Bill Gates has never been confused for Winston Churchill or the Rev.Martin Luther King, Jr. But as an orator, but Gates has improved dramatically as a public speaker. At the 2006 Consumer Electronic Show, his keynote address was a solid “B+” in speechmaking, without having to give him any grade inflation just for being a billionaire.
(Watch it here http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx)
Gates is smart not to stand behind a lectern; instead he faces the audience unobstructed. This makes him seem friendly, approachable, and confident. Sure, Gates still looks and sounds a little geeky, but he seems totally at ease with himself when talking to thousands of people. Gates kept a conversational tone thought his address. Notes and scripts were nowhere to be seen. Instead, Gates appeared to be talking, as if he were just giving a demonstration to one person in his own office. If Gates were nervous, he didn’t display it in any of the normal ways. He gestured freely, walked around the stage, and interacted with his computers in a relaxed fashion.
Gates isn’t trying to be Anthony Robbins, but the software billionaire did use lots of positive emotion in his presentation. He spoke of “the magic of software” when unveiling some of the tricks of his new Windows Vista operating system. So much of Gates appeal as a public speaker is because of what he DIDN’T do. Gates didn’t do any of the following:
* Dump excessive Data
* Use abstractions without giving examples
* Use PowerPoint slides with lots of bullet points and numbers
* Use too many PowerPoint slides
* Read from a script
* Attempt to use a teleprompter
* Rock back and forth nervously (as he once did for Justice Department depositions)
* Turn his back most of the time on his audience
* Rush
Gates used his visuals in a compelling way by showing images of a family and a real home. He demonstrated how a real person could use the new software in a real world office, home and car environment, whether using a PC or a cell phone. His ideas were easy to understand, follow and “see.” Because he wasn’t reading a script or staring at notes, Gates appeared to be supremely knowledgeable about his product, and therefore more believable. Gates understands what most software geeks and engineers fail to grasp (for that matter most business people land politicians), that the real power of a speech comes from the strength of your examples. Gates gave example after example on how his product could be used at home, in the car, at the airport and on the run. He never lost the audience and the never got lost in technical details.
Gates understands that everyone knows he is smart on the technical side, so he doesn’t have to prove to people how brilliant he is technologically. Instead he focused on what he thought might appeal to his audience the most. He painted a vivid picture of how his products could benefit consumers.
Whether you are a billionaire like Gates, a pauper, or a second grader giving a class report, one thing remains constant. If you focus all of your energies on what your audience will understand, appreciate, and benefit from, you will be a good speaker.
Bill Gates has never been confused for Winston Churchill or the Rev.Martin Luther King, Jr. But as an orator, but Gates has improved dramatically as a public speaker. At the 2006 Consumer Electronic Show, his keynote address was a solid “B+” in speechmaking, without having to give him any grade inflation just for being a billionaire.
(Watch it here http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx)
Gates is smart not to stand behind a lectern; instead he faces the audience unobstructed. This makes him seem friendly, approachable, and confident. Sure, Gates still looks and sounds a little geeky, but he seems totally at ease with himself when talking to thousands of people. Gates kept a conversational tone thought his address. Notes and scripts were nowhere to be seen. Instead, Gates appeared to be talking, as if he were just giving a demonstration to one person in his own office. If Gates were nervous, he didn’t display it in any of the normal ways. He gestured freely, walked around the stage, and interacted with his computers in a relaxed fashion.
Gates isn’t trying to be Anthony Robbins, but the software billionaire did use lots of positive emotion in his presentation. He spoke of “the magic of software” when unveiling some of the tricks of his new Windows Vista operating system. So much of Gates appeal as a public speaker is because of what he DIDN’T do. Gates didn’t do any of the following:
* Dump excessive Data
* Use abstractions without giving examples
* Use PowerPoint slides with lots of bullet points and numbers
* Use too many PowerPoint slides
* Read from a script
* Attempt to use a teleprompter
* Rock back and forth nervously (as he once did for Justice Department depositions)
* Turn his back most of the time on his audience
* Rush
Gates used his visuals in a compelling way by showing images of a family and a real home. He demonstrated how a real person could use the new software in a real world office, home and car environment, whether using a PC or a cell phone. His ideas were easy to understand, follow and “see.” Because he wasn’t reading a script or staring at notes, Gates appeared to be supremely knowledgeable about his product, and therefore more believable. Gates understands what most software geeks and engineers fail to grasp (for that matter most business people land politicians), that the real power of a speech comes from the strength of your examples. Gates gave example after example on how his product could be used at home, in the car, at the airport and on the run. He never lost the audience and the never got lost in technical details.
Gates understands that everyone knows he is smart on the technical side, so he doesn’t have to prove to people how brilliant he is technologically. Instead he focused on what he thought might appeal to his audience the most. He painted a vivid picture of how his products could benefit consumers.
Whether you are a billionaire like Gates, a pauper, or a second grader giving a class report, one thing remains constant. If you focus all of your energies on what your audience will understand, appreciate, and benefit from, you will be a good speaker.
One of the biggest problems most speakers have is the tendency to dump too much data in their presentations, i.e., 12 bullet points per slide, 89 slides for a 15-minute presentation. When you try to dump this much data in a speech, all you do is put your audience to sleep. You really aren’t communicating; all you are doing is putting people to sleep.
But if you streamline your speech and focus on just 3-5 key points the way most experts (including me) recommend, you may have some of your colleagues or clients disappointed. They want all the data and now you aren’t giving it to them.
The answer is to give people data in advance. Email or snail mail your audience all the data in advance. Tell them to study it. Ask them to prepare their questions. That way the people who really care will have the data they need.
For example, if someone comes to a half-day or full day presentation or media-training seminar at my studio, I inundate him or her in advance with data. I send them a couple of books, a dozen videos, several CDs, a software program, newsletters and several other learning tools. If they looked at everything they would spend 24 hours examining the data and info I sent them. Most trainees don’t do this, but for the ones who want to do so, it is available.
So when the day of the training comes, I don’t stand up to do a data dump for eight hours. Instead, I focus on just a handful of concepts and speak for less than an hour. That way, my trainees get to spend the majority of their time speaking and being critiqued.
Whether you are conducting an eight-hour training or just delivering a 15-minute quarterly sales summary, you have the power to control how you disseminate the data. Always use the option of data dumping in advance (or after the meeting), so that you can use your actual speaking time focusing exclusively on your key messages.
David Letterman, isn’t just a talk show host, he is a huge brand. He and his show are also an integral part of the multi-billion dollar CBS brand. So when a crisis hits Letterman, there are repercussions that go far beyond mere personal embarrassment. So far, I give Letterman/CBS an A+ for its crisis management initiatives. Here are the rules they have followed that apply to any corporation caught in a crisis.
1. Release the information first. By breaking the news first, Letterman defined the whole issue in the most positive terms for his side. He didn’t wait to be surrounded by reporters camping out at his house.
2. Release the information to a favorable audience. Letterman revealed all to his studio audience. They already love him and provided a sympathetic ear. Business people should select a media outlet that is also most favorable to their viewpoint.
3. Don’t sugarcoat the worst news. Letterman directly stated that he has had affairs with women staffers. Whatever is the most damaging information, be sure it comes out from your lips first.
4. Apologize for errors. Letterman apologized and said he was wrong. This makes other critics look like they are piling on for attacking him later. If your company has caused injury or inconvenience to others, apologize quickly and sincerely and you will take much of the venom out of the fangs of your enemies.
5. Change the topic. Letterman got everyone to focus on the Extortionist and off of the hanky panky. Whatever your crisis, get people to focus on your solutions, your pro-active steps—anything else!
Gestures guide the eye of the audience to a place you want them to look. When gesturing to your visual support you should be aware of the underlying meaning to certain gestures. For example, one of the best gestures you can use is the “reaching out” gesture. The arm extended with the palm up is an honest, open, and friendly gesture. It’s the equivalent of the business handshake. It’s the “handshake” from the presenter to the audience. It’s used most often when questions are asked or answered.
But just as the “palm up” has meaning, so too does the back of the hand. In fact, it means just the opposite – dishonest, negative, and unfriendly. Showing the back of the hand usually occurs when varying your hand positions while gesturing to your visual support. Make sure when you change hand positions that the back of your hand doesn’t face the audience.
Never give audience members a copy of the script of your speech in advance of your presentation for the following reasons:
1. They might read it instead of listening to you.
2. They might use the script as a reason to leave your presentation before you finish – or even before you start.
3. You have destroyed your ability to surprise or seem spontaneous if everything is written out for people in advance.
4. If you deviate from the script, some people will think you are making a mistake. (if they don’t have the script, no one will know you have made a change)
5. If you deviate from the script, some people will be highly disappoint that you are not meeting their expectations. (if you don’t give them a script in advance, they won’t have specific expectations)
6. If you have given out a script in advance, you may be more tempted to actually read the script in front of people and that is boring!
The only time to give out the text of a speech in advance is when you are required to by your boss, the law or some governing body that can deny you the right to speak otherwise.
What keeps a lot of very good speakers from every becoming GREAT speakers? It is this belief: “I’m just not comfortable being dramatic the way professional speakers are.” The irony is that these good speakers are quite emotional and, well, dramatic, when then are telling me how much they don’t want to be dramatic in their speeches.
I don’t think that most speakers should strive to be dramatic or theatrical when giving a speech. The real goal should be to come across as “real.” If you are telling an anecdote about a corporate blunder, then your voice, facial expressions and tone should suggest how ridiculous you felt the blunder was.
Most good speakers are quite emphatic when they are having a conversation one-on-one with a friend when discussing issues of importance. They might laugh, frown, or use sarcasm or humor. But the second they give a so-called formal speech, the laugh, the surprise, the shock, the amusement they find towards issues and events is drained away. Instead, the speaker presents information in a straight forward, clam, and steady pace. Sure, the speaker may look comfortable, have good hand gestures and even solid eye contact. But the presentation is too homogeneous and is too consistent.
The solution isn’t for the speaker to go to acting school and become more dramatic. The answer is to be more natural, more real. The speaker needs to relive the moment he or she first told a friend or colleague about an idea. Relive the fun or shock or surprise and then just talk in a conversational manner.
That’s what great speakers do. They usually don’t have acting backgrounds, instead, they just relive real moments in their life when they had interesting conversations with real people. And that’s a lot easier than going to Stella Adler or studying “The Method” for decades.
I was called by a reporter from a major national trade publication who was doing a story on media training and sound bites. The day he called was a national holiday, but I happened to be taping some video training segments when the call came in. I told the reporter that it wasn’t a good time and he said, “TJ, no problem, just call me back anytime in the next week.”
My response was, “I’ll call you today. How late will you be there?”
Why was I so insistent on calling him back that day, when it was a national holiday? Because I reasoned that this was the best way to get quoted in the story, to perhaps get more quotes than anyone else, to potentially squeeze other competitors out of the story, and to prevent the chance of not being interviewed at all.
I called the reporter back one hour later on the day of the holiday and he conducted an extensive 30 minute interview with me. I made darn sure he had dozens and dozens of greet sound bites from me on the relevant subject before we got off of the phone.
Here was my strategy:
- By calling back ASAP, I gave the reporter no time to forget me or his interest in the subject of interviewing me.
- By calling right away, I was his first interview for this story. It’s always best to be able to communicate any message first because that is when it is most memorable.
- By giving the interview first and by trying to make it a long and thorough interview, I am trying to subtly convince the reporter that he doesn’t need to interview anyone else on the subject, or at least not nearly as many people as he originally thought he might need.
- By getting my interview in the can, I am protected in case the reporter gets side tracked with other, more important stories. This way, even if the reporter had planned on interviewing 10 other experts, if I am the only one he got to and his deadline is in one hour, then chances are I will be the only one quoted.
- By being so prompt to call back, especially on a holiday, I generate more goodwill with the reporter. So it’s only human nature that if my quotes are comparable to another expert’s quotes who took a week to return a call, then the reporter may be more inclined to use mine.
- Long term reputation as a source. I always want reporters to feel like they can count on me for a quick turn around in their time of need. It just so happens that this story was not time sensitive. But my quick actions sent a message to this reporter that I am someone he can count on if he needed a quick comment on a breaking news story.
Always take enough time to prepare your message points and sound bites before calling back a reporter for an interview. But don’t take any more time than you need to do those bare essentials. In most cases, the early bird does get the bigger and juicier sound bite.
A lot of people like to sit around and complain about boring PowerPoint presentations.
“But TJ, I can’t do anything about it. That’s the way it’s done around here—it’s always been that way.” That’s what I hear all the time.
I can buy this if your boss is telling you that you have to give his PowerPoint presentation bullet point by bullet point to the board of directors, otherwise you are fired. But the reality is that most of us have a whole range of opportunities to influence PowerPoint presentations in our lives.
For starts, if any of your own employees or direct reports have to give you a presentation, you should issue the following edict to them:
“When you are delivering your PowerPoint presentation, do not give me any slides with bullet points on them. I repeat, it will be unacceptable if you have any slides containing bullet points.”
At first, your employees may think that you’ve gone mad. But once they’ve actually delivered an interesting presentation to you and others using PowerPoint slides as visuals, rather than overblown notes for bullet points, they will thank you.
Next, if a vendor is coming to give you a sales presentation, you can and should send them this note in advance of the sales pitch meeting.
“Our policy here at XYX Company is that we don’t participate in sales presentations that are delivered by using PowerPoint bullet points. Do not deliver us a PowerPoint using bullet points of text. Simply give us an interesting presentation by talking to us and, if you like, use PowerPoint visuals to enhance your ideas. We don’t give business to vendors who violate this rule. PS. we aren’t kidding.”
Now some of your vendors or prospective vendors may be shocked and appalled that you would make such a request. So what? You are the customer and the customer is always right. It is your vendor’s responsibility to conform to your wishes, so why not start out the relationship on the right foot?
Again, your vendor might not be initially happy. He or she may have to actually take an hour or two to prepare a new and interesting presentation instead of regurgitating the same old slides with bullet points. But over time, they will thank you.
And even if your clients and employees don’t thank you, YOU will thank you.
Because you have just eliminated thousands of hours of tedious boredom from the next 30 years of your life. Congratulations!
Bosses often tell their employees to speak “faster, faster, and faster” when the employee is giving a presentation to the boss. This causes problems for all involved. The employee giving the presentation thinks that the boss wants him or her to literally speak faster, so the employee starts racing through bullet point fact after bullet point fact on the PowerPoint slides. Any remaining interesting examples, anecdotes and tidbits are stripped away from the presentation.
With sweat on the brow, the employee finally finishes the speech and slinks away.
Here is what the boss is actually thinking when he tells the employee to speaker
faster: “My God, Dithers is amazingly boring. When is he going to tell me something I don’t already know? Doesn’t he know that I know how to read? Does he think I am stupid? What’s the significant of any of this? I might as well just read the handouts. This is torture. Would someone please put me out of my misery quickly? I can’t take this any longer.”
At that point, the boss now instructs the employee to proceed “faster” with the presentation because the boss figure it’s not going to get any better, so it might as well end quickly to minimize the pain. But it is crucial to note why the boss wants thing to go faster. It’s not because the employee is speaking to slowly or is giving too many interesting details or too many relevant stories.
The boss said, “Speak faster” because the employee was just too boring to listen to anymore and didn’t seem to be adding anything to numbers or words already on the printed out page.
The solution for the employee isn’t literally to go faster. The answer is to be more interesting, to add additional insights to the data, to explain relevance, and to engage the audience. So the next time your boss or anyone else instructs you to be faster during a presentation, you must realize that you need to be faster at getting to interesting content, not faster at sitting down.
Many of my corporate executive presentation training clients come to me and express concerns about how their presentation will “flow.” They are obsessed with each and every thought connecting in a seamless manner, as if they were writing a work of great literature.
All things being equal, of course it would be nice if every single thought out of your mouth flowed together during a speech. But not all things are equal. There is a much bigger danger for the average corporate speaker than “flow.” The danger s that the speaker is BORING AS HADES!
Your first concern as a speaker is figuring out how you can present information in an interesting and memorable manner. This should be a much bigger concern than whether all of your ideas “flow” together perfectly.
If you have just told an interesting story that makes a point during your speech, there is nothing wrong with simply stopping, pausing, looking at another part of the room and then starting an entirely new point. Your audience cannot judge your “flow” or your connections in the same way they could if they were reading a written report. When it comes to text, flow is critically important. When sentences and paragraphs don’t flow together well, it makes the writer stand out as amateurish, or worse, a poor thinker.
Transitions are not AS important when giving public speeches (note: I am NOT saying that transitions are completely unimportant). This is because people listen differently than they read. When you read, you can stop, go back to the previous paragraph, reflect, and analyze as you go (and take your own time doing it). When you listen to someone speak, you are in the moment. You are paying attention to the words as they come out. You don’t have the luxury of playing back what was just said, or fast forwarding to a later part of the speech. If you stop to critique some part of the speech, you miss what is being said in the present and you can never get that moment back.
Being an audience member is a totally different experience from being a reader.
The master speaker realizes this. Therefore, the speakers who excel spend most of their time making sure their messages and their stories are truly interesting and memorable. Concern for “flow” is not abandoned, but it is given a back seat.
What do you do if you have an incredibly large amount of data that you must present to an audience, but you are limited to a strict time amount of, say 10-30 minutes?
By far, the absolute worst mistake you could make is to do the following: cram every fact you can find into a bullet point and then on a PowerPoint and then race through that PowerPoint in front of your audience. You can guarantee that no one will remember anything you say if you try this technique (though you will be in good company, since this is what most bad-to-average presenters do).
If you goal is to actually communicate your ideas, facts and data, then you should use at least one or more of the following tactics.
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Email (or snail mail) reports, slides, fact sheets, graphs or even books to members of your audience IN ADVANCE of your presentation. That way, those who are highly interested can sink their teeth into your data, plus they will be more familiar with your concepts when you start to speak.
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Give out written fact sheets or other handouts during your speech, BUT AFTER you have already finished talking about that subject. If you hand out the fact sheets before you start the discussion on that topic, your audience members will ignore you and will focus on reading. By waiting until you have already covered a subject, audience members will be less tempted to begin reading while you speak.
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Pass out remaining materials AFTER your speech is over. This way, those who want lots of data will have it, those who don’t can throw it away. Nobody can accuse you of not covering all your bases.
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Email (or snail mail) your attendees dozens or even hundreds of pages of text or graphs that give ALL of the details surrounding the subject of your presentation. Again, those who are interested can hit “print” and have all your wisdom. Those who aren’t interested can hit delete.
When you are giving your actual spoken presentation, you must not yield to the temptation to try to cover lots and lots of data quickly, because this is not how the human brain processes spoken information. Instead, you should introduce a point, give a few facts about it, give an example, then tell a story and then provide a slide that illustrates your one key point. Then repeat this process.
So remember, it’s OK to dump data, but don’t do it in your speech and don’t do it in the PowerPoint slides that you are projecting to the whole room. Instead, dump your data using the four tactics above.
When a client comes to Media Training Worldwide for either media training or presentation training, we employ very one of these methods of communicating data.
Clients are given books to read in advance of the workshop, handouts during the session, handouts after the session and then more training tools and books sent afterwards. This truly is the best way to help people absorb large and medium bodies of knowledge.
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Forget about what mom said about keeping your hands in your lap while talking.
Gesturing while speaking appears to free up the brain to perform other tasks, such as remembering a list, scientists said on Thursday.
In experiments with nearly 100 adults and children, psychologists at the University of Chicago found that gesturing while explaining a math problem improved the recall of a previously memorized list of numbers or letters.
To draw the conclusion, memory test results were compared when subjects were permitted to gesture and when they were told to keep their hands still.
The value of gesturing to convey meaning to the listener has been shown in previous research, but it also may help the conveyor of the information, researchers Susan Goldin-Meadow, Howard Nusbaum, Spencer Kelly and Susan Wagner wrote in a report published in the journal Psychological Science.
They said that even blind people gesture with their hands when talking to blind listeners, suggesting another purpose to all the hand-waving.
“Producing gestures can actually lighten a speaker’s burden,” they wrote. The report suggested that by tapping into a different part of the brain dealing with visual and spatial subject matter, gesturing may make demands on other memory stores and allow the speaker to remember more.
“Whatever the mechanism, our findings suggest that gesturing can help to free up cognitive resources that can then be used elsewhere. Traditional injunctions against gesturing while speaking may, in the end, be ill-advised,” they wrote.
NOTE: complete details of this same story can found here
A great speaker has certain unstated goals for himself or herself while giving every presentation. One of those goals should be “I must improve the lives of my audience.”
At first blush, this seems almost cheesy, as if it were the motto of a second-rate, self-help motivational guru. But let’s look a little deeper to see how this applies to speakers in every industry.
If you are a politician running for office, of course you may have to talk about credentials from your past or why you think your opponent isn’t qualified. But your first objective has got to be to convince voters that you can improve their lives during the next two, four or six years when it comes to their health, safety and prosperity. Voters become receptive to other issues only after you have convinced them that you are a plausible force to improve their lives.
CEOs must be able to explain to employees why, if they work harder, everyone will make money, to fund vacations, homes and college tuition.
Civic leaders must be able to explain how a new tax-funded stadium will improve the lives of all citizens, even those who don’t like and won’t attend professional sports competitions.
Managers of all stripes must explain to their workers how a particular new policy or request for new action will benefit the employees, even improving their lives, even if it is to a very small degree.
When your focus shifts from looking good or sounding intelligent to actually trying to improve the lives of your audience, people will respond quite favorably to you.
So many business speakers have a difficult time concluding their presentations in a powerful way. Instead, they simply sputter to the end and then weakly and meekly say, “That’s it! Any questions?”
This is a great way to leave a bad taste in your audience’s mouth.
Conclusions don’t have to be heartwarming, poignant, or uplifting, but they do need to conclude, not simply die an untimely death. Too many speakers bore their audiences by quickly running through 123 facts, one after another, within a short time period. Then, after the 123rd fact is presented quickly, dryly and in a boring fashion, the speaker announces that the presentation is now over. This speaker is being selfish and thinking only about his needs to dump data, not about the needs of his audience.
Do the audience a favor by making it easier for them to retain the really important stuff. Remember, you audience does not have your full speech in front of them. Most likely, they weren’t transcribing your every word. Time f or a reality check: Your audience has already forgotten MOST of what you’ve said, and you haven’t even finished your speech yet. (When is the last time you remembered more than a handful of points from any speaker you listened to?)
You can help your audience by reinforcing your most important points. How do you do that? By simply repeating your 3-5 main points in the last couple of minutes of your speech. If your audience didn’t get it the first time, they might get it the last time.
So end your speech with a strong summary of key points and then ask audience members in a positive, upbeat manner to do whatever it is you want them to do.
Then stop. Keep your mouth shut. Smile. Your audience will know you have concluded without you having to say “That’sItAnyQuestions.”
The easiest way to spot an insecure public speaker is to look for someone who is dumping an endless supply of facts and details, but without the context of real examples and stories. Insecure speakers are afraid of looking stupid, so they always overcompensate by larding excessive facts into their presentation.
The insecure speaker uses the sea of facts as a protective covering to mask his or her insecurities. Only it doesn’t work.
The insecure speaker is so deathly afraid that his boss will say “hurry up and get to the point” that the speaker is afraid to stop to give examples or stories to flesh out the key points. The other biggest fear of the insecure speaker is that he or she will be asked a question that can’t be answered. So the speaker reasons that if he can just dump out the answer to every question in the speech and before the question can be asked, he can save himself from embarrassment.
This is dubious logic, but it is one that I find dominates most large corporations. The trouble is that this is an entirely defensive and negative mentality. This mindset views as speech purely as a potential landmine, never as a positive opportunity.
Speakers with this attitude are always trying to merely escape from a speech; this is pessimism to an extreme. The goal for any speech should be to communicate and spotlight a handful of key messages. Period.
So if you are nervous and you are tempted to data dump, remember, you aren’t fooling anyone.
Consistently, the worst advice speakers and presenters get, comes from everyone who is NOT your audience. The following gives examples of some of the WORST advice people are often given. It is followed by the advice of your audience. Listen to them. They are your true judge and jury.
Is drawing on white boards and charts too old fashion for modern audiences?
Director of marketing: “Of course it’s too old fashion. You should always use video or slick PowerPoint graphics.”
Director of Public Affairs: “We want to project ourselves as modern members of the 21st century, so let’s not be caught using old technology.”
You: “I don’t want to draw or diagram in front of people. What if I make a mistake? All eyes will be on me. If I do the PowerPoint slides in advance I can spend hours on them and add many layers of useful date to each slide.”
Your Audience: “Actually, it’s quite refreshing to see someone draw or diagram for us live and in the moment. It’s, frankly, much easier to follow because a speaker cannot draw 8 different color-coded lines at once. As audience members we feel we can see and experience exactly what the speaker is talking about us. Also, it slows the speaker down and gets the speaker away from doing a huge data dump. By drawing items, it forces the speaker to get away from meaningless abstractions. We don’t care if the drawing or writing is less than great, as long as we can understand the concept and see the drawng, we are OK with it.”
Let’s face it, we’ve all started to nod off while listening to a speaker, no matter how interesting the presentation. As a speaker, this can be disconcerting.
You may be tempted to walk over the offending sleeper, shake him by the labels and say, “wake up you knucklehead!” But that wouldn’t be polite.
I have found the most effective and yet subtle technique is to give the sleepy person longer eye contact than usual. Look at the person for an entire thought, plus a second or two. Of course you don’t want to look at this person to the exclusion of others in the room, but just enough to put a temporary spotlight on the drowsy one. That spotlight of your eyes will make the person just uncomfortable enough that sleep will seem less appealing.
If you feel the speaker in the room is looking right at you, it can make you slightly nervous. And if nervous, you aren’t going to want to sleep.
So look at the sleepy heads with your most direct eye contact possible, and you will see less of their eyelids and more of their heads nodding in agreement with your points.
It always pays to know your audience before you get up to speak. This applies not only to the subject matters of interest to them. You must take into consideration personal politics.
For example, if your boss is in the audience and he is incredibly petty, jealous, and worried about you outshining him, you must take this into account. In this case, keeping your job is more important than giving a good speech or even communicating any messages. There are times when you have to speak and your only goal is defensive: not getting sacked.
I hope this never happens to you, but it could. It that case, you should ignore all of the good advice I am sharing with you and then settle for giving a perfunctory speech, or worse, just reading a speech.
However, be warned. If you consistently give bad or mediocre speeches simply to avoid outshining your superiors, you will quickly develop a reputation for being a mediocrity. This can severely harm your long-term career prospects.
Good speakers always produce jealousy, even animosity, from lesser skilled people who are envious. The one thing that both Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had in common is that their enemies accused them of being overly “slick” because of their superior speaking abilities. But both men had careers that far surpassed their critics’ careers.
If you know with absolute certainty that your boss is jealous of your speaking abilities, then, by all means, adjust your performance levels downward when you must. But then spend all of your time looking for a new boss who will actually support you doing your best in all endeavors. Unless you know that your boss is jealous and wants you to do poorly, you should always seek to give the very best presentation you possibly can. Major career advancements, promotions and being “discovered” often come down to giving one great speech in front of the right person.
When you are being interviewed by a reporter, it is always a good idea to ask, “Who else are you interviewing?”
Some reporters might not want to tell you, but most will. This is useful information, because it can help your figure out your potential positioning for the story. The more you know about who else is being interviewed, the sharper you can refine your message, thus increasing your chances of getting quoted on the message you desire.
Let’s say you are a CEO of an airline company and a reporter calls you wishing to discuss trends in your industry. If the reporter tells you that you he or she is also speaking to the head of the Federal Aviation Administration and Members of Congress in charge of regulating the airlines, you probably don’t need to spend a lot of time explaining what current or proposed laws are affecting your industry.
Instead, you would want a much narrower focus on exactly how the laws are affecting your company. If you were speaking to a general consumer publication and the reporter is using you as a sole source, you may want to position yourself as more of the industry expert, not as simply a spokesperson for your own company.
If you are a politician currently in office, it is nice to know if the reporter is also talking to your opponent (if you have one). If your opponent(s) are being interviewed, it is important not only that you spell out your position, but that you also explain how is it superior to your opponent’s position and why, exactly, your opponent’s view are wrong.
If you are the sole source, you can focus on a simpler and more positive message.
Some reporters will appreciate if you ask who else they are interviewing. The will sense that you are trying to be as helpful as possible and that you want to give them a unique perspective. Others won’t like you asking and won’t tell you.
My experience shows that there is nothing to lose because the ones that don’t like it won’t hold it against you, but the info you receive from reporters who do share what other sources they are speaking to can help you immensely.
So find out who your competition is for space in the story.
