It’s still the holiday season and I’m still on vacation!
This is the time of the year that we all make plans for what we want to accomplish in the upcoming year. This time around, take your time and give some thought to what you can do to make this your best year ever…!
Here’s hoping that you’ll have peace, love, happiness, and success in the upcoming year. The blog will be back next week…
- Dr. Jim Anderson
Editor’s Note: This article has been selected to be included in Angela DeFinis’ “Public Speaking and the Holidays” Blog Carnival. If you aren’t familiar with blog carnivals, they are a compilation of blog posts from numerous authors on a given topic that are housed on a central blog.
Enjoy this article and be sure to check out the other ones at Angela’s blog.
It’s the holiday season once again, a virtual minefield of social speaking opportunities. I can just see it now: you’re at the office Christmas party, there will probably be some sort of food served, drinks will flow, and then someone will do it – they’ll stand up and give a toast. Oh, oh – now it’s your turn to do the same thing. How are you going to do this without looking like a fool or destroying your relationship with the person(s) of honor (your boss perhaps?)
First off, get rid of any plans that you might have to say something naughty. Rarely this might go over well; however, more often than not it falls flat on its face and so just say “no”. Michael Varma is a professional speaker who has seen his fair share of toasting disasters and he’s got some advice for all of us.
Michael says that when you are giving a toast, you should always start out by introducing yourself – in a crowd of people, there are probably a bunch of folks who don’t know who you are. Also spell out how you are related to the person(s) of honor because this will help to make your toast clearer. Michael suggests that your actual toast have three characteristics: make it brief, make it bold, and then be done with it.
A toast is NOT a speech! Mark Twain probably said it best when he recommended that toasts should never be longer than 1 minute. The longer your toast, the less impact that it will have. The “air time” that you are taking for your toast belongs to everyone and you need to use as little of it as possible.
When you are giving a toast, this is not the time to be shy. You are probably talking to a noisy room in which people may be eating, drinking, and having their own side conversations. You need to speak up! Your goal should be to speak loudly enough that everyone in the room, including the folks in the back, can hear you clearly.
When you are done speaking, shut up and sit down. Yes you’ve just given a performance; however, this event is not all about you so don’t do any bowing or waving. Shut your mouth and sit down so that everyone can once again return their attention to the person(s) of honor.
If you want your toast to be memorable, then the trick is to tell a story. I must once again reemphasize a key point – keep it clean! You shouldn’t tell stories about old girlfriends at a wedding and you shouldn’t tell stories about stealing office supplies at the annual Christmas party. Instead, tell a story that shows the person(s) of honor in a good light. Oh, and keep it to under a minute.
My recommendation is to get a little sappy, a little funny, and hopefully that will be just right for a toast at any holiday gathering.
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What is the best way to become a better public speaker? The problem with most approaches is that they take time. Too much time. A much better way to quickly improve is to find a professional speaker who is doing it right and ask them how they do it…
We can talk about how to give great speeches until we are blue in the face; however, it ultimately comes down to just how well all of the things that we’ve discussed are put into practice that will determine how effective our talks are.
I recently had a chance to attend a series of presentations that were talking about the U.S. healthcare system. This gave me a unique opportunity to watch some very well educated folks do their best to give a good speech. Come along with me and we’ll see how they did…
Pam Arlotto Speaks
Pam has great credentials: she is a big player in the healthcare field having been a past president of the HIMSS organization and currently being an advisor to the CCHIT. What missed right off the bat was that her introduction didn’t do her credit.
Sure the introducer covered the high points; however, he didn’t provide her with a lead-in that would have gotten the audience excited to hear what she was going to be talking about. Remember: your introduction is really your opening act. Since you are the one who cares the most about it, you need to write it out and give it to the person who will be introducing you.
Pam had a great voice and she was easy to hear. The challenge was that she was somewhat difficult to find. She strolled across the stage from side to side while she was talking leaving the audience feeling like they were watching a tennis match.
Her information was great, but her PowerPoint slides were not. On one slide I counted 15 text bullets — way too many to cram onto a single slide and way too many to expect an audience to read. I’ll be the first to admit that Pam had a challenge here — she was reviewing federal laws and they tend to be both lengthy and detailed. However, that doesn’t mean that your slides need to be that way. Break it up and use multiple slides if you have to.
The one thing that Pam did better than any of the other speakers who spoke that day was to use stories. Once again, a lot of what she was talking about were issues related to federal policy and that can be a bit dry. However, she added stories that were both motivational (you’ve got to make changes) as well as relative (“my customers are telling me…”). This really helped to make her speech stand out.
Dr. Jay Wolfson Speaks
Dr. Wolfson was, in a word, a character. He started off his presentation by telling the audience that he’s been a university teacher for over 25 years and it really showed in his presentation. He seemed to feel at home standing behind the podium and he had clearly done this before.
Dr. Wolfson exuded energy. From the forcefulness of his voice to his rapid hand gestures you could see that he not only knew his subject well, but he also cared deeply about it.
For such a high-energy person, it must have been frustrating to have to be tied to the podium, which is where the microphone was. However he dealt with it gracefully and only occasionally had to restrain himself from going for a stroll.
For such a great presenter, you’d hope that the supporting slides would be of the same quality. Nope, once again the slides clearly had not been designed to do what PowerPoint slides should do — support the speaker. Instead, odd fonts had been used and too much small text had been crammed into each slide. I believe that these slides may have looked fine on a computer monitor; however, once they were displayed for a large audience they showed their flaws.
Hopefully you can take heart from this report back from the front lines of public speaking — even really well educated people could stand to improve their speaking skills. Both Ms. Arlotto and Dr. Wolfson really knew their material well, it’s just that their presentations could have used some help.
The next time that you give a speech, make sure that you are prepared to stand where they tell you to. Whether it’s anchored behind a podium or anywhere on a stage, you’ll need to adapt your speaking style to match it.
Finally, although we all have mixed feelings about PowerPoint slides these two presentations clearly show that when you create a deck of slides you need a second opinion. Taking the time to run your slides by a colleague can do wonders for you ability to successfully connect with your audience.
How many bullet items do you think a PowerPoint slide should be limited to?
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If you want to make a lasting impression on your audience, then sometimes you just gotta bring in some help to pull it off. It’s time to bring out an advanced speaking skill – rigging a speech…
Just how much speaking can you do in a single day? We spend a lot of time talking about how to prepare for and give a good speech. However, sometimes life just comes at us like a runaway truck and we find ourselves double or triple (or more) booked to speak in a single day. Oh oh, looks like we’ve got a whole new challenge here…
Dr. Caren Neile spends a lot of her time speaking to raise funds. She knows a thing or two about how you’ve got to prepare for a day in which you’ll be giving multiple speeches.
Dr. Neile points out that your whole day is going to go downhill if you don’t get enough sleep the night before. This sounds easy to do, but all too often it’s not. We rush around the day before we’re going to be speaking (writing our speech perhaps?) drinking coffee / tea / soda and then we throw ourselves into our beds, shut our eyes and hope that we’ll fall asleep.
Sorry, life doesn’t seem to work out that way. All too often when we have a big speaking day ahead of us, we will find ourselves laying in bed completely unable to get to sleep. What you need to do is to make sure that you prepare to have a good night’s sleep at the start of the day before you are going to be speaking. This means staying away from stimulants (goodbye coffee), getting some exercise in, and basically making sure that you wind things down before you hit the hay. You may still be dealing with nerves, but at least you’ll have a better chance of getting to sleep.
When was the last time that you took a nap? I’m betting that the last planned nap that you had was all too long ago (kindergarten perhaps?). It’s time to rediscover the joys of napping.
On a day that you are giving multiple speeches you need to determine if you are going to be able to fit in naps in between your speeches. This may strike you as silly, I mean you’ve got a lot of things that you have to get done that day; however, it turns out that it’s one of the best things that you can do and it just might save you from slipping up and saying the wrong thing.
If you take a look at the energy that you’ll be expending during a day that you give multiple speeches, you’ll be peaking while you are giving the speeches. After you’ve exerted this much energy, you are going to need to recharge your batteries and a nap is a fantastic way to do this. Just remember to wake up before it’s time for your next speech!
Sorry, I’m just talking about drinking water here. When we speak, the parts of our throat that form the words get dried out. Being hydrated is the key to being able to go the distance in a day in which you’ll be doing a lot of speaking.
It probably goes without saying that keeping a glass / bottle of water by your side while you are speaking is also a good idea. This will become even more important as you go through your day and your body parts start to wear out.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen speakers make one of two different mistakes when it comes to eating: either they don’t eat at all or they eat too much. Not eating at all is a no-no because you are going to be exerting yourself while you are speaking and if you do this on an empty stomach, you are going to feel the effects. These can range from being distracted by a rumbling stomach to passing out because of low blood sugar. You don’t want to do either of these.
Eating too much can cause similar issues. One problem is indigestion — who wants to listen to a speaker who keeps burping? The other is that as your body goes to work on all of that food, it’s going to boost your body temperature and that’s going to slow you down and make you sleepy.
It would be great if we ran the world, but we don’t. This means that sometimes we will find ourselves with commitments to speak multiple times on a single day. It can be challenging enough to do a good job giving just one speech, giving multiple speeches in a single day make life even harder.
The key to doing this well is to make sure that you prepare to succeed. This includes getting enough sleep the night before your speeches and then doing the right things as you go through the day of the speeches. Take your time and take care of your body and just like a marathon runner you’ll eventually reach the finish line — then you can stop talking!
What is the most important thing that you think needs to be done in order to prepare to give back-to-back-to-back speeches?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.
We can talk about how to give great speeches until we are blue in the face; however, it ultimately comes down to just how well all of the things that we’ve discussed are put into practice that will determine how effective our talks are…
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