts, its intellectual achievements, and its shared history, gathered under a specific label.  That label might be national, such as Singaporean or American.  It might be ethnic, such as Malay or Chinese.  It might be religious, such as Muslim or Christian.  The difficulty is that these lines blur constantly.  Every person carries multiple labels and identities, emphasised differently depending on context.  In that sense, almost every negotiation is, in fact, cross-cultural, whether the parties recognise it or not.

The Persona

Nobody arrives at the table as themselves.  We all wear masks, facades constructed for the occasion.  William Shakespeare wrote, in As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII:

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts …”

Before reaching that table, real or virtual, every party must understand precisely which role they are playing, and which role every member of their own team is playing.  Negotiation, in most circumstances, is a team sport.  Someone plays the good cop, to a degree.  Someone else plays the bad cop, to a degree.  The team creates the impression that certain points are non-negotiable, while quietly searching for the compromise that actually matters elsewhere.  The briefing before the meeting frequently matters more than the meeting itself.

To operate effectively, a negotiator needs a clear picture of the people they represent, the people they face, and the role each plays within the wider project.  That clarity prevents overstepping, prevents the kind of mistake that diminishes credibility, and prevents inadvertently showing one’s hand.  This is chess.  This is poker.  Every move should matter.

In practice, my team builds a dossier on every significant counterparty ahead of major projects.  We construct the most complete picture available of the people we are about to negotiate with, and the people they answer to.  This includes the obvious, such as favourite child and marital stability, and the less comfortable, such as ongoing investigations and marital infidelity.  We acquire every advantage available to close the deal on favourable terms.

At the table itself, we wear what I call the speaker persona: a mask constructed from every rhetorical and psychological tool available, designed to shorten the distance between the other side and us.  Executed well, it convinces the counterparty that we sit beside them, understanding their perspective from the inside.  That is the actual power of rhetoric.

Rhetoric

The primary instrument of negotiation is rhetoric: the art of constructing a cogent, coherent argument, for or against a position, to move people.  Rhetoric is as old as civilisation itself.  The moment one person first convinced others to follow him, to believe what he said, to move together toward common action, society began, and human history commenced its long, uneven march of progress.  Anyone wishing to excel at negotiation must, by necessity, excel at speaking.

The art of rhetoric divides into three disciplines: the ability to listen carefully, the ability to discern the message beneath the words, and the ability to dissect that message and construct a response.  Negotiation should never be treated as a zero-sum contest, because reputation matters, and the other side’s network may well be worth doing business with again.

Some ruthlessness is required to secure a winning position, but that advantage must never be pressed home too brutally.  The other side must leave the table feeling they gained something, however modest.  Paradoxically, generosity that feels unearned generates suspicion rather than gratitude.  Everyone carries an ego, a measure of pride.  Excessive magnanimity, offered too freely, breeds resentment rather than goodwill, because nobody wishes to feel small.  Absolute ruthlessness is a card reserved for the moment bridges are meant to burn, for making an example of someone.  That is the domain of international diplomacy, or hostage negotiation with terrorists.  It has no place in ordinary international business.

Misconceptions

Several misconceptions about effective speaking deserve correcting outright.  The first: excellent command of language is not, in fact, required.  Effective communication requires only the ability to convey a point succinctly and simply.  Were mere facility with flowery language the actual requirement, poets and language teachers would run the world’s negotiating tables, and they emphatically do not.  Command of language, in the sense that matters here, means the ability to convey what one intends the other side to understand, and to discern accurately what the other side is conveying in return.

Mastery of grammar is similarly unnecessary.  The ability to write an essay on the morphology of words and the relationship between tenses does not make anyone a competent negotiator.  It is entirely possible to become lost in the surface meaning of a conversation while missing the message underneath entirely.

An expansive vocabulary is not required either, beyond the technical terms relevant to the subject matter at hand, whether shipping, finance, or otherwise.  The average reasonably fluent person uses between 16,000 and 20,000 words.  In a business exchange, that figure drops to roughly half, because tension pushes people toward the most familiar vocabulary, and sentences become utilitarian.  The actual skill lies in using the words the other party already uses, shortening the psychological distance between one’s own speaker persona and their listener persona.

The Stage

To paraphrase Sun Tzu, in the third chapter of The Art of War: “Know your enemy, know yourself; your victory is certain.  Know heaven, know earth; your victory is complete.”  Sun Tzu described nine varieties of ground: dispersive ground, weak ground, strategic ground, open ground, intersecting ground, serious ground, difficult ground, deadly ground, and desperate ground.  Identifying which ground one occupies is not optional.

Dispersive ground sits near home base, where soldiers, aware of a safe retreat, lack full resolve under pressure.  In negotiation, this is the opening phase, where the client one represents may fold at the first sign of resistance, absent an actual resolution.  This is addressed through briefing before the meeting, preparing the client for the other side’s feigned retreats, and pre-emptively rejecting apparent compromises that carry hidden costs.  A supplier offering a lower unit price while quietly altering payment terms is a textbook example.  Payment terms frequently affect a credit line far more than the headline price ever will.

Strategic, or contentious, ground carries value for both sides.  These are the primary points of contention, where each side seeks advantage while remaining convinced the other has also won something.  In an acquisition, the number of shares often matters less than the voting power those shares carry.  Control of a company does not require a majority stake.  Every party, every group, carries a psychological blind spot capable of exploitation.

Open ground offers both sides room to manoeuvre.  These are the open-ended contractual clauses that eventually become points of contention.  This is where rapport gets built, where small concessions accumulate into a bank of goodwill for later use.

Intersecting ground adjoins other ground, facilitating movement and communication.  Its strategic value lies not in what it contains, but in where it sits.  Real estate agents call this location, location, location.  In negotiation, it is the position that leads toward what is actually wanted.  Securing a term sometimes requires first securing the circumstances that produce it.  Consider an investment into Japan, where withholding tax runs close to 40%, and Japanese interests must hold at least 50% of any special purpose vehicle.  In such cases, structuring the investment through a trust or company elsewhere, which then loans funds to the Japanese vehicle, avoids the withholding tax entirely, because loan repayments are not subject to it.

Serious ground describes an army that has penetrated hostile territory without securing its rear, leaving it exposed to a multi-front assault or encirclement, its supply chain insecure.  In negotiation, this appears when a negotiator fixates on one issue, price above all else, while ignoring delivery schedules, payment timelines, tax liability, and currency exposure, every one of which will ultimately shape the real price paid.

Difficult ground resists manoeuvre.  A project spanning multiple stakeholders, several legal jurisdictions, and heavy political exposure qualifies.  The correct response is not to become entangled in it.  This demands considerable preparatory work: clearing contractual ambiguity, moving up the broker chain, and identifying the actual decision-makers.

Deadly ground is difficult terrain riddled with choke points.  Here, arriving early and preparing the ambush, rather than walking into one, is the only sound strategy.  Research and preparation before entering the room matter enormously.  Carrying oneself with decorum, dignity, and honesty is admirable.  Assuming the same of everyone else is foolish.  People come to the table to win.

Desperate ground is ground from which only immediate action can prevent destruction.  This ground is best avoided altogether.  When new developments, shifts in the wider world affecting price or availability, changes in legislation or management, catch a negotiator off guard mid-process, the correct response is recognition and retreat.  Returning another day beats being outmanoeuvred and losing outright.

Throughout all of this, knowing who attends the meeting matters, as does identifying who stands in a state of need and how that need might be created.  Above all, remember the question every party silently asks: what is in this for me?  Everyone wants something.  Effective negotiation appeals directly to that want.

The Performance

Three points of influence govern the performance itself: ethos, pathos, logos.  A fourth, kairos, completes the set.  Mastering all four properly is the work of a Toastmaster, which lies outside the scope of this piece.  Instead, consider the finer points that can be applied immediately.

George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright, observed that the United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.  The greatest negotiating challenges frequently arise with people who speak the same language as us, precisely because shared vocabulary breeds a complacency that produces expensive mistakes.  This returns directly to the earlier point about definitions.

Every conversation carries a distance between speaker and listener.  Closing that distance requires every rhetorical and psychological device available, convincing the other party that we walk in their shoes and think as they think.

Finally, people wish to be aggrandised, elevated, recognised.  The purpose of negotiation is fulfilling one’s mandate and securing the desired outcome.  Achieving that requires opening the hearts of the other side, and with them, their mouths, and occasionally, their wallets.

Further Considerations

Understanding the language a party thinks in matters, because that language shapes their thought process directly.  Some languages are more visual, others more linear.  This shapes how the negotiation itself will unfold.  Negotiations with the Japanese, or East Asians more broadly, proceed according to hierarchy, given the subtlety embedded in those languages.  The decision-maker is almost always the most senior figure present, though rarely the person one actually wants to address directly, and sometimes the reverse holds.

Power dynamics matter most visibly in a Western context, where establishing credibility demands extra time up front.  It remains impolitic to say so plainly, but post-colonial tensions still sit beneath the surface of many such meetings.  Where East Asians favour subtlety, Germanic peoples favour directness, Anglo-Saxons favour aggression, and Arabs favour fluidity of discourse.  These cultural distinctions require careful attention before anyone sits down.

Tip One: Play the Competent Fool

Negotiation, however personal it may feel, is never about ego.  It is about winning.  Being first to take charge in the room also makes one the first head offered up when blame needs distributing.  There is always someone at the table who wants to be seen as master of it.  Let him be, provided he sits on the other side, since roles on one’s own team have already been assigned.  That person will play his cards, and likely reveal considerably more than he intends.  Praise him, elevate him, and he will bloom like a flower, spilling exactly what is needed.

Claiming a position slightly lower in the hierarchy also helps, high enough to carry a say, not so high as to absorb the ultimate blame.  At an impasse, this allows an appeal to management, to a director, to a board, buying time to regroup and return with a revised strategy.  Flexibility matters.

Tip Two: Misdirect

Considerable time can be spent discussing matters that are not, in fact, the true objective, allowing the other team to prepare a position while leaving the actual target undefended.  In a recent biomass power plant project, worth US$250 million, a specific concession on the insurance coupon was the actual objective.  Over an hour was spent reviewing the finer contractual points, with full awareness that the other side faced a time constraint.  With fewer than fifteen minutes remaining, the conversation pivoted directly to the real objective, and secured it.  Time itself is a weapon.

Tip Three: The Power of Saying Less

Explicit statements of intent are sometimes necessary, but more often, saying less than required lets the other side talk themselves into a corner.  Most communication is non-verbal.  Very little of what people say is meant literally.  Allusion, allegory, and idiom saturate daily conversation, built on cultural assumptions that can work for or against a negotiator depending on whether both parties share them.

Idioms and cultural assumptions are, by nature, culture-specific.  Assuming the other side understands them, or that we understand theirs, is a mistake, particularly across cultures.  In an Anglo-Saxon context, “letting the cat out of the bag” means indiscretion, a secret revealed.  Someone unfamiliar with the idiom might reasonably assume cats are habitually kept in bags, and recoil accordingly.

Deliberately saying less exploits the same principle.  The average person cannot tolerate silence.  Silence produces discomfort, which people instinctively fill with conversation and nervous smiles.  Sustained quiet, paired with an attentive gaze, draws most people into revealing considerably more than they intended.

Tip Four: Reputation is Everything

Every person plays a part, and credibility is the sum of one’s reputation, requiring active cultivation and protection.  Eventually, reputation alone closes a deal, or reputation alone loses it.  Reputation also depends on network, on association, which is why ruthless pruning of one’s connections and careful selection of one’s team is necessary rather than optional.

Anyone lacking cultivated credibility must borrow it.  The simplest method involves anchoring a point to a quotation from a recognised authority, a worthy sound bite from a known name in the field.  Credibility can also be borrowed through association, a consideration worth weighing carefully when assembling a negotiating team.

Reputation alone occasionally swings a meeting before a word is spoken.  That effect rests on an actual body of work.  My own team carries a combined 120 years of experience, built not merely from curricula vitae, but from decades of accumulated network.  Frequently, who one knows matters more than what one knows.

Tip Five: Appeal to Self-Interest

Appeals should target self-interest, never altruism, never benevolence, never pity.  Appealing to pity, or invoking past favours, may succeed once.  It will not succeed twice.  It creates resentment through an imbalance in the power dynamic, since nobody enjoys being reminded of an obligation, however small.  People want to feel empowered, and effective negotiation cultivates precisely that feeling.  Appeals to someone’s higher self are a lottery, and no business can be run on chance.  Certainty is required, and vanity, greed, and self-interest are as certain as anything gets.

The Benjamin Franklin Effect describes a proposed psychological phenomenon, a form of cognitive dissonance, in which a person who does someone a favour becomes more inclined to think well of them.  It might seem intuitive that people do favours because they already like us.  In business, the causation frequently runs the other way: people come to like us because of the favours we induce them to perform.  The effect takes its name from Benjamin Franklin, who wrote in his autobiography, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”  Franklin illustrated this with an account of a rival legislator in the eighteenth-century Pennsylvania legislature: “Having heard that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days.  He sent it immediately, and I returned it in about a week with another note, expressing my sense of the favour strongly.  When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.”

The same dynamic appears among smokers borrowing a light from strangers.  A shared, trivial favour produces a cognitive bias suggesting mutual liking, which explains why smoking areas host conversations between people who have never otherwise met.  In a physical meeting, this is straightforward to replicate.  I habitually ask counterparts to fetch me coffee, which is nothing more than this same principle in practice.  In an online meeting, the same effect is harder to reproduce, though small talk touching on restaurant recommendations or local logistics achieves a diminished version of it.

Tip Six: Make Everything a Group Decision

At every milestone, securing something in writing, with as many signatures and as much buy-in as possible, matters considerably.  This makes retreat costly for any side, since reputational damage follows any unilateral withdrawal.  A bad decision reached collectively cannot result in an entire management team being dismissed.  Blame, when it lands, rarely distributes evenly, but enough spreads that everyone ends up smelling roughly the same.

This is precisely why organisations hold annual general meetings and similar events: the illusion of buy-in from every major stakeholder serves not just moral authority but a form of insurance against future criticism.  Once everyone has assented, nobody can credibly claim opposition, or work at cross purposes, without risking their own credibility in the process.

The same instinct applies at the negotiating table, regardless of who sits across it.  The moment agreement is reached, document it and record it.  Pausing the conversation at each milestone, and confirming accord on that specific point, creates a waymarker for the stage that follows.

Tip Seven: The Power Behind the Throne

Considerable business intelligence goes toward identifying who actually makes the decision.  It might be the managing director.  It might be his girlfriend.  Everyone has a pressure point.  I once attended a meeting at a hotel, negotiating the sale of an entire hotel chain, still new to the business and part of the team rather than leading it.  Everyone else arrived in expensive Italian or English-cut suits, wearing ties that cost more than most people’s monthly rent.  The billionaire arrived dressed like the gardener.  That is what real power looks like.  Enough money renders convention optional.

This concept extends beyond the decision-maker himself to whoever holds his softest spot.  In one negotiation, I discerned that a client’s youngest daughter was, without question, his favourite.  Steering the conversation toward her approval secured the sale.

Tip Eight: Check the Wind before Taking a Leak

Working as a deck cadet on a container vessel, using the toilet was not always practical, particularly at the forecastle, three hundred metres from the accommodation block.  The first lesson learnt was to check which way the wind blew before relieving oneself over the side, or face the consequences directly.  The same principle applies in negotiation: understand which way the wind blows before committing to a strategy.  No plan survives first contact.

In one project, discussing a potential investment in a neighbouring country’s port development, the other side kept trying to raise the cost rather than lower it, which was immediately suspicious.  It emerged they intended to have our side bid artificially high, then split the excess with them, effectively defrauding the state.  That is not how business gets done, and we walked away from the table entirely.

On a related note, anyone can claim to be honest.  Very few claims survive genuine testing.  Everyone has a price.  Most people have never actually been tempted to the limit of theirs.  Nobody can honestly claim incorruptibility without having walked away from millions offered purely on principle.  Reputation, career, health, even life itself, can be taken by others.  Only we can sell our own souls.  The task is ensuring the price for that sale sits so high nobody can afford it.

Conclusion

Every point above converges on a single purpose: negotiation exists to create the conditions for a sale.  That “sale” is whatever outcome was set out to be achieved from the outset.  What gets sold is rarely a product or a service in the narrow sense.  It is a solution.  A genuinely good solution leaves everyone at the table satisfied, convinced they were part of something momentous, whether or not that conviction survives contact with the fine print later.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code