Posts Tagged ‘public speaking’

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How To Rig A Speech To Get The Outcome You Want Every Time

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
Image Credit If You Stack The Deck, Then You'll Win Every Time

If You Stack The Deck, Then You'll Win Every Time

You can’t always do it all by yourself. If you want to make a lasting impression on your audience, then sometimes you just gotta bring in some help to pull it off. Speakers who are ready to move up to the next level in their speaking often come to me and ask for advice. Now that they’ve gotten over their fear of speaking, they want to move on and start to make more of an impact with their audience. It’s time to bring out an advanced speaking skill – rigging a speech.

The Setup

If as a speaker you can put aside your ego long enough to admit that sometimes if you really want to make a lasting impression on your audience, then you are going to have to allow others to help you, then you’ll be half-way there.

An advanced speaking technique is to work with an outsider to act as a “plant” in the audience. Having somebody in the audience who you control gives you enormous power as a speaker when it comes to steering the audience’s mood and reactions.

The most important part of stacking the deck is to make sure that you take the time to rehearse what you want to happen with your partner in crime – these things don’t just happen by themselves.

The Action

When you rig a speech, you need to make sure that you’ve carefully scripted what you want to happen. The three most common uses of a plant are to generate anger, humor, and questions.

Having a member of your audience stand up and angrily shout something out or accuse you of something is a fantastic tool; however, it’s just about as dangerous as nitroglycerin. This is an unexpected action – your audience will not be expecting it and so it will wake them up and grab their attention. I’ve used this one when I knew that what the audience would be thinking at a certain point was directly opposite to what I was telling them. Since you knew that it was coming, you have a fantastic response ready for them, this calms your angry audience member down, and everyone else is very impressed with you. That’s exactly what I did and it took the tension out of the room.

Humor is difficult enough to try to do by yourself let alone with a partner, but if you can pull it off you’ll be able to make a lasting impression on your audience. As with all types of humor, timing is everything here. One of my favorite techniques is to have my plant ask a question and then we end up getting involved in a very fast back-and-forth dialog that amazes and entertains everyone. Once upon a time I answered my plant’s question by saying that something would take 1 year, they replied with 2, I said “3″, they said “4″ and so on.

Finally, one of the worst things that a speaker can do is to wrap up a speech by asking “does anyone have any questions” and then be greeted by dead silence. This is when having a plant can save your life: have them stand up and ask an interesting or controversial question just to get things going. Since you know what they are going to ask, you can structure your speech so that your answer to that question is really part of your speech.

What All Of This Means For You

When you are ready to take your speaking skills up to the next level, starting to “seed” the audience with your trained agents is a great way to ensure that you are able to control how the speech will flow. These agents can control the audience’s mood: get them angry, make them laugh, or ask the questions that they are all thinking about.

As with all tools, the planted agent requires skill to use. You have to take the time both to structure your speech in such a way as to accommodate your plant and to rehearse what each of you is going to say before the big day. Do it right and you’ll have left your audience with a positive lasting impression.

Under what circumstances do you think it would be a bad idea to plant someone in your audience?


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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you could wish for just one thing before you give your next speech in public, what would it be? Sure we’d all like to be able to talk like Tony Robbins, move a crowd like Zig Ziglar, or even have a powerful story to tell like Rudy Giuliani. However, I’m willing to bet good money that after considerable thought, we’d all settle for spending our wish on making sure that there were no hecklers in the audience.

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Posted in audience | 2 Comments »

Hey Baby, Come Here Often?

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Image Credit What's A Nice Girl / Guy Like You Doing In A Place Like This?

What's A Nice Girl / Guy Like You Doing In A Place Like This?

Just like a cheesy pick-up line, the first words that come out of your mouth when you are giving a speech will determine if you are going to get lucky with this audience. Unlike a wanna-be Casanova in a bar, you (normally) don’t have an opportunity to buy your audience a drink, so you’re going to have work extra hard to make your opening lines do all the work for you if you want to have any hope of sweeping the audience off of their feet. How are you going to score?

The 4 Questions That Every Audience Asks Themselves

Hopefully you’ve been given a great introduction. Now it’s your turn to speak. Dana LaMon who was the Toastmasters’ 1982 World Champion of Public-Speaking says that as your audience awaits the start of your speech, they are sitting there asking themselves four questions:

  • Am I going to take the time to listen to this speaker?
  • Am I going to benefit from what he / she talks about?
  • Will they say anything that is valuable that I can take and use?
  • Will anything that they say be worthwhile for me to take action on?

If you waste your first few words, then I can tell you what the answers to these questions will be – and you’re not going to like it!

Am I going to take the time to listen to this speaker?

Aren’t those Blackberry’s and iPhones just the coolest? Today more than ever your audience has other things that they can do while you are talking if they aren’t interested in what you have to say. Let’s pretend for just a moment that today’s jaded audience starts by answering this question with a “No”. Now you’re not just trying to move them to a “yes”, instead you’ve got the doubly hard job of moving them off of “no” and over to “yes”.

Every speech that you give will be different, but you can lose your audience every time if you make one of the following common speaker mistakes:

  • Thanking Anybody: the first words out of your mouth in a speech are the equivalent of waterfront property in real estate – super valuable. Why would you waste them by saying something like “I’d like to thank the Dairy Producers Council for inviting me to talk to you today…”
  • Calling Out Important People In The Audience: I don’t care if Obama himself is sitting in the front row or your audience, wasting your opening words pointing out that you’ve got important people in the audience is just you complementing yourself and nobody really wants to hear you do that.
  • A Man Walks Into A Bar…: Why would anyone waste an opening of a speech on an old, tired joke that has nothing to do with what they are going to be talking about? I’ve seen this happen over and over again. Even when the joke is funny, all too often it doesn’t lead anywhere – it was just a cute thing to say and then the speaker starts his / her speech and the opportunity to grab the audience’s attention has been lost forever
  • The Title Of This Speech Is…: What? Why would I be sitting in the audience if I didn’t already know what you are going to be talking about? Also, don’t waste an opening by introducing yourself “My name is Bob Johnson and I’d like to talk to you about …” Assume that either the audience already knows this information or they just don’t care about it. Get on with the meat of what you are there to talk about

Am I going to benefit from what he / she talks about?

I’m a busy guy and assuming that you have somehow gotten me to answer “yes” to the first question, you sure don’t have any guarantee that I’m going to keep listening to you – I’ve got a lot of email that I could be working my way through on my iPhone.

Right off the bat you are going to have to very concisely tell me why I should care about what you’re going to be talking about for the next 30 minutes or so. Whatever this speech’s purpose is, you’re going to have to keep it short – one sentence is the rule. If it’s longer than that, I’m not going to pay attention. Do this and there is a chance that you’re audience will remember what you said after you are done.

Will they say anything that is valuable that I can take and use?

What’s the greatest complement that a speaker can receive? Is it a standing ovation? Nope. It’s when your audience whips out a pencil and starts to take notes.

In every speech there are some “nuggets” that you want your audience to remember and use after you are done talking. It’s your job as a speaker to make these pieces of actionable information easy for your audience to find and remember. Saying things like “Here are three things that you might want to write down…” are a great way to motivate your audience to take notes.

Will anything that they say be worthwhile for me to take action on?

I’ve taken notes at a lot of speeches that I’ve attended and then I’ve gone home and filed them away somewhere and that was the end of the story. As a speaker this is exactly what you don’t want to have happen.

Instead, you want the information that you are passing on to be used – you really want to change people’s lives. To get your audience to take action you need to do three things: you need to tell them what you want them to do, you need to tell them why they should do it, and then you need to tell them that they can be successful in doing it.

What All Of This Means For You

When I’m coaching speakers who are struggling to break through to the next level in their speaking skills, we spend a lot of time working on the opening of their speech because it is so important. There are an almost unlimited number of ways that you can successfully grab an audience’s attention with your first few words. Unfortunately, there is an almost equal number of ways that you can lose them forever.

You’ll lose them if you spend your time thinking about yourself when you are putting your speech together. If, instead, you spend your time putting yourself in the position of your audience and making sure that you answer the questions that are running though their minds, then you’ll find the words that will grab their imagination from the get-go and you’ll be off and running with the best speech of your life.

What’s the best opening to a speech that you’ve ever seen?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just how much speaking can you do in a single day? We spend a lot of time talking about how to prepare for and give a good speech. However, sometimes life just comes at us like a runaway truck and we find ourselves double or triple (or more) booked to speak in a single day. Oh oh, looks like we’ve got a whole new challenge here…

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Posted in passion | 2 Comments »

Never Give A Speech Without Having A Potato

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Every Speaker Must Respect The Power Of A Potato

Every Speaker Must Respect The Power Of A Potato

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.

The banquet’s master of ceremonies (MC) last year had tried very hard, but had ended up not being able to hold the crowd’s attention and they had started to leave before the event was even half over. This year’s planning committee presented me with a challenge: find a way to keep the audience in their seats until the end of the event. It turns out that a single large baking potato was a key part of my solution to this problem…

Not A Speech, But Rather A 3-Act Play

Two weeks before the banquet was to be held, I had a meeting with the planning committee. The banquet is an annual event for all of the engineers involved in transportation in the Tampa, Florida area. I had been asked to be a co-MC for the event in order to help make it a success. The trouble was that I know next to nothing about the transportation industry.

The other MC knew a lot about the industry having worked in it for over 25 years. This was a perfect pairing – his smarts and my creativity held the key to our potential success.

The planning committee wanted to focus on the future of transportation in Florida. Since this was not a typical speech, there wasn’t a speech to prepare. Instead I was looking at creating a play with three acts: an opening, then a second act after the banquet’s first speaker, but before its second speaker. Finally, there would be a third act that would close out the evening.

The Initial Plan: Potatoes Everywhere

Never one to be at a loss for ideas, my initial plan to the team was to propose other forms of transportation that people may not have thought of: catapults, rocket launchers, etc.

I took my plan one step further and proposed that we get someone to come up from the audience, put an apron on them, and then have them try to carry as many potatoes as possible across the stage. They would end up dropping some and we could say that a better transportation system was called for.

I had other ideas that involved the same potatoes: have planning committee members stand on one side of the stage and try to throw them into a bucket held by another committee member. Lots of potatoes were going to get hurt doing all of this.

In the end, the planning committee flatly rejected my potato idea. The possibility of someone getting hurt was just too great and it was sending a negative message about the transportation solutions that are currently being planned for Tampa. Sadly, I think that they made the right decision.

The Next Plan: Jet Packs

The clock was ticking and we were starting to run out of time. We went back to the drawing board and my co-MC did a web search and found all sorts of images of future transportation systems from the 1940’s and 1950’s covers of Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics magazines. A new idea started to emerge.

Instead of saying anything negative about Tampa’s current transportation plans, how about if we came up with our own vision of the future of transportation? Make it so outlandish so that everyone knows that it’s not a real plan, but incorporate all of that futuristic stuff that everyone has always believed is coming.

I thought that this was a great idea – with one addition. I wanted to have it all lead up to one thing: a proposal for a jetpack based transportation future. Hey, everyone loves jetpacks and engineers especially love ‘em. The planning committee agreed and one of the members even agreed to build a mock jetpack for us to use.

What This All Means For You

So how did it all turn out you ask? The evening was a smashing success. The audience was riveted to their seats – they had to know how this 3-act play was going to come out. Not a soul left before we told them that the show was over.

My co-MC did a great job of reaching out and drawing the audience in using his deep knowledge of the transportation industry. The three-act play did its job by hooking the audience’s attention in the first act, extending the story in the second act and building up to a big finish in the third act.

The crowning point of the evening was when my co-MC brought out the Jetpack model and put it on and announced that the event was over and he was leaving to go home. That was what the audience had been waiting for!

Oh, and the potato? I had brought one to the event as a backup just in case things didn’t go as planned. We ended up setting it on the podium and not talking about it, not moving it, not doing anything with it. It drove the audience mad with curiosity: why was the potato there? What were they going to do with it? Talk about holding an audience’s attention!

What have you done that has helped to hold your audience’s attention during one of your speeches?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just like a cheesy pick-up line, the first words that come out of your mouth when you are giving a speech will determine if you are going to get lucky with this audience.  How are you going to score?

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Posted in attention | 2 Comments »

Act Up Or Sit Down!

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Photo CreditIf You Aren't Acting While You Are Speaking, Then Sit Down

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?

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

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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Posted in connecting with your audience | 3 Comments »

Speaker: You Are What You Wear!

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

The Clothes That A Speaker Wears Are A Powerful Speaking Tool (c) - 2008

The Clothes That A Speaker Wears Are A Powerful Speaking Tool (c) - 2008

The purpose of giving any speech is to be able to reach out and connect with your audience. No matter whether you are trying to inform them, entertain them, or convince them to take some action, none of this can be done unless you are able to make a connection with them. What you say is an important part of doing this, but did you know that what you wear also plays a role?

What Your Clothes Say About You

I’m hoping that most of us already know enough to “dress up” when we go to give a speech. If you pick up any popular book on public speaking, you’ll find advice like “be the best dressed person in the room” and such.

What’s interesting is that it’s probably too much of a simplification to think of our clothes as being just that – clothes. Instead, Karen Hudson who retired from the movie business says that we should think about what we are wearing as being costumes that are “scenery on the move“.

Now I can already see some of you starting to roll your eyes – I mean really, costumes? Give me just a minute to explain. Your time with your audience is limited - 15, 30, 60 minutes, right? You need to grab their attention, hold it, and make a difference in their lives.

What tools do you have to do this with? Sure your words are important. Probably how you say the words (pitch, tone, etc.) also play a role. However, what else do you have? Not much! If you can start to think about what you are wearing as being yet another speaking tool, then all of a sudden you’ve got another “lever to pull” to get your audience to connect with you.

Different Speeches Require Different Types Of Clothes

Not all speeches are the same. In fact, you need to be aware of what type of speech you will be giving and then you need to dress appropriately in order to lend even more power to your speech.

Speaking To Inform

When you are speaking to inform your audience you will be presenting either lots of information or technical concepts in order to make your point. When doing this type of speaking, first impressions are quickly made by your audience when they are trying to determine if they are going to make the effort to listen to what you have to say.

For this type of speech your goal is going to be to establish your credibility in the field in which you are going to be talking about at first glance. You have two things that you want to quickly accomplish: you want your audience to understand that you are an expert in this field, and you want them to accept your credibility for speaking to them. What all this means is that your clothes have to convey a sense of strength, power, and leadership to your audience.

Speaking To Inspire

Things change when the purpose of your speech is to inspire your audience to take some action. What you are trying to do is to relate a story to your audience in a way that will provide them with a new point-of-view that will cause them to make a change.

For this type of speech, you are not trying to overpower your audience with your credibility. Instead, what you really want to do is to be able to inspire your audience. This means that you want your audience to reach out to you – to accept your ideas as theirs and to then grow because of these ideas.

This means that you want to come across as being three things all at once: credible, authoritative, and accessible. From a clothing point-of-view, this means that you are going to want to be less formal than you would be for a speech in which you were speaking to inform. Your clothing should present your audience with a softer, more conversational image of you.

Speaking To Entertain

Arguably you have the widest range of clothing choices when you are giving a speech that is designed to entertain your audience. Ultimately you are going to be telling your audience a story and you hope that by doing this you’ll be able to grab their attention and hold on to it throughout your entire presentation. In the end your goal is to allow them to fully enjoy what you have to tell them.

Your clothing can be a key part of how you go about doing this. Depending on the story that you are going to be sharing with your audience, your clothing can set the stage before you even open your mouth. You can go all out and dress up in a full costume, or you can simply add a particular accessory to what you would normally wear (e.g. an Abraham Lincoln top hat) in order to make your audience eager to hear your story from the moment they first lay eyes on you.

Final Thoughts

Hudson points out that when she was taking a screenwriting class, she learned that each character mist contribute to the outcome of the story. You can say the same thing about the clothes that you wear to give a speech: each item must contribute directly to the telling of the story and its final outcome.

This leads to the three key guidelines that control what we wear when we are speaking:

  1. The clothes should never take the focus off of you, the speaker.
  2. No matter what you wear, you will need to be able to perform comfortable and effectively in the costume and accessories.
  3. Time is of the essence – your costume should not tell more story that you have time to present.

Take the time to pick the clothes that you wear to match the speech that you will be giving and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Man, as though giving a speech wasn’t hard enough already, then you go ahead and throw that gender thing in there and all of a sudden it gets that much tougher! It can be a challenge when you are asked to talk to an audience made up of members of the opposite gender. How can you not screw-up this speech?

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Posted in appearances | 1 Comment »

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