Practice makes Perfect except when presenting. Why? Because as businesspeople, we just don’t get enough speaking opportunities to become really excellent. Repetition is key and with it frequency. Today we look at the problem and what we can do about it.
The usual frequency for most people for giving formal presentations is once in a blue moon. In other words, we don’t do so many in a year. This presents a problem, because as we know, repetition is key to learning and improvement. If we were giving formal presentations 50 weeks a year, we would see remarkable improvements as we honed our craft. In business though, this rarely presents itself as an opportunity. We may be lucky to give two or three presentations in a 12 month period. In this case, how can we improve our skills?
The obvious method is to proactively increase the frequency. Instead of hanging around waiting for someone to invite you to speak, you need to get out there and beat the bushes for opportunities to present. There are many organizations who are constantly on the look out for speakers. Rotary Clubs need speakers every week. Chambers of Commerce need a constant flow of speakers as well. There are innumerable interest groups who would love to have someone come and speak on an interesting and relevant topic.
This throws up the issue of what to speak about. There will be a natural alignment between your own areas of experience, expertise and knowledge and popular demand, which will determine the types of subjects you will be able to speak upon. If these areas are such that there is a common interest in this subject, you will find there will be groups who will be interested in having you speak. The trick is to let them know you exist as a speaker.
This is where you need to be strategic. Investigate what sorts of groups exist in your area who regularly feature speakers. Make a matrix between the subject areas they cover and your own range of interests and capabilities. If there is a match, then contact them and ask if they are looking for future speakers. The person tasked with finding speakers will be very happy to hear from you, because they usually have a difficult job finding good speakers.
If you are an unknown quantity, then there may be some hesitancy about taking a punt on you as their designated speaker. A simple way to demonstrate your ability is to do speeches on relevant subjects, video them and put them up on YouTube and your website. You don’t need a live audience for these speeches and it is quite sufficient enough for people to see if you have the goods or not, when they are considering you as their potential speaker. The videos don’t have to be “War and Peace” either. Short videos will suffice to demonstrate your expertise.
Once you get a chance to do a formal presentation, to a live audience, make sure you get it on video. The audience laughing at some humour during the speech, applauding, asking questions, etc., all adds to the atmosphere and makes the video a type of show reel for yourself, to demonstrate your goods. You can point the event organizers to the videos, to give them an idea of your ability. Remember your main competition are the totally hopeless and those devoid of any clue whatsoever about public speaking to business audiences.
When the speech is set, use your social media to blast out information about the speech. The number of people who see the posting and the number who can turn up are going to be vastly different. Don’t worry, the fact that many people see you are a public speaker, talking on these various subjects, will alert people to the fact that they can ask you to speak for them too.
After the speech you post the video to a link to your website so that people can see you in action. If you have the technical capability, you can turn a 30 minute speech into 5 or 6 videos through editing of the original. A speech has a number of points you will cover and each of these can be lifted out into a separate video.
So you finish up with the complete speech and then a video for each of the sections of the speech. Again blast all of these out on social media and on to your website for maximum exposure. With all of this content floating around you start to become a known face and people will start contacting you. We get into a virtuous cycle here where success breeds success. Consequently, our frequency of practice goes right up and we solidify our learnings and improvements. In short order, we will be joining the ranks of those in the most professional speaker groups. This is really great for personal and company brands and that is what we want.
