The Accidental Communicator

Archive for the ‘connecting with your audience’ Category

How To Make Your Audience Remember What You Said

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

It Would Hurt, But This Is One Way To Make Your Ideas "Stick"…

You’ve got great ideas trapped in you. You know the importance of public speaking and you want to use your speaking skills to make your audience’s lives better. The problem is that if you aren’t careful, what you say during your speech will just go in one ear and out the next. How can you make your next speech more “sticky”?

Make Your Audience Work For Your Information

When you get asked to deliver a speech, what do you think the person who is making the request is really asking you to do? I’d be willing to bet that what flashed into your mind was a mental image of you standing up in front of a bunch of people talking at them.

It turns out that that mental image, although very common among speakers, is dead wrong. The person who is asking you to give a speech is really asking you to change the audience that you’ll be speaking to. How you make that happen is up to you and more often than not we do stand up and talk to them in order to make a change happen.

In fact, most of the presentation tips that we talk about deal with how to do a good job of this standing-and-talking stuff. The problem with doing this is that the ability of your message to make an impact now depends solely on your audience’s listening skills.

I’ve got a suggestion for you: make your audience work for the information that you’re going to share with them. One of the benefits of public speaking is that there’s nothing that says that our audience can’t use words or movement in addition to their ears in order to learn what we have to teach them.

Think about the next speech that you are going to give. What could you do that would get your audience to think about what you are telling them, answer questions that you ask them, or even get up and move in order to demonstrate that they understand what you are saying? All of these are powerful ways to get your message to stick.

Make It All New

The worst thing that you can do as a speaker is to be boring – your audience will never remember what you said if you bore them. The ultimate presentation tip is to never tell your audience something that they’ve already heard.

A good example of this came from a speech I gave awhile ago. I was talking about emails and when I was researching email statistics, I ran across one that said that there are over 100 million emails sent every day. That’s an ok statistic, but we all have heard that one before – lots of email gets sent every day.

The next statistic that I ran across said that 35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone. Now that was something that I didn’t know (and it explains why that spam stuff works!)

If you find new and different things to share with your audiences, then you’ll be able to keep their attention because they will always be learning as you are talking. This is another way to make sure that your message sticks!

What All Of This Means For You

As long as you are going to go to the effort to both prepare and give a speech, you may as well make sure that what you say sticks with your audience long after you’re done speaking. In order to make this happen, you are going to have to adjust the way that you deliver your speech.

One way to do this is to involve your audience in your speech. Don’t allow them to just sit there and listen to you. Instead, make them answer questions that you ask them, make them stand up and take actions based on what you are saying. All of these things will help to make your message stick.

In addition, as you are putting your speech together, take the time to locate and include new information. If you use the same tired facts and stats that your audience has heard before, then what you say will go in one ear and out the other. Instead, present new and interesting information that your audience has never heard before and then what you say will stick with them long after your speech is done.

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

Question For You: How many times do you think that you could make your audience stand up during a 60 minute speech?

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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 you go to see a movie, what’s the first thing that you always see? The answer is, of course, trailers! I must confess that there have been movies that I’ve gone to in the past in which the trailers were the best part of the whole movie viewing experience! What’s interesting about these trailers is that they have been designed with one thing in mind: to get you to come back and see the movie that they are advertising. Maybe we can learn something from trailers that we can use in our next speech.

Tags: Audience Participation, engage audience members, examples, familiar with, feedback, hand-on activities, interaction, move, movement, new information, role paly, statistics, stimulating their brains, talk
Posted in connecting with your audience | No Comments »

The Power Of Using Repetition And Triggers In Your Next Speech

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

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It's The Ideas That You Share With Your Audience That You Don't Want Them To Forget

Can You Say That Again & Again?

I must confess that I’m a bit torn when it comes to recommending this particular technique for getting your audience to remember what you’ve told them. For you see, it goes against one of my most cherished beliefs about how to be a successful public speaker.

I’m willing to break my long held belief because of the importance of public speaking – if it’s important than you’ve got to find a way to get your audience to remember what you tell them. One powerful way to do this (I can’t believe that I’m actually recommending this) is to repeat yourself.

I’m sure that we’ve all heard the saying “When giving a speech, you want to tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them again.” I hate this saying. In today’s environment, audience’s won’t pay attention to you if they think that you are just saying the same things over and over again.

All that being said, it turns out that repetition works. All you have to do is think about some of the TV commercials that we’ve all be exposed to over the years and you’ll be surprised at how quickly you can remember a jingle or a silly catch phrase.

In conclusion, I believe that repetition has its place. You probably don’t want to over use it and you certainly don’t want to end up repeating your entire speech; however, picking the key points that you want your audience to remember and taking the time to repeat them can have a powerful impact.

Don’t Just Say It, Trigger It!

No matter how good of a speaker you are, there’s a really good chance that your audience won’t remember what you’ve told them. What this means for you is that you’ve got to come up with a way for the key points that you made to be recalled by your audience – this is one of the benefits of public speaking.

Clever public speakers use what are called “triggers” to make this happen. A trigger is an association that you plant in your audience’s minds that will cause them to remember the point that you were trying to make. An example of this would be if you were trying to motivate an audience and you wanted them to realize that they had an unlimited potential. You could tell them that the green light on a traffic light represented their unlimited potential and that every time they see a green traffic light they should remember what you told them.

The great thing about triggers is that they can last long after your speech is over. A well done trigger will continue to remind your audience about what you’ve told them for a very long time.

What All Of This Means For You

As a speaker you have two main goals: to provide your audience with clear direction on how to solve problems and to provide them with ways to remember what you’ve told them.

There are many different ways to go about doing this. One such way is simply to repeat your key points more than once. The power of repetition is that it will cause what you’ve told your audience to firmly stick in their minds. Another way to make this happen is to create triggers. Triggers will be associated with your key points and will cause your audience to remember what you said when they encounter the triggers in their everyday lives.

Making and communicating powerful information is what public speakers do. All of the presentation tips in the world won’t help your audience remember what you’ve told them. Even if your audience has the best listening skills in the world, they’ll quickly forget what you’ve told them without some help. Use the two techniques that we’ve discussed and they’ll be able to remember what you’ve told them and, more importantly, apply what you’ve told them in their lives…

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

Question For You: How many times do you think that you should repeat your main points?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you want to add some class to your next speech, if you are looking for a way to make your audience come to tears or break out in laughter, then perhaps what you need to do is to incorporate some poetry into your speech. I’m not talking the “Roses are red, Violets are blue…” variety, but rather poems that really mean something and which can lend their weight to your speech.

Tags: jingle, memory, reminds, repetition, simpler, triggers
Posted in connecting with your audience | 2 Comments »

Mnemonic Devices Come To The Aid Of Public Speakers

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

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Mnemonic Devices Might Look Complicated, But They Aren't…

Make It Easy To Remember By Making It Fun To Remember

One of the big challenges that I run into in my ongoing quest to become as good of a speaker as Tony Robbins is that often I simply have too much to say. That is, when I’m building the speech that I want to give, it turns out that I’ve got so many individual points that I want to get across that there is no way that my audience is going to be able to remember all that I have to tell them.

This leaves me in a bit of a quandary – should I cut back on what I’m going to cover during my speech and thereby deliver less value to my audience? I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the answer to this question is sometime “yes”. However, it turns out that there is another way.

There is this thing called a mnemonic device that, if used correctly, can help your audience to remember a lot more than they can all by themselves. Although “mnemonic” seems like a big word, I’m willing to bet that you’ve already encountered one of these.

The classic one in my opinion is “SMART goals”. If you’ve ever heard someone talk about these, SMART is simply a mnemonic device that people use to remember the characteristics of a good goal:

S pecific
M easurable
A ttainable
R ealistic
T imely

It turns out these 5 characteristics of a good goal are about two too many characteristics for most audiences to remember. The creation of the “SMART” word provides a fun and easy way for them to remember it – retention problem solved!

Turn On The Siren And The Red Flashing Light

So there you are, up in front of an audience giving your speech. Yawn. Sure, what you are saying is interesting and all that, let’s even say that you’re doing a good job in your delivery. However, you’ve got to remember that your audience has a lot of other things going on. They simply don’t have time to remember everything that you’re telling them because they’ve got so much else going on.

Hmm, looks like you’re going to have to find a way to break through that wall of “I just don’t have time to pay attention to you”. Maybe what you need to do is to turn the siren on during your speech and for good measure add in some flashing red lights.

Now, of course, you could use an actual siren and red flashing lights, but maybe there is another way that would cut down on the amount of gear that you’d need to bring to your next speech. It turns out that simply by introducing a sense of urgency into your speech, you can cause your audience to sit up and listen to you.

Creating this sense of urgency can be done in a couple of different ways. One of the easiest is to tell your audience that time is running out – they need to take action based on what you are telling them and they need to do it quickly or else the opportunity will go away. Another way is to convince them that there is a limited quantity of something that they need. If they don’t move fast based on what you are telling them, then a resource that they need will be gone and they will be unable to do it. That should get them moving!

What All Of This Means For You

The importance of public speaking is that this is one of the most effective ways that you have to communicate information to a group of people all at the same time. However, you’ll just be wasting your time if you don’t find a way to help your audience remember what you are telling them.

One fantastic way to make your points stick is to group them all together and make it fun for your audience to remember everything that you’ve said. Mnemonic devices take awhile to create, but the payoff for your audience can be huge. Another way to make sure that what you say is remembered by your audience is to create a sense of urgency and associate it with what you’ve told them. This will cause your audience to sit up and take notice of what you are telling them.

The great speakers don’t just have the ability to put the right words together in order to deliver a speech. They also have the ability to make what they are saying be memorable in a way that changes the lives of their audience forever. Use these two techniques the next time that you give a speech and watch how powerful your words become.

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

Question For You: Is there a limit to how long a mnemonic device can be?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Tags: attention, competing, long-term memory, message, mnemonic device, relevant, take notes, urgency
Posted in connecting with your audience | No Comments »

Public Speakers Need To Find Ways To Make Their Words Stick!

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

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Getting The Ideas In Your Speech To Stick Will Take Some Work

Everyone Loves A Good Picture

Considering how hard we speakers work to get our words right, you’d think that our audiences would have the common courtesy to develop the listening skills that will allow them to remember what we tell them, right?

Unfortunately, remembering words that we’ve been told is very hard for any audience to do. In fact, trying to remember a particular set of words when we’ve been hit with a bunch of different ideas during a speech can almost be impossible.

The good news here is that there is something else that works: pictures. Call it a fluke of evolution or whatever, but we humans do a much better job of remembering images than we do words. What this means for us as speakers is that we need to get better at creating mental images in our audience’s minds.

You might be thinking that all you have to do is to find the right image to put on a PowerPoint slide and then you’d be home free. Well yes and no. Doing this can certainly help make your message more memorable; however, it’s not where the real power comes from.

Instead, it’s the images that your audience create in their own minds that will stick for the longest time. These are the images that they build upon hearing the words that you say. What this means for you is that you need to start to use words that will describe the image that you want your audience to be imagining. Talk about how things look, what they would feel like if you could touch them, what color they are, how big they are, and of course what makes them unique or memorable when you look at them.

If You Can Tell A Story, You Can Make An Idea Stick

Painting images in your audience’s mind is a great way to start to make what you are telling them stick. However, you can take this one step further if you are willing to tell stories.

This is one area where you do need to be careful. Just telling any old story isn’t going to be enough. Instead, you need to tell stories that are going to connect with your audience and you need to make sure that those stories relate to the points that you are trying to make in your speech.

The stories that you tell need to be memorable. In order for this to happen, you need to make them be both emotional and unexpected.

The reason that you want to make your stories emotional is because if you can appeal to your audience’s emotions, then you will have found a way to make your story “sticky”. Long after you are done telling your story, your audience will remember what you said.

The worst kind of story that you can tell is a boring story. This means that you need to make sure that your story contains unexpected elements. By doing this you don’t allow your audience to become complacent and start to think that they know how your story is going to turn out. Keep showing them that they haven’t heard this story before!

What All Of This Means For You

All too often when we give a speech, our speeches which appear to us to be fantastic are loaded with too much information for our audiences to absorb. What we say goes in one ear and out the other. Clearly something has to change here.

As speakers, we are always looking for presentation tips that will allow us to share the benefits of public speaking. Getting our ideas to stick requires us to use two presentation tips: creating mental images and telling stories. The images that we can build in our audience’s minds are what will cause our key points to stick. We can enhance the “stickiness” of our message by adding stories to our speech. Long after the speech is over, the stories will be remembered and retold by our audience.

In today’s busy, busy world, it is no longer enough for us to give a good speech. We need to take the time to add presentation tips such as mental image building and the telling of stories to our speeches in order to make them stick. Doing so will transform your next speech from forgettable to life changing!

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

Question For You: How many stories do you think that you can reasonably fit into a 30-minute speech?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Tags: emotional, forgotten, mental picture, retention rate, story, unexpected, unforgettable, vulnerable, words
Posted in connecting with your audience | 1 Comment »

Nelson Mandela’s Tips On How To Customize Your Next Speech

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

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Nelson Mandela Knew How To Customize Each Speech To His Audience

Hopefully everyone knows who Nelson Mandela is – he’s the South African leader who’s tireless efforts helped to get rid of his country’s oppressive apartheid policies. What is less known is how he marshaled world opinion in order to support the change that he wanted. It turns out that one way he made this happen was by giving speeches that uniquely connected with his audiences…

Nelson Mandela’s Speeches

Nelson Madela spent 27 years in prison before he was released by the South African government. When he got out, he quickly started to give speeches that all had one common message: support his African National Congress (ANC) party in their attempt to create a new government.

It was important that Mandela work his key message into every speech that he gave. No matter where in the world he was, no matter who he was speaking to, his message was always the same: lend your support to the ANC.

This meant that he really had to give the same speech over and over again. However, he couldn’t just show up and say the same thing each time – he would quickly lose the interest of his audiences. He needed to find a way to deliver his message in such a way that it would appeal to his audience while at the same time allowing him to incorporate his main message: please support the ANC.

It turns out the Nelson Mandela is a good speaker – he has a lot of natural ability. However, it was the realization that he needed to find ways to connect with his audience each time that he spoke that turned him to a great speaker.

How Nelson Mandela Connected With His Audience

Nelson Mandela connected with his audiences by taking the time to customize the words that he was saying. He knew that the core of each of his speeches needed to remain the same, support the ANC, but that he could modify the rest in order to reach out to and connect with the audience that he was addressing.

William Stevenson III has spent time studying the speeches that Mandela gave and he has been able to document the ways that the speeches were customized for various audiences.

When Mandela traveled to the United States, he gave a speech to a huge crowd in New York City’s Harlem area. During this speech he changed it to include statements about how his struggles in South Africa were similar to the struggles of the Harlem residents to overcome their economic and social challenges.

Later in the same trip, Mandela addressed the U.S. Congress. During this speech he invoked the struggles that had been incorporated into the U.S. constitution and he related that to what he was trying to accomplish in South Africa.

What All Of This Means For You

Nelson Mandela is an accomplished political leader who successfully overthrew the oppressive apartheid polices that were holding his country back. One of the key skills that he used to do this was his ability to deliver powerful speeches to diverse audiences.

The only thing that the audiences that Mandela talked to had in common was that they were so very different. Mandela talked in multiple countries always sharing the same message: support my effort to cast out the current government of South Africa. In each country he would talk to different types of audiences. He would talk to common people in the street and leaders of government.

The way he was able to make his message connect with each of these audiences was by customizing his words to match what was important to them. He would use this type of tailored speech to capture the attention of his audience and then once they were connected, he would share his main message with them. We need to learn from Mandela and use his knowledge to reach our audiences so that our messages will make a lasting impression on them…

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

Question For You: How much customization of a speech do you think that you should do for a given 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!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Speakers who are facing a challenging speech or challenging audience often ask themselves what they could do in order to be more successful. Sure, there are a lot of tricks out there that one can use to capture an audience’s attention and make them laugh a few times. However, if you really want to deliver a successful speech then you are going to have to share the true you with your audience – you’re going to have to show them your personal speaking style…

Tags: adapt a speech to a specific audience, apartheid, common ground, Nelson Mandela, speeches
Posted in connecting with your audience | 3 Comments »

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The Accidental Communicator

Archive for the ‘connecting with your audience’ Category

How To Make Your Audience Remember What You Said

Make Your Audience Work For Your Information

Make It All New

What All Of This Means For You

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The Power Of Using Repetition And Triggers In Your Next Speech

Can You Say That Again & Again?

Don’t Just Say It, Trigger It!

What All Of This Means For You

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Mnemonic Devices Come To The Aid Of Public Speakers

Make It Easy To Remember By Making It Fun To Remember

Turn On The Siren And The Red Flashing Light

What All Of This Means For You

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Public Speakers Need To Find Ways To Make Their Words Stick!

Everyone Loves A Good Picture

If You Can Tell A Story, You Can Make An Idea Stick

What All Of This Means For You

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Nelson Mandela’s Tips On How To Customize Your Next Speech

Nelson Mandela’s Speeches

How Nelson Mandela Connected With His Audience

What All Of This Means For You

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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