We run training on presentations and public speaking continuously. These three requests to be more concise, clear and persuasive, often come up from the participants, regarding the nominated areas where they want to improve. In this Age of Distraction, if you miss the first two, you can kiss goodbye to number three. As soon as an audience hears you rambling, they are scrambling for the mobile phones to exit your talk. When you are mystifying your audience, they bolt for digital device safety.
I am the only English native speaker in my team here in Tokyo. My staff all have very fluent English and are skilled communicators. One of them however, as much as I love her to death, drives me nuts. When her brain has fixed on a topic she launches straight into the main body of what she wants to tell me. It has become a bit of a running joke in the office, because I will stop her and ask “what is the subject of this wonderful exposition?”.
We can do the same things when we are speaking. We are so deep into our subject, we forget that the people listening are unable to follow our thread, because we haven’t set up the topic properly. We have phases of our talk. The opening is the dynamite, the nitro. We light the fuse and blow everyone out of their complacency, sloth and slumber in order to get them to pay attention to us.
In the main body of our talk we need to be thinking in terms of five minute blocks. At around this frequency, we need to be switching it up, to keep our audience attached to what we are saying. We might do this through a powerful story, an impactful slide, an insightful quotation, or a killer question. When we make a statement in the main body, we need to make sure we are bolting on some evidence to prove what we are saying. Data, statistics, survey results, testimonials are all excellent sources of credibility for our provocative claims.
The arrangement of the blocks needs to have a logical flow. It might be by theme, chronological, micro to macro, problem-solution-result or any number of easy to follow formulas. The point is to choose one and use it, rather than allowing the muse to take you on a journey without direction.
Bridges between the sections are useful guideposts too. For example, “We have covered XYZ, now let me explore ABC”, or “In a moment let’s investigate the influence the economy may have on our projections”, or “There are three key things we must be vigilant for, the first is….”. These are threads to stitch the whole presentation together into a format the listener can follow without having to work hard at all. If we make our audience work hard, we often find they are all lazy escape artists and we have lost them.
Time is the weapon of choice for the speaker when it comes to learning to shave words, hone sentences and trim excess. Rehearsal is absolutely key to getting the timing correct. On how many occasions have we all had to sit there and listen to an unprofessional speaker tell us they are “running out of time” and they will have to “whip” through the last slides? How do we feel? Cheated, big time! We came to get some key information from the talk and skipping over key slides to satisfy some arbitrary time constraints has us worried we are not getting full value from the time we are allocating.
When the stop watch is running, you learn to sharpen up the prose, glean the essentials and focus on the most important things only. Rambling away soon trips you up and you realise you need to cut the excess and stick to the most powerful points only.
When we get to the end, we wrap it up with two closes, one for the pre-Q&A and one for the very end. These are our opportunities to underscore our punch lines, hammer our main conclusion, reinforce the ideas we are promulgating and leave the audience with a thought pounding so loudly in their ears that it won’t get easily displaced by something else. The close puts a nice bow on the whole enterprise, wrapping things up sweetly.
Action Steps
Plot the talk in five minute brackets Create bridges to lead the audience into the next section Get out the stopwatch to tighten up the delivery Spend time designing the opening and closes to properly marshal the talk