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It Would Hurt, But This Is One Way To Make Your Ideas "Stick"…

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”?

Make Your Audience Work For Your Information

When you get asked to deliver a speech, what do you think the person who is making the request is really asking you to do? I’d be willing to bet that what flashed into your mind was a mental image of you standing up in front of a bunch of people talking at them.

It turns out that that mental image, although very common among speakers, is dead wrong. The person who is asking you to give a speech is really asking you to change the audience that you’ll be speaking to. How you make that happen is up to you and more often than not we do stand up and talk to them in order to make a change happen.

In fact, most of the presentation tips that we talk about deal with how to do a good job of this standing-and-talking stuff. The problem with doing this is that the ability of your message to make an impact now depends solely on your audience’s listening skills.

I’ve got a suggestion for you: make your audience work for the information that you’re going to share with them. One of the benefits of public speaking is that there’s nothing that says that our audience can’t use words or movement in addition to their ears in order to learn what we have to teach them.

Think about the next speech that you are going to give. What could you do that would get your audience to think about what you are telling them, answer questions that you ask them, or even get up and move in order to demonstrate that they understand what you are saying? All of these are powerful ways to get your message to stick.

Make It All New

The worst thing that you can do as a speaker is to be boring – your audience will never remember what you said if you bore them. The ultimate presentation tip is to never tell your audience something that they’ve already heard.

A good example of this came from a speech I gave awhile ago. I was talking about emails and when I was researching email statistics, I ran across one that said that there are over 100 million emails sent every day. That’s an ok statistic, but we all have heard that one before – lots of email gets sent every day.

The next statistic that I ran across said that 35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone. Now that was something that I didn’t know (and it explains why that spam stuff works!)

If you find new and different things to share with your audiences, then you’ll be able to keep their attention because they will always be learning as you are talking. This is another way to make sure that your message sticks!

What All Of This Means For You

As long as you are going to go to the effort to both prepare and give a speech, you may as well make sure that what you say sticks with your audience long after you’re done speaking. In order to make this happen, you are going to have to adjust the way that you deliver your speech.

One way to do this is to involve your audience in your speech. Don’t allow them to just sit there and listen to you. Instead, make them answer questions that you ask them, make them stand up and take actions based on what you are saying. All of these things will help to make your message stick.

In addition, as you are putting your speech together, take the time to locate and include new information. If you use the same tired facts and stats that your audience has heard before, then what you say will go in one ear and out the other. Instead, present new and interesting information that your audience has never heard before and then what you say will stick with them long after your speech is done.

- 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 could make your audience stand up during a 60 minute 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

When you go to see a movie, what’s the first thing that you always see? The answer is, of course, trailers! I must confess that there have been movies that I’ve gone to in the past in which the trailers were the best part of the whole movie viewing experience! What’s interesting about these trailers is that they have been designed with one thing in mind: to get you to come back and see the movie that they are advertising. Maybe we can learn something from trailers that we can use in our next speech.

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2. Customized Presentations: How To Make ‘Em Let’s say that you were going to go out and...
3. Public Speakers Need To Find Ways To Make Their Words Stick! You’ve got great ideas trapped in you. You know the...

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If You Aren't Acting While You Are Speaking, Then Sit Down

When I come to hear you speak, no matter if it’s at a departmental project status report or at a local restaurant or even if it was at a convention, the worst thing that you can do is to waste my time. What are you going to do about this?

Why So Many Speakers Suck

Let’s be frank here – most speakers that you listen to really aren’t that good. In fact, the ones that we think are good may not really be all that good – they may just be better than the ones who are really bad! What’s going on here? It’s actually pretty simple, most speakers are boring. Who wants to listen to that?

All too often a speaker will focus exclusively on what they are going to be saying and spend little or no time thinking about how they are going to say it.

If you need an analogy to clear things up, this would be like a chef who worries about what ingredients go into a meal without spending any time thinking about how to actually cook the thing. Sure he’ll be able to make something, but it’s not going to taste very good.

Fixing The Problem Of Your Boring Speeches

You are in a rut. You’ve found a particular speaking style that you believe suits you (that means that it worked once and you’ve stuck with it ever since) and you have become what we all fear the most – a boring speaker. How are we going to fix this problem?

You are going to have to take action. You are going to have to start to experiment with the unknown. You are going to have to step into the world of theater.

Birgit Starmanns has spent time in both the world of speaking as well as the world of theater. She points out that actors spend their time working hard to allow the audience to feel what the actor is currently feeling. In order to make this happen they use six tools:

• Quotes: quotes are a powerful way to invite someone else into your speech. All too often speakers just stick any old quote into their speech in order to give themselves credibility – don’t do that. Instead, make sure any person that you invite into your speech by using their quote helps to move your speech along and gives you more creditability with your audience.

• Roles: It’s just you up there and that can get pretty boring for your audience. How about if you stop being you for a bit and turn into someone else? You need to make it very clear to your audience that you are doing this, otherwise they are going to think that you’ve all of a sudden lost it. I’ve used this during internal status reports in order to bring the voice of other departments (e.g. finance) into my presentation.

• Props: This is one of the simplest things to use, and yet all too few speakers take the time to think about what props would help them get their point across. In the past during presentations to sales teams, I’ve used marketing brochures from their competitors that they instantly recognized in order to drive a point home.

• Staging: I hate it when a presenter acts like a block of stone and stands in one place during an entire presentation. You’ve got the entire stage / front of the room / etc. – use it! In fact, as you move from section to section in your speech, move to a different spot to speak and your audience will understand that you’ve moved on in the speech.

• Costumes: Ok, so you’ve got to be careful here depending on your audience, but you should at least consider it for every speech that you give. I’m not talking about a full on Hollywood costume, but rather wearing something that will enhance your message. I’ve used a chef’s hat during a presentation to show that we were “cooking up” some new products to sell – you get the point.

• Audience Participation: Do you feel lucky? Well, do you? Bringing someone from your audience up on stage during a presentation is a huge risk. However, it’s a great way to capture everyone’s attention – they will all be breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn’t them that got picked. If you are ready to interact well with you victim, I mean volunteer, then your speech definitely won’t be boring.

Final Thoughts

Anyone can give a boring speech – don’t let it be you. You’ve got to realize that no matter the setting in which you’ll be presenting in, be it a boardroom or a convention hall, you are ultimately putting on a performance for your audience.

Not everybody is a born entertainer, but that’s ok. Where you’ll really tick me off is if you don’t at least try. Theater actors have to connect with their audience every time they put on a show. In order to do this they pull out all of the stops and use every device that they have available to them in order to make their performance unforgettable.

You need to learn from them, research their techniques, and then apply them to your next speech where appropriate. You may not turn into the next Robert De Niro or Glenn Close, but that doesn’t matter. You won’t be giving boring speeches anymore and that’s all that matters…!

What’s the one thing that you can do to make your next speech unforgettable?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Bored audiences will get up and walk out of your speeches. How would you keep the attention of 400+ engineers who were attending an industry dinner event that they didn’t really want to be at on a weekday evening? I recently had the opportunity to be the master of ceremonies at such an event – great gig, tough crowd.

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