When I started public speaking in the mid-1980s, I was deathly afraid. It’s taken me 20 years to get comfortable. Being called upon to give speeches is the closest thing to being a professional athlete. Here are 11 tips to help you earn your gold medal in speech making:
- Have something interesting to say. This is 80% of the battle. If you have nothing to say, you shouldn’t speak – end of discussion. It’s better to decline the opportunity so no one knows you don’t have anything to say than it is to make the speech and prove it.
- Cut the sales pitch. The purpose of most keynotes is to entertain and inform. It’s seldom to provide you with an opportunity to pitch. For example, if you’re invited to speak about the future of digital music, don’t talk about the latest MP3 player your company is selling.
- Focus on entertaining. Many speech coaches will disagree, but the goal of a speech is to entertain the audience. If people are entertained, you can slip in a few nuggets of information. But if your speech is dull, no amount of information will make it great. If I had to pick between entertaining and informing an audience, I would pick entertaining, knowing that informing will probably happen, too.
- Understand the audience. If you can prove to your audience in the first five minutes that you understand who they are, you’ve got them for the rest of the speech. All you need to understand are the trends, competition and key issues facing the audience members. This simply requires consultation with the host organisation and a willingness to customise your introductory remarks.
- Overdress. My father was a politician in Hawaii. When I started speaking, he gave me this advice: Never dress beneath the level of the audience. That is, if they’re wearing suits, you should wear a suit. To underdress is to communicate, “I’m smarter/richer/more powerful than you. I can’t take you seriously, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” This is hardly the way to get an audience to like you.
- Don’t denigrate the competition. By denigrating the competition, you’re taking undue advantage of the privilege of giving a speech. You’re not doing the audience a favour. The audience is doing you a favour, so don’t stoop so low as to use the opportunity to slander competitors.
- Tell stories. The best way to relax when giving a speech is to tell stories – any stories: stories about your youth, stories about your customers, etc. When you tell a story, you lose yourself in the story telling. You’re not “making a speech” anymore. You’re simply having a conversation. Good speakers are good story tellers; great speakers tell stories that support their message.
- Pre-circulate with the audience. Here’s how to heighten the audience’s connection with you: Talk to them before the speech – especially the ones in the first rows. Then, when you’re at the podium, you’ll see these friendly faces. Your confidence will soar, you’ll relax and you’ll be great.
- Speak at the start of an event. The audience is fresher. They’re more apt to listen to you, laugh at your jokes and follow your stories. On the third day of a three-day conference, the audience is tired, and all they’re thinking about is going home. It’s hard enough to give a great speech – why increase the challenge by having to lift the audience out of the doldrums?
- Ask for a small room. If you have a choice, get the smallest room possible for your speech. If it’s a large room, ask that it be set classroom style (i.e., with tables and chairs) instead of theatre style. A packed room is more emotional. It’s better to have 200 people in a 200-person room than 500 people in a 1 000-person room. You want people to remember, “It was standing room only.”
- Practice, and speak all the time. Thisis a “duh-ism” but nonetheless relevant. My theory is that you have to give a speech at least 20 times to get decent at it. There’s no shortcut to Carnegie Hall. As renowned violinist Jascha Heifetz once said, “If I don’t practice for one day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. If I don’t practice for three days, the audience knows it.”
