Posts Tagged ‘Q&A’

How Speakers Can Help Other Speakers Be Their Best

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011
Image Credit Even The Best Speakers Sometimes Need Assistance

Even The Best Speakers Sometimes Need Assistance

When we think about speaking in public, we normally think about one thing – ourselves. However, it turns out that that we really should be thinking bigger: how can we help other speakers do better? Since we know what it’s like to stand in front of an audience and try to give a speech, we have a special obligation to use this knowledge to make the speeches that we attend become better speeches. Read on and find out what your new assignment is…

Keeping Calm When Nobody Else Is

As speakers we all know that there are many things that can happen during a speech that are out of control of the speaker. These can include such distractions as audience members’ cell phones going off, fire alarms sounding, microphones that stop working, or any one of a number of different laptop related issues.

When you are the speaker and you have an event like this happen, your stress level can start to go through the roof. I mean you are already under a great deal of pressure to give a good speech, and now you have to deal with these additional challenges.

As speakers who are sitting in the audience, we can help a speaker get over these types of unplanned events simply by not reacting to them. Speakers feed off of the mood of their audience. When things start to go wrong, often times the audience will start to become restless or upset. When this happens, it’s very easy for the speaker to start to get upset also – he or she is simply reflecting back to the audience the mood that they are picking up on.

When you are a member of the audience and these types of events start to happen, you can help out the speaker by not getting upset. Let your cool, calm demeanor influence the people sitting around you and help to keep them from becoming restless. The more people that you can influence this way, then the more positive energy will flow up to the speaker. This can significantly help them to stay on track and still give a good speech no matter what goes wrong for them!

Helping Out With The Old Q&A

No matter how clear a speaker is, there will always be questions that the audience has once the speaker is done talking. The audience may have thought up a question early on and has held it until the end of the speech, or perhaps based on their personal experiences they’d like to know how to apply what the speaker was talking about to their life.

The Q&A part of any speech can be a life & death proposition for any speaker. They complete their speech and then ask the audience if they have any questions. The sound of crickets that all too often greets them takes away from whatever they just got done talking about. As an audience, we tend to judge the quality of a speech by the quantity of questions that the speaker gets asked after they are done – more questions must mean that the speech was a good speech.

As speakers in the audience, this is a simple place for us to step in and lend a helping hand to the presenter. We need to listen very closely to the points that they are making in their speech. Then, when the Q&A portion of the speech is announced, we need to immediately raise our hand.

This quick response to the request for questions will minimize the amount of time that the speaker is “hanging” waiting for a question. Next, the question that we ask has to also help the speaker out.

We can make our question help the speaker by making sure that the question reinforces their main point. Questions that contain words like “If I understood your point correctly, …” or “How could I apply that to my situation…” are great ways to do this.

Make sure that our question keeps the speaker on track and allows them to further expound on their main point even as they answer our question. The speaker will be forever grateful to you for allowing them to do this!

What All Of This Means For You

Giving a speech is never easy for anyone. As a speaker, since you know how hard it can be to give a good speech, you have a special obligation when you attend someone else’s speech to do everything that you can to help their speech go well.

Since each speech is a unique performance, you can never be sure just exactly what is going to happen during the speech. That means that you’re going to have to stay alert and look for ways to help out. One way that you can help is by keeping calm if things start to spin out of control during the speech. Another way to help is by being ready to ask good, topical questions if the speaker has a Q&A session.

I firmly believe that by helping out other speakers you can start to build a reputation as a friend to all speakers. When this happens, something magical will start to happen when you give a speech. Other speakers will be motivated to make sure that your speech goes well just like you have been doing for them. Do this often enough, you’ll eventually have your entire audience working to help you deliver the best speech ever!

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

Question For You: Do you think that you should make contact with a speaker before they give their speech to let them know that you’re them to make things go well for them?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you start a speech, you know that the first few words that come out of your mouth have to be interesting to your audience. However, I’m going to take that thought one step further – your first words have to “hook” your audience’s interest. What you say has to catch them off guard, has to intrigue them, has to make them want to hear more. This isn’t easy to do, but I’m going to show you how…

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Tales From The Frontline Of Speaking: The Story Of A Keynote

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010
Image Credit Here's How Dr. Jim Anderson Prepared To Give A Keynote Speech

Here's How Dr. Jim Anderson Prepared To Give A Keynote Speech

Sure it’s all good for me to go on and on about how you can improve your public speaking skills; however, what happens when I get the call to come and deliver a keynote speech in front of a room of strangers? It’s times like this that everything that I’ve learned about public speaking gets put to the test. Do you want to know how it all turned out?

Getting The Call

Every speaking gig starts with a call (or an email). In my case I got an email from the folks who were setting up a meeting of product managers in Chicago called ProductCamp Chicago. They had read one of my blogs that talks about my views on product management and were wondering if I’d be available to be their keynote speaker.

In my case, flattery always works. I did a quick check of my schedule and then told them that I’d love to do it. They had taken their time in getting in touch with me: I had just under two weeks until the big event. Clearly I was going to have to move quickly.

Creating The Speech

Having accepted the offer to deliver a keynote speech, I was now faced with the challenge of figuring out just what the heck I was going to talk about. Although I had never met my audience before, I knew what they did for a living and the challenges that they were facing.

The organizers had asked me how much time I wanted for my keynote (how many times do you have the opportunity to determine that!). I had told them that between 30-45 minutes would do me fine – on a Saturday morning, I figured that was just about all that any audience would want to sit through no matter how good of a job I did.

After having racked my brain for a few days, I finally decided that what I needed to talk about were the sweeping changes that I believe are going to be transforming the field of marketing. If I did a good job, then this topic would catch the audience’s attention and get them thinking about whether or not their jobs were going to go away. Always a good way to capture your audience’s attention!

Making It Stick

Although I generally prefer a more free-form style of speaking in which I create an outline and talk from, this was a case where I wanted to make every word count. That meant that I needed to write out my speech word-for-word. In 12-point Arial font it ended up filling up 10 typewritten pages. I speak at about 150 words a minute and that gave me 4,973 words or about 33 minutes of speaking if I didn’t speed up or slow down too much.

Having written the speech out, I now had to commit it to memory. I use a image / action association technique to do this and it served me well this time out. I finished writing the speech on Tuesday and flew up to Chicago so I had roughly 3 days to commit 10 written pages to memory. It turns out that that was just about right with a bit of a push on my part.

God’s Angry Wrath

In all of my haste to create and memorize a speech, I had not had time to create any slides for the speech. I stated to feel that I needed some on Friday morning but figured that I could just slap them out on Friday night. Well wouldn’t you know it, the electrical thunderstorm to end all electrical thunderstorms rolled through western Chicago on Friday evening and where I was staying lost power at about 5pm. No power meant that my laptop wasn’t going to work and I didn’t have any access to the Internet to get images for my slides. So much for that idea!

Things got just a bit more complicated the next morning. The house that I was staying still didn’t have any electricity and it’s on well water (pumped by an electrical pump). This meant that there wasn’t going to be enough water for me to take a shower. Can you say sponge bath?

By the time I actually caught the train to go into Chicago, I really wasn’t all that worried about giving a half hour speech in front of a group of strangers. So many hurdles had already presented themselves that I basically figured what else could happen?

One Final Trick: Just Say No To Q&A

The organizers had asked me if I wanted to have a Q&A session after I was done speaking. I actually really don’t like those: if nobody asks a question, then I am sorta left hanging there and that’s never a fun feeling.

I told them that having a Q&A session sounded like a great idea, but I wanted to do things just a bit differently: I’d be the one asking the questions. My hosts agreed so I took the time to create 5 questions that I felt that anyone could answer after listening to my speech.

Since getting called on by a presenter to answer questions after a speech is the second thing that I hate the most, I came prepared. I had stopped by a store the night before and purchased chocolate bars, some with nuts, some without. People who answered my questions get a chocolate bar for their efforts. Who doesn’t like chocolate?

In the end, the speech went off without a hitch. I had no problems remembering what I wanted to say, when I wanted to say it. The audience seemed to enjoy themselves and I got many complements when it was all done. The folks who had invited me were especially grateful. They said that I had “…hit it out of the park…” and that’s when I knew that it had all been worth the effort!

- 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 should practice a speech before you feel that you could have it fully memorized?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When it comes to wrapping up a speech that you are giving, you want to do it right and not leave your audience wondering why you stopped talking all of a sudden. Two great ways to do this are to use the “jigsaw puzzle” and the “future vision” closing techniques…

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Posted in keynote | 2 Comments »

What To Do When You Say The Wrong Thing During A Presentation

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
Saying The Wrong Thing During A Presentation Can Ruin A Good Speech

Saying The Wrong Thing During A Presentation Can Ruin A Good Speech

I’m sure that none of you would ever screw-up and make a verbal blunder during a presentation, right? There is an AT&T ad running right now that captures this concept – a guy has just told an office about an upcoming merger when he really was supposed to have not mentioned it (mayhem ensues). When giving a presentation, your best opportunity for a verbal blunder generally comes during the Q&A session. Here are some thoughts on how to cure yourself of foot-in-mouth disease…

During the recently concluded U.S. presidential race, both candidates were accomplished presenters. However, over and over again both sides said things that I’m sure they both really wished that they could take back. However, once said, your comments are what your audience will remember for better or for worse.

Experts at public speaking all agree on one thing: you can control what you say. Paul Sterman has done some research on this topic and has identified three things that you can do to prevent verbal blunders:

  1. Think Before You Speak: It sounds like something your parents would tell you, but it really is that simple. We seem to get into the most trouble when we fire off our mouth without taking a moment to think about what we are going to say.
  2. Practice, Practice, Practice: Even in a Q&A session, there is no reason for you to have not practiced responding to the questions that you knew were going to be asked. Remember: practice makes perfect.
  3. Get Some Sleep: We end up saying the silliest things when we have not gotten enough sleep. Keep your mind sharp by making sure that you are well rested before giving any presentation.

When you are faced with a situation where you will be speaking extemporaneously, such as a Q&A session or when answering questions from employees, preparation is the key to not making a mistake that you might regret later on. Professional comedians are the ones who are best known for the practice that they put into making spur-of-the-moment statements seem to be not practiced. You want to be able to do the same.

Thinking through the questions that you might be asked and then creating a set of “talking points” that you would use to respond to such questions is the key to preventing a verbal stumble. Your goal is to create “sound bites” that people will remember just like politicians do.

Finally, although it may seem like you need to reply immediately when someone asks you a question during a presentation, there is no rule that says that you have to. You are in charge of how and when you respond to each question asked. Take a moment, think about what the person is really asking, and then provide them with an appropriate answer.

Of course the old saying that the more you do something, the better you get at it is also true here. Instead of fearing speaking opportunities where you might stumble over your words, instead view it as a learning opportunity that will make you stronger for the times that you really need to be at your best.

Have you ever been speaking and slipped up and said something that you regretted? How did you deal with the after effects of what you said? Have you done anything differently since then to prevent future slip-ups? Has that worked out for you? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in questions | 6 Comments »