(Or secrets of a 25 year veteran speaker!)
Part 1 (part 2 next month if there is enough interest!)
Firstly, sorry to all my readers who have noticed a glitch in my newsletters! I have basically been away speaking for 3 months and am only just finding my feet and the ground!
I am in another plane en route to Adelaide to speak to a National Speakers Association event and as I was reading over my notes I thought “ I bet many of my readers have to present to either large or small groups and would like to know some tips on how to do it well.”
So hopefully you do cos that’s the focus of this newsletter!
No matter what business you are in, there will be a time when you have to present some ideas to a group, or maybe you are presenting at a wedding or personal event, these ‘rules’ apply to any presentation you have to do any where to any number of people!
If you are a CEO or meeting planner or senior manager it’s important that you pay attention to some of these rules, as your team may be more inspired with this process approach to a presentation.
Many times a CEO or manager stands up and wants to inspire the team but fails to do anything except TELL the how passionate they are, yet if you were in the audience listening, you would never realize it!
I became a speaker after meeting Ron Tacchi at the first conference I ever presented.
He listened as the MC and when I had finished said “you should be a speaker” and I said “what’s a speaker?”! Needless to say he had a lot of coaching to do and bless him, he did! For the next 5 years he taught me so many things I rarely hear now.
On top of that I have been studying with Michael Grinder who is an ‘educators educator’; a master of non verbal communication and the process of delivering content so it’s memorable and effective. (www.michaelgrinder.com) He is a must to study with if you are serious about being a great speaker.
So here we go with the ‘rules’!
- You must have fun!
Ron drilled into me that if I have fun, they will have fun. No matter how serious your content or how professional you need to be, you can always have fun. Even at a funeral, people love to laugh or have a good time and there are very few occasions where a bit of levity and humor is inappropriate. Find ways to inject a bit of fun into each few minutes of your conversation with the group.
- It’s a conversation NOT a speech or a keynote. The purpose is to connect! You to them and them to each other.
Think about the best speakers you have ever seen. They are the ones who seem to be talking directly to you, that’s a conversation, not a speech. Too many times, we focus on our ’speech’ and practice it and rehearse and re-craft it so the words are just right.
Although the words must be relevant, they are only one side of the equation! Think about how you have a conversation with another person or a small group. It’s interactive, you speak, they listen, they speak, you listen etc. So it is with you on stage.
Think of it as a conversation, you are listening to their non verbals and watching them carefully to make sure they are engaged and listening to your side of the conversation. If they seem distracted, or unconscious!, then you need to do something to re engage them. Probably something like stop speaking! And get them to do something active, so they are part of the conversation.
Some people have such a powerful story (like Charlie Plumb an ex Vietnam prisoner of war) and the story is so compelling that he doesn’t need to have a conversation, you are spellbound from the beginning! But few of us have a story so dramatic, Li Cunxin, the Chinese ballet dancer who escaped Mao’s China is another amazing spellbinding story, so we have to use conversations!
- People will remember how you made them feel.
This is truly the key - remember this and do all you can to make sure people feel great when you have finished speaking - and if you are delivering bad news make sure they feel that you have compassion for them and care!
People do not remember facts and figures nor does that make them change their behavior or thinking. We need to touch their hearts with stories and experiences or memories that will make them feel some positive emotion.
Ron was a master at taking his audiences on an emotional roller coaster, he would take them emotionally up and down and then finish them up a big high, so they left feeling fabulous, and changed.
- You are an experience creator!
We need to be creating experiences for people, not delivering a ‘speech’.
If you can create an environment in which people can feel safe; they are given permission to do things they have never done before; they join in and interact (even if they are reluctant); in which they can learn and remember information that is packaged in a way that is memorable; in which they have fun and laugh, where they have an AH HA moment which inspires them to change - then you will be a successful speaker! Experiences are living, interactive emotion filled events which inspire people in some way. We are all in the experience together,
- It’s never about you!
Too many people are so focused on what they are saying and where they are in the ‘speech’ sequence. If they are distracted in any way, they go blank cos they can’t remember where they were in the ‘speech’.
This sort of internal focus means that we are totally disconnected from the audience who will feel it; AND we forget that people are never thinking about us. They are too busy wondering what you are thinking about them to be thinking about you!!
So forget about how you look and how stupid you sound or if you just made a mistake or if you forgot something, just be real! The more authentic you are in this conversation, the more they will relate to you. Our work is to serve others and be useful to them; to give them what they need.
- Have your focus on the audience or group, always!
Prepare yourself before you get on stage or in front so that when you stand up in front of a group, you can focus totally on the audience. Watch them carefully to monitor how engaged they are, what topics and issues they relate to most, to how fidgety they are, to what makes them laugh the most and do something to re engage them.
That ‘doing something’ may be inserting an interactive exercise as simple as ‘turn to the person next to you and tell them one thing you have learned so far’; or creating an opportunity to laugh or asking a question or having them stand up and move to a different seat, anything that shakes their state and gets them listening again!
- Be original.
Too many speakers take jokes or content from other people and make it their own material. This is a no no, you may find something on the internet you wish to use in which case, try to find the source and acknowledge them or say you could not find the source. Taking a joke and adapting it as if it’s a real life story of yours is also fraught with danger if someone has heard the joke before!
Life is full of funny incidences and events; look at your life for the humor or lessons. Everything that happens to me is potential material to change a mindset.
Walking down a hotel corridor in Opryland, lost and frustrated, I ran into a family of Mum, Dad and 2 little girls. While all the adults were grumpy and lost, the little girls were excited and jumping up and down with joy!
This became the basis of a story I use to introduce the idea of how as adults we lose our sense of awe and wonder and reverence. People relate to it immediately and then I give them symbols to remember the content.
PS Let me know if this was useful for you! And if you want part 2!
