Public Speaking - How is Speaking Like Driving?

Clutching your brand new driver's license in your hot teenage hand, you feel triumphant. You call yourself a driver and you hit the road.

Then about 10 years later you realize that now you are a driver--it took years of actual experience, facing all the big and little things that happen when your'e behind the wheel to grow from someone who is licensed to drive to someone who is an experienced driver.

Speaking is like that. Learn some rules or speaking practices and implement them. You're speaking but you have a long way to go to call yourself an experienced speaker. You have to face all kinds of audiences and the various challenges of speaking venues, expectations, busy schedules, the ebb and flow of your passion and increasing amounts of knowledge. After 10 years of speaking, you will have the right to call yourself an experienced speaker--and more importantly, others will be asking you to speak.

Just like driving improves with practice facing many and varied obstacles, so speaking improves with each speech--if you recognize that great speakers get there by traveling a road.Too many business speakers think they've "got it" when they do what everyone else does--no imagination, no deviation from the norm, nothing to shake up the tired old habits.

Focus on your passion and your inner knowledge and then zero in on the answer to the question "What does the audience care about?" Then design your speech or presentation to answer that question in creative and iimaginative ways. Fill your content with your knowledge and your speaking style with your passion. Each time you speak ask yourself what was the best part, what was the worst part and then get rid of the worst part.

Repeat, repeat, repeat, and as you speak again and again, always fixing the worst parts, you'll earn the privilege of calling your self an experienced business speaker.

Share your "bumpy road" speaking experiences through our comment link.

Comments

[Susan Trivers]

Richard,

Thanks for your great story. I'm glad to hear that you built upon that disaster rather than deciding never to speak again!

[Richard I. Garber]

Susan:
My first career involved doing applied research in a laboratory and speaking once a year about the interesting results. Back in 1982 the annual meeting of the National Association of Corrosion Engineers was in Houston, Texas. Most of the sessions were in meeting rooms that held about 40 people, and had downward-pointing, recessed spotlights for easy note-taking.

I went to present a technical paper in a session on the metallurgy of oilfield equipment. Because of the drilling boom they expected a large audience and moved it to a ballroom that could hold about 150 people. This ballroom had no recessed lights. Once the doors closed and the main lights were switched off, the only light came from the 35mm slide projector and a little lamp on the speaker’s lectern.

When I got up to and started my talk I asked for the first slide. There was a bright flash on the screen as the projector bulb burned out and the rest of the room went black. The projectionist had to crawl to the back doors and push one open before he could even find the light switch and change the bulb. It probably took him only two minutes, but as I just stood there it felt like forever.

All my rehearsals had been done with the slides as a crutch. Without them I felt helpless. I wasn’t prepared to wing it and use a blackboard or flip chart as a back-up. Actually the first four slides in my introduction just were text. If I had been less nervous, then I could easily have smoothly started my talk without them.

Richard