The Accidental Communicator

2 Tips For Making Any Audience Laugh

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 15 May 2012 09:00:26 +0000

With the right skills, speakers can make any audience laugh

How about if we talk about two tips that will maximize the importance of public speaking and make it easy for you to have your next audience rolling in the aisles during your next speech?

It’s All About Encounters

When looking for ways to introduce more humor into your next speech, don’t go out and buy a book of 1,001 jokes – that never works. Instead, understand what your audience really wants from you – stories. Those listening skills that your audience has are best used when they are waiting for you to tell them another story.

Not just any stories, what they really want are stories that include them. Your job as a speaker is to maximize the number of encounters that you have with your audience before you step in front of them and start to deliver your speech.

It doesn’t matter if you are speaking to your company’s finance department, a room full of college students, or at a church gathering, adding humorous stories that include your audience will make them laugh and allow you to connect with them on a very real level.

Remember that someone from your audience contacted you and asked you to deliver a speech to this audience. That was your first encounter with them. As you set up and organized the speech more interaction occurred. What you want to keep your ears open for are miscommunications, different words that are used, or even jargon that they use that nobody else knows what it means.

The best kind of these stories are when you make a mistake. When you misunderstand something that they’ve told you. Your audience will be “in” on the joke and they’ll get a big laugh out of it.

Can You Say Idiosyncrasies?

Once again, the best kind of humor that a speaker can use is humor that the audience will relate to. Forget stand-up jokes, instead make it more personal.

One great way to do this is to identify any idiosyncrasies that your audience may have. Are there things that they do instinctively that they may no longer even be aware that they do?

Great examples of areas where you may find an idiosyncrasy that your audience has in common with each other might be in what they eat, their exercise patterns, the kind of music that they listen to, or even the kind of clothes that they wear.

Once you’ve identified an idiosyncrasy, as a speaker you can poke fun at it. Your goal is not to do this in a hurtful way, but rather in a way that reminds the audience that they have the idiosyncrasy – they’ve probably forgotten that they have it. When you point it out to them, they’ll remember that they share this common feature and they’ll laugh at how you, an outsider, sees it.

What All Of This Means For You

One of the benefits of public speaking is that we have a powerful tool called humor that we can use to connect with our audience. However, it can be very difficult to use correctly. In order to be able to connect with your next audience, it would be very helpful if you knew how to make them laugh.

Although there are many different ways to do this, we’ve discussed two tips that work well. The first is to realize that your audience will love stories and so if you can include a humorous story about your interactions with one of them, they’ll love you for it. Additionally, every audience has some set of characteristics that defines it. Take the time to learn what this is and then poke fun at it and they’ll come along with you.

Done correctly, humor can be a powerful way for a speaker to build a bridge from themselves to their audience. Use the two tips that we’ve discussed to create ways to make your next speech even more humorous.

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

Question For You: What do you think is the best way to “test out” and humor that you are planning on using in a speech?

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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

How was your last speech received by your audience? If you talked with them an hour, a day, or even a week after you gave the speech no matter how good their listening skills were, do you think that they would remember what you had said? If the answer is no, then you’ve got some work to do. I have some good news for you, don’t worry about learning new presentation tips — fixing this problem might be as simple as adding some humor to your speech.

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Hey Speaker, Do You Really Want Your Body To Be Saying That?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 08 May 2012 09:00:03 +0000

Image Credit

Do you know what your body is telling your audience?

I’m sure that you’ve heard this before, but your audience is sizing you up once they lay eyes on you. Sure, we hope that they have good listening skills, but this may not matter. You’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of about 30 seconds or so to make a good first impression. It’s not just what you say, but even more importantly it’s what your body is saying to your audience that is going determine what they think about your speech. Sure seems like we should figure out what your body is telling them…

The Eyes Have It

In the world of fancy PowerPoint slides in which we all live, it can be easy to think that it’s all of the extras like presentation tips that we bring to a speech that really count. Guess what, it’s the old standbys that will allow you to really communicate with your audience – simple things like making eye contact with them.

It turns out that your eyes are the most expressive part of your face. You do need to be careful where in the world you are giving your speech. In the West, direct eye contact is expected. Looking away or avoiding direct eye contact will make you come across as being shifty.

However, in Asian cultures, the opposite is true. Lower eyes are a sign of respect and honor. Too much direct eye contact will not be appreciated.

In the West, you want to shoot for making enough direct eye contact with your audience. You should try for making direct eye contact for roughly 60% of your speech.

Become A Mirror To Your Audience

Your audience will tell you what they are currently thinking by the way that they position their bodies. This is a great help to you when you want to connect with them.

In order to start to build a bridge from the stage to your audience, what you are going to want to do is to “mirror” your audience. This occurs when you take on the body posture and language that your audience currently has. If they are crossing their arms, then you do the same. If they are slumping in their chairs, then you do the same.

Once you’ve connected with them by mirroring their body language, then you can lead them to where you want them to go. When you uncross your arms, they’ll uncross their arms. When you stand up straight, they’ll sit up straight. You are in control of your audience when this happens.

3 Tips For Improving Your Body Language

We all know about the importance of public speaking. Having powerful and effective body language is a skill that every public speaker needs. In order to get this skill, you need to know what you have to do.

To boost your body language skills from where they are to the next level, there are 3 things that you need to do as a speaker:

Watch People: You are going to be speaking to an audience that is already “somewhere”. You need to find out where that is and join them before you start to speak. Take a look at the body language that they are transmitting and then match them before you take the stage.

Learn From The Pros: We can always learn from the professionals who are paid the big bucks to speak. YouTube is littered with speeches from professional speakers. Additionally, you can switch on any of the nightly news programs and watch a true professional use their body language to deliver the daily news to an audience of millions.

Take A Step Back: In order to do a better job of using your body language to connect with your audience, you need to be able to understand what messages you are currently sending. Two ways to do this are to record yourself giving a speech and then play it back (yes, I know that this is hard to do; however, it really works) or practice giving your speech in front of a mirror.

What All Of This Means For You

In order to be an effective public speaker, you need to control not only the words that come tumbling out of your mouth, but also the story that your body is telling your audience. Being able to tell your story two different ways at the same time is one of the benefits of public speaking. This can be trickier than it sounds.

It turns out that with a bit of attention, you can control the message that your body is sending to your audience. To do this you need to be aware of your eyes, how your audience is positioning their bodies, and how others are seeing you.

Speakers who are able to combine their words and their body language so that they are both telling the same story can be very effective. Follow these suggestions and you’ll have your next audience eating out of your hand!

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

Question For You: If you are going to watch people in order to determine how to behave, who do you think you should watch – your host?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make your next audience laugh. Good luck! We all know that humor is a powerful tool in the hands of a speaker; however, we all also know that on top of all of the other presentation tips that you are trying to get right, it’s quite difficult to use humor correctly. How about if we talk about two tips that will maximize the importance of public speaking and make it easy for you to have your next audience rolling in the aisles during your next speech?

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Speakers Know That To Be Understand, You Need To Use Analogies

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:00:12 +0000

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An analogy is like a model – just a different way of talking about something

I don’t know about you, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself in a situation in which I needed to share some information with my audience that was too big, or too strange for them to be able to grasp it. What’s a speaker to do? I knew that if I just told them the fact or statistic that I had, there was no way that they would remember what I had said. I needed a better way – isn’t there some collection of presentation tips that would help in this situation? It turns out that there is a better way – use an analogy.

What Is An Analogy?

Sure we’ve all heard about analogies, but what are they really? It turns out that an analogy is a process by which meaning is transferred from one subject to another subject. This might sound complicated, but good news – it’s not!

It turns out that the human mind is actually very good at both understanding and remembering things like pictures and symbols. However, at the same time, we’re not all that good at remembering words or numbers. Considering the importance of public speaking, we need to find a solution to this problem.

What this means for you as a speaker is that when you are giving a speech, all of those words that you are saying are more than likely not going to stick in your audience’s mind no matter how good their listening skills are. This problem becomes an even bigger deal when your speech contains new ideas that your audience has not encountered before or you introduce very large numbers that your audience will have difficulty grasping.

It should be pretty clear that we speakers can’t just throw our new ideas or big numbers out there and hope that our audience will write them down and remember them forever. Instead, since we now know that analogies are the way to go, it sure looks like we need to find a way to work analogies into our next speech.

How To Use Analogies To Make Your Point

Some of the best speakers out there use a lot of analogies when they give a speech. What happens when they do this is that their audiences “get” what they are saying and everyone leaves the speech with a head full of images that will stay with them long after the speech is over.

You need to start to use analogies when you give your next speech. By doing so you will be able to communicate your concepts in less time and create both a better understanding and a longer retention of what you said.

One of the classic areas that we see analogies being used all the time is when it comes to trying to communicate to an audience how large a computer storage system is. It turns out that the complete printed works of Shakespeare would occupy 5 megabytes and the entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress would occupy 10 terabytes of computer storage.

If we needed to create analogies to show how large these analytical sizes are, then we could tell our audience that the complete printed works of Shakespeare could be stored in about 0.036 inches of shelf space. The 10 terabytes that the U.S. Library of Congress would require to store would take up 10,000 yards of shelf space.

What All Of This Means To You

The role of any speaker is to communicate new ideas and information to your audience. Often this requires us to share a fact or statistic that is so hard to imagine, our audience is not going to be able to grasp it.

It’s our job as public speakers to find a way to connect with our audience — this is one of the benefits of public speaking. This means that we need to make sure that they’ll remember what we say. In order to get complicated ideas to stick with our audience, we can use analogies that allow us to transform complex concepts into memorable pictures that our audience will be able to remember for a long time after we’re done speaking.

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

Question For You: Do you think that it’s possible to use too many analogies in a speech? How many should you limit yourself to in a 30 minute speech?

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Does Your Audience Like The Way That You Move Speaker?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:00:41 +0000

Image Credit

You don't need to dance while you are speaking, but you do need to move

This giving a speech thing is hard to do! Think of all of the various things that you need to do at the same time: remember the words that you want to say, keep eye contact with your audience, keep your hands at your sides, maximize your audience’s listening skills, etc. Oh yeah, there’s one more thing – you need to remember to dance…

Why Moving Your Body While Speaking Is So Important

When it comes to moving your body, today’s speakers get a lot of mixed messages from the so-called experts. On one hand, since new speakers tend to be nervous and move around way too much, they are often told to find a spot and to then plant their feet there and not to move.

This is a good way to solve the problem. However, it just creates another problem: as a speaker you suddenly become quite boring. That’s right I said the “B” word – boring. You need to remember that in addition to the words that you are saying, your body has a language of its own and it’s trying to tell its own story – using body language. By not moving, you are muzzling this conversation with your audience.

Additionally, when you are in front of an audience giving a speech, despite the importance of public speaking, you are not one of them. You are removed from them. In order to be a successful speaker you need to find a way to break down the wall that exists between you and your audience. The good news is that you already know how to do this – use your body language.

How To Effectively Move Your Body While Giving A Speech

Knowing that you need to move your body in order to support the words that you are saying is an important first step. The next step is to discover exactly how to go about doing this.

The first thing that you need to do is to get closer to your audience. If you stand away from them for your entire speech, then you will be seen as being remote and distant. Connect with them by stepping in to the audience for at least part of your speech or, if you are on a stage, step down into the audience for a portion of your speech.

Before you start your speech, you are going to want to pick out three different spots where you’ll stand during your speech. The reason for doing this is that it will allow you to customize the content that you deliver from each position.

You’ll use the first position to deliver the bulk of your presentation. Often times during your speech, you’ll make a point and then you’ll explore alternatives. Use your second position as the place that you’ll stand when you are off on these side tangents. Move back into your primary position when you start your mainstream discussion once again.

Finally, your third position will be reserved for those times during your speech that you want to get closer to your audience. Use this position to walk out into your audience and to become closer to them.

What All Of This Means For You

On top of everything else that you need to do as a speaker, forget presentation tips — you also have to learn to use your body in a way that will support the words that you are saying. In other words, you need to learn to dance while you give a speech in order for your audience to get the full benefits of public speaking.

The one thing that you don’t want to do is to just plant your feet and not move. This might have been good advice when you were just starting out, but it no longer works. You need to come up with ways to let your body language talk to your audience.

Getting closer to your audience is a great way to do this. Walking out in to the audience allows you to become one with them. Picking three different spots to use while you are delivering your speech is another way to accomplish this.

Body language is a powerful communication tool that speakers can use to truly connect with their audience. You need to take the time before you give your next speech to come up with ways that you can use this tool to make an impact and change lives!

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

Question For You: Do you think that it is possible to use too much body language when delivering a speech?

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What Shakespeare Can Teach Today’s Public Speakers

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:00:47 +0000

Image Credit

If you can learn to speak like Shakespeare's characters, then you'll have won over your audience

Let’s pretend for just a moment that you were a public speaker who lived back in Shakespeare’s time (1564 – 1616). Forget all of those presentation tips that you’ve learned because all of your PowerPoint slides are now gone along with your fancy audio mic systems, and your embedded YouTube videos. It’s just you up there. What’s going to allow you to connect with your audience using their just their listening skills? All that you have working for you is your voice – you’re going to have to really learn how to use it.

Say Hello To Cicely Berry

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could work with a voice coach who could teach you how to get the most out of your voice? What would make that even better would be if you could work with Cicely Berry. She’s been the voice director for the Royal Shakespeare Company for the past 42 years. Yes, you read that correctly – the past 42 years.

What she does better than anyone else is to work with actors in order to help them to meld their voices with the voices of the characters in Shakespeare’s plays. No small feat considering that these plays were originally written for people who lived over 400 years ago!

Secrets To Developing Your Shakespeare Voice

Although you and I might not be earning a living putting on “Romeo and Juliet” each evening, we can still learn a great deal from what Cicely has to teach us. The more that we can meld with our words, the more powerful our message is going to be for our audience.

The first thing that Ms. Berry points out is that back in Shakespeare’s day the importance of public speaking was critical: only a very small percentage of the audience had the ability to read. This meant that their vocabulary might not be all that large. When the actors delivered their lines on stage, much of the audience would get the message of what was being said as much from the rhyme and the sound of the words as the words themselves.

Next, Ms. Berry works with the actors in order to teach them how to move and speak at the same time. We could all learn a thing or two about how to do this better. Cicely says that your ability to move while you are speaking allows you to underscore the flow of your words and add both sound and muscularity to what you are saying. She points out that taken together, there is a rhythm to all of this that helps to communicate the meaning of what you are trying to get across.

How we say our words has a lot to do with how our audience hears them. Ms. Berry works with her actors in order to get them to have a good resonance in their chest. By doing this, they can become more expressive and add variety to their voice.

Cicely’s final piece of advice for her actors is for them to truly study the lines that they are going to be delivering to their audience. She wants them to understand how fast to say them. Also, she wants them to take the time to learn how much to stress them. She realizes that this information isn’t written down like it is for a piece of music, instead we as speakers need to discover it for ourselves.

What All Of This Means For You

Thankfully we don’t live back in Shakespeare’s time; however, that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn a thing or two from those days. Cicely Berry has been working as the voice coach for the Royal Shakespeare Company for the past 42 years and she knows a thing or two about the benefits of public speaking and how to use your voice.

Her goal is to get speakers (actors in her case) to think out the rhythm of what they are going to be saying. She also wants to make sure that speakers understand how to move while they are speaking and to have the words work with the movements.

Instead of just standing at the front of the room during your next speech, learn from Cicely and use your voice to become your speech. By doing this you’ll draw your audience into your speech and you’ll change their lives forever.

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

Question For You: How important is it to work your voice into your physical movements as you deliver a speech?

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See What I Mean? How Speakers Can Use Eye Contact To Connect

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:00:22 +0000

Image Credit

If your eyes are the window to your soul, then let your audience see your soul!

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

Your Eyes: A User’s Guide

Forget all of those presentation tips that everyone’s been telling you, perhaps we should start this discussion with a quick list of what you should NOT be doing with your eyes when you are delivering a speech. The first thing is that you shouldn’t be looking at either the floor or the ceiling. When you’re doing this it’s pretty clear that you are trying to avoid looking at the audience.

So if that’s what you’re not supposed to be doing with your eyes, what should you be doing? It turns out that as speakers, we really speak to our audience through our eyes. This means that you need to pick a person out of your audience and make eye contact with them just as you are getting ready to say something.

As with everything, there is a trick here. If you make eye contact with anyone in your audience for too long, then they are going to start to feel as though you are staring at them and that will end up making them feel uncomfortable.

Instead, make eye contact with a member of your audience for between 3-5 seconds and then move on and make eye contact with someone else. This way you’ll be able to make a great deal of your audience feel as though you are talking directly to them. A more personal speech will be better received by your audience.

What NOT To Do With Your Eyes

Hopefully all of this advice about what to do with your eyes the next time you give a speech is clear to you. However, at the same time I have to warn you about a hidden danger.

In any audience, there will be people who are always smiling. I’m not sure if they are just having a great day or if this is the way that they always are. However, it turns out that they can be a significant distraction for you while you are giving your speech.

What happens is that we are naturally drawn to people who smile at us. This means that if you aren’t careful, you could spend your entire speech just making eye contact with the limited number of people in your audience who are always smiling at you.

Clearly you’ll want to connect with as many of the people in your audience as possible. This means that you need to be aware of the “smiling audience member” trap and take great care to not spend all of your time looking at them.

What All Of This Means For You

As the poets said, our eyes are the window to our souls. When you are giving a speech your eyes are one more way that you can connect with your audience and boost the benefits of public speaking.

Knowing what to do with your eyes is the first step in becoming a better speaker. Taking the time to focus one person in your audience at a time will allow you to create a bond with your audience. Make sure that you don’t spend all of your time looking at just the people who are smiling at you – you need to look at everyone.

The message that you are delivering in your speech is important. In order to make sure that your audience stays with you and is able to be affected by your words, use your eyes. You just might be surprised with what you see!

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

Question For You: How can you prevent yourself from appearing to be constantly twisting your head back and forth looking at different people?

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

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 09:00:10 +0000

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

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

It All Starts With Alignment

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

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

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

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

Don’t Let Your Words Trip Your Message Up

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

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

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

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

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

What All Of This Means For You

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

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

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

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

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Let’s Talk About Your Voice How’s that voice of yours doing? When you give a...

Let’s Talk About Your Voice

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 09:00:27 +0000

Image Credit

Having a big mouth does not mean that you have a great voice…

How’s that voice of yours doing? When you give a speech, how does your audience react? If they aren’t hanging on your every word, do you think that your voice could be having something to do with it?

Beware The Monotone

Nobody sets out to deliver a speech in a monotone. However, all too often many of us end up doing this. The key is to understand why this happens.

When you are giving a speech, there is a lot going on up there. Specifically, you are working to keep it all together as you try to do multiple things at the same time. Let’s think about what you’ve been asked to do: keep your hands at your sides, make good eye contact, speak clearly, connect with your audience, smile, etc. Oh, and you also need to remember what you’re going to say next.

What happens when we are forced to do all of these things at the same time is that we start to try to put as many of these tasks on autopilot as possible. Unfortunately, the vocal variety that can make our voice interesting to our audience is one thing that we all too often push off to the side.

The end result is that we end up speaking in a monotone. We start out speaking at one level and at a given pitch and then we don’t vary it for the entire speech. Quickly our audience finds it hard to pay attention to what we’re saying because everything starts to sound the same. Clearly this is a problem that we need to do something about.

What You Can Do Without Going Crazy

I have seen speakers solve this monotone problem by going crazy. You’ve probably seen something similar. This happens when a speaker works so hard to vary their voice that we find ourselves paying more attention to how their voice currently sounds instead of focusing on what they are saying.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It turns out that all speakers have three different ways that they can avoid the dreaded monotone without coming across as a circus performer.

During your next speech with a little bit of thought you can consciously make changes to your volume, tone, and pitch of your voice. Although these may seem like small changes to you, by making changes to the way that your voice sounds you’ll be able to grab and hold your audience’s attention.

Volume is the simplest tool that a speaker has. Most of us think that we need to speak louder if we want our audience to pay attention to us. It turns out that many times the opposite is true – the softer you speak the more your audience will work to pay attention to what you are saying.

Pitch and tone are related. Pitch has to do with the frequency that we speak at and we use tone to emphasize specific words. Raising your pitch when you are telling your audience about something that is exciting and lowering it when you want to convey a sense of an impending event will keep them listening to find out what is going to happen.

What All Of This Means For You

As speakers, our voice is the one tool that we have that can make the greatest impact on our audience. The problem is that most of us have never been trained to use it correctly.

All too often speakers focus too much on what they are going to be saying and don’t spend enough time worrying about how they are going to be saying it. When this happens, we can slide into speaking in a monotone and that’s never a good thing for us or for our audience.

Taking the time to learn how to introduce variety into our voice can pay rich dividends for our audience. Simple changes such as varying our volume and our rate of speaking can cause our audience to wake up and to start paying attention to what we’re saying.

Our voice is our greatest speaking tool. As speakers we have a responsibility to take the time to understand how to use it. Finding ways to use our voice to avoid speaking in a monotone and help get our message across to our audience even more effectively is what makes great speakers great!

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

Question For You: Do you think that it is possible to have too much variety in your voice when you give a speech?

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What Makes A Great Speech Great

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:00:10 +0000

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John F. Kennedy was truly a great speaker

Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela – we all recognize the names. I believe that we can all pretty much agree that each of these famous individuals were fantastic speakers who helped all of us to improve our listening skills because we really wanted to hear what they had to say. But the real question is – why? What did they know about speaking that we need to learn? It turns out that there are two traits that all great speeches share.

Big Connections

All of the great speeches aren’t based on simple presentation tips – they involve big ideas. Ideas that are much bigger than the audience members that the ideas are being shared with. No small goals will do the trick here, we’ve got to think big! These are the speeches that show the importance of public speaking.

The speaker has two goals. First, they need to carefully lay out the big idea. There can’t be any fuzzy parts to this – everyone in the audience needs to feel as though they clearly understand what the speaker wants to accomplish.

Next, the speaker needs to find a way to connect each audience member to the big idea. He needs to find a way to transform the idea from being just any old idea into their idea – an idea that is owned by the audience. It’s very important that this be done in a way that makes the audience member believe that they have selected the idea themselves – they’ll be more committed to it this way.

K.I.S.S.

A lot of the challenges that are out there are big complex things. It can be all too easy for us as speakers to create complex solutions that require a lot of details in order to be accurately communicated to others.

However, if we do this, then we’ll lose our audience. Instead, we need to find a way to get our idea across simply – simple words, simple concepts. This can take a lot longer to come up with when you are writing your speech, but trust me – the results will make it well worth the effort!

What All Of This Means For You

We may never have the opportunity to move the hearts and minds of billions of people like Gandhi did. We also may never have an opportunity to rally a nation to a single purpose like John F. Kennedy did. However, as speakers we have an obligation to try to connect with our audiences like they did.

In order to accomplish this, our speeches need to share two traits with those of the most famous speeches. This means that they need to connect our audiences to an idea or purpose that is much larger than they are. Our speeches also have to be very simple – our audience needs to be able to relate to our words.

Taking the time to learn from the great speakers is what every speaker should do. It turns out that all of the great speeches share the same characteristics — that’s one of the benefits of public speaking. If we simply take the time to make our speeches more like the great speeches, then we’ll be that much closer to our ultimate goal – becoming unforgettable.

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

Question For You: Where do you think the big concept should come from – do you make it up or should somebody provide it to you?

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The Value Of Time – What A Public Speaker Needs To Know

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 09:00:48 +0000

Everyone's time is valuable…

How long should your next speech be? Or maybe the more important question is, how long is too long? When we are asked to give a speech, there is an implied amount of time that we are being asked to fill. We are generally part of a bigger program and this is why time is so important: you need to know how to use your time in the right way…

How You See Time

I speak from experience when I say that how I see time as a speaker is probably very different from how the event planner that has set up my speaking opportunity sees it. We all know about the importance of public speaking and to do my part I know that I have a specific amount of information that I want to communicate to my audience. I’m going to accomplish that in my speech. The trick is to figure out how much time I’ll have in which to do it!

Often times I find myself as part of a program of speakers. This means that time has all of sudden become even more important. Not only do I need to be careful and use up only the time that has been allocated to me, but my fellow speakers had better do the same.

This means that I always take the time to ask how long I’m going to have to give my speech. Trust me, this information is more important than any presentation tips that you might be given. I’m also careful to ask once again when I arrive where I’ll be giving the speech. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that my speaking time has shrunk due to issues that have popped up.

Keep in mind that when you are actually speaking, there is a trick to wining the favor of your audience. In order to win the eternal gratitude of your audience, all you have to do is to finish just a little bit early. Keep in mind that they’ll be upset with you if you screw up and finish just a little bit late!

How They See Time

The person who invited you to give a speech sees time completely differently than you do. Whereas you just see the time that has been allocated to your speech, they see the time that the event is going to be taking up as a whole. Your speech is just a small part of something much larger.

This means that when you find yourself playing the role of event planner, you need to change how you view time. As you arrange for speakers to participate in your event, you need to make sure that you clearly communicate to them how long you want them to talk for. Don’t allow there to be any confusion!

Speakers are notoriously fickle when it comes to making commitments and then following through. As an event organizer, you are going to need to make sure that you reach out and confirm their participation in your event roughly a week before you need to have them show up.

Speakers struggle to keep track of time while they are speaking. This means that as the event planner you are going to be in charge of making sure that they know how much time they’ve used up. This can be done via hand signals or the holding up of signs from the back of the room. Make sure that they know how much time they have before they have to wrap things up.

Finally, as the event organizer you are the ultimate decider of when a presentation is over. If a speaker is not wrapping up and it’s time to move on to the next presenter, then you’re going to have to step in (yes, I know that it’s rude) and thank the speaker and then tell everyone that it’s time for the next speaker to take the stage.

What All Of This Means For You

No matter what role you are playing in your next speaking event, speaker or planner, you need to make sure that you have a firm grasp of time. If you don’t make the effort to control time, then you’ll be doing your audience a great disservice – no matter how good their listening skills are.

As a speaker it is your job to maximize the benefits of public speaking. To do this, you need to find out how much time has been allocated for your speech. If no time limit has been set, then you need to both set one and stick to it. As a planner you need to tell each speaker how much time they have to deliver their speech. You then need to manage each speech and ensure that the speaker wraps things up on time.

Time is the most precious thing that both a speaker and an audience have. When you give a speech or arrange for speeches to be given, you need to take the time to make sure that only the time that has been allocated will be used. Remember, if you can end things early, your audience will love you forever!

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

Question For You: What’s the maximum amount of time one speaker should be allocated to talk during a full day program?

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