Archive for the ‘opening’ Category

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Life Lessons: How NOT To Open A Speech

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
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A Poor Speech Opening Is Like Breaking A Promise To Your Audience

A Poor Speech Opening Is Like Breaking A Promise To Your Audience

Let’s say that you owned a lot of real estate. One of your properties was located on the edge of an ocean. Front this lot you could see the most beautiful sunsets every single night. Now you are getting ready to build some houses on the properties that you own. What kind of house are you going to build on your ocean front property? I suspect that it’s going to be the nicest house that you build – you are going to want the house to match the fantastic piece of property that it sits on. Turns out that you need to use the same thinking when you are creating an opening for your next speech…

How You Should NOT Open Your Next Speech

Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something is to find out how NOT to do it. I’m hoping that if we spend a moment talking about how you should not open your next speech this will help you to do a better job of coming up with a way that will work.

The first rule of what not to do is to try to tell a joke. The one exception to this is if you tell jokes for a living, then you can consider it. For the rest of us, this one is a no-no.

Likewise, opening with a barrage of words or terms that your audience won’t understand is a great way to lose them from the beginning. The flip side of this tactic is to take the time to laboriously define all of the terms that you are using. Don’t do this because it will slow down your opening and once again you will lose everyone from the beginning.

A very common mistake that I see over and over again is for the first words that come out of the speaker’s mouth to be a long series of thank-you’s. The audience really doesn’t care to hear you thanking everyone that you’ve ever met (that’s why those Hollywood awards shows are always so boring). Use your first words better.

If you need some help in what to open with, for goodness sake don’t think small. Talking about some minor point or some trivial matter will turn your audience off. They’ll be thinking that if you’re going to start out small, then you’re speech is just going to get even smaller so why should they pay attention?

Finally, no matter what is going on around you, never open your speech by apologizing for anything. Flames could be leaping from the curtains and the flood waters could be rushing in through the back doors, but don’t you mention it to your audience. You need to focus on your speech and let everything else take care of itself.

How You Should Open Your Next Speech

Now that you know what not to do, it does bring up the interesting question of what you should be doing. It turns out that the answer is that there are two things that you need to accomplish during your speech’s opening.

The first of these is to grab your audience’s attention. The first minute or so of your speech is your special time – everyone will stop what they’ve been doing and they’ll listen to you while they try to figure out if you’ll be worth spending time on.

This is your one chance to convince them that you’re going to be saying interesting things that they will want to hear. Make your opening grab their imagination by using provocative questions, startling statistics, or even by referring to recent events.

Once you’ve grabbed their attention, your job is not done. Now what you have to do is answer the one question that every audience asks themselves at the start of any speech: “what’s in it for me?” You need to tell them why spending the next 30, 60, or even 90 minutes listening to you is going to produce real tangible benefits for them. If you can do this during your opening, then you will have spent your first few words wisely.

What All Of This Means For You

Next to the way that you close your speech, the way that you open it is the most important thing that you’ll do during the speech. It sure makes sense that you don’t screw this up!

What this means is that you’re not going to want to start out with a joke unless you tell jokes for a living. You’re also not going to want to waste those precious first few words on things that have nothing to do with your speech.

You are going to want to use your opening to capture the audience’s attention. Once you’ve done that, you will want to follow up and make sure that you answer the question “what’s in it for me”.

If you can avoid doing the wrong things while at the same time doing the correct things, then the opening for your next speech should be spectacular. Just like that house that you built on your waterfront property, your speech opening will be someplace that you’ll be proud to go over and over again.

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

Question For You: How long do you think a speech opening should last?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ever get the feeling that your audience just isn’t listening to what you are telling them? I mean sure, they seem to be with you at the start of your speech and then they seem to show up once again at the end, but how’s that middle part going for you? Researchers have studied what’s going on with your audience during the middle of your speech and let’s just say that it’s not good – they are checking out. Looks like we’re going to have to have a talk here – let’s find a way to keep them on board…

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Speakers Need To Use A Hook To Catch Their Audience’s Attention

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011
Image Credit Every Speaker Has To Have A Hook To "Catch" Their Audience's Attention

When you start a speech, you know that the first few words that come out of your mouth have to be interesting to your audience. However, I’m going to take that thought one step further – your first words have to “hook” your audience’s interest. What you say has to catch them off guard, has to intrigue them, has to make them want to hear more. This isn’t easy to do, but I’m going to show you how…

Just What Is A Hook?

In the world of advertising, a “hook” is what grabs an audience’s attention and holds it. Each year in the U.S. the Superbowl football game sells its TV advertising spots for millions of dollars and each advertiser desperately tries to come up with a “hook” that will cause the audience to remember what they are trying to sell.

One key point that too many Superbowl advertisers overlook (and speakers too!) is that the device that you use to grab your audience’s attention needs to be tied back to the main message. Otherwise you’ll just be grabbing attention and not accomplishing anything.

This leads to the question: just what is a hook? A hook can be anything that a speaker uses to grab an audience’s attention. There are lots of different ways to do this: startling statistics, funny stories, or even a clever phrase will do the trick.

Giving a speech is hard work. A hook can make it easier. When you take the time to create a hook to use with your next speech, you will receive many benefits. These include having the ability to seize and hold on to your audience’s attention. You’ll boost the chances that your main message will be both heard and understood by the audience. Finally, a good hook makes what you say that much more memorable.

Kinds Of Hooks That You Can Use

Once you’ve decided to start your next speech with a hook, the question that you’re going to have to answer is what kind of hook do you want to use? The good news is that there are plenty to choose from.

One of the best hooks that a speaker can use is a personal story. A note of caution here: the story that you decide to tell must have a link to the main point of your speech.

The reason that a personal story works so well as a hook to draw your audience in is because your audience will be able to relate to it. Stories are how we communicate and so they are what your audience will be able to easily remember long after you are done talking.

Another type of hook that a speaker can use is a prop. A prop is simply any sort of visual aid. Since the art of speaking is all about using words to communicate your message, when all of a sudden you show your audience a tangible, physical object it will grab and hold their attention.

Using a prop that relates to the message that you are trying to get across can anchor your message in your audience’s head. During one speech that I was giving to employees of a wireless company, I used their own “mobile driving safety” brochure as a prop to show them that they weren’t following their own rules before I launched into a speech on how to better manage their teams.

Finally, providing your audience with statistics that are unusual or surprising is another way to hook them The reason that this works is that it provides your audience with a way for them to get their hands around what could otherwise be a boring concept.

An example of this would be if you were talking about how we can improve our relationships with our spouses. The American Animal Hospital Association did a survey that revealed that 78% of pet owners admitted to greeting their pet at the door before saying hello to their spouse or significant other. That kind of statistic would not be expected by your audience and would “hook” them to listen to what you said next.

What All Of This Means For You

In order to be an effective speaker you need to not only find a way to capture your audience’s attention, but you also have to find a way to hold it throughout your speech. It turns out that one of the best ways to go about doing this is to work a “hook” into the opening of your speech.

The true power of a hook is that by grabbing your audience’s emotions you will be able to make it easier for them to both understand and remember the message that is contained in your speech. A good hook has the ability to cut through all of the clutter that we all encounter each day and make your speech memorable.

Coming up with a good hook for your next speech is going to take some time and effort. The good news is that the time that you spend doing this will be richly rewarded by the rapt attention that you get from your audience and the complements that you receive from them when you are done talking!

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

Question For You: Do you think that you should only use one hook or can you use multiple hooks at different points in your speech?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So how do you get ready to deliver a speech? Write out your words? Create some PowerPoint slides? It turns out that there’s one very important thing that you may have been missing – taking control of the room that you’ll be speaking in…

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The 2 Most Important Things That A Public Speaker Needs To Do When The Curtain Goes Up

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011
Image Credit The First Words That You Say Are The Most Important…

The First Words That You Say Are The Most Important…

One of the questions that public speakers have been debating since the beginning of time is “what is the most important part of a speech?” There are really only three possibilities: the beginning, the middle, or the end. I’m here to solve this question once and for all: it’s the beginning and I’m going to tell you why…

What Time Should You Start At? (Careful, This Is A Trick Question…)

This might seem like sorta a strange thing to be talking about when what you really want to do is to become a better public speaker, but what time you start to speak at is actually a critical question.

All too often as public speakers, we’ll show up for an event and then we’ll basically put ourselves in the hands of the person who is running the show. We end up saying by our actions “I’ll start to speak when you tell me to start.” This is the wrong thing to do.

As the speaker, you need to drive the organizer to start your speech on time. I fully realize that this can be difficult to do especially if as you look out over the audience there are still a lot of empty chairs. However, things will go badly for you if you don’t start on time.

Just imagine this scenario: you delay your start time by 15 minutes to allow more people to arrive. They all notice that you are starting late. A break comes and you ask them to come back in 10 minutes. They end up trickling back in after 20 minutes. Then lunch comes. You ask them to be back in an hour. Most of them stroll back in about 20 minutes late. You get the point.

The thing that you have to remember is that your audience’s time is very valuable to them. By not starting your speech on time you are showing them that you don’t respect their time. Clearly, they’ll show you that they don’t respect your time either if you do this!

It’s Really All About Your Introduction

Most audiences won’t know anything about you before you take the stage. Interestingly enough, this is the same problem that professional comedians face. They’ve come up with a clever solution to their problem: it’s called the opening act.

The sole purpose of a comedy opening act is to get the audience used to laughing. The opening act doesn’t even have to be all that good, their purpose is to get the audience warmed up and ready for the main course: the headlining comedian.

In the world of public speaking your speaker introduction plays the role of your opening act. It is through your introduction that the audience’s expectations will be built up. Not only should your introduction explain why you are here, but it should also lay out what you’ll be talking about.

As you have probably already guessed, your introduction is too important to be left to chance. Some speakers leave it up to the host of the event to come up with some clever words to say. This is like playing the lottery: sure you might win, but the odds are stacked against you.

Instead what you need to do is to prepare your own introduction. Type it up and make sure that it covers why you are the right one to be at this event talking about this topic. A key point of a successful introduction is to have it lead up to your actual speech so that the transition from the introduction to your speech appears to be very smooth to the audience.

What All Of This Means For You

As speakers we all want each speech to go well. It turns out that we are really in charge of how things turn out. We control how each speech starts. To make your next speech a success, there are two things that you must do.

What we need to do is to set things up so that our speeches always start on time. Doing this communicates to your audience that you respect their time and that they should be sure to return the favor and respect yours. Your speech should start with someone else introducing you. What’s important about this is that the introduction is your opening act – it sets the stage for what you are going to be saying. Therefore, it needs to be done correctly. Never leave your introduction to chance – write it out and provide it to the person who will be introducing you.

How a speech starts sets the tone for everything else that you have to say. Taking the time to make sure that you get off to a good start is the key to ensuring that your next speech is guaranteed to be a success…

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

Question For You: Do you think that there is any way to get your audience to actually remember what is said in your introduction?

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

Political speeches, for the most part, are forgettable. Except when they aren’t. If you’ve spent any time listening to the types of speeches that politicians are giving these days, they are basically junk (the Phil Davison, GOP Candidate, Delivers Stark County Treasurer Speech on YouTube is a classic bad political speech). The question is whose fault is this: the speech writers or the speech givers? I’m willing to bet that the art of writing a good political speech has been forgotten by far too many speechwriters. I’m going to solve that problem right now…

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How Should I Introduce You Public Speaker?

Monday, October 6th, 2008
Billy Crystal Always Has A Great Introduction Before He Speaks

Billy Crystal Always Has A Great Introduction Before He Speaks

You know, it’s always the little things that set the real pros apart from the rest of us. When it comes to speaking in public, having a really good introduction for yourself can be the key to getting your speech off to a great start. I must confess that I had forgotten just how powerful an introduction could be. It took a chance opportunity to attend a private show put on by Billy Crystal to really remind me why introductions are important and, when done correctly, just how powerful they can be.

I was out in Las Vegas attending the big EMC trade show and as part of the show they had the comedian Billy Crystal come in and put on a private show. So there I was along with 1,000′s of other trade show attendees sitting in a mini-arena waiting for Billy to take the stage. All of a sudden, the lights went down, and the jumbo tron TV screens on the stage lit up. What happened next was the mini-movie that had been created to introduce Billy at the start of the 2004 Academy Awards played. This was a serious movie – it must have lasted for just a bit over 5 minutes or so. It was also quite funny – Billy kept finding himself stuck inside a bunch of famous movies as it appeared as though people were trying to talk him into hosting the Academy Awards. Once the movie was over, Billy came out, took the stage, and put on a great show.

It wasn’t until days later (sorry, I really am this slow sometimes) that I suddenly realized WHY the movie had been played. Billy Crystal is a comedian. Comedians (the big ones at least) never just come out and take the stage – they always have an opening act. Why you ask? Simple, the opening act gets the crowd warmed up. It gets them used to laughing. This means that when the main act (the comedian) comes out, he/she doesn’t have to work as hard to get laughs – we’re already primed for them. Even if the opening act bombs, the main comedian will appear great in comparison and we’ll still laugh much easier. Billy didn’t have an opening act for the private show that he was putting on so Billy’s intro movie got every laughing before he came out. It worked like a charm.

What we can all learn from this is that WE need an opening act before we start a speech. Even if other speakers have gone before us, we need our own personal opening act. Good news, you don’t have to go out and hire a comedian. All you have to do is write your own introduction and make sure that someone reads it just before you start your speech. If you’ve got a great intro, then the audience will be primed to hear what you are going to say. They’ll view you as an expert and they will hang on your every word.

What Should Be In My Introduction? Your introduction serves two distinct and separate purposes: to establish your authority and to inform your audience why you are there. I’d suggest that you start by establishing your authority to be speaking on this topic. This can be fairly boring stuff so boil it down to what will impress this audience the most: study that you’ve done, work experience, years in this field, etc. Next you want to explain why you are here today giving this speech. Just saying: my manager asked me to report on this topic is not good enough. Ideally you’ll explain that you are uniquely suited to discuss the issue, or that you have a deep motivation to resolve the problem. This serves as a great springboard into your actual speech.

How Long Should My Introduction Be? The shorter the better. When written out your introduction should be no longer than 1/2 of a typewritten page. Remember: from the audience’s point-of-view your introduction is just answering the question “who is this person” – once they’ve got the info that they need, they’ll stop listening.

Who Should Read My Introduction? This is the most important part. You’re introduction needs to be read to the audience (off of the paper that you handed to him/her) by someone that the audience respects and accepts as one of their own. This will act as a bridge to your speech and will give you instant acceptance by the audience.

As simple as these steps to creating a powerful introduction may seem, there are still a number of potholes that can still screw things up. The #1 issue that I see come up time after time is that the person reading the introduction doesn’t take the time to read it before the event, tries to wing it, and ends up flubbing it. Proper coordination with your introducer can minimize the chances of this happening.

What does your introduction look like? Has it worked for you in the past – do you feel that the audience is ready for you to start speaking when you finally open your mouth? Have you ever seen an introduction done badly? What went wrong? How did this impact the speaker’s speech? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Quick Hit: Top 10 Tips To Remember When Writing A Speech

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

10 Things To Remember When Writing A Speech

You might think that you have the most amazing information to share with your audience; however, if you don’t structure your speech correctly, your message will never “stick” with them. As we’ve already talked about, you need to have a strong opening and closing in order to get your message across. Here’s 10 tips to keep in mind when you finally get around to sitting down and writing that killer speech to end all speeches:

  1. Be sure to plan and practice the opening and closing parts of your speech just as much as you do the middle of the speech.

  2. Provide closure for your audience by re-using the same words that you used in your opening in your closing. This will show everyone how you’ve brought things together.
  3. Never, ever, ever apologize or complain. The audience should be thankful that you took the time to talk to them.
  4. Don’t use definitions for terms that have clearly been lifted out of a dictionary. This will seem forced and will break any connection that you’ve established with your audience.
  5. Don’t assume that your audience knows anything about what you are talking about. Skip the subject specific acronyms and jargon. I always like to assume that my Mom’s sitting in the audience and I write my speech for her to understand what I’m talking about.
  6. Don’t be a dork and say things like “This is the end of my speech”. Note that saying “In conclusion…” is just as bad.
  7. Don’t introduce new material as a part of your closing. The closing is there to allow you to wrap things up — not to launch a new speech.
  8. In your conclusion, don’t suddenly change topics. If you were speaking about the need to get a college education, don’t wrap up by saying that high school is where we learn life’s most important lessons.
  9. Never abandon the podium. Wait for the meeting leader or the MC to come out and take control. If you just walk away, everyone will be confused as to what comes next.
  10. Always make yourself available after the speech to answer questions and greet people. This is not for you to feel good, but rather it is for some of your audience to get closure on what you said.

This list is by no means complete, but it sure can provide a great start that will allow you to write a speech that is better than any other speech out there!

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