Image Credit

Poems Can Bring Real Power To Your Next Speech

After you’ve given a few speeches, it’s entirely possible that you’ll find yourself falling into a rut. You know the routine: write a speech, give a speech, write a speech, give a speech. Sure you are speaking, but are you really connecting with your audience? You can tinker with incorporating different presentation tips, but that’s not going to make a big impact. Looks like what you need is some “special sauce” – how about some poetry?

What Makes Poetry So Special?

It’s pretty bold for me to call poetry the “special sauce” of public speaking. Maybe I’m going to have to back that statement up. Perhaps we should start with a definition of just exactly what poetry is:

Poetry (from the Greek ‘poiesis’/ποίησις [poieo/ποιέω], a making: a forming, creating, or the art of poetry, or a poem) is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning.

Ah ha – now we’re getting somewhere. Clearly poetry is more than just words. It’s carefully selected words that have been put together in a particular way in order to generate a response in people who hear it.

I like to think of poetry as being a very concentrated form of communication. If it was a beverage, then I’d think of it as being similar to Turkish coffee – very strong and best enjoyed in small doses. It’s these very qualities that make adding some poetry to your next speech a great way to capture your audience’s attention.

How Do You Use Poetry In A Speech?

Poetry is powerful stuff. Just like high explosives, you are going to want to be careful in how you handle this stuff lest it get out of control and damage your speech. Dian Duchin Reed is a poet who has studied how poetry can be delivered to an audience. She’s come up with a number of suggestions:

• Poetry Needs An Introduction: most of us don’t encounter poetry during our daily lives. This means that if you are going to use some poetry in your next speech, you’ll need to take the time to prepare us for it. Provide some background on why you chose this poem to include and let us know what you’d like us to get out of hearing the poem. Doing this helps your audience to do what you want them to do.
• Take Your Time: did I mention that poetry is powerful stuff? What this means is that every word in a poem is there for a reason – all of the extra words have been cut out. You are going to want your audience to both hear and understand every word that tumbles out of your mouth. Help your audience improve their listening skills by taking the time to speak slowly while reading the poem. Make sure that you also speak very clearly.
• Speak In Tongues: well, ok, maybe not tongues but at least use some vocal variety when you are delivering a poem. If for no other reason than to set the poem off from the rest of your speech, you need to vary the sound of your voice while reading the poem. If there are multiple people being discussed in your poem, then try to give each of them their own voice.

What Does All Of This Mean For You

It’s all too easy to get up in front of an audience and then sit back down after you’ve given your speech having made no impact on them. If you find yourself falling into a speaking rut, then it’s time to change things up a bit – add some poetry to your next speech.

Keep in mind that poetry is powerful stuff. It’s words that have been refined to such a point that just a little bit can have a powerful effect on your audience. This means that you need to be careful in how you use it. Make sure that you introduce your poetry before you deliver it so your audience knows what’s coming. Deliver it slowly and very clearly – with poetry every word counts. Finally, use all of the power of your voice and include vocal variety where appropriate in order to maximize the power of your words.

In our everyday lives, there is precious little poetry on a daily basis. If you take the time to do some research you can find poetry that can be incorporated into your next speech in order to truly connect with your audience. Choose the right poem, deliver it well, and you will have found the right way to share the benefits of public speaking with your audience.

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

Question For You: How long of a poem do you think would be appropriate to include in a 30 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

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.

Related posts:

1. The Power Of Poetry In Your Next Speech If you want to add some class to your next...
2. Public Speakers Need To Find Ways To Make Their Words Stick! You’ve got great ideas trapped in you. You know the...
3. Public Speaking Practice? We Don’t Need No Stinking Practice… So what makes a speech a really good speech? Is...

Image Credit

The Power Of Poetry Can Transform Your Next Speech

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.

Just What Is This Thing Called Poetry?

Just in case you’ve been out of school for just a bit too long, maybe we should take a step back and make sure that we’re all on the same page when it comes to this poetry thing. The good folks over at Wikipedia seem to have a pretty good handle on it when they define poetry as being a:

“Literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm…”

We all know about the importance of public speaking and poetry is yet another way to get our points across. Because of the way that the words are put together in a poem, they can easily flow off of your tongue and into your audience’s mind. When your audience hears a line of poetry, they process it differently from everything else that you’ve been saying. It can almost instantly cause a reaction to occur in your audience.

The poems that we have all heard were written by famous, what else, poets. What this means is that when you add their poetry to your speech you’ll also be adding a new level of importance to what you are saying.

What’s The Best Way To Use A Poem In Your Next Speech?

The power of poetry is something that you can add to your next speech in order to make sure that your speech makes an impression on your audience. Celia Berrell writes a lot of poetry and she points out that you can’t add an entire poem to your speech, instead you’ll have to add just pieces and parts.

When you reach the point in your speech that you’ll start to recite the part of the poem that you’ve selected, you’ll find that you now have a license to do more. You can use more gestures and you can use more vocal variety to convey your message. You audience’s listening skills will be peaked because hearing poetry is not something that they do every day. It’s poetry so people expect you to act like a poet while you are reciting the poem.

The power of a poem comes from the specific words that make it up as well as the sequence in which they flow. In terms of presentation tips, clearly you’ve got some memorization to do here. On top of that you’ll need to take the time to practice, practice, practice. Reading poetry is probably not something that you do every day and so you are going to have to invest the time and energy that it’s going to take so that when you recite the poem, it sounds natural.

Finally, Celia makes a good point when she points out that just like you, your audience probably doesn’t encounter poetry every day. Therefore you can’t just hit them over the head with a poem right off the bat in your speech. Instead, you need to take the time to introduce both the poem and the poet. Give some backstory on when and why the poem was written. Tell them what the meaning of the poem is before you share the actual poem with them. By doing this you’ll prepare them to be wowed by the words of the poem.

What Does All Of This Mean For You

Even the most unread among us has heard some poetry at some point in our lives. The people who write the classic poems really know how to use words to create lyrical phrases that stir the memory and generate deep feelings.

Your next speech can tap into the power of poetry if you’ll just take the time to work some poetry into it. Take the time to prepare your audience for the poem that you’ll be sharing with them and then keep it short and to the point. Taking the time to carefully practice your delivery will allow you to ensure that the poem makes a lasting impression.

The goal of every speech is to make a lasting impression on your audience. The poet Mary Elizabeth Coleridge knew how hard it was to tap into an audience’s memory when she wrote:

Strange Power, I know not what thou art,
Murderer or mistress of my heart.
I know I’d rather meet the blow
Of my most unrelenting foe
Than live—as now I live—to be
Slain twenty times a day by thee.

Take the time to work some poetry into your next speech and you’ll have found a way to make a lasting impression on your audience.

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

Question For You: How long of a poem do you think that you could work into a speech without losing 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

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”?

Related posts:

1. The Power Of Using Repetition And Triggers In Your Next Speech You’ve got great ideas trapped in you. You know the...
2. Tap Into The Power Of Observational Humor To Score Big Laughs So we all know that humor is one of a...
3. Protect Your Next Speech From The Room! I’ll bet that you didn’t know that the next time...

Image Credit

What's A Nice Girl / Guy Like You Doing In A Place Like This?

Just like a cheesy pick-up line, the first words that come out of your mouth when you are giving a speech will determine if you are going to get lucky with this audience. Unlike a wanna-be Casanova in a bar, you (normally) don’t have an opportunity to buy your audience a drink, so you’re going to have work extra hard to make your opening lines do all the work for you if you want to have any hope of sweeping the audience off of their feet. How are you going to score?

The 4 Questions That Every Audience Asks Themselves

Hopefully you’ve been given a great introduction. Now it’s your turn to speak. Dana LaMon who was the Toastmasters’ 1982 World Champion of Public-Speaking says that as your audience awaits the start of your speech, they are sitting there asking themselves four questions:

• Am I going to take the time to listen to this speaker?
• Am I going to benefit from what he / she talks about?
• Will they say anything that is valuable that I can take and use?
• Will anything that they say be worthwhile for me to take action on?

If you waste your first few words, then I can tell you what the answers to these questions will be – and you’re not going to like it!

Am I going to take the time to listen to this speaker?

Aren’t those Blackberry’s and iPhones just the coolest? Today more than ever your audience has other things that they can do while you are talking if they aren’t interested in what you have to say. Let’s pretend for just a moment that today’s jaded audience starts by answering this question with a “No”. Now you’re not just trying to move them to a “yes”, instead you’ve got the doubly hard job of moving them off of “no” and over to “yes”.

Every speech that you give will be different, but you can lose your audience every time if you make one of the following common speaker mistakes:

• Thanking Anybody: the first words out of your mouth in a speech are the equivalent of waterfront property in real estate – super valuable. Why would you waste them by saying something like “I’d like to thank the Dairy Producers Council for inviting me to talk to you today…”
• Calling Out Important People In The Audience: I don’t care if Obama himself is sitting in the front row or your audience, wasting your opening words pointing out that you’ve got important people in the audience is just you complementing yourself and nobody really wants to hear you do that.
• A Man Walks Into A Bar…: Why would anyone waste an opening of a speech on an old, tired joke that has nothing to do with what they are going to be talking about? I’ve seen this happen over and over again. Even when the joke is funny, all too often it doesn’t lead anywhere – it was just a cute thing to say and then the speaker starts his / her speech and the opportunity to grab the audience’s attention has been lost forever
• The Title Of This Speech Is…: What? Why would I be sitting in the audience if I didn’t already know what you are going to be talking about? Also, don’t waste an opening by introducing yourself “My name is Bob Johnson and I’d like to talk to you about …” Assume that either the audience already knows this information or they just don’t care about it. Get on with the meat of what you are there to talk about

Am I going to benefit from what he / she talks about?

I’m a busy guy and assuming that you have somehow gotten me to answer “yes” to the first question, you sure don’t have any guarantee that I’m going to keep listening to you – I’ve got a lot of email that I could be working my way through on my iPhone.

Right off the bat you are going to have to very concisely tell me why I should care about what you’re going to be talking about for the next 30 minutes or so. Whatever this speech’s purpose is, you’re going to have to keep it short – one sentence is the rule. If it’s longer than that, I’m not going to pay attention. Do this and there is a chance that you’re audience will remember what you said after you are done.

Will they say anything that is valuable that I can take and use?

What’s the greatest complement that a speaker can receive? Is it a standing ovation? Nope. It’s when your audience whips out a pencil and starts to take notes.

In every speech there are some “nuggets” that you want your audience to remember and use after you are done talking. It’s your job as a speaker to make these pieces of actionable information easy for your audience to find and remember. Saying things like “Here are three things that you might want to write down…” are a great way to motivate your audience to take notes.

Will anything that they say be worthwhile for me to take action on?

I’ve taken notes at a lot of speeches that I’ve attended and then I’ve gone home and filed them away somewhere and that was the end of the story. As a speaker this is exactly what you don’t want to have happen.

Instead, you want the information that you are passing on to be used – you really want to change people’s lives. To get your audience to take action you need to do three things: you need to tell them what you want them to do, you need to tell them why they should do it, and then you need to tell them that they can be successful in doing it.

What All Of This Means For You

When I’m coaching speakers who are struggling to break through to the next level in their speaking skills, we spend a lot of time working on the opening of their speech because it is so important. There are an almost unlimited number of ways that you can successfully grab an audience’s attention with your first few words. Unfortunately, there is an almost equal number of ways that you can lose them forever.

You’ll lose them if you spend your time thinking about yourself when you are putting your speech together. If, instead, you spend your time putting yourself in the position of your audience and making sure that you answer the questions that are running though their minds, then you’ll find the words that will grab their imagination from the get-go and you’ll be off and running with the best speech of your life.

What’s the best opening to a speech that you’ve ever seen?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just how much speaking can you do in a single day? We spend a lot of time talking about how to prepare for and give a good speech. However, sometimes life just comes at us like a runaway truck and we find ourselves double or triple (or more) booked to speak in a single day. Oh oh, looks like we’ve got a whole new challenge here…

No related posts.

Speakers Often Find That They Are Trying To Sabotage Their Own Speeches!

A few years back I found myself in a situation where I had allowed myself to get roped into delivering a presentation to a university class. I was going to be talking about what I had learned during my IT career – a somewhat painful and introspective topic. My excitement level was at zero.

I put off creating the speech until the last minute. I threw together some slides the morning of the speech. I ended up showing up just a few minutes before the class started. All three of these actions are not how I do things – what was going on here?

The presentation ended up going ok (everyone clapped at the end). However, I was seriously troubled – why had such a simple speech come so close to being a disaster so many times? After running things through my mind a few times I came to realize that I had been a victim of self-sabotage!

I really, really didn’t want to do this speech. It turns out that because of this mind-set, I was working actively to make sure that the speech would never happen (don’t write the speech, don’t prepare the slides, don’t show up). Dang – what was going on here?

Kevin Hogan is both a psychologist and a speaker. His take on all of this is “Essentially, self-sabotage is consciously or unconsciously blocking yourself from succeeding or accomplishing some task or project.” Well there you go. It turns out that we all have some of this going on, but sometimes it can get out of hand.

What’s a presenter to do? First, you need to be aware that you are engaging in self-sabotage. Once you realize that it’s happening, you’ll be better able to deal with it. Next, use affirmations – tell yourself that you are good at what you are going to be doing. The simple act of saying this to yourself can go a long way. Finally, dig in – focus on what you want to get accomplished and shut out any negative noises that are coming from inside.

It turns out that I must have done better than ok on my presentation to that class because they’ve asked me back twice a year since then. I now look forward to this presentation because it the audience is always appreciative and it give me a chance to try out new material and techniques. I’m glad that I didn’t let self-sabotage do me in!

Have you ever found yourself trying to sabotage one of your presentations? What were you trying to do? How did you fight back? Who won in the end? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

Well, at least I sure would like to be able to give a speech like he does. Just in case anyone has been living under a rock for the past week or so, Steve Jobs rolled out the next version of the iPhone at the WWDC 2008 conference. Steve, as always, did a great job of giving the Apple corporate pitch. Clearly he has a nature skill for giving a great speech. We may never be as good at public speaking as Steve is; however, we sure can learn from him. Here are five quick tips from Steve to you:

1. Benefits NOT Features: This is where Steve is at his best. In his speeches he spends his time talking about the experience of using the product, not how the product was implemented. Instead of talking about the 30GB memory size of an iPod, instead he’ll talk about the 7,500 songs that it can carry, or the 25,000 photos that it can carry, or the 75 hours of video that it can carry.

2. Practice and Then Practice Some More: Steve’s a CEO of Apple, a board member of Disney, and probably still runs Pixar. You’d think that he’d have a team of speech writers create his speeches and then he’d just grab it, scan it, and jump up on the stage and give it. Nope, it turns out that he spends hours upon hours practicing each speech. A 2006 Business Week article reported that Steve would spend at least four hours going over every slide and every part of a demonstration as he prepars for a presentation.
3. A Picture Is Worth…: Have you ever seen a picture or a video from one of Steve’s presentations? There are either no words or very few words on the slides that are displayed on the giant screens behind him. There are certainly no lists of bullet points. Steve (and his highly paid set of presentation artists) understand that it’s really his words that count — the slides are just there to support his message.
4. Energy + Enthusiasm = Passion: Every time Steve speaks, it’s clear that he loves being on the stage and talking to us. You can almost feel his excitement grow as he gets ready to share with us the next great thing that he has up his sleeves. His passion is contagious and everyone in attendance can’t help but catch it.

I’m not so sure about trying to emulate Steve’s trademark jeans & black shirt look for your next presentation. However, understanding how Steve is able to do what he does so well will point you in the right direction.

No related posts.

Greetings from Las Vegas! I’m currently attending a very large trade show that is put on by the giant storage company EMC. This year it’s being held in Las Vegas and so far I’m only down about $100 or so; however, the conference goes for another two days so I can financially hurt myself still more!

The thing that I like best about attending this show is that if I move quickly, I can get a front row seat for the keynote addresses that are given by EMC upper level management team. I’m only vaguely interested in what they have to say, but I’m VERY interested in how they say it and if any of it sticks. Yesterday was the big kickoff: Joe Tucci who is the Chairman, Presidant, and CEO of this $15B firm. I had very high hopes: I mean, if anyone could buy their way to being an effective technical communicator, then Joe is the man.

So how did he do? Sadly, I believe that I’d have to give him a C. Maybe a C+, but that’s it. He did a fantastic job of delivering a speech from a technical point of view: clear diction, no filler words, very little pacing, and his slides / graphics were top notch (but of course — he’s in charge of a $15B company!). So why does he just get a grade of C? He didn’t connect with his audience. He talked for about an hour and must have hit on about 40 different points during his talk about EMC the company and all of it’s products and upcoming product. However, I’m betting that 30 minutes after he was done, you could pull aside anyone who had attended and they’d be unable to remember more than one or two things that Joe said. When it was over, it was over — the world had not be changed. What a waste!

I need to give Joe one little out here: he is in charge of the company. What he says can cause a change in the company’s stock price and so he always has to be careful about what he says. However, that doesn’t mean that he can get away with being boring.

Complaining is easy. Now how about if we talk about what Joe could have done differently to have been a more effective communicator. #1: know your audience, tailor your communication to your audience. Joe’s audience was VERY technical. These are the people who live, eat, breath storage systems for a living. Joe talked at a very high level for his whole speech and thus didn’t connect with anyone in the audience. He needed to at least once drop down into their world, show that he knows the types of challenges that they are facing, and then move on.

#2: Where’s the passion? Joe delivered his entire speech in a flat, non-emotional tone. Yawn! Come on, Joe’s from Boston the home of notorous hot heads. Oh, and he’s a sales guy to his core. Get some of that passion to come out — get people fired up! Tell the audience that HP and IBM make lousy products and that they made the right decision by selecting EMC products. Whatever — just show that you really care about this stuff.

#3: Tell a story. Nowhere in Joe’s speech did he include a story. Story’s are how we have always learned. If Joe had included a story, then this is what everyone would have remembered long after he was done.

So to answer the original question: no, CEO’s don’t necessarily do a better job of communicating than you or I do. Good communication always comes down to the three basics: know your audience, care about what you are taking about, and use stories to give your audience a way to remember what you have said.

No related posts.