Over at Corporate Presenter, I’ve mentioned that business speaker and writer Geoff Burch will be presenting a series on BBC2 starting at the end of July. The programme is called All Over The Shop. It’s all about business problems businesses face!
The programme will run on Tuesday evenings until the end of September. Details of the programme can be seen at Touch Productions.
Many of you will not have seen Geoff Burch in action. So here he is:
Reckon you can get others to see your point of view?
I, along with a few others, will be trying just that this Thursday at London Corinthians Toastmasters Club. Unique to LC’s, the “Persuaders Competition” is great entertainment.
Why not come along and join in the fun? Details on how to find the venue are here.
Many visitors to the stand at HRD 2008 earlier today, expressed a willingness to improve their public-speaking skills.
Most were impressed the courses run by Simply Speaking, and various courses were booked. The most popular - Creating Confidence. Details of this and other courses can be seen at Helen Sewell’s site http://www.simply-speaking.co.uk
Next week, I’ll be working with Helen Sewell, and her team from Simply Speaking, at a major HR Conference in London. Recently, Helen had an article published in Accountancy Age all about making effective presentations:
Six Top Tips for Presenting with Impact
Are emails and computers destroying our ability to speak well? Good verbal communication seems to have flown into cyberspace as inboxes fill up with emails and managers mumble their way through monotone PowerPoint presentations, reading aloud from over-packed slides and sending their audience into a stupor.
The skills required to analyse spreadsheets are a far cry from those needed to transform numbers into fascinating presentations. But analyse this: UK businesses lose nearly £8bn each year because of dull presentations that force colleagues and clients to switch off and waste company time. This is based on a manager earning an average £30,000 per annum and attending a one-hour meeting every week in which he or she does not listen.
With a justified reputation for being boring, it is perhaps unsurprising that British bosses dread public speaking more than any other part of their job. However, “nothing in life is more important than the ability to communicate effectively” according to former US president Gerald Ford. So here are some tips to transform your presentations into a performance that will make people sit up.
1. Make Your Message Memorable
Whenever you speak in public you are selling something - whether a principle, a service or an action. You are not just imparting information; your aim is to get people to do something based on what you say. This will only happen once they realise the benefits of your message, so you need to hammer these home. As Winston Churchill once said, “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.” This works extremely well if you can make your point relevant to your audience. The trick is to find the overlap between what you want to say and what they want to hear. Base your key message around this and everyone will be happy.
2. Enrich Your Voice
To create a rich tone to your voice, use your abdominal muscles as bellows to pump air through your voice-box at the top of your windpipe. This projects your sound forwards and adds resonance, making your voice more appealing. It can also increase your volume, depending on how hard you work the muscles. The power behind your voice should always come from your belly not your throat, otherwise you risk damaging your vocal cords and becoming croaky, hoarse or even speechless. To test that you are using the right muscles, blow forcefully as if you are blowing out a fire. You will feel your speech muscles tightening in your belly. You need to relax these again before using them for speech. When the muscles are relaxed and you breathe in naturally your belly should expand outwards and your chest should remain relatively still.
3. Create Vocal Energy
If you feel passionate about your subject (as you should!) this will come across in your voice. But if you feel uninspired you can bet your bottom dollar that your audience will be uninspired too. However, it is easy to give your presentation an extra energy boost. One important tip is to smile. This may seem counter-intuitive, especially for serious topics, but smiling brings your voice to life and adds extra sparkle to your speech. It enhances your musical ups and downs and creates more interest for your listeners. Smiling gives you the ‘three vital Es’ that make your voice attractive: excitement, energy and enthusiasm. It’s said that a smile is worth a thousand words; it is also worth some of the £8bn wasted annually.
4. Let Your Body Do The Talking
Your body language communicates a great deal, and you can use it to make yourself appear more dynamic and convincing. Body language can include a range of movements from strong, defined gestures to stillness. If you generally gesticulate a lot, you may find that stillness draws your audience in. If you are generally fairly still, then a sweeping gesture may grab attention. People are stimulated by movement, so don’t stand stock still. But don’t use random or overly repetitive gestures. One important rule is to match your gestures to your words. If you talk about a fall in profits, for example, your hand might follow a downward curve; but if you talk about an increase in profits you might demonstrate an upwards curve.
5. The Eyes Have It
Eye contact draws people in and encourages them to listen because they feel you are addressing them personally. Meeting someone’s gaze is one of the most intimate and powerful things you can do. It gives you a strong presence, creates rapport with your audience and adds impact to your speech, influencing whether you win people over. Here’s how to do it: look someone in the eye for between 2 and 5 seconds as you speak. Then make eye contact with someone else, before moving on to the next person. Look at people in different parts of the room and really try to connect with each individual. If the audience is large, mentally divide the room into four; identify one person in each quadrant and one in the middle. When you make eye contact with any of your chosen individuals, the others in their section will feel you are looking directly at them.
6. The Dos and Dont’s of Visual Aids
Visual aids should be exactly what their name suggests: a visual illustration of your topic. Coloured charts and graphs are useful for simplifying information and photographs can grab the imagination. However your audience will lose interest if you show a plethora of slides crowded with text. In addition, if you keep looking at your own slides you will lose eye contact; you will direct your voice towards the slides and away from the audience, and you may start reading aloud rather than speaking, which can sound stilted and boring. The general rule is to use no more than 1 slide every 5 minutes. This sounds very few, but it means that each slide can have maximum impact. Text should be in bullet points: no more than 5 bullet points per slide, with no more than 5 words per bullet point.
————————————–
Creating rapport with your audience and delivering an inspiring, relevant speech means people are much more likely to listen, remember and act. After all, they are not just buying dry information, they are buying you. The Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche famously said ‘If you want to get an idea across, wrap it up in a person’. If you follow these six tips and let your personality come across as the wrapping, you should end up with more stimulating, successful presentations.
This week’s guest blogger is Public Speaking and Presentation Skills coach, Lisa Braithwaite from California. Lisa has a great blog called Speak Schmeak which is full of public speaking tips. Here’s Lisa on public speaking fear:
Many people claim to fear public speaking, but is it really “speaking” that they fear, or is it something else?
What people really fear is usually something much more personal, such as:
* Being judged
* Not being liked
* Boring the audience
* Being exposed as an imposter – someone who really doesn’t know what they’re talking about
* Making mistakes
* Being the centre of attention
Public speaking is perceived by many as a venue for scrutiny, and much of what people really fear is that their flaws will be revealed – and then judged or criticized. Most of what people fear about public speaking isn’t really “speaking” at all.
If this is the case, how do you reduce your fear of being judged or criticized so you can focus on giving an effective presentation?
You don’t have to be friends with everyone
Not everyone will resonate with what you have to say or with your personality. That’s just a fact of life. If you get over the idea that everyone in the audience has to love and adore you, that is step one!
A few people won’t engage with you, and some people won’t like you at all. It’s okay. Just let it go.
Reframe the way you see your audience
A fearful speaker usually has a hostile view of the audience. She expects that they will be critical and unsympathetic, and so braces herself for conflict with the “enemy.”
By reframing the audience as friendly and encouraging, she drops her own hostility toward the audience and becomes open to their cooperation.
The audience wants a speaker to do well; the audience expects that she is an expert on her topic and will engage them in learning. The audience does not, for a second, hope the speaker falls on her face.
Reframing might involve merely changing your negative self-talk from “They’ll think I’m a terrible speaker,” to “The audience wants me to succeed.” Or you may visualize the presentation from start to finish, seeing the audience smiling, nodding, engaging and applauding.
Meet the needs of your audience
Make the conscious decision to focus only on meeting the needs of the audience, rather than being obsessed with your own discomfort. Do this by applying adult learning principles to your talk.
For example, make sure your presentation has practical, applicable information that your audience can use immediately. Ask for input, and put your audience’s lifetime of knowledge and experience to good use. And make sure to offer your audience well-organized content, with tools and solutions to their problem, not just vague theories.
When you build a relationship with the audience based on trust, respect and connection, and you provide practical, useful information, you meet the audience’s needs.
When the audience’s needs are met, you can worry less about yourself and stop dwelling on your own anxiety.
These three steps will take you a long way toward reducing your fear, and once you let go, you might even find yourself enjoying speaking!
If your looking for someone special for your event then contact Specialist Speakers on 0870 609 3861. Daniel can also handle enquiries for a link-presenter, corporate host or MC
