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.

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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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Alan Greenspan Gave A Keynote Speech At The HIMSS Conference

Even if you don’t work in the world of high-finance, you surely know who Alan Greenspan is. He was the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. There’s no question that this guy is smart, but can he deliver a good keynote speech?

Where It Happened

While attending the recent HIMSS health care show up in Chicago, I had an opportunity to watch Greenspan in action as he gave a keynote speech. Now you have to understand that he was speaking on the third day of a 3-day conference and generally the crowds would have thinned out by now, but that wasn’t the case. The hall in which he gave his speech had a seating capacity of between 15,000 – 20,000 and it was pretty much full.

What caught my interest was that people were not showing up because they thought that Greenspan was a good speaker. No, they were showing up because they wanted to hear the information that they thought that he would be communicating: how did the current recession come about and when will it end?

The Introduction

The lead up to Greenspan’s keynote speech was a spectacular Hollywood introduction. Lights flashed, the speakers boomed with an announcer’s voice, and a brief film played that showed all of Greenspan’s many accomplishments. This was followed up by the Chairman of the HIMSS organization coming on stage and reading a prepared introduction for Greenspan. What speaker could ask for a better intro?

The Speech

So I know that the question that you are dying to have answered is “how did he do?”. The answer is that Alan Greenspan is not a very good keynote speaker; however, the audience hung on his every word. Perhaps some explination is needed here:

• Technical Knowledge: Greenspan knows his stuff. He was there to explain how the U.S. economy works and the introduction plus the words that came out of his mouth confirmed that he really knows his stuff.
• Hands: Greenspan’s #1 problem with public speaking is that he, just like so many other speakers, has no idea what to do with his hands. During his keynote speech his hands spent the time traveling from his pants pockets to being clasped and back again. It was a big room and only his face was displayed on the jumbo-tron screens, but it was distracting none the less.
• Technical Content: I’m not sure what the rest of the audience was expecting, but I was anticipating a watered-down speech on basic economics. I was flat out wrong. Greenspan held no punches back and used very technical economic terms in his speech about how the world’s economy operates.
• Pacing: The stage that Greenspan was giving his keynote speech on was HUGE. He was equipped with a wireless mic and so he could go anywhere. Unfortunately, he did. He paced back and forth and moved from side to side. Now there is no problem doing this if it supports your speech, but there was no clear linkage between his movements and his speech.

• Using Notes: The first 25% of Greenspan’s keynote was delivered pretty much how you would expect a keynote to be delivered – he had some notes that he referred to occasionally, but the rest of the time he looked at the audience and spoke. However, just a little bit of the way into his speech, something strange happened – he picked up his notes and started reading from them word-for-word. The impact of his speech went way down when it felt like he was reading a book to us.

What Was Learned From All Of This

I had been very excited to listen to Greenspan speak – he is basically a rock-star in the world of finance. I came away from his keynote speech feeling just a little bit let down. On one hand, I was amazed at just how powerful a reputation can be in drawing people to come to a speech just to hear what the speaker has to say. Substance over style so to speak.

On the other hand, the reading word-for-word from notes really disappointed me. Then an interesting thing happened, I think that I figured out why he did it. Greenspan seemed to be a perfectly competent speaker. I don’t think that he NEEDED to read his speech from his notes. However, I now think that he is such an important person that the words that come out of his mouth can still move markets.

This means that, just like the President of the Unites States, he has to be very careful about what he says (and how he says it). If he had said that “… the recession is going to last for another 5 years…” then the stock market would have plunged the next day. Perhaps reading his speech was a way to protect us all from words that are too powerful…!

Questions For You

Have you ever attended a speech because you really wanted to know more about what was going to be talked about? Did you attend because you knew that the speaker was good or despite who the speaker was? How did it turn out – did you get what you wanted? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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…

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George Halvorson Gave A Keynote Speech That Can Teach Us All A Lot

We can talk about how to be a better communicator all we want, but in the end it comes down to learning – and we all do this in different ways. One great way to discover what a speaker should (or should not) do is to watch ‘em in action. This time around we’re going to take a look at how a powerful CEO, George Halvorson, did during a recent keynote speech.

Halvorson is the Chairman and CEO of the Kaiser Permanente health system. There’s no question that he knows his stuff, the challenge will be to discover how well he can communicate it.

While attending the recent HIMSS health care show up in Chicago, I had an opportunity to watch Halvorson in action as he gave a keynote speech. How did he do? Overall – not bad, but it could have been better. Let’s find out how.

• Nerves: First off, this was a big presentation. In the audience were approximately 10,000 – 12,000 eager listeners. We all talk about getting butterflies in our guts before we talk, but just image how Halvorson must have felt?
• Introduction: That being said, the lead in to Halvorson’s speech was spectacular. A professionally produced video and well done sound track listed all of his accomplishments. It was rock show quality stuff and everyone was pumped up and ready for a good speech by the time he took the podium.
• Opening: That’s when the ball got dropped. The first words out of your mouth have to be grabbers – they have to convince your audience to pay attention to what you are going to be saying. Halvorson’s were, unfortunately, forgettable. He started by thanking people and commenting on the convention – pleasant talk that went nowhere.
• Humor: It turns out that Halvorson has a great sense of humor. Although this was a high-stakes keynote speech, he was able to work his humor into it and this really allowed him to connect with his audience. He came across not as an aloof CEO, but rather as a real guy who is trying to solve problems.
• Notes: Reading from your notes is always a bad idea. Halvorson did a lot of this and it showed. Now I’ll grant that this was a big speech and there were multimedia issues – he had to synch up with the folks who were controlling the slide show. Still, when you read your speech word-for-word you lose that connection with your audience.
• Hands: what to do with your hands during a speech is always a big question. Halvorson did pretty well, but he still struggled at times. As we all have a tendency to do, he put his hands on the podium and even leaned on it at times. When he made gestures with his hands, they were down low and couldn’t be seen by the people in the back of the room. However, there was one point in time in which his right hand was used in a hammering gesture that drove home the point that he was making.

We can practice our public speaking by ourselves as much as we want, but having the opportunity to watch and learn from others is, as the folks at Visa tell us, priceless.

Questions For You

How do you like to get introduced – is there any multimedia involved? Do you have the courage to use your personal sense of humor in your speeches? How much effort do you put into having a great speech opening? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Even if you don’t work in the world of high-finance, you surely know who Alan Greenspan is. He was the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. There’s no question that this guy is smart, but can he deliver a good keynote speech…?

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The Super Memory System For Presenters

I recently had an opportunity to deliver a 45-minute keynote as part of a training session kick-off for a group of IT Mangers. I decided that in order to boost my creditability with this hard-nosed group, I needed to stay in eye contact with them and not be looking at my notes. This meant memorization.

Here’s how I did it:

• I broke the speech up into sections – my speech resulted in 9 sections.
• I then broke each section up into “ideas” – basically sentences.
• I then picked a place that I had lived in the past (a school or any place that you know well would have done fine also). The only requirement was that it had to have multiple, distinct “locations” – in this case rooms.
• Then I pictured myself in a room such as the kitchen. I could see myself sitting a the table in a particular chair.
• Next I came up with a picture AND an action for the first idea / sentence that I wanted to memorize.

Here’s how I had written my speech to start out:

“I’d like to start out our time together today by asking you a simple question: where do you want you want to be at in your career 5 years from now? That will be 2014 – it’s just 1,825 days from right now. I have no idea what you will be doing in 5 years, but there is one thing that I know with 100% certainty – the job that you are doing right now will no longer exist.”

• I basically had three image / actions to create. Remember, these are highly personal – what you come up with just has to work for you.
• My first image was of 5 calendars: one each being stuck to each of  the fingers on my right hand. I was shaking that hand very hard and they all flew off.
• My second image was of a stack of those one-a-day calendar tear-off sheets in a really, really tall pile sitting before me. Just to make it more vivid I pictured it as being sheets from the Dilbert: 2009 Day-to-Day Calendar. I then pictured a card in front of this stack that said “1,825 days” and the stack falling over and making a real mess on the floor.
• Finally, on the table in front  of me behind the stack of calendar sheets was a very small model of a worker in a cubicle typing away on a computer. All of a sudden a trap door built into the table swung open and the little cubicle vanished.

There you have it. When I went to give my speech, I didn’t even try to recall the words that I had written down. Instead, I had three pictures flash in my head – calendars stuck to my fingers, a stack of calendar pages, and a disappearing cubicle. Without looking at any notes, I was able to quickly and easily recall what I wanted to say without having to look at any notes!

Have you ever had to give a speech without using notes. How long was the speech? How did you memorize what you had to say? How did it go? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Presenters Need A Way To Memorize Their Speeches

Congratulations – you’ve been invited to speak for 30 minutes. Remember – don’t use any notes! If you got this offer could you do it?

As though standing in front of a group of people was not scary enough,  now you have to find a way to shove 30 minutes (that’s 1,800 seconds) worth of information into your head – and recall it under pressure. Given that we all talk at about 150 words/min, you’re looking at memorizing 4,500 words. Good luck!

I recently had an opportunity to deliver a 45-minute keynote as part of a training session kick-off for a group of IT Mangers. I decided that in order to boost my creditability with this hard-nosed group, I needed to stay in eye contact with them and not be looking at my notes. This meant memorization.

Now let me make a confession – I hate it when people memorize their speeches. When they do this, they have a tendency to deliver them in an automatic robot-like manner that has virtually no emotion because they are trying so hard to remember what they want to say next. I was determined to avoid this!

Here’s what I did to get ready for this speech:

• I wrote the speech out word-for-word. This allowed me to create a 6,750 word speech (45 minutes) so that I would exactly fill my time slot.
• I then “tuned” the words trying to drop in as many memorable phrases as possible. This is the real advantage of writing your speech out completely.
• I then memorized the speech.

… and that’s what you really want to about. But, I’m out of space for now so I’ll share all of the secrets about how I memorized this speech with you next time.

Have you ever had to give a speech without using notes. How long was the speech? How did you memorize what you had to say? How did it go? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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The Perfect Speech Needs To Contain The Perfect Stories

Last week I had the opportunity to give the perfect speech. Now, you might be offended by this statement and are probably wondering just how I could become so full of myself, so perhaps I should explain myself. I had spoken in this venue four times before, I had been invited to speak again because they liked what I had had to say before, and I knew that I was going to be speaking about a month before I actually got up on stage. These are all the elements of a perfect speech.

Since I already basically knew what I wanted to tell this audience, this time around I really worked on HOW I said it – I wanted to make an impact in their lives. Awhile ago I had read an article in which Patricia Fripp boiled down what makes a really memorable speech: tell a story, make your point, tell a story, make your point, etc.

So I did. I ended up working six stories into my speech and then following them up with the point that I wanted to make. In order to make sure that I would fit the 30 minutes that I had available, I did some quick math: 30 minutes x 150 words/minute = 4,500 words in speech. I then did something that I’ve almost never done before.

I wrote out my speech word for word. I did this because I had read somewhere else that in order for you to “tune” a speech, you need to know exactly what you are going to say. This came out to be about five single spaced pages of text.

How I memorized this speech so that I didn’t have to look at my notes even once during my speech is a story for another post…

Do you tell stories during your speeches? How many stories do you work into a typical speech? Do you write your speeches out? How do you ensure that when you give the speech it doesn’t seem like you are reading them off of the page? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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