Archive for December, 2006

Time to start December with a post of Public Speaking tips and thoughts that are somewhat off the beaten track:

• First of all, Public Speaking is a misnomer. As if there is such a thing as private speaking (maybe in the privacy of your own bedroom, or your own mind.) We are ‘public speaking’ all the time.
• That said, there is a difference in formal speaking (which most take as Public Speaking) and informal speaking (the other 99% of our time communicating.)

Don’t use LBOW’s

• LBOW is our acronym for Lovely Bunch Of Words – they sound like they mean something, but they are just fillers. Most opening remarks in a speech are LBOW’s – and you really don’t need those lazy warmups – just get right to it.
• And while we’re at it, you don’t need those short LBOW’s. Too many speeches or seminars are opened up with a hearty "Good Morning!" – which usually get a half hearted "good morning" from the audience in response. That’s like "Good Question" in our recent post on handling the Q&A session – you don’t need it. These are really non-words, or short LBOW’s, and aren’t very skillful. Yet we hear them all the time.

Be Short

• "Blessed are the shortwinded, for they shall be heard again." Don’t know who said it, but it is truth. I’d guess 95% of all speeches go over rather than under, and we all have been agitated by good speakers who have just gone on too long. And how terrible when they are boring and long.
• We coach people to fit their time to the AUDIENCE’S time expectation, not their own, nor to how much material they think they have to get across.
• Don’t look at your watch (because everyone else will want to look at their watch – a distraction.) But DO keep an easily seen timepiece on the lectern or table or wall – you can easily catch it in your look at your notes or the audience.

Think influence, not information

• 95% of business presentations are data dumps – information overload – and 5% of them are correctly influential. We should use information to influence, yet 95% of the time we go to the computer and PowerPoints and whale away with bullets and words and text. Wrong approach. Decide what you want people to do and take away, and then use facts and figures to augment your ideas.
• As an aside, I think Pareto’s Law of the 80/20 principle should be altered to 95/5. We live in an age of extremes, so sometimes we need hyperbole to make a point sometimes.

Visualize Ideation

• I could say "Be Interesting" but that’s not very interesting. There are great tools on the internet today to use quotes, words and phrases to create a ‘swirl’ or an ‘aha’ in the listeners mind.
• Think of Pareto’s Law above. Use Wikipedia for new takes on old subjects.
• Increasing vocabulary is easy – just look up on the internet any time you see a word you don’t know. And a great NEW TOOL I’ve found is the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus – you can try it for free but it’s worth a subscription to increase your ‘influence quotient.’ It’s at http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
• SHARP principles. This is our acronym that we teach to add Stories, Humor, Analogies, References and Pictures to all of your communicating. It’s all ideation in an interesting way.
• If you have some slow part of a speech – just put the concept or a factoid into one of the Quotation search engines and bring it alive. Quotes are interesting and add credibility – here are several of the best urls for getting quotes.
• http://www.brainyquote.com/
• http://www.quotationspage.com/
• http://www.bartleby.com/100/
• http://www.saidwhat.co.uk/

I could go on as there are so many public speaking ideas that can increase our presentation skills in the other 95% of our communicating – but the post would be too long. More to come…