Last week one of the members at Solent Speakers, the local Toastmasters club which I belong to,
gave a very powerful speech on the subject of hope. Afterwards many people commented on how the speech had touched them personally. Why was this? Well partly it was the speaker’s measured delivery, beautiful word picture painting and great use of pauses but there was more to it than that.

What really made the difference was the fact that he dared to share a personal story about how a member of his family had suffered from mental illness and how this had effected him and other members of the family.

This story was powerful and personal and it helped the audience to feel the emotions that he was feeling. Sharing personal stories such as this are not appropriate for every presentation but they are part of the presenters toolkit. All of the best presenters I know make a habit of collecting true stories of the things that happen to them and those close to them. Such snippets can then be used to bring their subjects to life.

My challenge to you is to become a story collector as well as a story teller and also to dare to share some of the more personal and poignant stories from your life in order to help you connect with your audience.

Have a great weekend

Gavin
The Presentation Doctor.

This morning I attended a networking meeting in Winchester with members of 4Networking, it was a great event with some really great people and I was particularly impressed by the communication skills of some of the group members. They spoke with confidence, authority, humour and engagement.

One member had volunteered to give a 10 minute educational slot on the legal profession and how to get the most out of it. He wasn’t selling his firm, he was helping to broaden our knowledge and in doing so he help build his own brand in our minds.

So many networkers complain that they don’t get a return on their networking investments and yet they do the minimum possible in the meetings. They stumble through their 1 minute elevator pitch, and they run a mile when given the opportunity to speak for longer. How crazy is that. Who in their right mind would avoid a direct opportunity to establish their credibility and expertise?

I appreciate that public speaking is a major fear for many people but that is no excuse. Given the impact that developing this skill can have on your business, career and income, isn’t it worth learning how to do it properly! Practice in conjunction with constructive feedback is the single most effective way I know to overcome your fear and develop this immensely valuable skill.

Hats of to the people who take the plunge and as for the rest of you…

What will it take to make you change your mind. There is a great communicator in every one of you. If you can’t find it in you on your own, don’t hesitate to ask for help!

Gavin Meikle,
The Presentation Doctor.

It was a beautiful Saturday here in the UK,  sunny and warm yet I spent three hours of it in a hall listening to some of the best speakers in the South of England at a Toastmasters  speech contest.  Why?  Because I  learn so much from listening to and analysing great speakers.      Iain Upton, from Solent Speakers in Fareham Hampshire won the international speech contest with a presentation entitled Spice up Your Speech.  In it he argued that  many speakers are lead to believe that “delivery is everything” and he wanted to redress the balance by making sure that content and language were given at least equal billing.

I think he has a point.   Presentation coaches, including me, bang on about the importance of great delivery and perhaps we are giving people the unintended message that content doesn’t matter.     Listen to many of the political speeches in the media here in the UK in the run up to the general election and you can see the problem.   Many are a triumph(?) of style over substance.

Of course any presentation coach worth his or her salt will agree that content is critical.   Listening to a great speaker without good content is like eating a chinese meal. It fills you up at the time but after a few hours you can’t even remember eating it.     The reason we put so much emphasis on the delivery side of things is because great content on its own is not enough either.      Both are needed  for effective and long lasting communication.

So as a presenter or budding speaker make sure you spend time on both aspects of your speech.  get the content right first.  

• Set yourself a clear objective
• Next assemble a compelling argument which you can support with evidence that will stand up to intellectual scrutiny.   
• Choose your language with care and avoid  falling into the trap of repeating  well worn cliches.

Iain’s powerful message hit home with the audience and with me and so I hope it will with you too.

In my book, presentation skills and selling skills go hand and hand.   The principles of effective selling will help you to produce powerful persuasive presentation and the principles of great presenting will help you sell much better face to face.

Almost every type of presentation is about persuasion.   You want your audience to do something as a result of your presentation.  So to do this you need to consider the same sort of things you do when planning a sales call.

1. What is your outcome
2. Who is your customer(audience)
3. What are their needs and wants?
4. What is there initial attitude to your message (product)
5. What features of your product or message can you turn into relevant benefits for the audience
6. What are the potential pitfalls of staying with their existing behaviour or supplier and how can you use these to “disturb” the status quo?

The answers to these questions will allow you to develop an effective and tailored sales proposition for your audience which you can then bring to life with great presentation skills.

Remember most of the skills needed to be a great presenter or speaker work whether you are speaking to 1 person or 1000!

1. Establish rapport through mirroring non-verbal signals, tonality, volume and vocabulary
2. Engage with confident eye contact
3. Vary your vocal delivery to maintain interest and build enthusiasm
4. Ensure that your body language and gestures are congruent with your message
5. Use silence effectively to allow your audience time to process your proposals

So if you are just a good salesman, polish your presentation skills and you will become great!

And if you are just a confident presenter, learn how to use the techniques of selling and influencing to supercharge your presentations.

Update:  if you want to read more great articles on this topic visit the Angela DeFinis’s blogcarnival

Stories are incredibly important tools for communicating all sorts of information. I have been an “unconscious” story collector now for many years and as a trainer, these stories have been incredibly helpful to my participants in bringing the material I teach to life.

To be honest I tend to take them for granted because I use them without thinking but today their importance was drawn to my attention. It was the final presentations and feedback session from a class of managers who have been facilitating through a monthly series of leadership training modules.

 During the feedback I suddenly realised that stories were a key part of my USP and what makes my training so effective.  Not only do they help to make the topic relevant in the seminar, they also serve as memory hooks which help the participants retain their learning and then apply it in the real world  long after the course is over.

So, are you a story collector?    Do you capture and file away, either mentally or on paper, iconic stories that illustrate key principles.    Do you then weave those stories into your presentation, speaches, conversations and seminars?

If you don’t you are missing a trick!

In this day and age it seems like everybody is looking for the quick fix without any effort.   Whether it’s making money, getting fit, loosing weight or becoming a celebrity.  Andit seems to me that this obsession for instant success is supported and encouraged by adverts for all sorts of products both online and offline which claim to help you achieve success in your chosen field without doing anything!

I find the same think with aspiring presenters.   They want to go on a 1 day course or even just read a book and then start earning big money as a presenter or speaker.  It’s time for a reality check – nobody gets to be a great speaker without lots and lots and lots of practice!

So, if you are not prepared to put in the hours, set more realistic expectations. 

But if you are prepared to practice then the sky’s the limit.   Jack Nicklaus, one of the worlds greatest golfers said “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”     I agree.    I have been speaking in public since I was around 14years old and I still actively seek opportunities to practice.

When I first started writing speeches, I struggled to know how many words to write for a speech of a given length.  The only way I would know was to rehearse the speech and time how long it lasted.

Now I have learned that I typically speak at an average of  80-100 words per minute when presenting in public and so I can quickly calculate how many words I need to write  i.e. 400-500 words for a five minute speech and so on.

Now not everybody speaks at the same pace.   Some books quote the normal speaking rate as around 125 words per minute but remember that there is a big difference between normal conversation and public speaking.   The best public speakers tend, on average to speak a bit slower so i would recommend that you start of with around 100 wpm and see how you get on.

Most word processors have a word count function built into them so it’s easy to check how much you have written.

Of course it goes without saying that when writing a speech of any length don’t  forget the basics.  You need an interesting opening, a powerful conclusion and relevant body content. and remember to rehearse it out loud.  Give as much time to planning the delivery as you do the planning the content.

Good luck

Gavin

Last night I attended a meeting of a new public speaking club called Hamwic Speakers- Southampton.  Hamwic have only been going since March but are doing extremely well.   At last nights meeting I was entranced by a wonderful speech by a young man called Rich Watts, who talked about “A trip to grandma’s“.

On the face of it, not the most exciting of topics but Rich delivered a most entertaining and excellent speech in which, by describing in vivid detail, what it was like to visit his grandmothers, from the perspective of his five year old self, he evoked powerful memories and emotions in all of us.

I was particularly impressed with the way Rich matched his energy and pace of delivery to the story he was telling.  At the start his pace was slow and measured as he described the rather boring car journey where he was too small to see much out of the car window but clouds.  Then, when he arrived at his gran’s the pace picked up dramatically as he described zooming into her house (an Aladdin’s cave for a five year old boy!) with his arms outstretched behind him pretending to be a plane.

The pace stayed high as he described how he explored and played and then slowed a little as he started to describe the other family members present.   The pace slowed further as he brought us up to the present day and how things had changed.  How his granny wasn’t as energetic as she had been, how the food wasn’t as home cooked as it had been and so on.   This “gear change”change of pace brought a poignancy and a sense of reflection to this speech that worked beautifully and lead us up nicely to Rich’s take away message.

Rich finished with two key messages, about remembering the importance of Granny and perhaps even more important, remembering (& not losing) the sense of wonder and playfulness we had when we were younger.

I hope this short article has captured the importance of being able to change gear in any speech or presentation in order to be a more effectie story teller and influencer.

In my last post I focused on the delivery side of an impromptu speech but what about the content?   How do I stop by brain going blank and running out of things to say?

Well here are two further technique to help you wow your audience ;

Use the PEP model

• Position – Start by stating your position on the topic – do you agree or disagree?
  
• Explain – Now expand on that by explaining why you hold this view.  How can you justify it?  What evidence support it? What alternatives have you considered and why have you dismissed them?
• Position – End by restating your position confidently and authoritatively.  Some people are good at coming up with a powerful and clever closing quote but if inspiration escapes you try a simple “and so I believe ….”

Paint a picture: See, hear & feel.

Stories and case studies come to life when the speaker paints word pictures that hep us re-create the situation in our heads as they speak. To do this you need to use sensory specific language to bring your words to life.   A good tool to practice this skill is to describe  three things you could see, three things you could hear and three things you could feel (and also things you could taste and smell if appropriate).  This sort of detail really helps your audience see, hear and feel what you are talking about it.

For example, if your story is about meeting someone in the queue at the post office you could describe:

• See – What they were wearing, the looks on the faces of the other people in the queue, the curling posters on the notice boards etc.
• Hear – The muttering complaints from people in the queue next door, the laughter of a child playing at his mothers feet…
• Feel – The mounting frustration as all the other lines seemed to move faster than yours, the firmness of their grip as they warmly shook your hand etc.

Have fun experimenting with sensory word pictures and see for yourself how they can make even the dullest subject come alive.