How Would You Use Two Minutes To Make Your Point?

When you speak to an audience, how long do you talk for: 60 minutes, 30 minutes, 10 minutes? Any of these are normal answers. What would you do if you only had two minutes to get your point across?

In my neck of the woods, a developer wants to build a gas station at the entrance to my neighborhood. There are good sides and bad sides to such development, but the neighborhood has decided that this is not something that they want to happen.

The way that you stop things like this from occurring is that you go down to city hall and attend a zoning hearing. At this hearing both sides get to present their sides and a hearing master will end up making a decision. The trick is that both sides were limited to 15 minutes of talking. Lots of people wanted to voice their objections so I was looking at having only 2 of those 15 minutes in which to speak. What could I say in order to have an impact?

When I sat down to get ready to figure out what I would say, I realized that I was dealing with no more than about 300 words (150 words /min x 2 min = 300 words). I knew that I needed to throw in some facts and stats for the zonning hearing master, but then I also needed to come up with some sound bites that any reporters who were attending could use as quotes.

So what did I come up with? You be the judge if any of these would stick in your mind if you hear them:

• If this gas station is permitted to be built, the zoning laws will have to be changed in order to account for the mountain of roadside memorials that will appear due to drunk drivers.

• The County might be tempted to change zoning rules in order to generate more revenue ; however, just like a teenager who gets a tattoo this would be a bad idea that the County would end up having to live with forever.

• A gas station that is open 24-hours a day and which is located close to a major highway will act like a bug light for all manner of criminals who are seeking an easy score.

The next day one of my “image statements” was quoted in the local paper. Not too shabby for a two minute speech!

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.

Presenters Can Get New Ideas By Reading More Books

Sometimes when we are called on to give a presentation, we sit down to create the presentation only to find that our creative juices have somehow run dry. Oh, oh – this can be a big challenge. What always just seemed to “be there” can go missing just when we really need to draw upon it. What’s a presenter to do?

Despair not fellow presenters! This situation has happened to me and other presenters and we have a fairly simple solution that will get you out of this pickle: read a book.

Katherine Meeks is a New York City based speech consultant and language coach. She’s spent a lot of time with speechwriters and has made a not-so-amazing discovery: those of us who read a lot seem to have the best thoughts, the best style, and the most precise ways of using our vocabulary to make our presentations memorable.

I can hear you now: “Hey, I have a subscription to People magazine – I’m well read!” Umm, nope that’s just not going to cut it.

How often do you work on expanding your vocabulary? Probably  not all that often. It turns out that once we are out of school, the size of our vocabulary stops growing as fast as it once did. Reading turns out to be one of the most effective ways that as adults we can continue to grow our vocabulary. Once again, a word-of-the-day desk calendar is not going to get you to where you want to be.

If you want to become a great presenter, then you have to become a great reader. In order for this to happen, you need to discover interesting books. The best way to do this is to simply ask other people that you know what they are reading.  The key here is to find a way to filter the unending stream of books that are produced every year into a manageable trickle that you can have a chance of reading.

Other good ways to fette possible books for you to read include seeing movies and then reading the book. I was touched by the movie “Pursuit of Happyness” and just had to follow this up by getting and reading Chris Gardner‘s book that the movie was based on. Wow – the book was much different from the movie, I was very glad that I read it. Another way to pick out the books that you might want to read is to spend some time with the book review section of your local newspaper – this can be a great way to spot stinkers.

Once you’ve created a list of books / authors that you’d like to read in order to have your presentations become inspired, the next thing that you need to do is to get your hands on some books. This is actually quite easy to do, but you’ve got to remember that you’ve got a lot of choices. Remember when you used to go to the library as a kid? Well guess what – the library is still there. When was the last time that you went?

Other sources for books include your local used book store (why pay full price?), the local Borders / Barnes & Nobel, and your on-line friend – Amazon. It really doesn’t matter where you get your books from, just make sure that you get them and that you read them! Your audiences will thank you…

Do you think that you read enough books? Have you ever used some of what you’ve read in one of your presentations? What types of books do you think help your presentations the most? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

Presenters Need To Use Their Personal Stories About Facing Challanges To Reach Their Audiences

Today’s audiences are a jaded bunch. In fact, a Gallup Poll shows that just 16% of us have a favorable opinion of business executives. With all of the Wall Street failures and auto maker bailouts that are currently going on, this number will probably keep going down. What’s a presenter to do in order to cut through the fog of cynicism that we are all existing in?

One way that presenters are doing this is by sharing their own stories of adversity. These stories seem to be able to reach out to audiences and somehow make the presenter much more “real” than just another glib business success story.

If this is what your audience wants, what can you do to meet their needs? We all may not have survived a wild bear attack, but we may be able to find other types of material in our lives that will allow us to connect with our audiences:

• Audiences Love Adversity: The bigger the challenge that you faced, the more they love it. Erik Weihenmayer is a mountain climber who is blind. He over came lots of adversity and ended up climbing Mt. Everest. His story shows his audience how to overcome adversity in their lives.
• Tales Of Survival Match Today’s Business Environment: Today’s business environment is harsh and unforgiving and surviving is what most of your audience is trying do every day. Trisha Meili
  was assaulted and left for dead in New York’s Central Park. She now speaks to audiences about what she had to go through in order to recover.
• Find The Metaphor: What your audience is really looking for is hope. They will be interested in your story no matter what you tell them, but it will have a real impact if they can understand that what you went through is similar to what they are currently going through. The fact that you survived (and hopefully thrived) is what is going to give them the courage to keep on trying.
• Tie Your Story Into Business: A great story will keep your audience on the edge of their seats – but what happens when you stop talking? John Amatt survived a mountain climb 20 years ago that killed three of his climbing teammates. The only way that he survived that disaster and made it to the top of the mountain was to  make radical changes to his climbing route and tactics. This story is very well received by business people who are facing major changes in their business environments.
• Use Humor Where Appropriate: These topics can be pretty heavy – life and death struggles are rarely something that anyone wants to joke about. That being said, if your entire presentation is dark and scary, then your audience will just be happy when it’s all over. Instead, use humor at the start and at the end in order to start and end on a lighter note. You audience will appreciate it and this will allow your message to sink in further.

We have not all faced life threatening situations. However, what your audience is really looking for is a good story that they can relate to. If you look back over your life, I’m sure that you can find points in which you were faced with a challenging situation that looked impossible at the time. Then all you have to do is weave a story that will grab your audience’s attention…

No related posts.

Creating A Keynote For A Graduation Dinner Required Careful Planning

Tis the season for college graduations and I was recently asked to deliver a keynote speech as part of an engineering graduation ceremony. The interesting thing about this speaking opportunity was that I was basically starting from ground zero – I didn’t have an engineering keynote speech in my bag of tricks. This meant that I needed to build one from the floor up quickly – they asked me just a week before the big day.

As I was pulling together my keynote, it dawned on me that lots of presenters often find themselves in a similar situation and may not know how to go about creating a keynote speech that will fit the occasion. In an effort to fill this knowledge gap, I’m going to share with you the steps that I went though to build my keynote speech and, because I delivered it last night, I can also give you some feedback on what worked and what didn’t.

1. Always Start With Your Audience: I followed this rule! I realized that I was going to be talking to a group of graduating engineering students, some of their parents, their professors, and various other people (dates, administrators, etc.). This gave me a fairly homogeneous group and that meant that I needed to work “engineering” content into my speech so that they would feel as though I was talking directly to them.
2. Start At The End: What’s the purpose of a keynote? You probably aren’t going to change any lives so you had better make sure that you don’t try to. In my case, I decided that I had two goals: to entertain and to provide motivation for the graduates to succeed as they moved forward (“We know that you can do it”).
3. Content Is King: So what to say? Since I knew that I was not going to be changing any lives with my speech, I decided to focus on two things: funny stories that have happened to me during my career and a discussion about what things the graduates needed to be aware of in order to have a great career. I mixed in several references to paying off student loans (everyone has those), homework (all engineers have too much of that), and dealing with professors. These were common elements that everyone could relate to.
4. Watch The Clock!: Early on I asked how much time I had for my keynote. I was told that 20 minutes would be perfect. It turned out that this was very important – I shaped my entire speech to fit in this time. It is instant death to the speaker who goes on too long especially in an after-dinner speaking situation like this was. People speak at about 150 words/minute and since I was going to be speaking for 20 minutes I knew that I had to limit myself to about 3,000 words which meant that I needed to…
5. Write It Out!: There is some controversy to this point, but here goes it anyway: I wrote my speech out from start to finish. There were two reasons that I did this. The first was to make sure that I could fit my speech into the 20 minute window – my written speech needed to be no more than 3,000 words long. The next was because I could remember reading somewhere that if you want to deliver a memorable speech, then you need to get your wording just perfect (“I have a nice thought” vs. “I have a dream”). In order to do this you need to write the speech out word for word. So I did it. Then I proceeded to revise it 1,000,000 times.
6. Memorize It!: So if you are never supposed to write out your speech, then of course you should never memorize it! However, that is basically exactly what I ended up doing. I practiced my speech over and over reading it as it was written. After about 5 times of doing this, I was able to spend more time looking at my (pretend) audience than looking at my written speech. Did I ever completely memorize my speech, no. I did get it stuck in my brain well enough so that I really only used my written out speech as an occasional reminder. This mean that I spent most of the speech making eye contact with my audience.
7. Use BIG Print: For the version of my written out speech that I had before me when I was delivering the speech, I made some changes to the written out speech. I increased the font size to a nice, easy to read 16 point Arial. I then turned every sentence into its own bullet point. Needless to say this resulted in a longer printed speech – it was 13 pages long in its final form! Oh, make sure that you put PAGE NUMBERS on each page of your printed speech – you just know that you’ll drop the whole thing as you walk to the podium!
8. A Highlighter Is Your Friend: As I read over my 13 pages of bulleted sentences, I found it difficult to keep my place. I ended up using a highlighter to highlight the one or two words in each sentence that were the key idea. This allowed my eyes to dance from highlighted word to highlighted word and that helped me to keep my place better.
9. PowerPoint Can Be Your Friend: I’m really good looking, but 20 minutes is a long time for an audience to spend staring at me. Since PowerPoint slides were already being used as a part of the graduation dinner, I decided to create some to use as part of my keynote. I ended up creating just 10 slides and none of them contained any words – each just contained a single photo. As I delivered my speech, I had written out [man with truck slide] and so I knew when to move to the next slide. Each slide reflected what I was talking about at the time in my speech so the two media, spoken word and displayed image, helped each other. Oh, and I have a Kensington wireless remote control device that I used to automatically advance to the next slide – much smoother than having to run over and hit the space bar (or say “next!”)
10. Have A Good Ending: Ultimately, this is what will stick in everyone’s memory. I took some extra time and carefully worded my last few sentences so that everyone would feel a warm glow of congratulations for the graduates and they would feel as though they had been recognized for their achievements.

So how did it all turn out? I’d give myself a score of 90/100. The PowerPoint pictures that I used were very well received (here is one with a guy and a truck so you can see what they were laughing at) and so I probably should have used more of them. I explained how Milton Bradly’s “The Game of Life” had good lessons for all of us and that went over fairly flat (not enough laughs). I would make changes if I ever gave this speech again, but I received lots of compliments. Making a speech to engineers interesting AND funny is no simple task!

Have you ever been asked to give a keynote speech? How did you go about creating your content? Did you write your speech out or just speak from notes? Did you use any visuals? How did your speech turn out? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

Becoming A Professional Speaker Requires A Great Speech And Business Skills

Not everyone dreams of becoming a paid presenter; however, as we labor over a speech we have all had that thought that started something like “I am NOT being paid enough for all that I do”. Considering how many people are terrified of public speaking, if you can do it and do it well, why not give some thought to “turning pro”?

One note of caution before we start this discussion: it’s been said that in the world of professional speakers, 1% of the speakers make 99% of the money. What that really means is that it’s not just enough to be able to speak in public, but rather you also need to have good business sense.

Jane Atkinson has spent two decades working in the professional speaking business and she knows a thing or two about what it takes to be successful as a pro. Here’s are a few suggestions that she has for those who are considering trying to make some cash from this speaking thing:

• Where Will The Money Come From? If you want to speak professionally, you are going to need to get paid. The key here is to find out who will be willing to pay you for your speech. You need to have unique information or a unique style that is going to help someone solve a problem. Once you know what problem you can solve, you need to find out who has that problem.
• Move From Free To Fee: Everyone would like to get paid for every speech that they give from day 1, but life doesn’t work that way. Instead, what you need to do is to start your professional speaking career by giving free speeches and then the paid gigs will follow.
• I.T.S.S.: It’s the speech, stupid! At the end of the day, it’s your speech that people will be paying to hear. It’s got to be the very best speech that you can give. What this means is that you’ve got to create the speech and then refine, refine, and refine it again.
• Well, Aren’t You Special: If you expect people to pay to hear you speak, then you had better come up with a bio that paints you as being a special person. Your bio should clearly state why anyone would want to hire you.
• Learn From The Pros: If you want to be a professional speaker, then you need to start spending time hanging out with other professional speakers. You will learn the most from those who are currently making a living speaking professionally.
• Mind Your Business: Although the speaking part is what people are buying, it’s really a small business that you are running. This means that you need to be taking care of sales, marketing, accounting, etc. Lots of speakers are great speakers but end up failing because they forget to run the business.

Have you ever thought about speaking professionally? Do you know what topic you would speak on? Do you spend time with professional speakers? What have they taught you about the business? What do you think I left off of my list? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

It Can Be Hard To Do A Good Job Talking About Money

Money – it’s a love / hate thing. We all would like to have lots of the stuff; however, most people (us included) would probably rather lose a finger than have to sit though yet another incredibly boring presentation about the green stuff. Why is this? It’s actually pretty easy to understand what’s wrong with most presentations about money: it is presented in a boring way, the PowerPoint slides that are used are crammed with numbers that are way too small for any human to be able to read, and the presenter often uses vocabulary that we don’t understand. What can be done to fix this?

We already know that one of the most effective ways to deliver a presentation that will “stick” with your audience is to tell them a compelling story. A presentation about money should be no different – it’s the story that you tell that will get your point across. Keeping that in mind, here are some tips that will make your next presentation on money unforgettable:

1. K.I.S.S: No, not the rock group, but rather Keep It Simple Stupid. In other words, whenever you talk about money there can be the tendency to say too much. DON’T DO IT! Instead, before you create your speech write out a single sentence that contains the message that you want your audience to walk away with. Then, when you are describing some financial tool re-read this sentence and determine if what you are talking about supports it. If not, then drop it and move on.
2. Come Early, Leave Late: This is just a basic speaker tip; however, it’s even more important when you are talking about money. Making sure that you don’t have to worry about your equipment or the room gives you more time to focus on what you are going to be saying. Not having to run out at the end means that you can provide more detail for those who really want it.
3. Bring A Partner To Help – Mr. Handout: Since much of what you may be talking about can be (a) complex and (b) detailed, this is one speech that you do want to provide a handout for. However, don’t do what too many speakers do and just give everyone a copy of your slides. Instead, create a special handout that provides detailed information about things that you didn’t have time to cover.
4. Careful About Colors: Since so much of what is shown in any presentation on money is charts, you need to carefully check your colors. Stay away from the common color-blindness colors and make sure that all of your text is readable from the back of the room.
5. Shut Her Down When You Don’t Need Her: All too often an audience in a talk about money can start to pay more attention to the slides than the speaker. One way to put a stop to this is to either turn off the projector every so often or, even better yet, put a completely black slide into your deck when you want all eyes on  you. It’s startling and it works really well.
6. Do The Dark / Light Thing: Making your PowerPoint slides readable is critical. One way to help this happen is to make sure that the contrast between your slides’ background color and the foreground colors is very distinct. For a large room, I’ve found that making your slide background dark while making your text and drawings light colored makes everything readable even from the back of the room.
7. Turn Off The Hollywood Effects: PowerPoint and other presentation applications allow you to go wild on how one slide goes away and the next one shows up – transitions. Here’s a suggestion : don’t. Either pick one transition and use it throughout your presentation or only vary the transition when you really want to draw attention to the new slide. Otherwise you risk training your audience to look forward to your next transition and not what you are saying.
8. Don’t Create A Fighter Pilot Eye Exam: I can’t tell you just how important this one is – make sure that you keep your font selections to a minimum and make sure that all text is large enough to be read. I like to choose “sans serf” fonts because they don’t have the loopy stuff and are generally easier to read. I’ve also found that the 18 pt font size is the smallest that you want to use, otherwise it just gets too hard to read.
9. Remember What A Picture Is Worth: Instead of trying to overwhelm your audience with words that describe technical financial terms, instead try to use more charts and graphs. Displaying a chart and then talking about it gives your audience time to apply your words to real situations and promotes understanding and retention.
10. Remember That Only 5 lbs. Will Fit In A 5 lbs. Bag: Avoid the #1 sin of public speakers who talk about money – putting too much information on a single slide. We can fall in love with the way that we describe something and we like to add more and more details to it. However, take a moment and think about your poor audience. Try to present just the bare minimum amount of information that they need on each slide.

By following these simple tips you can create a powerful presentation that makes an impression on your audience and leaves them with the thoughts and ideas that you want them to have.

Have you ever given a presentation that talked about money? How did it turn out – was it well received or did your audience go to sleep after your second slide? What made your presentation work / not work? What did you think about the last financial presentation that you went to – did the speaker follow these tips or did he/she make you want to leave? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.