Successful public speaking correlates so much with good preparation. Always be well prepared when you enter a stage and talk to an audience. A small but important part of this preparation is to get rid of any potential distraction for your audience. My goal is to prevent any form of visual or auditory distraction. Coins or keys that make jingling sounds in my pocket? No way. Expansive bracelets or earrings, if I were a woman? No way. And that conference name tag flying around in front of my chest? Definitely no way!
Great delivery in public speaking does not only depend on your eye contact, your body language or your voice. Great delivery also depends on how you use your stage, how you handle your tech and how you prepare your room. As always, good preparation is the secret ingredient for success.
It took me years and years to finally be… present… on stage. My thoughts used to go wild during my speeches: Did you prepare well? What if this humorous line doesn’t work? What will they think? Why did you have to say that? My thoughts used to get stuck in the past and in the future. But the magic of #publicspeaking happens in the now. Today, I am 100% present, always. You speak in public for one sole purpose: to make your audience a present. But how can you make someone a present, if your are not present yourself? Apart from that, being present on stage offers three big benefits, which your audience will appreciate tremendously. ______ publicspeaking #charisma #beingpresent #audienceinteraction #calltheroom #humor #courtesy #authority #spontaneity #fminsights
How many times in my life did I have to sit through presentations I couldn’t have cared less about? But was it my problem? It is your job as a speaker to make your message, your content relevant to your audience. Over the years, I collected seven ideas to make my audience care more about my talks. Be creative, find your own ways, but never assume that someone cares, from the start, about your added values, KPIs or market entry strategies in western New Hampshire. ______ #publicspeaking #charisma #relevance #whyshouldtheycare #speechcontent #speechwriting #fminsights
Are rhetorical questions good? Of course they are. If you use the right ones. My logical me smiles every time speakers invite me to confirm their standpoint in an elegant way. In contrast, I feel a shiver every time speakers force me to agree with them. ______ #publicspeaking #charisma #rhetoricalquestion #rhetoric #persuasion #fminsights
From my book, PLUSPLUS – Patterns for Better Communication: (you can get your copy at Amazon) ______ “Dinosaurs became extinct some 65 million years ago. I knew that. But did you know how many years dinosaurs populated this planet? 165,000,000 years. Once I was reading Mark Twain’s classic Letters from the Earth, and found another number that made me think a lot. When we look at the sky at night, we see bazillions of stars — 300 sextillion (more or less) by the latest estimates. But light takes time to travel. If we could travel at light speed, 299,792,458 meters per second, it would take 3.6 years to reach the solar system that’s closest to us. Aren’t we small? So there is absolutely no need at all to make ourselves even smaller — but that’s exactly what we do all the time, both in everyday communication and on stage. 99⅓% of all business presentations in Spain start like this: Hoy vamos a hablar un poco de nuestra empresa. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about our company. Hey! Wait just a minute — what do you mean, A little bit? ¡¿¡A little bit ? ! ? Your company is your passion, your life, your future — why would you want to talk about it a little bit? I refer to things like this as ‘message reducers’, and our vocabulary simply teems with them. A little bit, little, small, short, simple, simply, quick, quickly, hopefully, probably, potentially, basically, actually, perhaps, maybe, could, should, would, ought to, think, believe, guess, try, want, pretty much, kind of, sort of, rather, quite — The list goes on — and on — and on. We are all world champions when it comes to diminishing our message — and ourselves. Stop it!“ Cut the strings. ______ #publicspeaking#charisma#fminsights
