The Accidental Communicator

Let’s all agree on one thing: you’ve worked hard to prepare for the next  speech that you will be giving. 

When you take the stage, you are  assuming that your audience will be interested in what you have to say  and they will pay attention to you while you are speaking. However, in  this day and age, there is a very good chance that some of the members  of your audience may not be giving you all of their attention. Instead they may be using their mobile phones to text or tweet while you speak. 

What’s a speaker to do?

So why are you willing to go to the effort of giving a speech? 

If you  are like most of us, you have a goal in mind. What you want to do is to  use the, importance of public speaking to influence your audience to either change the way that they think or to take an action. If you  can do this, then you will have become a powerful speaker. 

We may all think that having the ability to influence an audience is hard to do;  however, it may turn out that doing this is easier than any of us may  know.

Would you like to have a big audience show up for your next speech? 

I  mean, would you like to have the room filled to overflowing? It turns  out that this is actually fairly easy to do: just agree to give a speech about a controversial topic,  you know what I’m talking about: sex, religion, or politics. The reason  that so many people are going to show up is because a lot of them are  going to disagree with what you have to say. 

Just exactly how is a  speaker supposed to go about giving a speech like this?

Congratulation, you now have the ability to stand in front of an  audience and give a speech – you understand the importance of public  speaking. 

What comes next? Have you ever thought about branching out?  Perhaps you can use your speaking skills in a different way in order to  communicate with a group of people. One way to do this is to become a trainer.  If you think about it, being a trainer is very similar to giving a  speech. 

Just exactly what does it take to make the switch from being a  speaker to being a trainer?

I’ve got some good news for you: you are a powerful speaker. 

This  means that you are brilliant. You have incredible ideas. Every question  that you ask is insightful. You have compelling ideas to contribute,  important businesses and organizations to build, and provocative  questions to share. However, there is the possibility that the way you  speak fails to command your power when you are sharing the importance of  public speaking. You may equivocate, apologize and look away as you  speak. What you are doing is subtly undermining yourself with your words  and body language. 

As a result, your ideas do not have the impact they  could.

I think that we can all agree that giving a speech can be a very  stressful thing to do. 

There are so many different things that are out  of our control and any one of these things can go wrong and end up  destroying our speech and preventing us from sharing the importance of  public speaking. One of a speaker’s greatest fears is that half way  through our speech we are just going to forget what we wanted to say.  Our mind will go blank and we just be staring at our audience. 

It turns out that if we don’t want this to happen, there are several things that  we can do in order to prevent it…

When we give a speech, one of the most important things that we want to  accomplish is to find a way to connect with our audience. 

If we can make  this happen, then what we tell them just might sink in and perhaps we  can use the importance of public speaking to change their lives with our  speech. If we can connect with them, then we have a better chance of  having them listen to our message and accept what we are telling them.  

We’ve got a lot of different ways to make this connection happen;  however, one way that we don’t talk about very often is the simplest:  pronunciation.

As speakers the one thing that I think that we can all agree on is that  we want our next speech to be the best one that we have ever given. 

The  challenge that we are all facing is that we really don’t know how to go  about making that happen so that we can show our audience the importance  of public speaking. Well, it turns out that there is probably no one  “silver bullet” that you can change or add to your next speech that will  make it your best. 

Instead, there are a number of different, little,  things that you can do that will help to move your next speech closer to  being the best speech that you have ever given.

Pity the poor speaker. 

All that he or she has to work with during their  speech is words. It is their challenge to find a way to draw their  audience into their speech and make them experience what they have  experienced only using words. In order to make this happen, we need to  find a way to paint a “verbal picture” with the words that we use. We  want our words to create a mental image in the mind of each member of  our audience. 

Just exactly how can we go about making this happen?

Honesty is soooo overrated. 

When we are asked to give a speech, we know  what we need to do in order to deliver a good speech. We need to make  sure that we know who will be in the audience, we have to sit down and  create a speech that will allow us use the importance of public speaking  to connect with our audience, and then we have to get up there and  deliver it in a way that will allow us to clearly communicate what we  are trying to say. How hard could all of that be to do? It turns out that it becomes a lot harder when we are telling ourselves things that just are not true.  

Our lies can have a negative impact on our speech and we really should stop saying things like this to ourselves.

I can only speak for myself, but I can tell you that every word that I write when I’m putting together a speech is pure perfection. 

The words  just flow together and create a seamless whole. The very idea of going  back and editing one of my speeches after it has been written just seems  to be a travesty – who would want to mess with perfection? This is the  speech that I am going to use to show my audience the importance of  public speaking. Ok, so maybe my writing is not really all that good.  

However, the effort involved in editing one of my speeches is so great  that I often don’t want to do it. However, it turns out that if you want  to find a way to pack more of a punch into your next speech, you are going to need to be willing to do some serious editing of what you’ve written.

As speakers, we tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the importance of public speaking and how we speak. 

We try to find ways to  connect with our audience and we try to be aware of anything that we are  doing that might take away from our speech. However, it turns out that  we also have another job that we need to be doing. We have to help out our friends and colleagues who are giving speeches.  Since this is something that we have spent time trying to become better  at, we are the ones who are best positioned to be able to help them to  become better also. 

What we need to learn to do is to help them during  the three stages of their speaking.

As speakers, we all know that creating a great speech is hard work. 

All  too often we can sit down to start to create a speech and have no clear  idea where we are trying to go or just exactly what points we want to be  making while we deliver our speech despite our understanding of the  importance of public speaking. As we put our speech together, things  just tend to go from bad to worse – our words start to fall over each  other and we end up with disjointed ideas and incomplete thoughts. We  all understand that our problem is not that we can’t write words down,  rather it’s that we can’t get our words to make sense.  The reason that we are running into this problem is because we are not  being clear in our objective. 

Instead, we find ourselves trying to say  too much and, as result, ending up saying nothing.

How lucky we all are. We get to live in these modern times with all of  the advantages that technology can bring to us. 

Yes, giving a speech is  still a difficult thing for any of us to do. However, it turns out that  if we’re willing to invite some technology to our next speech we can make the whole process a great deal easier and do a better job of sharing the importance of public speaking. I’m  sorry to have to tell you that you are the one who is still going to  have to stand up there in front of the audience and deliver a speech.  

However, there just might be ways to better prepare you to do that and  to provide you with some assistance while you are up there.

All to often when we are giving a speech, we do it in what is called the “classic style”. 

This means that we stand on a stage and we speak to  our audience and they listen to us because of the importance of public  speaking. This is a one-directional monologue.   However, times are changing. We are no longer limited to having to give  our speeches in this way. Our audiences want more interaction with us  during our speech. 

As speakers we need to understand what new tools are  available so that we can start to work them into our next speech.

As speakers, the one thing that all of us want to do is to become better. 

We may go about doing this in a number of different ways. We may  take courses. We may watch videos of other speakers. We may have our  friends listen to our speeches and then provide us with feedback.  However good all of this is, in the end we may still not be getting all  of the feedback that we need in order to become better speakers. What we  really need to be able to do is to look at ourselves. 

We need to see how we look and how we act while we are delivering our speech. In order  to do this, we need to see ourselves on camera.

As speakers we often get a chance to hear other speakers present.  

Sometimes we’ll be memorized when a speaker puts on a show that  captivates their audience. They are able to deliver a powerful speech  for a number of reasons. Perhaps they have mastered the art of using  body language. Maybe they used props that caught our attention. However,  all too often it can be easy to get dazzled by things that are on the  surface of a speech and end up overlooking how a great speech is really  built: using words. 

The good news for us is that if we want to create a  powerful speech, all we have to do is to pick the right words.

The goal of any speech that we give is for us to find a way to connect with our audience. 

If we can do this, then we’ll be able to clearly  communicate our message to them. An interesting question for you is if  you were in your audience listening to yourself speak, would you rather  hear two people having a conversation or hear a summary of what they  said? I think that most of us would agree that hearing the conversation  would be more interesting. 

What that means for our speeches is that if  we can find a way to work conversations into them, then we’ll have a  better chance of connecting with our audience.

The goal of any speech that we give is for us to find a way to connect with our audience. 

There are a number of different ways that we can go  about doing this; however, one of the most powerful is to include humor  in our speech. Humor is a tricky thing for us to deal with – what is  funny to us may or may not be funny to our audience. We are always  looking for new ways that we can add more humor to our next speech. 

What  we need are ways that we can increase the humor content of our speech  so that we’ll have a better chance of connecting with our audience.

As speakers, we know that if we want to give a good speech we need to  take the time to prepare for it. 

This means that we need to create a  theme for our speech, we need to create a great opening, work in some  physical gestures, and include the proper amount of vocal variety.  However, even after doing all of that, we might not be successful. It  turns out that your audience will be forming an impression of you within  the first 12 seconds of seeing you. Even worse, they probably won’t  change their impression of you even after they know you for a bit. 

How  can a speaker make a good first impression?

The world that we live in continues to change all around us. 

As  speakers, what this means is that more and more often when we are asked  to deliver a speech there is a good chance that our audience may not be  sitting in front of us. Instead, they may be remotely located.  When we find ourselves in this kind of situation, because of the  importance of public speaking, we need to adjust how we deliver our  speech in order to make sure that we are able to keep our audience  engaged. 

How to make this happen is the secret that every presenter  needs to discover.

There are a lot of high profile CIO jobs out there. 

However, one of the  ones that has the most attention being directed towards it is being the  CIO at the gigantic retailer Walmart. Think about it – there is a  Walmart in just about every town and we all go to Walmart every so often  to get things. The IT side of Walmart has to operate smoothly or else  there will be trouble for everyone. 

What is it going to take to do this  job well?

If there is one thing that every speaker wants, it’s to be remembered in a good way.  

We’ve gone to the effort to create, practice and then deliver a speech  and we would like to use the importance of public speaking to ensure  that there will be a lasting impact for our effort. The good news is  that we are the ones who are in charge of making this happen. It turns  out that it’s how we go about delivering our speech that can have the  biggest impact on if our audience will be able to remember what we’ve  told them after we are done. 

What we need to do is to make sure that our delivery style is going to make an impact on our audience.

Giving a speech is hard work. 

As long as you are going to go the effort  of understanding the importance of public speaking and giving a speech,  you sure want your audience to remember what you have told them. That’s  where things can become a bit of challenge for us as speakers. We’ll  often spend so much time trying to figure out what we want to say that  we don’t spend enough time thinking about how to get what we are saying to “stick”. 

That’s why we need some suggestions on how to make sure that our message is going to have an impact on our audience.

The next time that you are asked to make a presentation, how it goes may be based more on how well you prepared than how good of a job you did making the presentation. 

What this means  for you is that you are going to have to take the time to use the  importance of public speaking to master the steps that a speaker has to  go through in order to deliver an effective presentation. The good news  is that none of these are hard to do. 

You just need to be able to  remember the steps that you need to take.

Welcome to our modern world where everything seems to be changing all  the time! 

Back in the old days, we used to be able to show up at an  event that consisted of a room filled with an audience. We’d take the  stage, deliver a speech, interact with our audience, and then go home  and feel as though we’d been able to deliver on the importance of public  speaking. Well, things have changed. In our modern age there is a very good chance that the next speech that you are going to be asked to give will be a remote presentation that consists of you sitting in front of a computer or a video camera  and your audience sitting far, far away in front of their computers.  

What will you have to do to prepare for this new type of presentation?

Let’s face it – giving a speech can be a nerve wracking experience.  

Sure, you’ve created a speech and hopefully you’ve taken the time to  practice it. However, when you are up there standing in front of a room  of people who are all staring at you and you are thinking about the  importance of public speaking, it can be a truly unsettling experience.  I’m sorry but there is nothing that I can tell you that will ever make  this experience go away. 

However, the good news is that there are a  number of tips that I can share with you that can help you to boost your  confidence so that the next time you get to give a speech, you can do  it with gusto.

So just exactly what is a title? 

It is how we choose to introduce our speech to the world.  This is how we go about luring an audience into wanting to hear what we  have to say. However, despite just how important a part of your speech  you title is, all too often speakers overlook this critical part of  speech writing. What we really should be doing is spending time coming  up with title ideas that are both thoughtful and creative. 

What we  really need are techniques that we can use to create a great title for  our next speech.

Wouldn’t it be great if the next time that you took the stage to deliver  a speech, you could have somebody else come up there to help you out to  communicate the importance of public speaking? 

This other person would  always know what you were trying to say next and they would take action  to communicate the same thing that you are trying to say at the very  same moment. 

Well, things are going to get a bit crowded if you start  inviting people to be on stage with you while you give a speech, but it  turns out that your hands can help you to deliver your next speech even as you are talking.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if every speech that we gave was a great  speech? 

I mean we can almost picture our audience standing up once we  were done and giving us a standing ovation. That would truly be magic to  our ears. Now, this is a great concept, but just exactly how should we  go about making it happen? It turns out that it is really not all that hard to make a great speech.  The trick is that you have to understand the importance of public  speaking and know how to go about doing it. 

That sure sounds like  something that we need to talk about.

So let’s all agree on something: not all speeches that we give are the  same. 

Some speeches we give are just being delivered because we promised  somebody that we’d get up there and give a speech. However, then there  are the other speeches. These are the ones that are very important.  It may be our big idea that we’re trying to get support for, perhaps  it’s something that we need people to vote on, or it’s important  information that we need to somehow communicate to our audience. No  matter what the reason, we believe that we are trying to deliver very  important information that reflects the importance of public speaking.  

When we find ourselves in this situation, we need to take steps to make  sure that we’re ready to deliver a very good speech.

So you are a speaker. 

Congratulations. What’s your next step now? Have you ever thought about writing speeches for somebody else? I mean, you can write a pretty good speech for yourself, why not do it for somebody else? You might decide to do this simply because you are a nice person and you want to help somebody out, or you might decide that this is a type of business that you want to go into. 

No matter your motivation, do you know how to go about writing speeches that another person will deliver?

Let’s face it – you are not the first presenter your audience has ever  seen. 

In fact, they have probably seen lots of other presenters.  However, you would like to be able to use the importance of public speaking to become the presenter that your audience remembers.  You’d like this to happen if you are the only presenter that they are  seeing today or if they are going to be seeing a lot of different  presenters. When your audience goes home tonight, you want your words to  be the ones that are still ringing in their ears. 

If you want this to  happen, then you are going to have to impress your audience.

I’m hoping that we can all agree that in this world in which we live in,  there are three types of writers out there. 

There are the writers who  are able to write for the spoken word, writers who are able to write for  the written word, and writers who are just flat out bad writers. I’m  hoping that none of you fall into that later category. 

However, when it  comes to writing your next speech, are you going to be writing it to be read off of a page or spoken on the stage?

As a speaker, I must confess that I can get pretty comfortable with the  ways that things are. 

I use PowerPoint, I have an automatic slide  advancer, and I know where to get royalty-free images. I have a bad  habit of thinking that I know everything that I need to know I order to  share the importance of public speaking. However, it turns out that time  marches on. What this means is that things are always changing and that if I really want to stay on top of my speaking game, then I  need to be aware of the new technology that has become available to me  that will allow me to make my presentations even better. 

Let’s take a  look at what I was not aware of.

Just going to the effort of creating and delivering a speech is a big  challenge. 

However, once you start to spend some time thinking about who  you’ll be talking to, this challenge can become an even bigger deal.  When we realize that just about every audience that we’ll be talking to will contain people from other parts of the world,  this means that we need to tailor our speech so that we can share the  importance of public speaking with them and they’ll be able to  understand us. Although we may be open to doing this, many of us simply  don’t know how to go about making this happen. 

We need some suggestions  on how to make our next speech one that that the entire world can  appreciate.

The one thing that I think that I can say that everyone will agree with  me about is that when we go to the trouble of giving a speech, we want to be remembered.  

In order to make this happen, what we say has to use the importance of  public speaking to connect with our audience. What we need to understand  is that the facts that we include in our speech are not going to be  tied to the audience’s emotions and therefore won’t be remembered.  

However, if we can work stories into our speech then we will have  discovered our greatest tool that we can use to both connect with our audience and engage them.

Isn’t it great when you have time to prepare to give a speech? 

At home  you can sit down, think about what you want to say, lay it all out on  paper and then make changes in order to ensure that your ideas flow  smoothly from start to finish. This is all well and good; however, in real life we don’t always get the chance to prepare to give a speech.  No matter if its in a business meeting, at an organizational get  together, or when we’re hanging out with friends and family, there are  times that everyone turns to look at you and you are expected to deliver a speech right then and there. 

What’s a speaker to do now?

So why do we give speeches? 

In all honesty, there are probably a bunch  of different reasons. These reasons can range from trying to use the  importance of public speaking to provide our audience with new  information that they don’t have to trying to win them over to our way  of thinking. No matter why we are giving a speech, our goal is always  the same: we want to make sure that our audience hears what we  are telling them and, most importantly, remembers it after our speech is  over and done with. As speakers, all that we really have to  work with are words. 

How can we use our words to make sure that what we  tell our audience will stick in their minds?

As a speaker, we control the world when we are on a stage. 

Unless there  is somebody with a big hook waiting for us offstage, while we are  speaking time stands still and our audience only has ears for us as we  share the importance of public speaking. However, the biggest problem  that we all face is that we don’t yet control the world.  What this means is that although we may have been asked to come and  give a speech, a great deal can change between when we were asked and  when we take the stage. That speech that you have worked so hard to  prepare may no longer be the speech that you want to give or your  audience wants to hear by the time you are taking the stage. 

What’s a  speaker to do?

As speakers we’d all like to be able to give speeches that captivate and  interest our audiences – that’s what the importance of public speaking  is all about. 

However, the challenge that we have every time that we sit  down to write a speech is coming up with something to say that will be interesting.  As hard as this may seem to be to do, it turns out that we all have the  answer to this problem. It turns out that the most interesting thing  that you have to talk about is yourself. 

What we need to find out how to  do is to work more of our story into our next speech.

Every time that you have a chance to give a speech, you want it to turn  out well. 

You’d like to be able to walk off of the stage feeling good  about the speech that you gave and because of the importance of public  speaking the impact that it had on your audience. In order to make this  kind of speech happen, there is a lot of information about your speech  that you are going to have to be able to remember and then tell your audience. 

There are many different ways to go about doing this, which one is the best?

I’d like to be able to tell you that every time that you get asked to  give a speech, you’ll be told what the people running the show want you  to talk about. 

However, as is the case with all such things in real  life, it never seems to work out this way. Instead, somebody who is  hosting a show realizes that they need another speaker to fill their  slots and they come and find you because you understand the importance  of public speaking. Great, so you’ve been asked to give a speech, but you have no idea what you’ll be talking about. 

What’s a speaker to do?

When we are creating a speech, we’ve got a lot of work to do in order to  capture the importance of public speaking. 

There’s the opening, the  middle, and the ending. Each one of these parts is important. However, we might be able to say that the opening is just a little bit more important because of the impact that it can have on our audience. When we start a  speech, our audience is trying to make up their minds as to if they  should pay attention to us. 

How we begin a speech will determine if they  decide to give us their attention…

So why do we go to the effort of giving speeches? 

I think that it’s  pretty safe to say that the reason that we do this is because we want to use the importance of public speaking be remembered.  We want the words that we shared with our audience to remain in their  heads long after our speech is over and done with. This presents us with  quite a problem. All of us engage in lots of different conversations  every day and by the end of the day if you asked us to remember any of  them we would be hard pressed to remember them. 

What we need to do as  speakers is to find a way to add more flair to our next speech.

This has pretty much happened to all of us at one time or another. 

We’ve  agreed to give a speech and eventually we sit down to write the speech  and then bang – nothing comes into our mind. We draw a  blank. We might know what we’ve been asked to talk about, we might know  our audience, we might know the importance of public speaking, we might  know everything, but still we just don’t seem to be able to find a way  to start our speech. 

What’s a speaker to do when this happens?

So the question is do you want to become a better public speaker? If the  answer to this question is “yes”, then the next question has to be  “how?” 

It turns out that there are a lot of different answers to this  question and some of them work, and some don’t. Through trial and error  and experimentation, what has been found to work is for public speakers  to engage in some improv. 

It turns out that spending your time doing  this is a great way to engage in exercises that will boost your  spontaneity and allow you to hone your communication skills. 

I’m sorry to have to be the one to share this with you, but when you are giving a speech your audience really does not care about you.  

Oh yeah, you picked a topic that you thought would appeal to them, you  have some experience or expertise in this area that you told the world  about in order to get people to show up for the speech, and so on.  However, as your audience sits there in those uncomfortable chairs, it  turns out that they really don’t give a darn about you. 

Instead, when it  comes to your speech, they want to know whats in it for them. How are  you going to make this happen? 

Before we look at some strategies to help you position your message  for a favorable response, I encourage you to first look inside yourself.  How do you approach asking? Are you an asker or a guesser? Let’s talk  about both. 

Some people are fine with asking questions without regard for the  outcome. In other words, they’re fine with asking anything at all and  are readily willing to accept no. Other people fall into the guesser  category. Those in this category avoid making “the ask” without being  pretty certain the answer will be yes. People in this category will  often put out feelers to better predict the outcome. These people often  ease into the ask, or don’t even have to make it at all. By edging  closer and closer to the desired outcome, their audience will often be  persuaded through this strategic, indirect approach to persuading. 

 Let’s explore three ways of positioning...