What are the 5 most important quick ideas for improving your public speaking?  I’m going to go for broke this week and blog on 5 quick takes in 5 days.  Put them together and you should have a good ‘cheat sheet’ for fulfilling your resolution to improve your public speaking in 2012. 

5.  Make your speaking personal – talk to individuals.  Many people have been told to talk the foreheads of the audience, or look just over their heads.  That’s the wrong approach.  But don’t just make eye contact.  When trying to use that advice, most people find their eyes darting all over the room.  That makes you look furtive. 

Instead, focus on real individuals in turn, and talk to each one as if you were having a conversation with them.  How long you spend with each person depends on the topic, where you are in the talk, and a host of other issues.  But if you talk to one person for 30 seconds to a minute or so, and then move on to the next one, that’s good starting practice.  And pick people in different places in the audience, so that you bring everyone in and make the room feel small.  If you’re willing to walk around a bit, you can make even an audience of 500 or 1,000 people seem small. 

There you go.  5 days, 5 ideas, 5 quick ways to improve your speaking this year.  Good luck and here’s to better speaking in 2012. 

What are the 5 most important quick ideas for improving your public speaking?  I’m going to go for broke this week and blog on 5 quick takes in 5 days.  Put them together and you should have a good ‘cheat sheet’ for fulfilling your resolution to improve your public speaking in 2012. 

4.  In delivery, don’t fall into the Power Point Triangle of Death.  I have seen so many speakers, even confident, highly paid speakers, talk to their slides instead of the audience.  It’s a dead giveaway that the speaker is using the slides as speaker notes, and it’s a nearly unforgiveable sin.  Here’s what happens.  The speaker stands between the computer and the screen, forming a triangle.  Then, all of his motions and gestures are confined to that triangle, and are not focused on the audience.

Why is that bad?  Because we’re only interested in motion toward (or away from) us.  Motion by the speaker that is toward the screen or a random computer causes us to check out.  If you don’t think this is the case, watch how interested you are when someone half-turns away from you, or gives you the ‘cold shoulder’.  You check out; you can’t help it.  Same thing is happening to your audience if you’re not always moving toward them, and away when you are changing the subject or moving to a new topic. 

Learn your slides so that you don’t talk to them, or your computer.  Talk to the audience.  Always.

What are the 5 most important quick ideas for improving your public speaking?  I’m going to go for broke this week and blog on 5 quick takes in 5 days.  Put them together and you should have a good ‘cheat sheet’ for fulfilling your resolution to improve your public speaking in 2012. 

3.  Don’t start with Power Point.   Most people create a presentation by sifting through the collection of slides they’ve accumulated – and maybe a few from Ed down the hall – and grabbing the ones that seem vaguely relevant to the talk.  Then, a little shuffling around, and maybe a few new slides, and you’re good to go, right?

Wrong.  That almost guarantees that your talk will be a collection of slides, weakly linked together, rather than a strong story, a narrative that makes sense for your audience and engages them for the full 45 minutes.  The collection of slides may make sense to you, because you already know the territory, but will it to the audience, who is hearing the talk for the first time?  Unlikely.

Instead, think of a talk as a series of steps you take the audience on, beginning by framing the idea, then delving into the problem, then the solution, then closing with the action that you want the newly convinced audience to take.  Figure out what you want to say for each of those 4 steps, and then – and only then – decide if a slide will help illustrate each step.   That's an audience-focused speech.  It takes a little more work than shuffling slides, but your audience's response will make it worthwhile.   

What are the 5 most important quick ideas for improving your public speaking?  I’m going to go for broke this week and blog on 5 quick takes in 5 days.  Put them together and you should have a good ‘cheat sheet’ for fulfilling your resolution to improve your public speaking in 2012. 

2.  Don’t do Q and A at the end.   Most people who have an hour speaking slot talk for 45 minutes or so and then take questions.  Here’s the problem with that.  People’s attention spans last about 20 minutes, by most measures, so by 45 minutes, you’ve taken your audience through 2 attention cycles and haven’t given it a chance to respond or clear up any confusions.  And once the questions do come, you’re at the mercy of the questioners.  The session ends, not with your brilliant, prepared thoughts, but with the last dumb question some yo-yo finally dredges up.

Instead, stop for questions at 20 minutes and 40 minutes.  Then, if you wish, give people one last chance to ask questions at 50 minutes, but save 5 minutes of your speech to finish with, so that you deliver a killer close and control the ending, which is what the audience remembers best. 

What are the 5 most important quick ideas for improving your public speaking?  I’m going to go for broke this week and blog on 5 quick takes for fast quality enhancement in 5 days.  Put them together and you should have a good ‘cheat sheet’ for fulfilling your resolution to improve your public speaking in 2012. 

1.  Think of your job as persuading the audience.   Most people think of speaking as dumping information on the audience.  And there are lots of schemata that tell you some speeches are persuasive, some are informational, some are ceremonial, and so on.  But it’s simply better to figure out what it is that you want the audience to do differently as a result of your presentation, and then persuade them of that. 

Here’s how you do it.  Begin by talking about the problem the audience has for which your information is the solution.  Then give them your information.  If you’ve presented the problem well, your speech will be persuasive.   It’s that simple.  And your audience will be much happier, because you’ve presented your information in a way that both makes sense to them and is interesting to them.  If all speeches were persuasive, the speaking world would be a much better place for audiences.   

For my blog today, I'm pointing to an article I wrote for the Public Words website on handling the all-too-common problem for speakers of coping with a strange room layout on the fly:  http://bit.ly/wixOe3.  Enjoy!

What happens when your words and body language don’t match?  Audiences believe the body language every time.  But they don’t consciously take the two apart.  Our minds are constructed to infer intent from our unconscious reading of other people’s body language.  That’s for obvious survival reasons.  In other words, if someone starts walking toward me, it’s important for my survival to be able to decode his intent very quickly, and act on it, in case he appears to mean to do me harm. 

Our unconscious minds are very good at reading the intent of the people who come within our sphere of awareness.  And when they’re talking at us, we unconsciously compare words and body language.  When they’re aligned, we get the communication.  When they’re not aligned, we believe the body language.

Which brings me to Ed Miliband.  He’s the English Labor Party’s current leader, and they’re out of power now (ever since Gordon Brown turned out to be such an unpopular follow-up to Tony Blair).   He’s been licking his wounds for a while, since David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, took over in a clumsy shared power arrangement.  But now Miliband has delivered a major policy speech all about how a new Labor Party has got it figured out and is ready to change.

That’s a message that should be delivered with optimism and energy.  And that’s what Miliband’s words are presumably trying to convey.  But his body language, specifically his face, is angry and sneering.  He evinces micro-expressions –fleeting sneers and scowls – that are clearly at odds with his message. 

The result?  He got pasted in the press for not being charismatic or convincing.  A wonderful example of what happens when your emotions – and therefore your body language – are at odds with your message.  Miliband would have done his party better service by keeping his mouth shut – or straightening out his emotions before he spoke. 

What was he really feeling?  We have no way of knowing.  He could have been unhappy with anything from David Cameron to his commute to the amount of starch in his shirt collar.  Doesn’t matter.  What matters is that he showed up with inconsistent verbal and non-verbal ‘conversations’.     

It’s a great lesson for all leaders who are preparing to communicate an important message.  Get clear on your emotions as well as your message.  And make sure they’re consistent.  Otherwise, you’ll do a Miliband, and you’ll do yourself and your organization no good. 

 

I first published this blog a year ago in honor of MLK.  So many people have remarked on it that I've decided to republish it today, with minor modifications, once again in honor of the 20th century's greatest orator. 

Justly celebrated as one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century, Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech becomes even more remarkable when you know that the last 6 minutes of the 16-minute speech were ad-libbed.  King felt that he was not reaching the audience the way he wanted to with his prepared text (and Mahalia Jackson, standing nearby, was urging him to "Tell them about the dream, Martin!"), so he called up the metaphor that he had been thinking about for some months, and uttered the unforgettable plea for racial justice, “I have a dream.” 

The first 10 minutes of the speech would have been brilliant enough for most speakers to retire on.  King began by echoing the Biblical language of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, saying, “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. . . .  But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.” 

King then goes on to talk about the “promissory note” owed to Black Americans – the bad check – the freedom that was still due.  He says, “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”  The response was a roar, and King moved on to talk about “the fierce urgency of now,” repeating the line again and again that “now is the time” for America to make good on that bad check.   In fact, the speech is perhaps the best example of the effective use of repeated lines that gather power and force with each repetition. 

For an average speaker, that call and response would have been good enough.  But King was inspired by the occasion, the locale, and the enormous crowd, and he made an on-the-spot decision to reach deeper.  

At the ten-minute mark, King wraps up the section by saying, “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”  This stock Biblical phrase from the Baptist preaching tradition is the signal that King is going off-text, and he next does something truly dramatic: he reaches out to the audience directly, saying, “I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations.” 

“Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina,” he continues, and then comes the famous metaphor:  “I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream.” 

As King works up to the mighty peroration of the greatest American speech of the 20th century, his cadences continue to rise and fall, going higher each time to signal his passion for the subject.  The top of the rhetorical arc comes with the closing lines, when King stands on tiptoe, and raises his right hand, and says:

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

The roar from the crowd is unmistakable:  King has connected with them, he has given an unforgettable speech, and by digging down deep into his soul, he has forever changed the world.

A number of readers have asked me to talk about iPad/iPhone apps for speakers, especially since I recommended giving that special speaker in your life an iPad as a present this holiday season.  So here goes – the iPad and its apps for speakers.

First let me say that I love the iPad for presenting.  Not every conference is ready for them – I just spoke at the PCMA conference in San Diego, and the organizers there wanted a DVD for my video clips (or embedded Power Point).  Because they were controlling the show, using their own computers, they didn’t want me just plugging in to their system.  So you won’t be able to use it everywhere.  But where you can, it’s great – light, fast, easy to use, and relatively crash-free.  I haven't myself tried to run an entire presentation off an iPhone or one of the others.  Have you?  I use video in my presentations, and I don't have enough room to store them on my iPhone, so I haven't gone that route.  But maybe you have and you've got good & bad stories to share. 

So how about those apps?  I’m an app junkie; I have over a hundred on my iPad, and I’m always swapping them out for shiny new ones when they come along.  But currently here’s what I’ve got in play.  Caveat:  Apps change daily.  This is not a list for all time or even an exhaustive one right now.  It’s just what is working for me right now. 

Pages, Keynote, Print Central

These are the basics from Apple.  Pages provides word processing for writing out notes, speeches, ideas, and so on.  Keynote allows you to create slides.  And Print Central lets you print stuff out that you can’t keep virtual. 

Office HD

This app is one of those combo apps that allows you to read or create a word processing file, or a slide deck, or a spreadsheet.  I like it because it is easy to use and saves you real estate on your iPad. 

Noteshelf

I love this note-taking app because you can hook it up to the projector and write in real time.  Voila – instant white board.  It’s great for capturing audience feedback, ideas, and so on in a way that’s visible to the entire audience (assuming you have those giant screens on either side of the stage). 

Goodreader

I looked long and hard for this app and tried a bunch of others before I settled on Goodreader.  Basically, it’s a way to store files on your iPad.  What’s the big deal?  You can easily store video, pdfs, slides, etc – and then play or view them with a click or two.  With the right adaptor, you’re set to play video clips with the least muss and fuss I’ve found so far.  And it’s real easy to move video files from computer to iPad with a drag and drop when your iPad is syncing. 

Evernote

I use Evernote on my computer, my iPhone, and my iPad.  It’s the single best note management system I’ve found.  You can take pictures, notes – information in any form – and store it for future use in a presentation or simply in your preparation for a presentation.  I use it to store ideas I run across – to ‘remember everything’ as the advert says. 

Dropbox

Great for moving large files around. And storing them in the cloud.  I’m sure this one is familiar to just about everyone. 

Presentation Clock

A giant timer, plain and simple.  Useful for making sure you don’t run over your time.

Prompster Pro

There are a number of teleprompter apps.  This is the one I’ve looked at most recently.  At $10, it’s a bit on the pricey side, but it seems to have all you need.

OK, so what apps do you love and find essential for public speaking?  The app world is constantly changing and new apps come out daily.  I don’t pretend to know all of them.  Please weigh in with your finds, and I’ll update this blog every now and then with new apps speakers can’t live without. 

And one final question.  Have you run a presentation off a smart phone?  If so, have you tried Apple's Remote app, and did it work for you? 

People send me their books regularly for comment, and the last half-dozen I’ve received all are aimed at the level of basic information for beginning speakers.  If you’ve resolved to kick-start your career in 2012, then one or more of these books may save you from making the usual beginners’ mistakes – and may even give you an idea or two for accelerating your career. 

10 Steps to Writing a Vital Speech
Fletcher Dean

Dean aims his basic manual at speechwriters, but there’s good, beginning advice in here for all speakers.  He covers a variety of ways to think about preparing a speech, storytelling, structure, Power Point, and other aspects of getting started, as well as a little on delivery and the stage managing of a speech. 

Quick Takeaway:  Dean believes that a speech can do one (or more) of 5 things:  inform, create understanding, reinforce shared values, change attitudes, or elicit action.  He says these get harder in that order and the last two are the hardest of all.

Secrets from the Greenroom
David Michael

This slender volume talks about entertaining audiences from the comic’s perspective.  Michael, who has worked the comedy circuit as well as corporate public speaking, offers brief takes and stories on issues such as: 

•    Don’t be afraid of being afraid
•    Nervous?  Pretend you’re someone else – adopt a persona
•    Why it’s important to check out the room beforehand
•    How to know when to quit – when the audience is still with you
•    Why you need to work the room
•    The importance of props
•    How to make the audience your friend – identify with them

Who Needs Words?
A Christian Communications Handbook
Richard Littledale

This is my favorite of the book on review here, even though it’s aimed at pastors and Christian communications.  Littledale has thought deeply about the means and the ethics of communications, and he shares his insights in this warm and engaging book.   There’s something for every communicator to learn here, especially as you’re beginning your forays into public communication of any kind.  

Quick Takeaways:

•    You must “land in the world” of your listener
•    Don’t be afraid of silence
•    All speakers – and pastors – need ‘confident humility’
•    Ask yourself, what is your communications culture?
•    Use mirroring and meta-mirroring (role playing the positions of the other people you’re communicating with)
•    Embrace your vulnerability
•    Enjoy your humanity

Obama’s Secrets:  How to Speak and Communicate with Power and a Little Magic
Gil and Nili Peretz

The premise of this book by an Israeli communications team might strike Americans as a bit odd:  we can learn valuable insights from studying President Obama’s communications and communications style.  We here in the US think of Obama as a great campaigner, but many Americans have soured on his communications now that he’s in office.  Of course, as Winston Churchill famously said, you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. 

Nonetheless, the Peretz team have lots of useful, if rather basic, insights gleaned from studying the 44th President.  They use the NLP filter as a way of understanding Obama’s strengths, and that limits their work a little.  NLP – neurolinguistic programming – is based on old science that hasn’t been significantly updated since the 1970s.  As a result, it’s right some of the time, and way behind the research some of the time. 

With that caveat, here’s a sampling of their takeaways and insights: 

•    Use your own real life experience
•    Listen to your audience
•    Put yourself in someone else’s shoes
•    Use “Us” and “We” not “Me”
•    You are what you say
•    You can shape your own destiny
•    Self-confidence is the secret for success
•    It’s better to be strong as a communicator (and a person)
•    Ask what motivates your audience
•    Keep it simple
•    Build rapport with key words, messages, body language
•    Pace and then lead your audience 
•    Tell stories
•    Use metaphors
•    Ask questions
•    Use the rule of threes
•    Use repetition, contrast
•    First look at your audience, then pause, then speak

Speaking Professionally
Alan Jay Zaremba

This is a beginning textbook covering all aspects of communications for the student.  Zaremba has chapters on ethics, speech anxiety, audience analysis, style, structure, visual support, group presentations, persuasion, body language, and Q and A.  Recommended if you’re looking for a simple, clear introduction to the research and scope of modern communications. 

Paid To Speak
The National Speakers Association 

This is a useful book for people looking to start a professional speaking career.  Written by a series of successful professionals in the NSA family, Paid To Speak covers a number of issues that speakers starting out always have questions about.  The advice in this book could save you a year’s worth of flailing around. 

Topics covered include:

•    Eloquence – making yourself and audience comfortable
•    Storytelling and speaking
•    How to facilitate
•    The power of the pause
•    Using improv
•    Working with humor
•    Basic body language
•    How to dress – what to wear
•    Building your confidence
•    Creating your brand