Great Speaking Coach

Deliver Relevance to Your Business Audiences

"If you don't select and deliver what is relevant to your audience then they will tune out everything because eliminating 95% of the whole is very hard." Susan Trivers

What if 95% of everything you read or hear is junk? It is not relevant to serve your purpose or needs at a particular time. Wouldn't you love to easily identify the 5% that is perfectly relevant? You'd be able to devote much more time and energy to what is important.

Edward Tufte, known to many as the expert on displaying quantitative information on slides, explains this search for relevance in a video on WashingtonPost.com/leadership.

Tufte came to this understanding when he was in graduate school: "I realized that the published literature was junk... That is, there is only 5% you have to read. You just have to be able to identify it. That is, you have to have a sense of relevance, a sense of excellence."

Tufte's search for relevance meshes exactly with my starting point for any speech or presentation: what does the audience care about? Your call-to-action, your key points, your mix of high impact content and your attention-getting opening must all be meaningful to the audience, not just to you.

When Tufte explores a new topic, he wants to learn enough to be competent and to do it. He doesn't want to learn theory or to pass a test for a license. When you're creating your speech or presentation, remember that your audience is happy to let you be the expert. They want to learn only enough to DO something new going forward in a way that is relevant to them.

Read through my blog archives to learn more about putting the audience first, and creating speeches and presentations that inspire rather than inform. As Tufte says: "If you're not doing something different, you're not doing anything at all."

Share your thoughts about relevance through our comment link.

 

Prescriptions to Cure Your "Uh/Um" Speaking Problem

"The Board of Directors counted the number of 'uhs' and 'ums' included by a staff member as she gave a report. And they were not pleased. She has to fix this. Can you help?" Thus I began coaching a rising star in the non-profit world. On paper and in one-on-one conversations, she is qualified and well-spoken. In front of groups, she is not easy to listen to. Nearly every other sound is 'uh' or 'um'.

Drop a penny into a jar; tap on the table; clap your hands. These are often prescribed as ways for an audience or peer group help someone overcome their dependence on 'uh' or 'um'. More times than not these techniques create an even more nervous speaker who decides it's too upsetting to work on getting better. And they always occur after the fact rather than before the 'uh/um' is uttered.

Here are my top three prescriptions to cure your "uh/um" problem:

1) You'll make a much better speaker when you write your speaking notes in short sentences in the active voice. Short sentences bring you to a clear halt, which you can then use as a silent pause. As you're making speaking notes, use a red pen for each period at the end of a sentence. This will help you remember when you're ending one sentence. The visual part of your brain shows you the period even as you're speaking and reminds you to pause silently.

2) Examine your slides and/or speaking notes for information: facts, numbers, dates, percentages, quantitative targets; rules, policies, procedures; historical track records. All of these types of content require accuracy. Worrying about accuracy turns into the audible pause 'uh' or 'um' as you search your mental database. Unlike your smartphone or laptop search engine which stays silent during the seconds it takes to generate results, we speakers tend to fill that silence with 'uh' or 'um'.

Increase your speaking about concepts, trends or future actions. These ideas will flow easily and you'll reduce the tendency to 'uh' or 'um'. Reduce the specific data you need to speak about to your audience by making it available on a handout.

3) Record yourself each time you practice. (You do practice out loud, don't you?) Identify patterns that you hear yourself falling into. Do you say 'and' between every thought? Do you speak in a monotone, just trying to get through all your content? Where are you smooth and where are you stuck? Where do you use vocal variations such as volume changes, speed variety, and inflection that reflects the content?

You'll be pleased with much of what you hear and allow yourself a pat on the back for that. This isn't just to make yourself feel good--identifying your strong moments gives you a model for the parts you need to fix.

Address each small flub one at a time. Practice your intended improvements until they are installed in your mind, then move to the next one.

My client significantly reduced her 'uhs' and 'ums' just by writing and speaking in short sentences and providing a written snapshot of the data her audience wants. She is enthusiastic about recording her practices and learning from them.

Apply these prescriptions for your 'uh' and 'um' problem and make your audiences happy to listen to you. Share your success stories through our comment link.

Buzz Words and Filter Words: 2 Speaking Habits to Change

Two different posts came through my social media and provided related tips for business speakers. One post was on what the author calls 'filter words' and the other on 'buzz words'.

Filter words distance the listener from the action. When you say "I saw two people arguing" you create distance. If instead you say "the man yelled an obscenity and the woman's mouth dropped open as if she was physically smacked in the face" you bring your listeners to the action.

Buzz words such as 'utilize', 'process', 'deliverables' and dozens of others make your presentation sound like everyone else's. These are filter words in that they distance the listener from any action. They are buzz words because they are used so frequently as short cuts or jargon in business presentations.

"The note-taker quickly read his notes from the staff meeting one more time, then pressed send to distribute them to the team of nine." This description of meeting the requirement for a deliverable is more colorful and adds life to an action in a way that "he sent the deliverable" does not. It takes just a few words more while bringing flesh and blood to the person, his actions, and the composition of the recipients.

I am sure you can think of many opportunities to substitute lively descriptions for filter words and buzz words. Try just one or two the next time you speak or present and observe the responses of your listeners. You'll see them pay a bit more attention and perhaps even flash a quick smile. Keep it up until using real words, not buzz words and filter words, becomes your new habit.

What's been your experience with audience response to more descriptive and lively language? Share it through our comment link.

 

 

 

Create Speaking Notes for Slides in Five Easy Steps

Slides for business presentations are not your script or your speaking notes. They are the outline of your content. Follow these FIVE easy steps to create interesting speaking notes that will lead you to become a confident and compelling business speaker.

1 - Know your audience and what they care about. As you go through your slide deck, repeatedly ask yourself what about this specific topic is of interest to my specific audience?

2 - Use a hard copy of the slide deck and circle key words which relate to the answers to the question in step #1. Handwrite your key words on index cards to install the ideas in your brain. One, two or three key words per slide and one card for each slide (number them).

3 - Once you have all your key words on your cards, close and put away the slide deck. Spread your cards out on a large table.

Look for patterns of ideas, similarities, differences, changes of subject, and interesting or amusing words that you could elaborate on. What visuals or props come to mind when you look at these key words? What stories or examples pop up? Have you read an article recently about one of them? Do you remember a quote from your boss, a colleague or a customer that relates to some of the key words? Is there a movie with a theme similar to one or more key words?

Jot down your creative ideas on separate cards that are numbered in the same sequence as the cards for the key words. Your end product is a two index cards for each slide: the key words are on one card and the creative ideas are on the other card.

What you are doing during this step is making the speaking content your own.

4 - On the table, organize the sets of cards into a sequence that makes sense to you. You will have to stick to the basic order of the slide deck, but don’t be a slave to the deck. Plan your speaking content first, and then figure out how to move through the slides so they keep pace with you, rather than you following the slides.

5 - Once you’ve got your cards organized for the first time, pick them up, move to a place where you’ve got room to move around, and stand up and begin to speak.At this point you want to hear yourself speaking and to hear the whole presentation. Speaking is about speaking, not reading.

The best part of about following these five steps is that you become a speaker your audience wants to listen to. That leads to success for your company or organization, your career and your audience. And no slide deck can ever do that as well as you can.

Invest the Most in Your Business Presentation Content

Let's talk about content. Stories are very popular components of business speeches these days. The CEO or the engineer should use well-crafted stories to tap into the emotions of their audience--then follow them with their facts or plans, or figures, steps, or processes.

What are stories if not content or words? Only mimes tell stories without words. The rest of us write stories, select words thoughtfully and deliberately, and put the sentences together in specific sequences to enhance the impact. A poorly written story told with a lot of body language and vocal variety is still a poorly written story that will not have a lasting impact on the audience and won't lead the audience to respond to the call-to-action that is the purpose of the story.

Processes are designed to help your company and your customers achieve results and reduce risk. When you describe a difficult situation and show how your process helped the customer get their results or  reduce the major risks, your content--the words--are your means for making your point. Too many dramatic flourishes of the body or the voice can lead to the opposite conclusion. In this case the content is 80% or more of the impact.

Past performances are used to convince prospects that you can do the work for them and achieve their desired results. You use these citations to stress partnership, trustworthiness, expertise, timeliness and cost management. Can you imagine a skeptical prospect responding positively to excessive body language and voice qualities when their money is on the line? I don't think so.

• Promise yourself that you will never, ever again be fooled by the myth that only 7% of the impact of your speech or presentation comes from the words or content.
• Promise yourself that you will vociferously dispute this myth when anyone else promotes it.
• Promise yourself that you'll put the vast majority of your effort--time, thinking, writing, slide development, practices and rehearsals--into your content.

Then you can expect to make a powerful impact on your audiences and enjoy the outcome you're intending to achieve with your speech or presentation.