Archive for June, 2010

4 Things That You Should Never Talk About

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
Image Credit There Are Some Lines That Speakers Just Shouldn't Cross

There Are Some Lines That Speakers Just Shouldn't Cross

The next time that you are given an opportunity to create and deliver a speech, do me a favor and stop, put your pencil done before you start to write. I can just imagine what’s running through your mind: the magic words that will come spilling out of your mouth and will entertain and entrance your audience. Umm, unless of course they don’t. If you talk about the wrong things, then your speech will go nowhere quickly. Maybe we should have a chat about what you shouldn’t be talking about…

The Big Three

In every speaker’s life, hopefully there is someone who takes them aside early on and tells them the three topics that are absolutely off limits: race, religion, and sexuality. Yeah, yeah – if you are talking on one of these topics, then it’s ok, but if you’re not, then you need to stay far, far away.

The reason for this is because each of these topics are polarizing flash points that will instantly divide your audience. Some will agree with what you say, some won’t and you will have lost your audience.

Too Much Personal Info

As long as we are talking about things that you shouldn’t be talking about, let’s make sure that you know that sharing is good, but too much sharing is bad. I’m not even talking about the embarrassing personal stuff, instead I’m talking about the boring details of each of our lives.

I’m sure that we all have hobbies and personality quirks that we may find interesting or endearing. However, they aren’t. This is why you always want to test your speeches with friends who will be honest with you. If that personal story just isn’t doing it, then it needs to go away before you hurt an audience with it.

Personal Success Stories

So you saved a busload of schoolchildren from a pack of rampaging wild elephants. Yawn. Look, if you’ve done something impressive, that’s pretty cool. However, do you really think that you can tell me about it without coming across as someone who is bragging?

It takes a very careful skill for a speaker to share a story of personal success with an audience in the right way. You have to have a reason for telling the story. That reason has to have something to do with your audience. You had better be telling them how they can have the same type of success that you had or the story will just end up making your audience feel inadequate.

Book Reports

Any time that we have a speech to give that includes describing a sequence of events, such as a trip that we took, how something is manufactured, etc., we run the risk of delivering a book report that nobody wants to hear. You would be amazed at how many times I’ve had to sit though speeches that started out with “I’d now like to tell you about the 17 steps that we had to go through to solve this problem.”

Even if something took 17 steps to do, you don’t have to cover them all in your speech. Take some mercy on your audience and trim it down to two or three steps and tell them to talk to you to get more details if they want them. You must always think about how your speech is going to sound to your audience before you deliver it.

Bad Objects

I like a visual aid just as much as the next speaker, but sometimes they can work against you. Depending on the size of your room, a visual aid can be either too big and overshadow you or too small and not visible to your audience.

Keep in mind that you are the star of your speech – nothing else is. This means that if you choose to use something else that will allow your audience to take their eyes off of you, then it had better be the right object for the right audience.

What All Of This Means For You

As speakers we like to focus on what we can include in our next speech. However, it might be just as important to spend some time worrying about what we should not be putting into that speech.

The obvious topics that shouldn’t be included include race, religion, and sexuality. However, boring personal habits, overblown success stories, book reports, and poorly selected visual aids can also bring your next speech down.

The key to avoiding including things that will take away from your message is to put yourself in the place of your audience. If you can create a speech that has only good content and no bad content, then you will have created a speech that everyone is going to want to hear.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills

Question For You: Did I leave anything off of my list? What other topics should a speaker never include in their speech?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

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Posted in speech topics | No Comments »

That Can’t Be My Voice, Can It?

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
Image Credit
We Never Hear Ourselves The Way That Others Hear Us

We Never Hear Ourselves The Way That Others Hear Us

Have you ever had the misfortune to hear yourself talking? Can you remember what your facial expression was as you heard your voice come out of the recording device – pain, anguish, disbelief? Almost universally we all dislike the way our voices sound and we just can’t imagine that an audience would be willing to sit through one of our speeches. What’s up with all of this?

It’s All About The Bones

So just why do we sound so weird when we listen to recording of our own voice? It turns out that the answer has to do with bones – specifically our bones. When we speak, we of course hear ourselves. However, we do this in a couple of different ways. Obviously our ears are working and we pick up the sound of our voice. However, at the same time, as we are speaking the words, the sounds that we are speaking are also traveling through the bones in our skull and reaching the inner ear. This ends up making us “hear” a deeper sound to our voice than everyone else is hearing.

Recording our voice to listen to can screw things up even more. Since every recording device is imperfect, what gets recorded is not necessarily what your audience heard. Depending on the quality of the microphone that recorded you and the speakers that you were played back through, you voice may have picked up even more of a tinniness to it.

Why Everyone Wants To Sound Like James Earl Jones

If this was a perfect world (it’s not, by the way), what would you want your voice to sound like? I don’t know about you, but I’d like it to sound like the actor James Earl Jones’s voice – you know, the one who played the lion in the movie “The Lion King”, did Darth Vador’s voice in the Star Wars movies, and who has done countless voice-overs for TV commercials around the world.

Why his voice? Simple – studies have shown that people associate deeper voices with authority. Clearly James Earl Jones has a very deep voice and that’s why he has always been in demand in the entertainment industry.

The Story Of Bitching Betty

True story: once upon a time I worked building fighter jets. The manufacturer of the jets wanted to find a way to get the pilots to pay attention when they had to immediately take an action – such as pulling up if they were flying too low to the ground. They decided to build into the aircraft a voice alert system (sorta like today’s “a door is a ajar” voice that your car has).

They searched high and low for the right voice: they needed one that would make the tough, manly pilots sit up and do what it told them to do right away. They tried men’s voices, women’s voices, sweet voices, urgent voices, sexy voices, and none of them did the trick until they found just the right voice. It happened to belong to a New Jersey housewife (yes, you can imagine what it sounded like) and it had exactly the right timber to it. For obvious reasons pilots came to refer to the voice as “Bitching Betty”.

What All Of This Means For You

So what’s a speaker to do? You really can’t change your voice – the best that you could hope for is to take some expensive voice classes and change it just a bit. Instead, the best thing to do is to become comfortable with your own voice.

This means that you need to spend time listening to (imperfect) recordings of you speaking. This will give you the ability to hear yourself as other hear you and this will be the first step in controlling how you sound. Don’t worry – no matter how bad you think you sound, you always sound better to others because they sound just as silly to themselves as you do to yourself…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills

Question For You: Do you think that it is possible to have one voice that you use to deliver speeches in and another that you use for normal conversations?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you talk about the wrong things, then your speech will go nowhere quickly. Maybe we should have a chat about what you shouldn’t be talking about…

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Posted in voice | 2 Comments »

Getting What You Want: How To Inspire Your Audience

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
Image Credit
The Microphone Is The Only Tool That You Need To Inspire Your Audience

The Microphone Is The Only Tool That You Need To Inspire Your Audience

What is the purpose of having you create a speech, practice it until you have got it “just right”, and then go through the mental and physical challenge of actually delivering the speech? Hmm, perhaps our purpose for going through all of this effort should always be the same – we want to change the world.

The trick, of course, is to figure out just how to go about making this happen. It turns out that there’s really only one way – you’ve got to find a way to inspire your audience. As you might well imagine, that’s easy to say, but hard to do. Maybe I should offer you some hints…

Enthusiasm Counts

How much energy can your audience detect coming off of you from the stage? What you say is actually less important than how you say it. If you are giving a lackluster performance or if you are just going through the motions in order to get this over with, then you’re audience will detect it and there’s no way that you’re going to inspire them.

Find your passion for the message that you are giving. After that, make sure that it shows when you are speaking: in your words and in your actions.

Tell Them Where To Go (In A Good Way)

If you want your audience to do something, then you’re going to have to tell them what to do. This means that you’ve got to use your speech to describe to them where they want to get to. You many not have all of the answers for them, but if you can describe what the future will look like for them, they will be more than willing to follow you.

What’s In It For Me?

If you want to get an audience behind you and your ideas, then you’re going to have to be able to answer the age-old question: what’s in it for me? As you are creating your speech you need to be asking yourself one simple question: “why should anyone care about what you are going to be saying?” If you can answer this question, in a convincing way, then you will have found the key to inspiring your audience.

It’s All About The Stories

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the most powerful tool that a speaker has is the stories that we tell. Our stories, unlike the rest of our speech, have the ability to connect with our audience at a deep emotional level. This is exactly the kind of connection that you want to make and stories are the tool that will allow you to make it.

Be Optimistic

No matter how bad things might either be currently or might become in the future, your speech needs to hold out the chance that there is a better tomorrow somewhere down the road. You don’t need to gloss over the obvious – everyone can see tough times or big challenges. Instead what you need to do is to show everyone how optimistic you are about their future. By doing this what will happen is that your optimism will spread and soon everyone will be sharing it.

What All Of This Means For You

When we think about changing the world, we always seem to think that it is something that “other” people do. Well guess what, there is absolutely no reason why you couldn’t be that person who makes a difference with your speech.

In order to cause a change to occur, any sort of change, you are going to need to find a way to inspire your audience. This isn’t nearly as scary or intimidating as it sounds – yes, you really can do it.

As long as you are going to go to the effort of preparing and delivering a speech, you may as well make sure that you are going to end up changing the world. Take the time to do this the right way, and your audience will leave your speech forever changed…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills

Question For You: How do you think that you could tell if you had been successful in inspiring your audience?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Have you ever had the misfortune to hear yourself talking? Can you remember what your facial expression was as you heard your voice come out of the recording device – pain, anguish, disbelief? Almost universally we all dislike the way our voices sound and we just can’t imagine that an audience would be willing to sit through one of our speeches. What’s up with all of this…?

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Posted in inspire | 4 Comments »

Put Your Hands In The Air And Wave Them Like You Don’t Care…

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
Image Credit To Wave Or Not To Wave, That Is The Question…

To Wave Or Not To Wave, That Is The Question…

If you’ve ever gotten any training on how to give a speech, the instructor probably told you that if used correctly, hand gestures can be a powerful tool. However, as with all such things in life, do you think that it’s possible to use this tool just a bit too much? Where should a speaker draw the line?

The History Of The Hand Gesture

So just where did the idea of using hand gestures to give some more “oomph” to a speech come from? Well, there are a lot of different ideas but the one that seems to hold the most weight is the one that reminds us that PA systems are a relatively new invention.

What this means is that back in the day a speaker might not be able to be heard by some (or most) of their audience. At least not everything that they’d say. Clearly this was a problem. In order to at least partially solve this problem, speakers started to use outsized hand gestures in order to clearly convey the emotion of the words that that they were speaking at the time.

This means that if you were getting angry about something, while you said the words you’d go ahead and start to punch the air in front of you with your fist. This meant that even the people sitting back in the “cheap seats” would get the point that you were ticked off about something.

In all honesty this made a lot of sense. Public speaking got its start in the theatrical productions that were popular back in the day. Speaking for a long time was simply a form of acting.

The Day That The Hand Gesture Died

Well, ok, it didn’t really die. However, the arrival of the ability to amplify a speaker’s voice by using a PA system changed the nature of public speaking forever. All of a sudden, those wild hand gestures were no longer needed – everyone could hear you and it was your words that counted, not your hand gestures.

This has all led to where we find ourselves today. Instead of attempting to appear as though we are putting on a one man (or one woman) stage production, what we are all trying to do is find ways to come across as being as authentic as possible. This means that we’ve done away with the windmilling of the arms and instead started to focus more on the words that we say.

This isn’t to say that hand gesture are no longer an important part of the toolkit that a speaker has to work with. The trick is to know when and how to use them.

A hand gesture should never come across as being a forced action. Instead it should bubble up and be interpreted by your audience as a natural extension of what you are saying. It should fit the moment and help to make your point.

What All Of This Means For You

When you watch the video of old-time political leaders, we often have to laugh to ourselves when we see the wild hand gestures that they used. However, if we realize that the reason for those gestures was because more people could see them than hear them, it all starts to make sense.

The days of the big hand gestures have gone away; however, that doesn’t mean that hand gestures are not still a powerful tool for a public speaker. You just need to be careful how you go about using them. In the end, your hand gestures should be as authentic as your speech is.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills

Question For You: Do you think hand gestures are appropriate to use when you have a small audience?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What is the purpose of having you create a speech, practice it until you have got it “just right”, and then go through the mental and physical challenge of actually delivering the speech? Hmm, perhaps our purpose for going through all of this effort should always be the same – we want to change the world.

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Posted in hands | 1 Comment »

What Could Chris Matthews Teach You About Speaking In Public?

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
Image Credit
Chris Matthews Is The TV Star Of The “Hardball With Chris Matthews” Show

Chris Matthews Is The TV Star Of The “Hardball With Chris Matthews” Show

If you’ve ever wished that there was a formula for giving the perfect speech, are you in luck! Chris Matthews is the host of a couple of TV shows including Hardball with Chris Matthews. He gets paid handsomely for the work that he does now, but he got his start as a humble political speechwriter. Based on all of that experience, he’s come up with a way to give the perfect speech…

It’s All In His Book

Chris has written a book called Life’s a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success. In this book he lays out his six-step program for creating the perfect speech.

  • Step #1: Break The Ice – When you first take the stage, nobody knows who you are. The first thing that you need to do is to put your audience at ease. One of the best ways to do this is to make a small joke that is based on current events: the room is too cold, it’s raining outside, the local sports team just won / lost. Whatever you say the purpose is to relax your audience and let them know that you are one of them.
  • Step #2: Show Some Skin – Everyone in the audience didn’t just show up there by accident. They are there for a reason – they want to hear what you are going to talk about. Give them a quick “tweet” about what you’ll be talking about just to capture their attention.
  • Step #3 – Share A Story: You need to be able to explain why YOU are up there on the stage. Tell the audience the story of how you were approached and asked to present. The purpose of telling this story is to get your audience to both settle down for your main speech while at the same time building excitement for what comes next.
  • Step #4 – Let Them Have It With Both Barrels – Now is the time to give your audience what they came for: your & message and your content. You may be delivering a lot of information so be sure to break it up into bite sized pieces.
  • Step #5 – Lighten Up: you’ve got to communicate to your audience that the real meat of your speech is now down. The best way to do this is to tell another story, but this time keep it light and make it fun.
  • Step #6 – Launch Them: At the very end of your speech you want to get your audience excited about what they’ve learned from you. Revisit the reason that you were asked to speak and make sure that you leave them with clear direction on how they can use the information that you’ve given them.

    • What All Of This Means For You

    Ok, so I wasn’t completely honest with you – there’s no magic formula that will work for every speech. However, Chris Matthews does have a pretty good approach.

    Taking the time to initially connect with your audience, telling stories, and then sharing the content that your audience desires is a powerful way to get your message across.

    Chris’ technique should give you a place to start the next time you have to create a speech. Use these six steps to giving a speech in order to truly connect with your audience.

    - Dr. Jim Anderson
    Blue Elephant Consulting –
    Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills

    Question For You: Do you think that you should deliver your main content in the middle of your speech or does it belong at the beginning or the end?

    Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

    What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

    If you’ve ever gotten any training on how to give a speech, the instructor probably told you that if used correctly, hand gestures can be a powerful tool. However, as with all such things in life, do you think that it’s possible to use this tool just a bit too much? Where should a speaker draw the line?

    Tags: , , , , , ,
    Posted in speech writing | No Comments »