by Beth Levine | Jul 14, 2015 | preparing for a presentation, public speaking, quote
“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 strangle 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 30, 2015 | preparing for a presentation, public speaking
I was reminded yesterday by @TanyaRivero on @WSJLive that it’s wedding season, which means lots of toasts are being delivered. Best Man toasts. Maid of Honor toasts. Father of the Bride toasts. You name it!
The way I see it, toasts fall under the category of highly personal speeches – a category that includes not just toasts, but eulogies, graduation and retirement sendoffs and the like. These kinds of speeches are often touching and/or funny, yet they also provide the perfect storm for audience-centricity to implode; the topic is limited to a couple or person, the speaker was chosen for their special relationship to the couple or person, and the audience is made up of people who also have their own special relationships with the couple or person.
Sounds like the perfect storm for perfection not disaster, right? Wrong. Apart from the notorious toast flops that include revealing long-held secrets or telling inappropriate stories, there’s another potentially damaging dynamic that happens when the speaker isn’t careful. And that is, they make the audience feel badly. By taking the opportunity to share personal stories, sometimes to excess or even exclusively, the toaster can make the audience feel left out or less important to the people being toasted. It ends up feeling exclusive and not inclusive to the audience.
By contrast, a speaker who embraces the principle of audience-centricity during a toast or other highly personal speech might talk about the qualities or experiences that everyone in the room knows about and can appreciate or laugh at; they might share lessons learned from the couple or person being toasted that everyone can related to; or they might take a bigger picture view of the occasion and talk only about the couple or the person and not even include their own personal connection.
The audience-centric speaker in the case of a wedding toast or other highly personal speech opens the tent wide so that everyone in attendance feels connected and feels like they could have toasted the couple or person with that very same speech.
by Beth Levine | Jun 16, 2015 | preparing for a presentation, public speaking
Nothing informs the future of business communication quite like the need for brevity in meetings and presentations.
Brevity is not simply about using less time or saying less, it’s about being efficient with your communications. It’s about identifying the meaningful, meaty parts of your content and delivering those without unnecessary fluff, background or side points.
Brevity requires you to prepare, prioritize, and package your material. Prioritizing is the key here.
A couple of #Brevity tips:
- Serve dessert first: If you have a takeaway or call to action, don’t save it for the end, deliver it up front (the ultimate priority!). It helps set context and expectations, which are important for holding onto audience attention.
- Go modular: Build your presentation in chunks rather than in a narrative so you can remain adaptable. You might be reading your audience and want to jump to only the most important chunks (prioritizing again!), or your time might be cut short unexpectedly. Chunks leave you prepared and nimble.
- Know your big fish and little fish: Within those presentation chunks, know your main points or big fish (this requires you to … yep, prioritize your material) and your supporting information or little fish. Big fish come first. Leading or inundating with lots of little fish, or too much information, is overwhelming to both speaker and audience.
Even if attention spans were infinite, which we know they’re not, brevity is more efficient, which is valued and appreciated in any workplace!
by Beth Levine | Jun 2, 2015 | preparing for a presentation, public speaking, smartmouth talks!
Your topic is set. Your time is limited. You know it’s all about them – your audience – because you’ve wisely adopted the principle of audience-centricity for yourself as a communicator.
So, when preparing yourself for a presentation, ultimately the question for you is this: Which end result do you prefer? Standing in front of a group and being comprehensive, saying everything you know and covering everything in your slide deck? Or being selective and targeted and saying something— even just one thing—that actually resonates with your listeners and sticks in their minds?
Which presenter are you?
It’s your call.
Either way, let me know what you decide.
[*Excerpted in part from Jock Talk: 5 Communication Principles for Leaders as Exemplified by Legends of the Sports World, www.jocktalkbook.com]
by Beth Levine | May 12, 2015 | preparing for a presentation, public speaking
There is quite a bit of consensus that business meetings and presentations are too often marked by mediocrity and tedium, and there are simply too few people calling phooey. It’s as if herd mentality got together with bystander effect and conspired to make time spent in conference rooms and boardrooms insufferable.
I’m trying to call phooey and help leaders and aspiring leaders raise the bar on business communications for themselves and their organizations.
Communication is the currency of success, it’s how we sell, persuade, motivate and inform. It’s how we get things done. The usual organizational values of excellence and efficiency can and should be applied to communication as well, but are they?
When it comes to how organizations communicate, I am struck by how corporate leaders strive for excellence and efficiencies in so many operational areas, yet are willing to settle for merely adequate—or worse, time-wasting—when it comes to business communications. Meetings, presentations, and speeches are so often where and how business gets done, but in these settings mediocrity abounds. Many companies in the manufacturing sector even subscribe to the tenets of the Lean Movement yet tolerate flab and time-wasting in communications.
Business audiences have come to expect and accept a relatively low standard. Well, what is standard in the business world may be adequate, but it’s not optimal and, let’s face it, it shouldn’t be acceptable. Think about how often you roll your eyes during meetings that are too long and, worse, pointless. Think about the boring presentations you’ve sat through—the ones in which you waited for the single valuable nugget, that one answer, that lone call to action that came at minute 52 out of an hour-long talk. Think about the speech by the CEO who was incredibly dry or who mouthed the same old-same old. A bar set at adequate or standard is far too low for organizations that expect excellent outcomes.
Don’t be a bystander. Do what you can to embrace good communications within your organization – and at the very least, for yourself!
[*Excerpted in part from Jock Talk: 5 Communication Principles for Leaders as Exemplified by Legends of the Sports World, www.jocktalkbook.com]
