Posts Tagged ‘purpose’

How To Say Goodbye – The Eulogy

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
Image Credit Finding The Right Words For An Eulogy Can Be Difficult

Finding The Right Words For An Eulogy Can Be Difficult

Giving a speech is hard. Delivering an eulogy can be downright impossible. However, if we are asked to give one by people who are grieving, then we need to step up and do a good job of it. Since you are being asked to give the eulogy because you knew the person who passed on, this can be one of the most difficult speeches that you’ll ever give. I can’t make it any easier, but I can show you how to do it well…

What An Eulogy Is All About

The first, and potentially the most important question, that you’re going to have to answer is what is the purpose of this eulogy? Look, the person being eulogized is gone, your words won’t reach them so there’s no purpose in talking to them.

Instead, you need to realize that your words will be heard by those who are still here. The one thing that unites everyone who is in the audience is that they had some connection to the person who passed on. Clearly, this person needs to be the focus of your eulogy.

The tone of your eulogy is something that you need to get right; however, it can be tricky to select the right one. Tones can run the range from the fun remembrance to the solemn. Take your cue from who will be in your audience. The age, the background, and how the person passed are all factors that need to be considered when you are making a decision on the tone that you’ll use in your eulogy.

How To Build A Great Eulogy

Once you’ve decided on the tone you want to use for your eulogy, the next step is to design the speech itself. First off, let’s make sure that you don’t make the classic mistake of trying to tell the person’s whole life from beginning to end. Nobody wants to hear that.

Instead, what you are going to want to focus your eulogy on is the impact that the person had. The fact that the person was born, lived, and passed on has to stand for something. How was the world changed by their time on this planet? The purpose of your eulogy should be to bring the deceased back to life for just a few moments while you are giving your speech.

One of the best ways to make this happen is to make the focus of your speech be the relationships that the person had when they were living. No matter if the relationships were with friends, colleagues, or family members, talking about these aspects of the departed is what your audience wants to hear about and to remember.

No, your eulogy is not going to make your audience feel better while you give it – in fact they may temporarily feel worse as they remember what they’ve lost. However, if done correctly you’ll be able to provide them with one final opportunity to remember the best parts of the person who has left them and ultimately that’s how the healing process starts.

What All Of This Means For You

Dealing with the loss of someone that we knew is very hard. Having to give a speech about that person to others who are feeling your sense of loss can be the ultimate challenge for a speaker.

When you are asked to give an eulogy, you need to start your planning process by understanding what your goal is. You won’t be speaking to the person who has passed on, instead you’ll be talking to those who have been left behind. The purpose of your speech needs to be find a way to give comfort to the friends and family in their time of grief.

Depending on the person, your eulogy can take on many different forms. You need to match the style, funny or formal, to the person and to the situation. The goal of your speech needs to be to bring that person back if only for a few moments so that everyone can share in one last joint remembrance of the person who was.

Nobody ever gets good at giving eulogies. Instead, we all try to become good-enough to provide the words that heal during a moment when everyone is only thinking about what they’ve loss. Do it right and you’ll be the one that helps everyone to move on.

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

Question For You: How long do you think a eulogy should be?

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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

As speakers we are always being urged to “connect with our audience”. Now this sounds all fine and good; however, as with everything else in life the devil is in the details. Just how is a speaker supposed to connect with a room full of people who are staring at him or her? It turns out that you already know the answer – you need to use your eyes. As simple as this seems, all too often we do it wrong…

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Technical Talks: Is There Any Way To Make This Stuff Interesting?

Monday, April 12th, 2010
Image Credit Oh No! Not Another Technical Speech!

Oh No! Not Another Technical Speech!

I don’t know about you, but more and more I’ve been finding myself being asked to deliver speeches that have technical information in them. I’ve got a great deal of self confidence; however, having had to sit through more than my share of boring technical presentations this is the one type of speech that scares me the most. There’s got to be a better way…

You Need To Know Your Purpose

Dr. April Andreas has looked into the problem of why technical speeches are so hard to do well and she’s discovered that one of the reasons is that all too often we have no idea what we are doing.

Every presentation, including technical presentations, is given for a reason. Before the first word comes out of your mouth, you need to decide why you are standing up there talking. Are you trying to teach your audience? Are you trying to explain your results to them so that they can use them? Are you trying to find that one member of your audience who shares an interest in what you’ll be talking about so you can find ways to work with them? Or perhaps your goal is to get people talking about what you’ve presented and maybe scare up your next job offer.

Be Basic

Congratulations – if you’ve prepared for your speech, then you really are the smartest person in the room. However, the problem is that not everyone else is as smart as you are. This means that you need to make sure that you don’t lose them from the get-go. Dr. Andreas suggests that you make sure that everyone in the room, no matter what their background is, can follow the first 1/3 of your speech. This way when you are done everyone will have gotten something out of listening to you.

How About Some Examples?

Depending on what topic you are talking about (room temperature fusion perhaps?), when you are giving a technical talk things can get pretty detailed very quickly. In order to keep as many people on board for as long as possible, take the time to relate what you are talking about to examples that your audience can find in the real world.

In the case of room temperature fusion, one thing to talk about would be the temperature that fusion normally takes place at which is 119,999,727 degrees Celsius. You could compare this to the temperature at the surface of the sun which is about 6,000 Celsius. Clearly fusion is hot stuff.

Pictures Are Good

When you are trying to convey information during a technical presentation, it can be tempting to show your audience lots of equations. When possible, don’t!

Instead, use pictures to make your point or, if possible, animation. Yes, it might look a bit hokey, but you’ll do a much better job of creating a long lasting mental image if you do it this way.

Stop With The Equation Reading

This one should be simple. If you must show an equation to your audience please don’t make the mistake of reading it out to them. Either they’ll get it or they won’t, but your reading of it out to them won’t help matters.

What Does All Of That Data Mean?

This is the cardinal sin of technical presentations: blasting your audience with too much data. If you have to present a lot of data to make your point, then at least include a box somewhere that summarizes what it all means. At the end of the day this is what your audience will remember.

What’s Your Bottom Line?

Speaking of summarizing, you should do the same thing at the end of your speech: tell you audience why what you just told them was important. During any technical presentation your audience can get lost or caught up in the discussion and forget “the big picture”. Help them out by bringing it all together at the end so that everyone will leave having reached the conclusion that you wanted them to get.

How To Get Ready

Preparing to give a technical presentation is just a little bit different from getting ready to give any other type of speech. One of the most important things that you need to do is to very carefully practice how long your speech is going to take. All too often technical presentations can run long and nobody likes that…

You’ll also have to prepare yourself to deal with questions once you are done. The whole purpose of a technical presentation is to convey information and this always generates questions. Practice your answers before you need to give them and you’ll always come across sounding smarter.

Finally, you need to make sure that you show some excitement about what you are talking about. The technical presentations that I remember the best are the ones where the presenter clearly had a deep love for their topic and it showed. If you can convey this to your audience, they’ll listen to your every word.

What All Of This Means For You

There is no need to fear giving a technical presentation; however, you do need to respect it. It’s all to easy to make this type of presentation boring and uninteresting. Taking the time to do it right is easy to do and the results make it worth your time.

You need to make sure that you make your presentation understandable to your entire audience as you start out. Help people stay with you by taking it easy on the equations and using as many pictures as possible. Where possible, relate what you are talking about to real-world things that your audience will know about.

Just having a great technical presentation is not enough, you also need to prepare to deliver it. This means making sure that you’ll be able to cover your topic in the time provided and that you’ll be ready to answer the questions that always come after one of these types of presentations. If you can do all of this, then you just may start to look forward to delivering your next technical presentation.

Question For You: Do you think that a technical presentation should be “dumbed down” so that you don’t lose your audience or should you deliver complex material and lose some of them?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’ve always spoken English. I never really spent a lot of time thinking about what it took to speak “good English” because it’s my native tongue. However, when I started working with speakers for whom English was not their first language, I quickly came to understand just how hard it is to give a good speech in English if it’s not your first language. That’s “hard”, but not “impossible”…

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Are You Acting Like A Presenter?

Monday, December 29th, 2008
Don't Scare Your Audience, But Do Use Acting To Capture Their Imagination

Don't Scare Your Audience, But Do Use Acting To Capture Their Imagination

When you are asked to deliver a presentation, one way of looking at this request is that you are actually being asked to put on a one-person show. No matter if you are presenting at a college graduation or are simply reviewing last quarter’s sales figures, you are an actor who is there to put on a show for your audience. Do you know how to act?

Ed Brodow is a professional speaker who has also spent 12 years as a Hollywood actor. Needless to say, he know his stuff. He points out that the actors that we like to watch on the big screen or on TV were not born that way. They’ve studied their craft and that’s how they have become so good.

Brodow has worked with a number of acting coaches and he’s discovered the acting skills that speakers need to incorporate into our presentations in order to make them more memorable. No, you’re probably not going to win any Academy Awards for you next presentation; however, you might just do a better job of connecting with your audience.

Learn To Improvise: If you’ve delivered your presentation before or if you’ve spent the last month preparing for this presentation, then there is a chance that you are going to come across as “wooden” or “scripted”. Having the ability to improvise, or make it up as you go along, is the key to making your presentation fresh and making the audience feel as though you make it up just for them.

Stories That Are Personal: We’ve talked about this before, but what makes any presentation memoriable are your stories. Brodow reveals that the way an actor prepares for a scene with powerful emotions is to think back over their life and find a situation in which they were experiencing those emotions. They then substitute the scene that they are playing for their remembered scene and that’s how they are able to convey such powerful emotions.

When you are presenting, don’t just TELL a story. Instead, FEEL a story as you tell it. You audience will pick up on this and your stories will come alive for them.

What’s Your Drive?: This is one of my biggest complaints about so many presentations that I’ve sat though – the speaker didn’t have a point to make. When  you present you need to have a single point – what are you advocating that the audience should do after you are done? How are you hoping to change them? If you don’t have this, then you are just delivering a book report. Pick your position and then tell you audience why it’s the right positon for them also.

Be An Actor: Look, real life is rather boring – we see / live it every day. When you are presenting, you need to step-it-up-a-notch. You need to throw some drama into your words. You need to make your audience laugh. You need to stop being yourself and become an actor playing a role. Become larger than life and you will be able to put on a heck of a show for your audience.

Manage Your Energy: You are leading the show and so you need to be operating at a high level of energy. However, you also need to match you audience’s energy level – if they are to low (like if you were talking to bankers these days) and you are too high, then you’ll never connect to them. Instead, you need to sense their energy level and then start your presentation at an energy level that is just a bit higher then theirs. This way you’ll connect with them and they’ll follow you to whatever energy level you want to take them to.

There you go – this is a start. Anyone can stand before a group of people and deliver a boring presentation. In order to deliver a great presentation that will have an impact and will be memorable you need to become an actor!

When you’ve given a presentation in the past, have you ever had to improvise? Do you tell stories as a part of your presentations and do you take the extra time to personalize them? How do you become “larger than life” when you are giving a presentation? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

How To Make A Technical Presentation Riveting

Monday, December 1st, 2008
"Technical" And "Interesting" Can Both Be Parts Of The Same Presentation

"Technical" And "Interesting" Can Both Be Parts Of The Same Presentation

So who among us ever really looks forward to sitting through a technical presentation? Collectively we’ve all sat through so many of these things that we almost defensively shut down before the speaker even has a chance to get started.

So when it’s our turn to talk about things that contain lots of financial details, construction details, manufacturing details, procedure details, etc. it’s quite common for our blood to run cold because we realize that now the shoe is on the other foot – we are going to be the ones who are boring the audience!

Why are these types of presentations so hard to do? In all honesty, the problem really lies with the presenter, not the audience. Specifically what they all seem to be doing wrong is that they’ve made the mistake of thinking that they are just having a talk with coworkers: they show up to share information. Big mistake.

Nobody ever shows up for a presentation hoping to have the presenter share information with them. Instead, they are showing up so that the presenter can tell them what they need to do. They may not agree with what they are being told to do, but that is what they are looking for.

What this means for the presenter is that he/she needs to understand that the goal of the presentation is for action to be taken by the audience based on the information that was in the presentation. It really is that simple!

Professional speaker Anne Warfield has come up with three ways to make your next technical presentation even more riveting (and I’ve added a suggestion of my own). Let’s take a look and see what you need to do in order to keep your audience on the edge of their seats next time you talk technical:

  1. What’s The Next Step?: When you are creating your technical presentation, you need to start at the end. Once you are done with your presentation, what action do you want your audience to take or what conclusion do you want them to have reached? If you don’t have a clear understanding of this, then you’ll end up filling your presentation with a discussion about HOW you reached your results and that is what everyone will end up talking about.
  2. What Question Do You Need To Answer?: If you’ve been able figure out what action you want your audience to take once you are done, then the next step is to understand what questions or objections might be preventing them from taking that next step either right now or after you are done. This is the question (or questions) that your presentation needs to provide answers to.
  3. Make It Real: The technical topic that you are talking about may or may not be familiar to all  of your audience. If you can “map” it to something that they are all familiar with, then all of a sudden the audience’s comprehension of what you are talking about will go up dramatically.
  4. Match Your Audience: The amount of technical detail in your speech and your use of technical terms and acronyms needs to be matched to your audience. If you assume to little, then they will quickly become bored by your too basic discussion. If you assume too much, then they will become lost in a sea of terms that they don’t recognize. Get it right and you’ll be connected to your audience from the get go.

Your next technical presentation does not have to be dry and boring. Use these tips BEFORE you give the presentation in order to ensure that your presentation will be riveting and talked about long after you are done.

Would you consider your last technical presentation a success or a failure? Had you taken the time to determine what you wanted your audience to do afterwards? Did people fall asleep or end up peppering you with nitty-gritty questions? Do you feel that you talked to your audience on the right level? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in amount of information, technical | 1 Comment »