Archive for the ‘practice’ Category

#1 Secret All Successful Public Speakers Know (And You Should Too)

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
Image Credit
You've got to spend some mirror time before your next presentation

You've got to spend some mirror time before your next presentation

You’ve got fantastic thing to tell your audience. They are lucky enough to be able to sit in the room when you give a speech. If you want to do a good job of connecting with your audience, then you’ve got to know and put into practice the most important secret that all successful public speakers already know.

What Happens If You Don’t Know The Secret

Before we dive into the secret that you just MUST know, let’s talk about what happens to presenters who don’t know the secret. You know, like perhaps you today.

If you have a presentation coming up you probably do what we all do: throw together some slides. Once that’s done you remind yourself that you really should spend some time practicing what you are going to say. I mean, you already know it all, but it seems like someone once told you that you should practice a speech before you give so that’s what you think that you should do.

How do you go about doing that practice thing? Well, once again if you are like most people, you probably just sit there at your laptop and flip through the slides thinking about what you’ll say when that slide is being displayed. If you take it a step further, you might actually move your lips and say things like “oh, I should mention…” and such.

The problem with all of this “practice” is that it’s not really doing you a lot of good. In fact professional presentations coach Jerry Weissman recently pointed out that this is actually going to reinforce bad habits. When you get up to speak, you just may start to mumble like you did during your so-called practice and that’s not going to do anybody any good.

How To Use The Secret

Ok, so I’ve kept you hanging long enough. It’s time for me to share the big secret to delivering a speech that will connect with your audience. What you need to do is to take the time to practice it correctly. This means actually verbalizing what you are actually going to say to your audience while you are practicing it.

What this means is that you’ll be training yourself to say the right words in the right order. If you practice giving your speech enough, then when the big day comes, you’ll be able to deliver the speech without even having to think about what your next words should be. Instead, you’ll be able to run on auto-pilot allowing the correct words to tumble out of you in the right sequence.

Practicing what you are going to say before you actually have to say it allows you to spend your time during the actual presentation watching your audience and developing listening skills so that you can determine if they are understanding what you are saying. This allows you to do what the pros do: dynamically adjust what you are saying in order to ensure that you connect with your audience.

What All Of This Means For You

We would all like to become as good of a speaker as that famous Tony Robbins guy. In order for that to happen, we are all hoping that there is some sort of magic formula that we can learn that will allow us to overcome our fears and capture the hearts and minds of our audiences.

I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you. We’ll start with the bad news: there is no magic formula. However, the good news is that simply by taking the time to practice the exact words that you’ll be saying you can make your next speech much more effective.

Learning to practice your speech correctly and then taking the time to actually do it may not seem all that glamorous, but the pros have shown that this is the best way to become an effective speaker. In order to let all of those ideas that you have inside of you out, practicing giving your next speech the right way is what you are going to have to do.

- 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 practice your next speech before you give it?

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”?

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5 Advanced Public Speaking Practice Techniques

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
Image Credit In public speaking, as in sports, practice makes perfect…

In public speaking, as in sports, practice makes perfect…

Are you ready to kick your speaking skills up to the next level? If you are, then do you know how to become better? If you are thinking that you need to get one of those “fancy word of the day” calendars to practice with, that’s not going to do it. In fact, the secret to becoming a better speaker has nothing to do with learning a new skill. Rather, it has everything to do with becoming better at something that you should already be doing – practicing your next speech.

Why Practice Really Matters

For most of us, speaking in public is not the only thing that we do during a given day. What’s interesting is that we seem to understand that for most things in our life if we want to get better at them, then we need to practice.

However, when it comes to public speaking, for many people practice is not something that they do. Instead, all too often speakers seem to pull together a speech, glance at it before they take the stage and then go out and wing it.

Ouch, speaking as an audience member I can tell when you are winging it and it’s not pretty. In order to boost your speaking skill level, you’re going to not only have to practice but also practice right. It’s time to go over some advanced practice techniques.

5 Ways To Improve How You Practice Your Next Speech

Speaker Roena Oesting is a speaker who has taken the time to study the best ways to practice giving a speech. Based on her research, here are 5 advanced practice techniques that you need to start to use:

  • You’re Perfect – Not!: The first thing that you need to realize about practice is that it’s going to make you a better speaker, but it’s not going to make you perfect. Don’t think that you’re going to have to keep practicing until you become perfect, you’re goal should simply be to become better every time you practice your speech.

  • Learn From The Past: We’ve all given speeches in the past and based on these speeches you should have some feedback. Hopefully you have written evaluations that you can refer back to. In the worst case, give a call to someone who was in the audience last time you gave a speech and ask them what you need to change in your next speech.

  • Practice! You are only going to become better by practicing your speech, take the time to run though it from start to finish. Don’t worry about mistakes you make – keep on going until you reach the end of the speech. You need to get a “feel” for how the whole speech fits together.

  • Give It A Rest: After you’ve practiced the speech a few times and feel that you have it pretty well under control, back off. Put your speech away for the rest of the day and even a full day if you have the time. Getting some distance from your speech will allow you to come back to it with a fresh outlook later on.

  • One More Time On The Big Day: The day that you will be giving your speech, make sure that you carve out enough time to practice the speech one more time fully from start to finish. Once you’ve got this taken care of, put it away and know that you are now fully ready to deliver a a great speech.

What All Of This Means For You

For some reason the thing that we know about sports, singing, and games that we play – that practice makes us better – seems to escape us when it comes to public speaking. As a group, we all seem to try to minimize how much we practice the speeches that we give – do we really think that we’re that good?

If you want to take your speaking skills to the next level, then you need to start to use the 5 advanced practice techniques that we’ve discussed. This includes realizing that you’ll never be perfect, using your notes to improve, practicing again and again, and taking a break in between practice sessions.

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

Question For You: When do you think you should practice your speech on the big day – early on or just before you take the stage?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Public Speaking Practice? We Don’t Need No Stinking Practice…

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011
Image Credit Speakers Who Don't Practice Sound Out Of Tune…

Speakers Who Don't Practice Sound Out Of Tune…

So what makes a speech a really good speech? Is it that you are “on fire” when you deliver it? Does your audience need to be “in the mood” to hear what you are going to tell them? Or is the magic of the words that you’ve put together that will allow you to connect with your audience and move them to action? Actually, it’s none of these – practice is what makes a speech work or not work. Do you know how to practice a speech?

Why Bother?

We all live busy lives. It can be hard enough to find the time to pull together a speech, let alone to find the time to practice it. Because of this, all too often speakers just decide to skip the whole practicing thing. Turns out that this can be a big mistake.

The thing that we seem to forget is that the first time that we ever give a speech will be the worst delivery that we ever make of that material. We’ll fumble over our words, get lost in our thoughts, and generally do a poor job of communicating.

What we need to do is to take the time to practice our speech before we give it. I often get asked just exactly how many times you should plan on practicing your speech. It turns out that the answer is 7 times.

I’m afraid that I can’t point you to any hard science that shows that practicing a speech 7 times is the correct number of times to do it; however, experience has shown this seems to be the right number. The first 5 times that you practice a speech you will find yourself making changes to it. The 6th time you’ll pretty much leave it alone and the 7th time you’ll find yourself being slightly bored while giving the speech. This is perfect, when you have reached this state you will be able to focus on your audience and won’t be worried about remembering what the next word that you want to say is.

5 Ways To Correctly Practice Your Next Speech

If I’ve been able to convince you that you need to practice your next speech before you give it, then this will lead you to your next question: “How?” It’s funny that in all of the material that has been published on speaking in which speakers are told that they need to practice more, there’s actually very little information available on just exactly how we need to go about doing all of this practice.

Speaker Roena Oesting has been taking a look at the nitty gritty details of just what makes for an effective speech practice session and she’s got 5 suggestions for us.

  • Be Natural: In order to have the best chance of connecting with your audience, you are going to want your words to come across as being natural, not forced. This means that you’re going to have to stifle the urge to write out and then memorize every word in your next speech. Taking the time to practice your speech will help you organize your thoughts and this will eliminate the need to have the whole speech written out.

  • Create An Outline: I like to think of a speech as being a length of rope – you start at one end and work your way to the other end. In order to mark your progress along this “rope speech”, it can be helpful to know how far you’ve come and how far you still have yet to go. This is where an outline can come in handy. Don’t make it too detailed – just include enough points so that you’ll be able to understand what you want to say and what the next point that you’re going to want to cover will be.

  • End Strong: The folks who study stuff like this tell us that what your audience is going to remember after your speech is over are the last few words that came out of your mouth. This means that the exact words that you use to close your speech are very important – you can’t be pulling these guys out of the air. Instead, take the time to write them down and memorize them. This way when you reach the end of your speech, you are guaranteed that you’ll be able to finish strong.

  • Begin Strong: Once you are sure that you can end on a high note, you next need to make sure that you can start off on the right foot. Once again, taking the time to write out your opening and memorizing it can make this much easier to do. The purpose of your opening is to answer the one question that is on the minds of everyone who is sitting in the audience: “why should I bother to listen to you?”

  • Practice Early: Don’t wait until you have your entire speech written out before you begin to practice it – it will be too late then. Instead, once you have your opening, outline, and closing created take a moment to give the speech a run-through. By doing this type of early practice you can detect where there may be problems with your speech before you’ve spent a lot of time getting your words right. It’s much easier to change parts of a speech before you have a big investment in it.

What All Of This Means For You

Anybody can stand up in front of an audience and give a speech. However, it takes something special to deliver a great speech. It takes a real polished speaker to do a good job of this. The only way that you’re going to become an effective speaker is by learning to practice your speech before you give it.

When you practice a speech, you try out different ways of organizing your words. This allows you to come up with the sequence that works best for the audience that you’ll be addressing. We’ve discussed 5 ways to correctly practice your next speech. By doing these you’ll transform your speech from an ok speech to an OMG speech.

The really great speakers that we all can name don’t have any special magic when they gave speeches. Instead, they have practiced their speeches and they have arranged their words to have the maximum impact on their audience. By practicing your next speech you can follow in their footsteps and become a great speaker also.

- 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 practice a speech before you give it?

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

Are you ready to kick your speaking skills up to the next level? If you are, then do you know how to become better? If you are thinking that you need to get one of those “fancy word of the day” calendars to practice with, that’s not going to do it. In fact, the secret to becoming a better speaker has nothing to do with learning a new skill. Rather, it has everything to do with becoming better at something that you should already be doing – practicing your next speech.

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Presentation Practice: How Much Is Enough?

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Just Creating A Presentation Is Not Good Enough, You Have To Practice IT Also

Just Creating A Presentation Is Not Good Enough, You Have To Practice It Also

So you’ve got a big presentation / speech coming up. How many times should you practice your speech before you give it for real? This is actually a very good question that most presenters either forget to ask themselves or come up with the wrong answer to. We all know that practice makes perfect so how can we tell when we’ve reached perfection with our speech?

We should probably start with the good news: even a little practice will probably make you better than most presenters. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to sit through a train-wreck of a presentation that clearly showed that the presenter had laid out some thoughts on paper, but had not taken the time to practice what he/she was going to say.

If you want to create and deliver a great presentation, there are three key interlocked factors that you need to make sure that you take care of:

  1. Make sure that the speech plays to your speaking strengths. If you hate to give speeches, make sure that this one is as short as possible in order to minimize your time “on stage”. If you are good at telling stories, then include them in your presentation.
  2. Establish good connections between the different parts of the speech. Ensuring that the speech flows smoothly and logically from section to section will make it much easier for you to memorize the flow of the speech.
  3. Make sure that you have your speech down cold before you deliver it. You’ll know that you’ve been able to do this when you could recite it by heart if someone asked you to do so at a moment’s notice. This will ensure that when you deliver your presentation the words tumble out of your mouth automatically and with no effort.

I’m not sure if you really want to hear this, but you cannot over-rehearse a presentation. I know that you are dying for a hard number to hang your hat on so here it is: 7. I firmly believe that any presentation that you are going to deliver deserves at least seven practice runs by you. The first will be a flaming disaster and the seventh should be quite good. This means that your “for real” presentation will be (at least) the 8th time that you’ve delivered the material and it should flow from you quite naturally. Key point: if this is one of those career defining presentations then you should probably practice it at least 15 times in order to make sure that each and every word comes out perfectly.

So we’ve answered the question of “how many” times you should practice, now the follow on question is “how to practice”. The key to the first few run throughs is to make sure that you are in a secure environment in which you won’t be interrupted. For most of us, this means a bathroom that has a lock on the door. The added advantage of practicing in a bathroom is that there is a large mirror in front of you and you can watch yourself as you talk. I can assure you that it’s hard to do, but you’ll eliminate unnecessary moves and twitches quickly when you practice this way. Beginning speakers often want to make their presentation “perfect”. This means that when they are practicing, they will speak until they screw-up, grit their teeth and then go back to the beginning and start over. This ensures that it’s going to be hours before they can make it through the entire speech. I recommend a different approach: start at the beginning and just run though the entire speech until you hit the end. Yes, there will be screw-ups; however, just keep on going. Doing it this way will allow you to get a feel for the speech as a whole and you may end up changing big parts of it – no need to perfect something that you’re going to be changing anyway.

Last point: get feedback. If the first time that you get feedback is when you present to your “real” audience than you’ve made a mistake. I can’t begin to tell you just how important it is to get feedback from real humans as you prepare a presentation. Words and ideas that seem to flow together for you may turn out to be confusing gibberish to them. Your cutting and trimming to make your speech fit in the allotted time may have caused you to skip over important definitions and concepts that are critical to your audience’s understanding of your main points. It does not matter if the feedback comes from family, friends, strangers, or co-workers, just make sure that you get it.

How many time did you rehearse your last presentation? Did you feel that this was enough times to get it down or do you wish that you had practiced more? Who do you use as an audience for your practice presentations? Do they give you valuable feedback? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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I Want To Be Just Like Steve Jobs

Friday, June 13th, 2008

portrait of steve jobs
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.

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