Archive for December, 2011

Merry Christmas – Take The Week Off!

Tuesday, December 27th, 2011
Here's Hoping That You Name Shows Up On The "Nice" List This Year!

Here's Hoping That You Name Shows Up On The "Nice" List This Year!

Loyal readers & subscribers, here’s hoping that this upcoming Christmas season week is a great week for you – I’m taking it off! Blogging will resume next week…

Everyone seems to celebrate something different this week, but I’m hoping that no matter how you choose to spend your time you enjoy yourself. The world can wait, let’s spend time with friends and family and we’ll get back to the madness next week.

Have a happy and safe week no matter where you are and we’ll talk next week.

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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This Is How A Speaker Is Supposed To Make Good Eye Contact

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011
Image Credit Hey Speaker, How You Doing On That Eye Contact Thing?

Hey Speaker, How You Doing On That Eye Contact Thing?

As speakers we are always being urged to “connect with our audience”. Now this sounds all fine and good; however, as with everything else in life the devil is in the details. Just how is a speaker supposed to connect with a room full of people who are staring at him or her? It turns out that you already know the answer – you need to use your eyes. As simple as this seems, all too often we do it wrong…

The Right Way To Make Eye Contact

What’s so funny about eye contact is that as speakers we’ve always been told that it’s important to make eye contact with our audience; however, we’ve never really been told how to go about doing this. In fact, a lot of us do it incorrectly.

All too often speakers decide that what they need to do is to make eye contact with every single person in their audience. Many times. This leads to what I like to call “machine gunning your audience”. The speaker quickly, and all too often in a very predictable sequence, quickly makes eye contact with each member of the audience. The effect of doing this is that you make no real contact with them, but you do succeed in creeping everyone out as they wait for you to come back around to them again.

So what’s the right way to handle this eye contact thing? Here’s what you really want to do. It turns out that your audience can’t really tell exactly who you are looking at. When you pick someone out of the audience and gaze into their eyes, the 20 or so people sitting around that person all think that you are gazing into their eyes.

Once you’ve located a person in the audience, look at their eyes and make your point. This should take anywhere from 10-30 seconds. You are not trying to stare them down, rather you are looking at them as though you were having a conversation with them and them alone.

When you do this, you achieve what every speaker is looking to do: you become intimately connected with your audience. The members of your audience feel as though you are talking directly to them and nobody else.

How To Tell If Your Message Is Getting Across

Making a connection with your audience is a critical skill to have, but it is really only half of the story. Not only do you want your audience to hear what you are telling them, but you want them to be able to tell you if they are comprehending what you are saying.

The best way to go about doing this would be to halt your presentation, take a trip down off the stage and out into the audience, pull up a chair, and have a chat with your audience to see if they are really “getting” the points that you are trying to make.

Since in most cases this really is not a practical thing to do, we need to come up with a different plan. It turns out that if you know how to pay attention to it, your audience is already telling you if they are understanding what you are saying.

What you need to start to do is to read your audience. Their eyes and face will be telling you all that you need to know about how your speech is being received. You need to pick up on everything from smiles to frowns, boredom to excitement. This steady stream of information from your audience to you gives you the information that you need in order to adjust the speech that you are giving on the fly in order to become a more effective speaker.

What All Of This Means For You

They say that our eyes are the windows to our souls. I’m not sure if that’s really true, but when it comes to your audience their eyes are the key to understanding if they are understanding what you are telling them.

As speakers we need to ensure that we are making good eye contact with our audience. This means taking the time to connect with individual members of the audience – not attempting to connect with everyone all the time. We also have to take the time to read what our audience’s eyes are trying to tell us.

So much of our daily human communication is based on what the other parties’ eyes are telling us. When we get up to speak, the same rules apply. We just need to learn how to read what’s in our audience’s eyes.

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

Question For You: How long do you think that you can continuously stare at one member of your audience?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!

Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

We’d all like to be seen as being great speakers. We imagine ourselves as the next Tony Robbins, standing in the middle of a huge stage with a large audience hanging on our every word. I fully support your dream, but perhaps we need to have a talk about how you are going to go about achieving it. Before you can give a great speech, you are going to have to learn how to write a great speech.

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3 Secrets To Writing A Really Great Speech

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
Image Credit Writing a great speech is the first step in delivering a great speech

Writing a great speech is the first step in delivering a great speech

When it’s really important that a speech that you’re giving make an impact on your audience, then it’s going to be really important that you do a good job of writing the speech. Hmm, so I’m sure that you can write a speech, but do you know how to write a great speech? It turns out that there are three characteristics that every great speech has (that are even more important than presentation tips!)

Clarity

As we write our speech, we can get caught up in what we believe to be the importance of public speaking and end up trying to use flowery words and fancy descriptions in an effort to “wow” our audience. Author Philip Yaffe reminds us that we need to resist the urge to do this – focus on maximizing your speech’s clarity.

You need to do some planning before you start to write your speech. What you need to identify is what your key points are. You’ve probably heard this before, but it can’t hurt for you to hear it again. You need to start at the end and identify what points you want your audience to walk away from your speech with.

Just as important as it is to take the time to figure out what you want to share with your audience, it is just as important to determine what you don’t want to burden your audience with. Too much of the wrong things can leave your audience confused about what the purpose of your speech was.

Conciseness

One of the main problems that every speaker has is with time. How long should you speak? Your goal when giving a speech is to (sorry for the dated reference) is to make it like a lady’s skirt – long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep interest.

The key will be to write your speech out then have the courage to come back and do some cutting. Your goal should be to remove everything that doesn’t have to be in the speech. If you do this well, then what remains should be just the bare essence of what you want to tell you audience – and that’s perfect.

Density

Although none of us really like to think about our speeches as being “dense”, Yaffee makes the point that what’s important is how you describe things within your speech.

What you want to do is to be very precise – you want to choose your words so that each word conveys the maximum amount of information. You don’t want to have to make your audience have to practice their listening skills. Not only do your words need to be precise but they also need to be linked together – one idea needs to lead to the next. Doing this well will allow you audience to follow along with your speech and arrive at the conclusion that you want them to get to.

What This All Means For You

Knowing how to write a speech is good skill to have. Knowing how to write a great speech is a skill that we should all be working to have. It turns out that all great speeches have three characteristics in common: clarity, conciseness, and density.

Great speeches are clear and easy for your audience to understand. One of the benefits of public speaking is that you can make this happen by ensuring that you emphasize what’s important and stay away from what’s not. You need to make sure that your speech is long enough to cover the points that you want to make, but no longer. And finally, you need to make sure that within your speech you use precise information and don’t make your audience struggle to understand what your point is.

It is possible to write a great speech. The key is to be able to combine the three key ingredients, clarity, conciseness, and density in a way that will allow your audience to understand and connect with your message.

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

Question For You: What’s the best way to make sure that the speech that you’ve written is long enough, but not too long?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
 
Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Posted in speech writing | 2 Comments »

Great Speakers Aren’t Afraid To Stumble On The Way To The Top

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
Image Credit
Great speakers always slip up before they become great

Great speakers always slip up before they become great

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to get up and give a speech if you knew that it was going to turn out badly? Even though we all know the importance of public speaking, I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – speakers who do a good job get asked to speak again, those who don’t are never asked back. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

How To Kill Your Public Speaking Development

In your speaking opportunities right now, what would happen to you if you failed? That post event review would be a tough one to sit through, right? Let’s face it, failure is not something that is rewarded in our speaking opportunities and in fact it’s something that we all actively avoid if we possibly can. The benefits of public speaking are great, but failing at giving a speech is something that none of us wants to do.

However, maybe we’re just setting ourselves up for a much bigger disaster. Can we all admit that the world as we know it is changing? What audiences are looking for in a speech is changing and in our world of iPhones, Blackberrys, and Twitter we are now competing with many other sources of information al the time. We all know that the way that the world used to be is long gone.

Something else is changing also: what is asked for when you give a speech. The first speech that you ever gave probably wouldn’t be asked for these days – things have moved along. The speech that you may be preparing to give, no matter how many clever presentation tips you are planning on using, probably won’t asked for in what, 2, maybe 3 years from now. This all means that you are going to have to change and change involves risk and along with risk comes the very real possibility that you are going to fail.

How To Become A Success By Failing

Well, that failing stuff doesn’t sound like it’s going to be any fun. But wait, has anyone else ever failed? Turns out that yes, in fact most successful people can look at their past and point to failures that helped them to get to where they are now.

The poster child for this kind of “good failure” would be Howard Schultz – the guy who founded the Starbucks chain of coffee shops. We all know and love the Starbucks store today, but when Howard first started it he really blew it. There were no chairs, he played lots of opera music, and his menu was in Italian. Clearly he quickly realized that he had failed, adjusted, and went on to become a big success.

You can do the same. You just need to learn to make lots of small bets when you give a speech. Some of these bets will pay off, and some won’t. It’s through what you learn from the failures that you’ll be able to make tiny changes to your approach and try, try again.

If we keep doing things the same way that we’ve always been doing them, then we will eventually stagnate and then we’ll go into decline. However, if you have the courage to start to fail and to learn from those failures, then the future contains limitless possibilities for both you and your speeches.

What All Of This Means For You

Speakers who are afraid to fail will never become a true success. Oh sure, they may do ok for a few years, but when things get really rough, they’ll wash out.

If you are willing to adjust how you view failure, your speaking can take off. If you can start to look at failures as being simply being learning experiences that are not be feared, but they are to be used to become a better speaker then you’ll be able to grow and become better at what you do.

No, you can’t be an idiot about this and do silly things that cause your speech to fail – don’t try to test your audience’s listening skills, but if you try your hardest and your speech still fails than you will have learned what doesn’t work. The big deal is that it takes courage for you to be able to do this.

Speakers who are a success have to had failures in their past. It’s from the forge of failure that the steel of success is formed. Learn how to make small bets so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t. Do this well and you’ll become a successful public speaker.

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

Question For You: What’s the best way to get the person who has invited you to give a speech to become comfortable with failures as a sign of success?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
 
Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When it’s really important that a speech that you’re giving make an impact on your audience, then it’s going to be really important that you do a good job of writing the speech. Hmm, so I’m sure that you can write a speech, but do you know how to write a great speech? It turns out that there are three characteristics that every great speech has (that are even more important than presentation tips!)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Howard Schultz | No Comments »