“Don’t make the almost universal mistake of trying to cover too much ground in a brief talk.”
“Above all else, don’t make your talk abstract.”
“While preparing, study your audience. Think of their wants, their wishes.”
“Don’t read, and don’t attempt to memorize your talk word for word.”
“The ideal thing would be not only to see and hear the thing to be remembered, but to touch it, and smell it and taste it – above all else, we are visual minded.”
“Stop leaning against the table. Stand tall. Don’t rock back and forth.”
“Use emphatic gestures.”
“Use conversational tones.”
“Love you audience.”
“Pause before and after important ideas.”
After you have risen to address your audience, do not be in a hurry to begin. That is the hallmark of the amateur. Take a deep breath. Look over your audience for a moment; and, if there is a noise or disturbance, pause until it quiets down.
Where do they all of these quotes come from? They all contain nuggets of sound advice. In fact, I tell my trainees these things all the time. Plus, I use variations of these in my own books and training DVDs. But every one of these quotes came from Dale Carnegie’s 1926 book “Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business.”
Every new generation thinks it is “modern” and “special.” But the reality is that many of us are boring and ineffective speakers at the beginning of the 21st Century and we would have been just as boring at the beginning of the 20th Century. Many principles of good speaking are timeless. If you want to get a better since of how timeless, I’d urge you to pick up an old, dusty copy of Dale Carnegie’s “Public Speaking.”
TJ Walker, Media Training Worldwide
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