by Beth Levine | Sep 6, 2016 | preparing for a presentation, public speaking, smartmouth talks!
WIIFM. What’s in it for me? This is the universal question every audience member is asking themselves when they’re attending a meeting, sitting through a presentation, or listening to a speech.
WIIFM has become a popular acronym in business. It’s a reminder to business people that whatever it is they’re talking about – or let’s face it, sometimes huckstering! – they need to consider the unique needs and interests of their audience and direct their remarks so they convey the potential benefits to their audience, especially if those benefits may not be obvious.
You know from your own firsthand experience as an audience member that WIIFM runs through your own head plenty of times, that you want something in return for your time and attention, and that you feel more satisfied, more impressed (with the speaker), more “heard” and valued when you get something out of a talk.
Conscious or subconscious, people are waiting to have their self-interests met. Sometimes the “me” is more like an “us” – a collective me, as in “okay, what’ve you got to give us?” – because the group has a common self-interest. Regardless of whether it’s individual or collective, the bottom line is this: You, the speaker have a topic and an objective. The audience has a self-interest. Your work is to bring those two factors into alignment. If you can do this, it will always, always, always serve you well.
So, if you’re the speaker, here are 3 simple ways to think about addressing your audience’s WIIFM:
New. Given your topic, is there a new angle or twist? An update or a surprising bit of news? Do you have something that other people don’t know yet? Something this audience hasn’t heard or considered yet?
Useful. Given your topic, is there an application this audience could use? Can you help them sort through or think through a common problem in some way? Do you have a solution to something they face?
Beneficial. Given your topic – and, more importantly, given what keeps your audience up at night – what is it that you have that will help them? What is it about your topic that will benefit your audience? Is there a silver lining for them? A net gain?
The companion acronym to WIIFM, in SmartMouth vernacular, is IAAT – It’s all about them! No matter what, your audience’s needs and interests and experience reign supreme. Think through what you have that’s new or useful or beneficial to them, and plan accordingly for your next turn at the front of the room!
by Beth Levine | Aug 16, 2016 | public speaking
The Olympic Games are upon us and not only is the USA winning in the medals race, but many of our athletes are setting some great communications examples. Naturally, there are so many terrific examples coming out of Rio right now and, while most of them are stellar and memorable in their own ways, some are not Olympic quality. Let’s take a look at one winning and one losing example in today’s post.
In the winner’s circle: I found Kayla Harrison’s post-win interview with NBC particularly noteworthy. Kayla won gold for the US in Judo (78KG division) for the second time in a row and thus making her the most decorated American Judoka of all time and of any gender.
When Liam McHugh of NBC asked her about her experience of being booed by the crowd in Brazil, Kayla embraced the Jock Talk principle of #graciousness. She could have taken the low road and been critical of the Brazilian crowd, but instead she turned it around. She took the high road and turned a negative into a positive. She said she actually enjoyed being booed, because it made her feel like “the bad girl,” which was something she found refreshing and different.
This should be no surprise coming from Kayla as taking the high road, being positive and helping others is her brand. Kayla is someone who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a coach when she was in her teens, but has overcome that to become a history-making world-class champion. Additionally, she is using her star power to found a non-profit to help victims of abuse. Kayla does not back down from tough questions or the hard truth, and she manages to find the positive even in bad situations.
Not every American athlete, however, has followed Kayla’s lead.
In the loser’s circle: After getting knocked out of Olympic soccer tournament medal-less by Sweden, USA’s Hope Solo kept up her streak of controversial comments by calling the Swedish team “a bunch of cowards.” (Whoa! Was that really necessary, Hope?) This kind of negative language immediately makes her into the bad guy and the Swedes into the good guys. No one likes a sore loser, especially at the Olympic Games. Even if she had had a legitimate point, that point would have been lost to the uproar over the negativity of her reaction. (Sportsmanship, Hope!) A lack of #audience-centricity and #graciousness with a little too much #transparency predictably leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths.
When the world comes together in the spirit of peace and athletic competition, there’s no room for anything but #audience-centricity and #graciousness. And really, this provides a good lesson and model for the rest of us – even if we’re not Olympians – which is to embrace #audience-centricity and #graciousness no matter what, at all times. It’s a winning combo!
by Beth Levine | Aug 3, 2016 | preparing for a presentation, public speaking
During our recent webinar, “Getting Your Point Across,” we polled participants to find out what they were most concerned or fearful about when giving a presentation. We asked the question two different ways and both sets of answers yielded the same result. By far, the most pervasive concern of the participants was that they might appear or sound “stupid.” I found this so interesting!
So interesting for two reasons:
- The reality is that most audience members don’t go into a presentation preparing to judge whether or not a speaker is smart. They go in hoping to get something good or new or useful out of it. In fact, if anything, audience members assume that the person at the front of the room is intelligent.
- Worrying about whether you’ll sound stupid, while understandable, is a misplaced concern for a speaker. Worrying about connecting with and engaging the audience is a far more worthwhile concern. If you don’t connect and engage, it won’t matter how intelligent you sound.
If this concern resonates with you – and you are inclined to feel the way our webinar attendees did – here are some quick fixes to help you connect and engage:
- First, get to know as much about your audience as you can beforehand. That way, you will have some “entry ramps” to use in order to build connection.
- Prepare some relevant questions ahead of time – thoughtful, thought-provoking questions that might help engage your audience, build suspense, or get a dialogue going (if the group is a manageable size). One small caveat is that you’ll need to have answers to these questions at the ready in case your audience goes radio silent on you.
- Keep your points succinct and limit the amount of detail you share. Plan your time so that you can open it up for a quick Q&A after each major point or section of your talk. That way, if your audience wants more detail, they’ll ask for it, but you won’t have killed them with TMI unnecessarily!
- Tell stories. Be self-deprecating. Be open and vulnerable. And always, always be relevant – to your audience and to your topic.
- Prepare ahead so that you are familiar enough with your material that you can forget about your notes – and focus on your audience – once you start talking. (Winging it is one of the best ways to appear or sound stupid. Don’t take that risk.)
- And finally, look at your audience. Really look at them. Yes, I’m talking about eye contact. But I’m also talking about how you look at them – look at them as potential friends you want to make, not as adversaries or a firing squad. Your attitude and energy will rub off on your audience, so keep it positive!
All of this is to say, focus on your audience and the experience you want to give them rather than on how you sound. You’ll survive the event either way, so put your attention on them!
by Beth Levine | Jul 19, 2016 | smartmouth talks!
This unusual take on overcoming nervousness comes straight from the horse’s mouth, original public speaking guru Dale Carnegie:
Students of public speaking continually ask, “How can I overcome self-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before an audience?”
Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that some horses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at the thundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing a farmer’s wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse as the train goes by?
How would you cure a horse that is afraid of cars—graze him in a back-woods lot where he would never see steam-engines or automobiles, or drive or pasture him where he would frequently see the machines?
Apply horse-sense to ridding yourself of self-consciousness and fear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying. You can never attain freedom from stage-fright by reading a treatise. A book may give you excellent suggestions on how best to conduct yourself in the water, but sooner or later you must get wet, perhaps even struggle and be “half scared to death.” There are a great many “wetless” bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim in them. To plunge is the only way.
― Dale Carnegie, The Art of Public Speaking
by Beth Levine | Jun 29, 2016 | public speaking
Recently I listened to NPR’s Doug Fabrizio of “Radio West” as he interviewed British linguist David Crystal about his new book, “The Gift of the Gab: How Eloquence Works.” It was a fascinating and validating piece on what it takes and means to be a persuasive and impactful speaker. He and I agree on many important points.
For starters, Crystal has an interesting theory that really everyone is eloquent. And I would have to agree there is a lot of truth to this. All of us have had impassioned personal conversations and convincing one-to-one conversations. However, we often assume this is not a skill transferable to the podium and to a larger audience. The larger an audience gets, the more nerve-wracking it feels to the speaker, but the reality is that the fundamental skills you use to be eloquent or persuasive when speaking one-to-one are the same for a larger audience.
Crystal notes that preparation and rehearsal are keys to eloquence. Very few people can step up on a stage unprepared and then be eloquent. Preparation not only helps you be more fluent, but it also boosts your confidence. Yet a lot of speakers are so full of dread that they avoid preparation (denial!) and then at the last minute wing it. In the end, though, this makes everything worse. It affects the speaker’s ability to genuinely project confidence as well as the ability to be truly connected to the audience – as the speaker will be more focused on trying to remember what he or she was supposed to say next. The only cautionary warning about preparation is that there is a fine line between being prepared and being over-prepared. Audiences recognize and dislike speakers who feel forced or fake. You have to prepare just enough to be fluent with your material and be natural.
Another good point that David Crystal brings up, and one that I always tell my clients, is that the most annoying thing for an audience is when a speaker does not keep to time. That is an instant speech killer. If you are scheduled to talk for 20 minutes, talk for 20 minutes, not 30 minutes and not even for 22. The longer your speech is, even if the time expectations have been set for the audience, the greater the chance you have of losing your audience. With long speeches or presentations, you have to build in moments that bring the attention of your audience back and make sure to add pauses and little breaks so the audience has time to process what you are saying. But no matter what, to go over your allotted time is just about the most audience-unfriendly thing you can do.
In the same vein, it is very easy to overload an audience even in a short speech or presentation. Often, speakers become excited about their material and offer too much or speak too quickly and thus the audience does not have time to understand or comprehend what they are saying. Even in the best of speeches, the audience won’t remember everything, but as David Crystal says, “in a good speech you remember fragments, in a bad speech you remember nothing.”
David Crystal must have been reading my mind, because we agree on another important fact: people can comprehend three points, but after that comprehension takes a nosedive. It is usually best to divide a speech into no more than three important points or messages if you want to be impactful. Otherwise, if you decide you cannot pare it down to, let’s say, less than six points, you are likely to end up with an audience that remembers nothing.
