Posts Tagged ‘presenter’

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Personal Information: How Much Should A Presenter Reveal?

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

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Speakers Can Sometimes Share Too Much Personal InformationHave you ever sat through a dry an boring speech? Of course you have, we all have. Did you spend any time trying to figure out why the speech was so dry? I’m going to bet that at least one of the reasons is that the speaker didn’t connect with the presenter – the speech content itself was impersonal. Did you know that it’s possible for a speaker to go too far in the other direction also?

A Speech That Nobody Wants To Hear

Once upon a time I had the misfortune to attend a speech that was being given by a presenter who had been married four times. Now the fact that he had been married so many times was no big deal, but the speech was on how to choose the correct investment plan for a 401k. During the speech, the speaker must have “revealed” aspects about his four different marriages at least 30 times. To this day I really couldn’t tell you anything about the different funds that one could use as part of their 401k plan, but I can vividly recall aspects of each of this guy’s marriages. This was a clear case of TMI: too-much-information. No the speech wasn’t boring, but the amount of personal information that was being shared overpowered the message. There’s got to be a balance.

So Where Do You Draw The Line?

All of us desperately want to avoid giving boring speeches. However, we also want to make sure that our speeches have an impact – and if we’re sharing too much personal information this isn’t going to happen. Here are some tips on how to draw the line between too much and too little personal information correctly:

  • Match Your Speech Type: certain types of speeches naturally lend themselves more readily to having personal information included in them. Speeches in which you are trying to persuade or entertain your audience are great vehicles for more personal information. Speeches to inform are not.
  • Match Your Audience: Who is in your audience (and why are they there)? If you have a business audience who are looking for ways to keep their business afloat during a severe economic downturn, then your childhood stories are not going to be appropriate. However, if your are speaking to a Garden Club filled with mothers, then perhaps a childhood story might be the perfect way to establish rapport.
  • Stay On Topic: Sharing personal information just because it makes a great story (like my 401k presenter did) is a bad idea. You need to make sure that the story ties in with what your speech is all about. If it doesn’t, then skip it.
  • Listen To Your Audience: In the end, it all comes down to what your audience wants to hear. If, while you are giving your speech, you start to detect that your audience is not staying with you, then cut back on the personal information and instead focus on your core content.

Final Thoughts

This is one of those tough areas where you are going to have to rely on your speaker’s judgement. Sometimes you’ll get it right and sometimes you might be off the mark and include either too little or too much personal information in one of your speeches. However, keep at it and refine each speech the next time you give it. In the end, you’ll know how much personal information to include in order to be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

Questions For You

When was the last time you sat through a boring speech? Why was it boring? Would it have been better if the speaker included more personal information? Have you ever attended a speech where too much personal information was shared? How did that make you feel? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking. Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If there is one thing that presenters dread more than forgetting their lines, it’s having someone add to their speech without an invitation. What should you do when someone in the audience starts to deliberately take away from your carefully rehearsed speech? Start crying and go home is always a possibility; however, I’ve got some better ways to deal with this situation for you…

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Posted in stories | 6 Comments »

Can You Hear Me Now Is What Presenters Need To Know

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
Presenters Need To Make Changes For Their Hearing Impaired Audience Members

Presenters Need To Make Changes For Their Hearing Impaired Audience Members

When we are given an opportunity to address a group, we spend a great deal of time preparing what we are going to say and how we are going to say it. This is all well and good, but we may be forgetting one critical factor: our audience may not be able to hear us speak.

Why Can’t They Hear Us?

Even if you have the most interesting story to tell your audience, they may not be able to hear you tell it.  Rick Moore is a professional freelance writer who speaks in public and he knows a great deal about this because he has a hearing loss and this has caused him to study audiences. He points out that in the U.S. there are 26 million people who have permanent hearing damage. What are the odds that one or more of them will be in your next audience?

Rick notes that as though this wasn’t enough, there are another 12 million people who suffer from tinnitus – a constant ringing in the ears. Put these numbers together and clearly you need to change the way you’ve been speaking in order to accommodate this portion of your audience.

Things To Do So That A Speaker Can Be Heard

There are a number of things that you can start to do as a presenter in order to better meet the needs of the members of your audience who have hearing problems. These include:

  • Room Awareness: We are probably already aware of the lighting and the microphone setup – now we need to become aware of the acoustics. The key here is to pick a spot to stand at that you will be able to be easily heard from everywhere in the room.
  • Speak Up!: This one is pretty obvious, but it’s an important point – in order to be heard by your audience you are going to have to project your voice. Quiet whispering won’t cut it – make sure that you are speaking to be heard in the back of the room.
  • Practice Age Discrimination: No, not the bad kind – the good kind. Take a look at your audience – what does their average age appear to be? The older the audience, the greater the possibility that some members will have hearing problems. This means that you need to be extra vigilant in keeping your volume up and using very clear diction.
  • Show ‘Em Your Lips: Even if your audience members don’t read lips, looking out at them so that they can see your lips moving while you speak, instead of down at your notes, will give them another visual clue that will help them decode what you are saying.

Final Thoughts

These tips are a great way to address the general hearing needs of your next audience. However, as you are giving your next speech you may discover that someone in your audience appears to be becoming bored or disinterested. It could be because despite your best efforts they can’t hear you.

The correct thing to do in this circumstance is to adapt to the situation. Move close to where they are sitting, look directly at them more often, and use more pauses so that they can more easily interpret your words.

Making sure that everyone can hear you helps you to better accomplish your goal in giving the presentation: changing lives for the better.

Questions For You

Have you ever tried to listen to a speaker who was talking without a microphone or in a noisy environment? How frustrating was this for you? Do you have any friends who have hearing problems? How do they deal with listening to speakers? Have you ever been told to “speak up”? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Have you ever sat through a dry an boring speech? Of course you have, we all have. Did you spend any time trying to figure out why the speech was so dry? I’m going to bet that at least one of the reasons is that you didn’t connect with the presenter – the speech contenent itself was impersonal. Did you know that you can go too far in the other direction also?

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Posted in hearing | 2 Comments »

Bragging Is What Presenters Need To Be Able To Do Well

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
Presenters Need To Learn How To Use Bragging To Establish Their Creditability

Presenters Need To Learn How To Use Bragging To Establish Their Creditability

Just in case you’ve forgotten it, the #1 question on the minds of any audience that is seated and waiting for you to begin talking to them is “Why should I even bother listening to you?“. This means that in order for you to have any hope of making an impact on this  audience, you’re going to have to answer this question right off the bat. But how?

The Art Of The Brag

I’m afraid that we’re going to have to talk about the “C” word – “credibility“. As a presenter, it’s your job to establish your credibility in the minds of your audience. This is where bragging comes in.

John Spaith has spent some time thinking about how to do this correctly and he’s got some good suggestions. Spaith points out that you always have competition when you give a presentation. This doesn’t mean that you have to deal with other speakers (although sometimes you do), but rather your audience has a lot of other things on their mind and if you don’t grab their attention and hold it by establishing your credibility, then they won’t pay attention to what you have to say.

A Plan For Self-Promotion (Bragging)

The best way to establish credibility with your audience is to have the person who is introducing you do it for you. However, for a variety of reasons this may not always be possible. When you find yourself in situations like this, you need to do your bragging yourself. Here’s what Spaith suggests that we think about:

  • Make It Relevant: If you are addressing a sales team, then spending time talking about the amazing singing career you had in the past won’t buy you any credibility. Instead, make your bragging relevant – tell them that you survived a trip down the Amazon and that you’ve been shot four times. Survival bragging would work well with this group.
  • It’s All Relative: The accomplishments or talents that you are bragging about have to be something that your audience can relate to. Telling everyone that you are an award winning professional ballroom dancer is great, but who can relate to that? If you tell everyone that you spent 10,000 hours on your feet in uncomfortable shoes practicing to become an award winning professional ballroom dancer, now that’s something that we can relate to.

How To Brag

Once you’ve established WHAT you’ll be bragging about, you need to nail down just HOW you’re going to go about doing it. First off, you need to get your bragging done at the start of your presentation – credibility is something that you need right off the bat. Next, you need to keep it long enough to build that credibility, but not too long. I’m going to say that a minute should be long enough and you might want to keep it even shorter.

You are going to want to write out and memorize your bragging words. It is so important to get these words just right – not too boastful, but at the same time not too self-deprecating.

Final Thoughts

Some of you might be a bit shy about bragging about yourself – get over it. You owe it to your audience to deliver the best presentation that you can and taking the time and effort to make sure that your message sinks in is part of this. Using carefully designed bragging to establish your “street cred” is an important part of any presentation that you give.

Questions For You

When you give a presentation, do you include bragging about yourself? Have you ever “gone over the top” and done too much bragging? Have you ever done too little bragging and not gotten the audience’s respect? Have you ever seen an introduction that established just the right amount of credibility for the speaker? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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

What We’ll To Be Talking About Next Time

When we are given an opportunity to address a group, we spend a great deal of time preparing what we are going to say and how we are going to say it. This is all well and good, but we may be forgetting one critical factor: our audience may not be able to hear us speak…

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Posted in introduction | 2 Comments »

Dennis Quaid Gives A Keynote Speech – Real Life Speeches

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
Dennis Quaid Gave A Keynote Speech That Missed The Mark

Dennis Quaid Gave A Keynote Speech That Missed The Mark

I just got back from spending the better part of a week up in Chicago at a big health care conference (HIMSS09). This was an amazing opportunity for me to sit back and watch somewhere in the neighborhood of about 100 different presenters get up and do their very best job at communicating. One of these presenters was Dennis Quaid – the actor.

What was Dennis Quaid doing at a fairly boring health care IT conference you ask? Well it turns out that he has a heck of a story to tell about how his newborn children were given the wrong medicine. Everyone attending the conference knew about the story, and so roughly 15,000 – 20,000 folks showed up to hear Dennis give his speech.

So how did it go? Well, in all honesty, not that well. I mean, it was ok – but not what everyone was really hoping for. Generally when you show up for a keynote speech, you are expecting a great speech. When the speaker is a famous actor, your expectations are that much higher. Things didn’t start as well as you would have hoped that they would have.

Dennis was introduced by a slick video that reminded the audience of all of the movies that he has been in. He then came out and took control of the podium. This is where things started to fall apart. His first few statements dealt with how he’s not really a doctor and how he really has never played a role in the health care industry. These are all true things, but what a lousy way to start a speech to folks who ARE in the health care industry!

Add to this a great deal of hemming and hawing, playing with his hands, and just all around nervousness and you end up with a speaker who is distracting his audience away from what is a very powerful message. So what was going on here?

I’ll never know the exact answer, but here are a few guesses. Dennis Quaid is an actor. He sure seems to do a great job of performing for a camera – in front a film crew of about 40 people or so. Put him in front of 20,000 folks sitting in chairs in a massive convention hall and he may feel the same way that any one of us would feel – incredibly nervous.

One other contributing factor may have been that the story that he was there to tell was a VERY personal story. It’s entirely possible that each time he tells it, the emotions that the story stirs up in him causes him to fall apart.

No matter what the cause, the effect was the same – a less than expected speech. Us mere mortals can learn much from Dennis Quaid’s challenges. First, practice, practice, practice – no matter how good you think you are, everyone is going to be able to tell if you try to “wing it”. Secondly, practice in front of people that you know – their feedback can tell you things that you can’t see yourself.

Questions For You

Have you ever seen a famous person give a speech? How did they do? What do you think that they could have done better? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just in case you’ve forgotten it, the #1 question on the minds of any audience that is seated and waiting for you to begin talking to them is “Why should I even bother listening to you?“. This means that in order for you to have any hope of making an impact on this  audience, you’re going to have to answer this question right off the bat. But how…?

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Posted in keynote | 6 Comments »

Business Stories: Out Of Place Or On Target?

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
Stories Can Be A Powerful Part Of Any Business Presentation

Stories Can Be A Powerful Part Of Any Business Presentation

One question that I keep getting asked over and over by speakers that I am working with is if storytelling is such a powerful communication tool, then why isn’t it used more in business settings? It’s a good question, but the answer is a little bit complicated.

Where Did All The Stories Go?

I can’t tell you how many business presentations I’ve sat though that at the end I couldn’t have told you what was talked about if my life depended on it. It’s not that the speaker was necessarily bad, it’s just that nothing that they said caught my imagination and so nothing stuck.

This is where stories come in – people remember stories long after you get done talking. We remember them because it’s a fundamental way that humans have exchanged information for as long as we’ve been around.

For some reason, people have decided that stories don’t have a place in the environment of business – perhaps they don’t think that they are “grown up” enough and that facts and figures should only be used. This is completely wrong.

What Is The Value Of A Business Story?

Dr. Caren Neile has been looking into the use of stories in the workplace and she reports that Makingstories.net president Terrence Gargiulo has identified 9 key values to using a story in a business presentation:

  1. They empower the speaker.
  2. They can be used to create a particular environment.
  3. They can be used to bond individuals together.
  4. They can help your audience to engage in active listening.
  5. They can be used to resolve differences between both individuals and groups.
  6. They can encode information.
  7. They can act as tools to help with brainstorming.
  8. They can be used as weapons.
  9. They can be used to start or enhance a healing process.

The professional storytellers define the act of storytelling as being “… a face-to-face oral narrative that employs non-verbal communication and imagination“. One side effect of this definition is that when stories are told in a live business setting, they are much more powerful than when they are just written down.

What Kind Of Stories Work In Business Presentations?

Dr. Neile reports that Annette Simmons, who is the president of the company Group Process Consulting, believes that there are six types of stories that can be used in a business environment:

  1. Who I Am: this type of story is used to gain an audience’s trust by having the speaker explain where they are coming from.
  2. Why I Am Here: this story type is a way to communicate your agenda to your audience.
  3. The Vision: this story paints a vision of the future that the audience can see and can then decide that they want to be a part of it.
  4. Values-In-Action: this story shares the good things that can happen when the audience has shared values and the bad things that can happen when those values are violated.
  5. I Know What You Are Thinking: this story shows how connected the speaker is to the audience and that he/she has their best interests in mind.

How Can We Use Stories During Business Presentations?

Stories that your audience can relate to are the best kind of stories to use. This means that you need to spend the time to uncover the true stories that already exist within the organization: the successes, the failures, and people behaving both badly and wonderfully.

The power of business stories is that they provide one of the most effective ways to achieve agreement about how to resolve issues and meet goals. It’s  no longer a question of IF they should be used, but rather a question of HOW MUCH they should be used.

Questions For You

Have you ever used a story in a business presentation in order to make a point? How was it received? Did you feel awkward using a story? Does your senior management use stories when they are discussing the company’s vision and goals? Does this make you buy in to what the company is trying to accomplish? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I just got back from spending the better part of a week up in Chicago at a big health care conference (HIMSS09). This was an amazing opportunity for me to sit back and watch somewhere in the neighborhood of about 100 different presenters get up and do their very best job at communicating. One of these presenters was Dennis Quaid – the actor…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in stories | 6 Comments »

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