Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
Gore Vidal
It’s one of the speaker’s worst nightmares -that terrible blank moment – or getting to the end and realising you have forgotten important points that are crucial to the success of the presentation.
The first solution we automatically want to adopt is to read the material either from paper or from slides. Unfortunately it is really difficult to maximise the impact of your presentation if you read it. It can question your confidence with your subject, and it dampens your personality.
So we need to develop other ways of remembering our material and presenting it in the best way to create an impact.
You can start by remembering the structure of your speech.
As you created the presentation, you chose the main sections and the best order for them. Remember that decision, the logic and power of it and it will be the basic framework of your memory.
When you created the speech you would have created a single sentence that embodied what you wanted to achieve with the speech – the purpose of the speech and the message you wanted to put across. That will be the first memory cue. If you use nothing else (and I hope that is NOT the case !
Dates, figures and statistics are all very powerful ways to support your points.
Overuse them, though, and they just become boring, and your audience will turn off.
If data is absolutely necessary, use your slides to create a visual rendition of it.
Tell stories about it.
Find some way to relate it to your audience – percentages of people like them, for example, or of their country.
Most audiences will respond to humour. You don’t need to be a comedian, or even a humorous speaker, if it is not your style. You can still use humour to engage with an audience and have them be comfortable with you and your presentation.
“But I’m just not funny and I’m hopeless at telling jokes” Yes, I know – me too. So where do we find humour to use in our speeches? There are three main places to find humour. They are readily available to you, and they are used by all successful speakers and comedians. Those places are life, jokes and situations. Let’s look at how to extract the humour from them.
The first place to find humour is to look around you – look at your life – look at everything within it. Look at the conversations that make people laugh. Use them. Or look at what worked to make people laugh and use that. When you find yourself laughing or even smiling, look at why. What made you smile? Yes, I know you have your own sense of humour, but it is your own sense of humour that will make the humour in your presentations authentic, strong and personal. Select from that, what you think will appeal to your audience and what will best support your points.
Seek out humour. Look at the internet – not to copy jokes (we’ll look at that in a minute) but, again to see what makes you laugh. What makes other people laugh? Go to the library. Look into magazines and ezines. Read humorous writers, go to comedy clubs, listen and watch radio and television. What works and what doesn’t and why? When you find out what works and what doesn’t and why, then you can go back to your own life and watch for those same things, what works, what doesn’t and why – those same conversations, those same situations. See the humour and how that humour can be used in your presentations.
When they are situations and conversations and events that have happened to you or around you or to those around you, they have so much more impact. They have all the added benefits that storytelling brings to a speech. They are authentic and not some joke that you are repeating and trying to twist to suit your point. And they are certainly not a joke that your audience has heard before.
Another source of humour is our own speaking experience. You will discover, as you speak, what people find humorous about you and your style. Sometimes you may make an aside or a throw away remark that was not intended to be humorous, but that makes people laugh. You may make a point using exaggerated body language and people laugh. You might create a situation with the audience or the stage that creates a laugh. Note it well, and use it again. Next time it will be deliberate, certainly, but you can make it look spontaneous if need be. If it works, keep it!
Other people’s jokes are a very dangerous source of material for your humour. Part of the danger lies in the way people use jokes. Some speakers, desperate to be humorous, plan to simply tell jokes to get a laugh, relax their audience and create engagement. If it is not your joke, you risk it falling flat. If it is just a joke on its own, you increase the risk because everything is riding on that joke being funny, you telling it well, the audience being in the mood for that sort of humour – all sorts of pitfalls. If, on the other hand, you choose to use the joke as a support for a point you are making, then you decrease the chances of failure. If worst comes to worst and your audience does not respond, you can just carry on as if it were a story and not necessarily a funny joke. If it succeeds then you have got double value from the joke in creating a memorable tag for the point you were making. You can find jokes in all of the places I mentioned above – the internet, the library, magazines, other comedians and so on. You can use quotations and crazy predictions. You can search in the area of the subject of your presentation or in the expertise of your audience. Just be very careful that the joke suits you audience and the occasion, that it suits your style and your sense of humour and that it suits the point you are trying to make.
The final source of humour is one that works really well. I will call it situational humour. Find humour in the situation you find yourself in, for this speech. You can use geographical humour – compare your home country with this country. Tell the story of something funny that happened here on this occasion, or on another occasion. Use the organisation or the people in the audience or the event. Research the history of the organisation and its culture. Find (appropriate) humour in that. Find humour in your relationship with someone in the audience – something funny that has happened or that the person said had happened. Turn someone’s idiosyncrasies into humour if t can be done respectfully. Use current events – in the world, the country, this town or this audience. All of these are particularly useful in your opening segments that will help relax the audience and to make build engagement with them.
Making eye contact with the audience is vital in projecting confidence and authenticity.
Looking people in the eye in any form of face to face contact means you are not afraid of being caught out.
You are not lying or deceiving. You have confidence in your message. You are being sincere.
So use it as much as you can in your public speaking, to have people connect, believe and follow.
An Open Letter to Steve Ballmer
Dear Steve,
How are things..? It looks to have been a bumpy few months for you but it all seems to be coming together for you now. Nicely played…
We wanted to drop you a line to firstly commend you, secondly to point out some “opportunities for improvement” and lastly to suggest something a little “out there”. Bear with us…we think you’ll like it.
So firstly, the commendation – PowerPoint 2010 is really very very good…. => http://bit.ly/i9cBRH
The most important things you need to get across to the audience are your message and your image. Any other aspect of your presentation (and there are many – visuals being just one) should be secondary to, and supportive of, getting the message and the image across – and certainly not distracting from those.
Some people memorise their whole presentation. Some people read the whole speech. Both of these approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. But most people use a compromise and, if possible or necessary, use notes.
Two very important parts of your speech are the opening and the closing. If you memorise those you can be sure you will use the words you chose for the greatest impact, and you can concentrate on delivery and especially on eye contact. You can choose to read them, but you will need to find other ways of giving them power. You probably should also memorise the punch lines of your jokes, and any words you are quoting verbatim.
If you want to persuade, you can build your success with the reciprocity rule.
What is the Reciprocity rule?
When someone gives us something, we feel obligated to give something back. We are uncomfortable if we don’t. And that something might be a physical object or it might be a service or a gift. That something might not even be something we want or need. We probably never asked for it, or expected it.
How does this work?
The Reciprocity Rule has been ingrained in us for centuries. I suspect it began in a society that was based on barter and trade. The system could only survive if there was a rule that we always return favours, we must never owe. It safeguards anyone who wants to do a favour or give a gift – they know they will get something in return.
Strangely enough, the return favour can be bigger than the original and we will reciprocate even if we don’t like the person who gave the gift or don’t like the gift itself. The rule is that deep and that powerful. It is part of our socialisation process. People who do not return favours are shunned. We are brought up that this is the right thing to do, and warned of dire consequences if we do not “do the right thing”.
Because the rule is so deeply ingrained, we are used to using it when we need to make decisions. There are so many decisions to be made on a daily basis that we will use whatever we can to avoid having to think about them and this rule comes in handy. Oftentimes the decision to think in a certain way or to choose a particular person can be based solely on the fact that we owe them something, or that they gave us something.
It has been found that no human society does not use the reciprocity rule. It has been used by corporations and governments to persuade people for thousands of years.
I want to look at this concept of “doing the right thing” but first want to add some of the ways the Reciprocity Rule works in practice. It does not just apply to gifts or favours. It applies to concessions. I request a favour and it is refused. Then I request a smaller favour. Because I have made a concession to you, it is highly likely that you will accede to the smaller favour in return. If I yield to your opinion on one topic, it is more likely that you will agree with me on the next topic, in return.
Now, given all of this information, you can go ahead and use the reciprocity rule in your persuasion efforts. Making sales? Offer a freebie, any freebie, and ask for the sale. Asking for a favour? Ask for a huge one first, then you can ask for what your really want. Want to change someone’s mind? Agree with them on anything else, but expect them to change in the way you wanted. And this amounts not just to persuasion, but to manipulation.
We all know of salesmen, the old type of salesmen, who use the rule of reciprocity to trick people into the sale – to manipulate. Many of us immediately put up a barrier as soon as we suspect the trickery. Every time someone knocks on my home front door, I move into that barrier mode. I don’t like it because I cannot “do the right thing”, and politely reciprocate. I have to be on alert to trickery. In the end, we will use the rule of reciprocity to buy or to return favours or to be persuaded, when we believe that the gifts or favours or beliefs are valuable and offered in good faith. We will not reciprocate a favour or gift for a trick or a marketing tactic.
Now I want to turn this around and look at the situation from our viewpoint as speakers who want to persuade. And there are speakers who are so obviously using these techniques with one thing in mind – manipulation – their own gain…. they are not “doing the right thing” either.
And now there are other people not “doing the right thing” – in our audiences. As a speaker, we also are facing the challenge of dealing with people who are distracted from our messages by their electronic devices – their phones, laptops, tablets. Not very long ago, this would have been considered incredibly bad manners, to show such disrespect for a speaker – certainly not “doing the right thing”. So we cannot depend on our audiences to do the right thing and sit through ill-disguised efforts to trick them into buying our products, or trick them into doing us favours or trick them into believing the message we have for them.
So what is the answer to this quandary? How can we create a win-win situation for everyone – persuade ethically and not manipulate or trick. I think the answer lies in “doing the right thing”.
Be prepared to give without expecting something in return. Know that giving is a useful persuasion tool, but give anyway.
Give value – that is value to the audience or your client or potential buyer, something that is exclusively for that person or group of people.
Be transparent and authentic. Make it clear that you are giving a gift. Use language that reinforces this side of the transaction. But make it clear that the recipient has a choice. You are “doing the right thing” but also empowering your client/audience/buyer. Empowered people feel more open to being persuaded. Make it also very clear that what you are asking for in return is in their best interests as well – the service you offer, the new perspective you introduce, the product.
If you want to use the rejection-retreat strategy, then do so transparently. It is valid to assume that a portion of your audience will want the higher priced product, the more difficult action to take. It is also valid to assume that perhaps more will want the lower priced/easier solution, and you can make that clear as well.
In terms of making a concession, it makes sense to address objections to an idea early on in a presentation. People need to feel understood and to have their beliefs and prior understandings validated, even if you are about to prove them wrong!! And that is the “doing the right thing” aspect of making a concession in terms of a belief so that your audience may be more happy to reciprocate and make a concession towards whatever you want to persuade them to do, think or feel.
I really do not want us to be part of the increasing number of speakers who use ill-disguised efforts at manipulation in order to persuade – not when it is so easy to “do the right thing” and persuade with honesty, openness, integrity and to create a win for all concerned.
© Bronwyn Ritchie … If you want to include this article in your publication, please do, but please include the following information with it:
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In this cluttered marketplace it is more important than ever to keep your message simple. People just don’t have the attention span to work hard at understanding what you have to offer. Consider Google’s core message as they sought out venture capital years ago.
“Google provides access to the world’s information in one click”.
Can you do that with your business?
=> http://bit.ly/QUCOvT