Archive for the ‘speech topics’ Category

4 Things That You Should Never Talk About

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
Image Credit There Are Some Lines That Speakers Just Shouldn't Cross

There Are Some Lines That Speakers Just Shouldn't Cross

The next time that you are given an opportunity to create and deliver a speech, do me a favor and stop, put your pencil done before you start to write. I can just imagine what’s running through your mind: the magic words that will come spilling out of your mouth and will entertain and entrance your audience. Umm, unless of course they don’t. If you talk about the wrong things, then your speech will go nowhere quickly. Maybe we should have a chat about what you shouldn’t be talking about…

The Big Three

In every speaker’s life, hopefully there is someone who takes them aside early on and tells them the three topics that are absolutely off limits: race, religion, and sexuality. Yeah, yeah – if you are talking on one of these topics, then it’s ok, but if you’re not, then you need to stay far, far away.

The reason for this is because each of these topics are polarizing flash points that will instantly divide your audience. Some will agree with what you say, some won’t and you will have lost your audience.

Too Much Personal Info

As long as we are talking about things that you shouldn’t be talking about, let’s make sure that you know that sharing is good, but too much sharing is bad. I’m not even talking about the embarrassing personal stuff, instead I’m talking about the boring details of each of our lives.

I’m sure that we all have hobbies and personality quirks that we may find interesting or endearing. However, they aren’t. This is why you always want to test your speeches with friends who will be honest with you. If that personal story just isn’t doing it, then it needs to go away before you hurt an audience with it.

Personal Success Stories

So you saved a busload of schoolchildren from a pack of rampaging wild elephants. Yawn. Look, if you’ve done something impressive, that’s pretty cool. However, do you really think that you can tell me about it without coming across as someone who is bragging?

It takes a very careful skill for a speaker to share a story of personal success with an audience in the right way. You have to have a reason for telling the story. That reason has to have something to do with your audience. You had better be telling them how they can have the same type of success that you had or the story will just end up making your audience feel inadequate.

Book Reports

Any time that we have a speech to give that includes describing a sequence of events, such as a trip that we took, how something is manufactured, etc., we run the risk of delivering a book report that nobody wants to hear. You would be amazed at how many times I’ve had to sit though speeches that started out with “I’d now like to tell you about the 17 steps that we had to go through to solve this problem.”

Even if something took 17 steps to do, you don’t have to cover them all in your speech. Take some mercy on your audience and trim it down to two or three steps and tell them to talk to you to get more details if they want them. You must always think about how your speech is going to sound to your audience before you deliver it.

Bad Objects

I like a visual aid just as much as the next speaker, but sometimes they can work against you. Depending on the size of your room, a visual aid can be either too big and overshadow you or too small and not visible to your audience.

Keep in mind that you are the star of your speech – nothing else is. This means that if you choose to use something else that will allow your audience to take their eyes off of you, then it had better be the right object for the right audience.

What All Of This Means For You

As speakers we like to focus on what we can include in our next speech. However, it might be just as important to spend some time worrying about what we should not be putting into that speech.

The obvious topics that shouldn’t be included include race, religion, and sexuality. However, boring personal habits, overblown success stories, book reports, and poorly selected visual aids can also bring your next speech down.

The key to avoiding including things that will take away from your message is to put yourself in the place of your audience. If you can create a speech that has only good content and no bad content, then you will have created a speech that everyone is going to want to hear.

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

Question For You: Did I leave anything off of my list? What other topics should a speaker never include in their speech?

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10 Tips For Becoming A Public Speaker Who Can Talk About Money

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
It Can Be Hard To Do A Good Job Talking About Money

It Can Be Hard To Do A Good Job Talking About Money

Money – it’s a love / hate thing. We all would like to have lots of the stuff; however, most people (us included) would probably rather lose a finger than have to sit though yet another incredibly boring presentation about the green stuff. Why is this? It’s actually pretty easy to understand what’s wrong with most presentations about money: it is presented in a boring way, the PowerPoint slides that are used are crammed with numbers that are way too small for any human to be able to read, and the presenter often uses vocabulary that we don’t understand. What can be done to fix this?

We already know that one of the most effective ways to deliver a presentation that will “stick” with your audience is to tell them a compelling story. A presentation about money should be no different – it’s the story that you tell that will get your point across. Keeping that in mind, here are some tips that will make your next presentation on money unforgettable:

  1. K.I.S.S: No, not the rock group, but rather Keep It Simple Stupid. In other words, whenever you talk about money there can be the tendency to say too much. DON’T DO IT! Instead, before you create your speech write out a single sentence that contains the message that you want your audience to walk away with. Then, when you are describing some financial tool re-read this sentence and determine if what you are talking about supports it. If not, then drop it and move on.
  2. Come Early, Leave Late: This is just a basic speaker tip; however, it’s even more important when you are talking about money. Making sure that you don’t have to worry about your equipment or the room gives you more time to focus on what you are going to be saying. Not having to run out at the end means that you can provide more detail for those who really want it.
  3. Bring A Partner To Help – Mr. Handout: Since much of what you may be talking about can be (a) complex and (b) detailed, this is one speech that you do want to provide a handout for. However, don’t do what too many speakers do and just give everyone a copy of your slides. Instead, create a special handout that provides detailed information about things that you didn’t have time to cover.
  4. Careful About Colors: Since so much of what is shown in any presentation on money is charts, you need to carefully check your colors. Stay away from the common color-blindness colors and make sure that all of your text is readable from the back of the room.
  5. Shut Her Down When You Don’t Need Her: All too often an audience in a talk about money can start to pay more attention to the slides than the speaker. One way to put a stop to this is to either turn off the projector every so often or, even better yet, put a completely black slide into your deck when you want all eyes on  you. It’s startling and it works really well.
  6. Do The Dark / Light Thing: Making your PowerPoint slides readable is critical. One way to help this happen is to make sure that the contrast between your slides’ background color and the foreground colors is very distinct. For a large room, I’ve found that making your slide background dark while making your text and drawings light colored makes everything readable even from the back of the room.
  7. Turn Off The Hollywood Effects: PowerPoint and other presentation applications allow you to go wild on how one slide goes away and the next one shows up – transitions. Here’s a suggestion : don’t. Either pick one transition and use it throughout your presentation or only vary the transition when you really want to draw attention to the new slide. Otherwise you risk training your audience to look forward to your next transition and not what you are saying.
  8. Don’t Create A Fighter Pilot Eye Exam: I can’t tell you just how important this one is – make sure that you keep your font selections to a minimum and make sure that all text is large enough to be read. I like to choose “sans serf” fonts because they don’t have the loopy stuff and are generally easier to read. I’ve also found that the 18 pt font size is the smallest that you want to use, otherwise it just gets too hard to read.
  9. Remember What A Picture Is Worth: Instead of trying to overwhelm your audience with words that describe technical financial terms, instead try to use more charts and graphs. Displaying a chart and then talking about it gives your audience time to apply your words to real situations and promotes understanding and retention.
  10. Remember That Only 5 lbs. Will Fit In A 5 lbs. Bag: Avoid the #1 sin of public speakers who talk about money – putting too much information on a single slide. We can fall in love with the way that we describe something and we like to add more and more details to it. However, take a moment and think about your poor audience. Try to present just the bare minimum amount of information that they need on each slide.

By following these simple tips you can create a powerful presentation that makes an impression on your audience and leaves them with the thoughts and ideas that you want them to have.

Have you ever given a presentation that talked about money? How did it turn out – was it well received or did your audience go to sleep after your second slide? What made your presentation work / not work? What did you think about the last financial presentation that you went to – did the speaker follow these tips or did he/she make you want to leave? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Group Meetings: More Gain, Less Pain

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

Four more suggestions on how to make technical team meetings more effective

We’ve talked about the fact that group meetings, especially for technical teams, can be a large expense and a big waste of time if not set up and run correctly. These are great opportunities to communicate with the entire team and you really don’t want to blow it. If you get picked to set one of these meetings up, I’ve got just a few more suggestions on how to make the meeting memorable not a memorial.

  1. Bridge Virtual and Real Worlds: all adults learn differently and they don’t stop doing this just because there’s a large group meeting going on. Blogs, podcasts, wikis all play a role in day-to-day life and have become the way that some team members prefer to learn. Don’t fight this, instead embrace it. If you don’t have time for everyone associated with a project to present their part of it, why not record a podcast and make it available to attendees to download. This way you can reduce the amount of time spent on that topic and yet still provide complete coverage. Use the tools to enhance the meeting experience.

  2. So What Did You Think About That? Providing the audience with an opportunity to comment on speakers and sessions is the key to completing the circle. Especially with Gen-X & Gen-Y’ers there is a need to be able to provide feedback in order to feel as though their participation really counted for something. This also helps shape the next meeting by telling the organizer what worked and what just flat out bombed.
  3. Context Gives Meaning To Content: Identify what you want the attendees to get out of attending the meeting. Why are they coming and what do you want them to be able to do when they leave? With this knowledge you can plan the day’s events to start everyone out in the same place and then gradually lead them to where you want to get them too. This sure beats just throwing together a bunch of speakers to fill a day.
  4. Is This Going To Be Graded? How the meeting is viewed after it is all over will be the summation of how each individual speaker was viewed. You really want to get the audience’s opinion of each speaker; however, having one of those one-size-fits-all speaker evaluation forms never really seems to provide any useful feedback. Instead, create a set of different evaluation forms based on the presenter’s content – technical, motivational, strategic, etc. This way you can truly learn who made a difference with your audience.

There you have it – everything that I currently know about putting on a good team meeting. I’m sure that there is more to it than I have been able to share here, so let me know what I missed. Have you ever had to run or help out running one of these big team meetings? How did it go – can you remember anything that was discussed and, perhaps more importantly, did the meeting cause any positive changes? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Group Meetings: Group Hug or Group Mug(ging)?

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

IT group meetings can either be done well or very, very badly

Every technical organization seems to have a big annual meeting of some sort. The last one of these that I attended was put on by an Executive Director at a firm who liked to do these twice a year. He would fly in all of his direct reports and have them spend 30 minutes each talking about what their team had accomplished. Some awards were given out, the Executive Director spoke some words of encouragement and then his vice president who had also flown in for the meeting wrapped things up with a motivational talk. This took the better part of a full day and for the life of me, an hour after the meeting was over I could have told you how many emails I had waiting for me once I got back to the office, but not what was discussed.

The motivation for these meetings can be quite different from group to group or even from year to year; however, each meeting seems to be painfully familiar. Although the scope of the meeting often depends on the size of the company. Now that we’ve got the inner game of public speaking taken care of, let’s talk about the outer game of how to throw a BIG meeting – those are often the biggest communications disasters.

What’s the purpose of these meetings? Often the firm has so many different products / projects / programs that they decide that a big meeting is just the way to ensure that everyone knows what’s going on at the company. These meetings are, on the surface, quite expensive to put on, and if you take an even closer look they turn out to be really, really expensive once you take into consideration the lost productivity that they cause. They could be a good use of time; however, here are a few reasons why they generally miss the mark:

  1. Who You Talking To? Most of these technical organization meetings are planned and put on by the same set of non-technical folks (the people who drew the short straws). What this means is that the topics that are covered and the sequence in which they are covered tends to be the same from meeting to meeting – why mess with success? How can you possibly expect an audience to “stay in the moment” for these types of presentations? What makes a great meeting is when controversial topics are included. Yes, this can be dangerous but that’s exactly why people will remember them.

  2. My Way Or The Highway. Who is invited to do what and how they are permitted to do it can be a real sticking point at these meetings. If every speaker is required to have 25 slides and to talk for 30 minutes and participate in one big panel session at the end, then congratulations – everyone is going to look the same and be forgotten just as quickly. If instead, each presenter is encouraged to do what they need to do in order to get their message across, then at least you’ll have some variety. Sure, there will still be some with 25 slides and 30 minute presentations; however, you’ll also have others that just might have their message stick.
  3. You’re So Popular To Me. Just because someone who is presenting during one of these meetings is popular, doesn’t mean that anyone is learning anything. I have seen plenty of presentations where a well-liked manager delivers a presentation to a packed house. However, afterwords I realized that he/she really hadn’t said anything. What a waste of time! Making sure that everyone has a point to their presentation is a key preparation step.
  4. Complex Meetings Need Simple Solutions. The more complicated the subject matter, the more simple it must be for the audience to attend and to understand what is being discussed. If the discussion requires detailed charts or process flows, then make sure that handouts are available and that the slides only show a subset of the information – no need to remind your audience that they aren’t getting any younger by making them squint at tiny fonts on a screen all the way up at the front of the room. Likewise, if everyone is going to be in one room listening to one speaker who is talking about a complex subject, make sure that everyone can see the speaker – ensure that there is a raised platform. This will go a long way to help keep their interest.
  5. Watch Those Awards. The one part of a meeting like this that can kill the whole deal is the awards show. This introduces two problems: first, they are boring and second, if I’m not winning an award then I’ll start to resent the person who is. Keep in mind what you are trying to achieve with the whole meeting and make sure that an awards show fits. If it does, then make it like a hotel room tryst – quick, pleasant, and forgotten once its done.

There are more communications keys that you need to keep in mind when planning a large meeting like this; however, we’ll cover those next time.

Have you ever had to plan one of these meetings? How did it turn out – huge success or crashing bore? Did you get picked to do it again or did someone else get lucky? Leave me a comment and tell me about your experiences.

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