Archive for the ‘connecting with your audience’ Category

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Could Interference Be The Reason That Your Message Isn’t Getting Through?

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
Image Credit If your message can't get across the tracks, then you can't make a difference

If your message can't get across the tracks, then you can't make a difference

You think that you speak clearly, right? There are no marbles in your mouth or anything weird like that. You speak the same language as your audience. Then why does it seem to be so hard to get your audience to understand what you are trying to tell them? Could it be that there is some interference going on that you aren’t aware of?

It All Starts With Alignment

When we’re not able to connect with our audience, one of the first things that we think is “what’s wrong with them?” In reality, the problem is probably with us – after all, there’s more of them and just one of us.

One of the most common forms of interference that can cause problems for speakers is when the words that we’re saying don’t line up with the body language that we are conveying to our audience. The reason for this is very simple: we don’t believe what we’re saying.

When you find yourself having to give a speech and try to convince your audience about something that you yourself don’t really believe in, you are going to run into problems. How you really feel is going to be given away by the tone of your voice (monotone), your posture, and your gestures.

The best way to deal with this is to make a promise to yourself to never even try to convince an audience about something that you don’t believe in. Instead, search hard for some part of what you’ve been asked to tell your audience that you can agree with and focus on that during your talk. This will eliminate the interference that you have been causing.

Don’t Let Your Words Trip Your Message Up

There are many sources of potential interference for any speaker. Sometimes what trips us up comes right out of our own mouths.

A very common problem that any of us can have is that we over-qualify our statements. This is very easy to do. When you start out a statement by saying “I’m really not sure, but…” you are over-qualifying.

What we are doing in this case is letting our own self-doubts get in the way of what we want to say. Sure you may believe that you are not the expert on some topic that you’ve been asked to give a speech on, but there is no reason that you need to start out your speech by advertising this fact to everyone.

The reason that we use phrases like this when we are preparing to speak is because we’re searching for a way to start our speech. Instead of providing a nice lead-in, what we end up doing is torpedoing our speech from the start.

What you need to start to do is to skip the over-qualifying statement and get right to what you want to say. When you learn to get to the point then the words that you are speaking will have a great deal more influence on your audience.

What All Of This Means For You

The whole reason that we go to the effort of delivering a speech is because we want to affect our audience: we want to change how they see the world. This is not an easy thing to do.

If it turns out that our message is encountering interference from the moment it leaves our mouth and before it enters our audience’s ears, then we’ve got a real problem on our hands. This interference can come from a number of different sources: our words may not be aligned with what our bodies are telling our audience or the way that we are over-qualifying what we say.

Both of these sources of interference are easy to get rid of. However, first you have to recognize that your message is encountering the interference. After that it’s straightforward to remove the source of interference and become a powerful and effective speaker.

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

Question For You: Do you think that having a friend listen to your speech would allow them to detect if you were having interference problems?

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

So there you are, standing up in front of all of those people giving your speech. We all know about importance of public speaking, but I wonder what they are thinking about? I wonder if they are wondering what you are thinking about while you are giving your speech? Sure, they’ve got great listening skills, but how are you going to break out of this “I’m up here and you’re out there” mold and really, finally, connect with your audience? It turns out that the answer is in your eyes…

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5 Ways For Public Speakers To Not Say “I’m Sorry”

Monday, February 20th, 2012
Image Credit We All Know When We've Done Something Wrong

We All Know When We've Done Something Wrong

Oh, oh – now you’ve done it. Somehow, in some way, you screwed up. You made a mistake and did something (or in many cases you said something) that was wrong. What are you going to do now? The best thing to do would be to apologize and hope that your audience is using their listening skills. However, it turns out that this is just a bit more difficult than it seems…

The Problem With Saying “I’m Sorry”

So why do we even bother with saying “I’m sorry” in the first place? When we do something wrong, we offend others. This means that they are going to be less willing to work with us and to help us out. If we go to the effort of apologizing, then we can mend fences with these people and get things back to the way that they used to be.

One-on-one apologies are fairly simple to do. However, when we’ve done something that has offended a larger group of people, then that’s when our public speaking skills are going to have to come into play and the true importance of public speaking is going to have to save the day.

5 Ways To Not Say “I’m Sorry”

Just as there are many ways to correctly tell the world that you regret what you’ve done, there are just as many ways to do a bad job of it. No presentation tips are going to help you out here. The author Chris Witt has taken a look into how we can make up for the wrongs that we’ve done. Let’s take a look at 5 ways that you should not go about saying “I’m Sorry”.

  • Duck!: As kids we all did this – when we were caught doing something wrong we were quick to blame someone else: “He did it!” As speakers, we can’t do this. We need to “man up” and take responsibility for our own actions.

  • Hide: It’s not your fault if there were a set of circumstances that ended up forcing you to do or say what you did. This is another classic defense that won’t go over very well with your audience. Don’t even try it. Instead, accept responsibility no matter what the sequence of events was that led you to where you were.

  • Others Did It: This is an interesting defense that your audience might not pick up on for awhile, but they’ll see through it eventually. When you use the passive voice to offer your apology you deflect the blame on to others by talking about what happened in an onlooker way: “Facts were incorrectly evaluated and a bad decision was made”. You made the bad decision, tell everyone that you are sorry that you made it.

  • Time Is On Your Side: Every event has a timeline associated with it. This means that from the moment that the mistake is made going forward, things can happen or not. When you choose to make an apology is important. You may be tempted to wait as long as possible in the hopes that the whole thing will blow over. Don’t. The sooner that you apologize, the quicker the event will become defused.

  • Keep It All Inside: Making a mistake and then having to apologize is a big deal for all of us who are not emotionless serial killers. This means that while you are making your apology, there is a good chance that some of your emotions will come spilling out around the edges. This is a good thing – it shows that you are human. Don’t let your emotions obscure your message, but do let them show.

What All Of This Means For You

We all make mistakes. Even knowing this, we will all continue to make mistakes. What this means is that we need to become good at asking for forgiveness. The ability to say “I’m sorry” and to be believed is the key to starting to move beyond whatever we’ve done.

As easy as this may appear to be able to do, it turns out that it’s quite difficult to do it well. One of the benefits of public speaking is that we can apologize to a large group of people all at the same time. Speakers need to be careful to avoid making the 5 mistakes that we’ve discussed when offering an apology.

Learning to make a good apology may be something that none of us instinctively wants to do; however, the benefits can be substantial. When people believe that you mean what you are saying then you’ll be able to quickly move beyond the situation that you find yourself in. This is a skill that is well worth developing.

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

Question For You: How soon after you realize that you’ve done something wrong do you think that you should offer an apology?

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

As public speakers, we all know the importance of public speaking. The one tool that we all have to work with is our choice of what words we want to speak. Even more important than any presentation tips is the choice that we have in choosing a wide variety of both words and phrases that we can use in our next speech. It turns out that we can make good word choices that help us get our message across to our audience or we can make bad choices that cause our audience use their listening skills to tune us out. When we use a cliché, we’re doing a bit of both…

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How To Make Your Audience Remember What You Said

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011
Image Credit It Would Hurt, But This Is One Way To Make Your Ideas "Stick"…

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?

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 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.

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The Power Of Using Repetition And Triggers In Your Next Speech

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011
Image Credit
It's The Ideas That You Share With Your Audience That You Don't Want Them To Forget

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

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”?

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?

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

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.

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Mnemonic Devices Come To The Aid Of Public Speakers

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
Image Credit
Mnemonic Devices Might Look Complicated, But They Aren't…

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

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 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?

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

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”?

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in connecting with your audience | 1 Comment »

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