Broadbent is an admirer of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s approach. “At one stage he spent two days looking for some imagery to define the separation between Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc countries – he of course came up with the ‘Iron Curtain’”. Not bad.
Great speakers know how to get the words off the page and into people’s hearts and minds. An easy, relaxing way to rehearse is to take the dog (or yourself) for a walk and say it out loud. The shower, bath or in transit are also great rehearsal spaces. Get used to hearing the speech and hearing yourself say it. This process allows you to edit and finesse the speech and, most importantly, avoid the perils of hearing your speech for the first time on the podium and hating it. After all, a great speech is a hell of a lot more than reading from the printed page.
Seek honest, constructive feedback. You may find it embarrassing having a colleague tell you to stop mumbling/take your hands out of your pockets/make eye contact, but surely it’s preferable to avoiding criticism and giving a poor performance. If you can’t trust the feedback, find yourself a coach who can quickly get you up to speed.
Morgan has some advice for those watching their boss/colleague or employee deliver a rotten speech. “For those helping out, don’t try to tinker with the speech. Instead, ask the speaker, ‘what are you trying to get across?’ And then ask yourself honestly, how well is the speaker doing on that score? Give feedback on that specific point, nothing else.”
Non-verbal communication is a major part of the impact of a speech. The best way to measure your delivery style is to ask a friend to video a part of your speech on their phone. Play it back to assess any nervous habits, such as jiggling, rocking, sweating, nervous eye movements, excessive hand waving, poor posture or crappy microphone skills.
At the recent Australian Davos Connection Future Summit conference at Crown Towers in Melbourne in May, Twitter played a starring role. During keynote addresses, many delegates were tweeting comments (using an agreed hashtag that groups the comments together), giving the planet real-time updates on how the conference was developing.
As the comments piled up during the day from all over the world, the conference was ranked on Twitter as the sixth most tweeted topic globally. Twitter also has a clever feature, called Twitterfall.com, that allows a series of tweets to cascade down a webpage in real time. During the political unrest in Iran, for example, Twitterfall is a compelling, real-time, blow-by-blow look at the dramas unfolding.
“For tweets, you’d be sure to advise people of the right hash tag to use so you can get the feedback later,” says director at Applied Insight Micheal Axelsen. Axelsen, an IT specialist who lectures and speaks extensively and judges public speaking competitions, knows that there are tough audiences out there that can’t stop looking at Facebook. He is quickly adjusting to students tweeting during his lectures too. (One student was cheeky enough to say one of Axelsen’s lectures was boring.) At this stage, he thinks it’s still rude to tweet during a formal speech but that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen.
Turn off the laptop, put down the notes and charts for a second and try this exercise. Can you sum up your speech/presentation/pitch in one sentence? If you can’t, you have a problem. We live in an age of short attention spans. (“Yes we can” sure worked for US President Obama.) It is amazing what you can do with five words or less.
Take inspiration from the internet Oscars, the Webby Awards, where a five-word limit is enforced for award winners. For her acceptance speech at June at the 2009 Webbys, influential political blogger Arianna Huffington said: “I didn’t kill newspapers, okay?” Lingerie company Victoria’s Secret’s spokesperson also nailed it in five words: “Victoria’s Secret, sexy lingerie, yeah.”
Smart speakers can speed ahead in areas of the speech that are not getting any traction with the audience. They are aware when they are not getting traction. Bad speakers ignore their audience. To break things up, try and engage the audience in a series of questions on your topic, a hypothetical or a “quick show of hands” to get a sense of what they are interested in exploring. Remember, public speaking is about the audience, not the speaker.
Check your running length carefully before giving the speech. Never run over. If that is likely to happen, have a section of the address that can be quickly pulled, to leave enough time for Q&A and a punctual end of the session. Says Axelsen: “Sit down and shut up when you’ve said what you needed to say.”
Planning – Must include fresh, valid, data, content research and compelling case studies/stories.
Audience – Identify who they are and what you want to say to them.
Preparation – Get the structure of the speech, the beginning, middle and end and work out where all your pieces of information fit. What other tools do you need?
Rehearsal – Watch the body language and get those words off the page and out there.
Timing – Make sure it is spot on, never over.
Set up – Make sure everything works, the IT is on, you have the podium, microphone, projector, etc, where you want them to be. You may sometimes need to change around a room for small talks, away from wedding banquet seating to more of a round table. You need to feel (relatively) comfortable up there and feel able to connect to the audience, however large or small.
Last-minute – Take some deep breaths, check your watch, take a glug of water, introduce yourself, ask people to switch off their phones and then off you go.
Emily Ross is the co-author of 50 Great e-Businesses and the Minds Behind Them. She also coaches executives in public speaking with Media Manoeuvres.
