Some speakers are artists. You can be one too because speaking artists are made, not born.
No speaker I’ve ever worked with started by saying “I want my speech or presentation to be a waste of time.” However, rarely has anyone ever said to me “I want my speaking to be a work of art.” Why not become a speaking artist?
Artists elevate their work from ordinary to extraordinary. Monet painted everyday scenes with brush strokes, uses of color and perspectives that allowed viewers to see the scenes with fresh appreciation. Musicians take the same 8 notes everyone has to use and combine them with rhythm and instruments so the music is memorable, moving and reaches your soul.
Some speakers are artists too. They weave their stories and their 'aha' moments in such a way the audiences are laughing, crying, shocked or surprised. They take the language that is available to everyone and mold it artfully—that is, creating masterpieces out of the fabric and supplies everyone uses all the time.
Why should you strive to be an artistic speaker? You want to inspire people to change their behavior, have aspirations beyond the everyday, spark a flood of insight into their own lives, remember the moment that transformed them.
I’ve never met a person who didn’t want their speech or presentation to be meaningful. Engineers want their solutions to have meaning; sales people want their customers to find meaning in the products or services they offer; managers and executives want to generate meaningful and valuable work for their employees.
Yet too many business speakers across the spectrum fall into the traps that lead to speeches and presentations that are a waste of their time and their audiences’ time. The biggest and most common trap is to focus on delivering information. Company overviews, past performances, features and benefits, missions, vision statements, strategic goals, policies and procedures—none of this is transformative in any way. And the trap is compounded by delivering the information in limited, repetitive and colorless business-speak.
You are a transformative business speaker when you artfully weave your best language into an evocative picture of the most important concerns or challenges facing your audience today. What will happen to them if they address or overcome the challenges? What fresh and exciting expectations can they have for the future? Show them a fresh view of their lives and the future and they will transform themselves to meet it.
When Monet or Picasso painted their pictures, they helped the viewers understand the times and places around them. This may seem simple to us now, but when Monet painted train stations or water lilies, he was opening the eyes of so many people who had a dull gray view of the world around them. When Picasso deconstructed men and women and reassembled them, he showed viewers that they too could imagine the world differently from what was on the surface. Many musicians and singers express in poetry and music the longing of the heart and that’s what makes them transformative artists.
Other traps business speakers fall into include: reporting rather than storytelling; attempting to be persuasive by using logic; leaving the best content for last; never making a connection from the end back to the beginning; using stale content from company libraries; focusing all their energy on slides and never on their delivery and the live audience they’ll be speaking to; speaking down to their audiences; forgetting that audiences are actual human beings who are controlled by human factors.
Any of these traps prevent you from being an artistic speaker. I’ll have more to say about the connection between these traps and artistic speaking in the future. If you’re interested in learning more sooner, let me know.
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