When speaking at a conference one shouldn’t underestimate the importance of energy as part
of your delivery. I recall the advice given to me when I strated my sales career many years ago. Always be an inch more enthusiastic than your customer. How can you expect anyone to be enthusiastic about your product, service or idea if you aren’t!

Now you might not think of yourself as a sales person but when you are presenting your ideas you are effectingly selling. The fact that you are tired, hung over or just plain jaded is no excuse. If your outcome is to get your audience to agree with and take action as a result of your speech then you need to look and sound enthusiastic!

I was recently working at a series of regional conferences and at each one the leader of the
organisation opened the meeting with a keynote address. At the first one they were upbeat. excited, energised and they puller their audience along with them. By the fourth event they
were starting to look and sound a little flat. By the seventh, they were starting to sound
like a recording and there was a lot less energy and enthuisiasm.

Now I understand that it is difficult to say the same messages repeatedly and keep up your energy level but, it is vital that you do. You may have heard the words several times but your audience has not. Don’t they deserve to hear you speak as if it was for the first time?

So what can you do to keep your talk fresh?

1) Remind yourself of your objectives for the speech and think about the importance of your delivery and in helping you achieve that outcome.

2) Remind yourself that this audience haven’t heard it before.

3) Try to vary parts of the speech to maintain your own interest as well as that of your audience whilst keeping your key messages constant. E.g. a topical introduction.

4) Maintain your awareness of your energy level and do whatever you can to energise yourself before you take the stage e.g. exercise, deep breathing, visualise an appropriately energetic delivery.

You owe it to your audience to look and sound enthisiastic!

One of the joys that the internet has brought to the world of public speaking is the abilityt to watch and replay some of the worlds best (and worst!) speakers online wherever you are in the world.

My favourite site for this is TED  (www.ted.com). The speakers on TED vary from good to outstanding in terms of their delivery and the content is always thought provoking and highly educational.

Today I spent some of my lunch hour watching a presentation by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink.

I recommend that you too check it out.

Malcolm Gladwell on TED

Enjoy & learn!

After giving a talk last night in which I used a lot of images and very little text, one of the participants emailed me with the following question:

“Dear Gavin,
I attended you very helpful presentation at the Basingstoke Country Park Hotel yesterday.  There is a 13^th tip that I would find helpful.  When I put photos into my presentations the file size grows massively and it becomes difficult to manage.  I have real difficulties e-mailing presentations with lots of photos in for example.

How do I insert photos in a PowerPoint presentation and yet keep the file size down? I know there must be a way of doing it.

I would appreciate your advice.”

My response was as follows:

“Thanks Steve – What a great question:

 For Powerpoint 2003:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA011168821033.aspx

 For Powerpoint 2007:
http://presentationsoft.about.com/od/powerpoint2007/ss/080508compress.htm

 Or you could buy a purpose built file compression utility such as

http://www.balesio.com/fileminimizer/eng/index.php?gclid=CIGrodblxZsCFVUA4wodiEucDw

 or

http://www.neuxpower.com/products/nxpowerlite-desktop/

 I haven’t tried either of these myself but i think they both have free trial versions.”

 Later in the day he emailed me back and this was his response:

Brilliant!  I’ve just reduced the size of a presentation from 27,843 kb to 519 kb.

Based on his response I thought that some of you might find these links useful too.

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.

A good friend of mine and fellow trainer Stella Collins drew my attention to this unusual new application which creates a “word cloud” from any web page or piece of text.   The frequency with which the words appear  in your text determines how large they appear in the Wordle image.    Apart from creating interesting graphics, it occurs to me that this little tool may give us a new way to analyse the key messages in our speeches and presentations.  Check it out at wordle.net

Here’s one I prepared earlier:

I recently read an excellent post by Andrew Dlugan where he draws some powerful lessons in speech writing from President Obamas inauguration address. We can all learn much from the study and deconstruction of effective speeches and this article is one of the clearest I have read for a while. I recommend that you set aside five minutes to read this post.

Read andrews post here

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.

Delivering a prepared speech can be nerve-racking enough, the thought of being put on the spot to give a short speech without any preparation or advance warning can seem to some people like their worst nightmare.

other people cope remarkably well with these situations so what can we learn from them?

Well for a start they know that every speech, even if its a short one or two minute impromptu one, needs a good structure.  A beginning that grabs the audiences attention, an ending which wraps up the speech clearly and a middle which supports the main points.

Another think they know is how important delivery is. not only for winning over the audience, but also for managing their own nerves.  The key is to behave as if you were feeling confident and confidence will come.   So how do you do this.

1) Step up - When asked to speak, smile and step forward confidently

2) Stand – Before you start to speak pause for a second and look out at your audience

3) Smile – It will relax both you and the audience

4) Speak – Begin your speech clearly and confidently.  A good tip is to repeat the question or topic you have been assigned. This buys you a few extra seconds of thinking time and allows you to get your brain in gear.

5) Stay still – Don’t dash off as soon as you have finished speaking. , Stay standing confidently and either enjoy the applause or ask for questions

Ina  later post I’ll give you some sure fire tips for structuring your “on the hoof” speech.

Gavin Meikle
The Presentation Doctor