Provide a clear, brief outline. Tell your audience in one sentence the topic of your speech, or, if it’s more informal, what you want to talk about. Then briefly go through the elements you’re going to cover. Think of this outline as a road map that will help them to follow you. After the outline, tell them directly how your talk will change them. For example, in a speech to your board of directors you might put it like this: “The purpose of my strategy review is to help us take a sober second look at our 5-year business plan, to make sure we are headed in the right direction to meet our long-term goals.” This gives them motivation to listen to you.
Get their attention. People are often distracted by the thoughts in their head when a new talk is beginning. Remember: No attention, no retention. If your audience is not listening, you might as well stop speaking.
Three effective attention-getters are:
• Deliver a startling fact, something unexpected or dramatic that the audience doesn’t know, yet that they will immediately realize is important to them. Example: “Most people don’t know that still today, nearly half of all child deaths are due to malnutrition.”
• Ask a key question, a question the audience really wants to know the answer to. Ask this rhetorically – with the implicit promise that you are going to answer the question in the course of your talk.
Example: “How will your job change in 5 years?”
• Tell a personal story that makes them feel strongly connected to you, and establishes your credibility or your connection to the issue (this is for longer, more formal talks).
Example: “I became passionate about the issue of child trafficking when I met a remarkable woman in Kathmandu, Nepal. She was saving young girls from a life of forced prostitution, and I realized I had to help her, I couldn’t turn away.”
Here’s a great example of an attention-getter used by Kelly McGonigal in her 2013 TED Talk. You can see she is incorporating all three of these approaches into just a few lines:
I have a confession to make…I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be healthier and happier. But I fear that something I have been teaching for the last ten years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress…3
Content or Body of the Speech
Three main elements must be transmitted in the body of your speech: a clear central idea, the information that makes that idea convincing, and the relevance of your main idea to the audience.
The main idea
Deliver your main point right after your introduction. This is when your audience is listening with their full attention. The mistake many speakers make is to begin with the background, context or history of their subject. They like to lay out all their data and their premises first, and then conclude with their main message. The problem with this is that it requires a lot of attention before getting to the interesting part. It’s boring. By the time you get to your important point, no one is listening. Imagine the audience’s response to these lines we have heard speakers deliver:
“To truly understand Syria’s refugee crisis, let’s first look at the history of humanitarianism, beginning with the founding of the Red Cross in 1863. That year at a conference in Geneva the emblem was chosen…”
“So, what is the future of social gaming? Let’s begin by looking at some statistics about our company…today we have 10 major games that we run through 13 studios in 6 countries. We are focused on growing our team a lot. We have 1300 full-time employees…”
Our advice: scrap the historical overview that puts your audience to sleep. No one cares. Instead, bring on the main attraction – your main idea.
The challenge here is not just to deliver your idea up on a platter, but to transmit it so that it sticks in the minds of your audience. The chapter on memes provides most of the guidelines for how to do this effectively. Try to make your idea concise, catchy, concrete, and connected to what your audience cares about. Here are a few examples of great main messages we have heard from our clients:
“Africa’s growth is already strong, but our growth must become shared and sustainable if we want to prosper in the twenty-first century.”
“What happens when banks become ‘too big to fail’? In the USA, a relatively small elite has become too powerful – powerful in ways that distort the financial sector and damage the rest of the economy.”
“Knowledge matters. Having the right information can make the difference between sickness and health, poverty and wealth.”
“When it comes to preparing for natural disasters, putting early-warning systems in place is an inexpensive way of saving lives. When a tsunami is coming, a simple alarm bell in a coastal town can give people enough time to get to higher ground.”
Supporting information
Support your main message with information that will be convincing to your audience. What does not work are general or vague claims such as: “We all know GMOs are bad for you,” or “Trust me, inflation is a major cause of poverty.” Also avoid conceptual or technical language or acronyms your listeners might not know. For example: “Our aggregated social welfare indicators indicate an upward trend in GDP may not correlate with a decline in the GINI Coefficient.” (You think that was bad? In our work with development institutions we have heard much worse.)
Clarity is really important at this stage. You want your audience to get each chunk of supporting information in a linear way so they can follow your flow. You can also apply the second C from Chapter 2: be concrete. When you can give your audience a “word picture” of what you are talking about, they form that picture in their heads. This makes them more likely to believe that it is true.
Here are the kinds of information that are most convincing:
• Concrete facts
• Specific examples
• Numbers and statistics – these are crucial to sounding authoritative
• Stories and “eyewitness” accounts
• Analogies and metaphors expressed using visual “word pictures.”
Audience relevance
Relevance helps us hold information in our minds. We can’t remember everything we hear, but if something has a direct application to our lives and work, we pay more attention and are more likely to store it away for future reference. We are also more likely to care about what is relevant to us, which is important for moving an audience to action. Finally, you want to be sure to speak inside your listeners’ frame of reference. For example, use pounds and miles for a US audience, kilos and kilometers in the rest of the world. Here are some key questions to help you find what is relevant to your listeners:
• What’s at stake for them?
• What are the risks and opportunities ahead?
• Is there a choice for the audience to make?
• What power do they have to affect the outcome?
• What in your talk connects to their higher values?
• Does your topic connect to issues of morality, justice, identity or the welfare of others?
• What can they do to make a positive difference?
Guideposts: Number your sub-topics
Coming back to our analogy of a road map, it will help your audience know where they are in your talk if you number your main points or sub-topics. Explain this in your introduction, and then during your talk remind your audience where you are: “Now I’ll cover my second point, the financing.” Use a congruent system: “first…second…third,” or “point number one…point number two…point number three.” This might sound obvious, but many speakers don’t say these markers out loud, or they introduce each new topic with confusing phrases such as “next…also…another thing…an additional point I want to mention.” The audience has no idea where such a speaker is heading, nor when the talk will ever come to an end.
Three seems to be a magic number. We can usually remember a list of three things. When it gets to four or beyond, it’s easy for a listener to lose track.
When you reach your conclusion, use a
final guidepost. Say, “In conclusion…” or “To sum up…” or any other phrase that clearly indicates you have reached the end. This will bring joy to your audience. Listening to even a riveting speaker requires energy and focus; we appreciate the elegance of a speaker who is able to be concise and informative at the same time. Be concise in your final few minutes as you wrap things up.
The Conclusion
Swiftly accomplish the three main tasks of your conclusion:
• Repeat your message
• Move your audience to action
• End with a moment of rapport.
When you say, “In conclusion,” this heightens your audience’s attention. It’s your opportunity to repeat your main message and have them remember it clearly.
Now motivate them to act. You are communicating because you want to accomplish something, reach an objective, change your audience’s mind, persuade them to act. So at the end, give your audience something specific to do with your idea and information. It can be something simple, such as inviting questions or prompting a discussion. Or it can be something big: advocating for a new policy, asking for a signature, requesting a vote.
If the purpose of your talk is to interest people in a new program or project and you have a brochure or document with you, you might end by asking whoever in the audience would like a copy to raise their hand. Then give it to them so that they have to reach out and accept it. This simple act creates a physical pattern of taking and accepting the information you have shared. One sometimes hears motivational speakers urging their audiences to make one change in their lives at the end of a talk. It’s the same principle: it helps move your listeners from information to action.
For example, one of our clients is a multilateral development agency that wanted to motivate its staff to write blog posts for their new corporate blog. They asked us to give a lecture on social media and step-by-step instructions on how to write a blog post. We ended our talk with an invitation that everyone stay for 30 extra minutes and write a blog post on a work-related topic they cared about. Almost everybody stayed. They wrote 47 posts. Some volunteered to share them aloud, and they blew us away with their quality and creativity. We encouraged everybody to submit their posts to the agency blog. Several of the participants told us they never would have done it if we hadn’t asked them to write a post right then and there.
The very end of your talk is an important final moment of rapport. Smile sincerely and make eye contact. Pause without looking away, or sitting down immediately. Stay present with your audience; don’t disconnect abruptly.
Tips for Preparation
1. Speak from notes. Write down your key points rather than a full text, with one or two sentences per point. Get to the essence of each point. Use large font and leave plenty of white space between points so you don’t get lost.
2. Refine by deleting extraneous background information, tangents, complaints, or explanations that are too lengthy and convoluted.
3. Practice out loud. If this is an important talk or conversation, you should record it and listen to yourself. Are you boring yourself? Do you sound like you’re whining? Too many “Ums”?
In conclusion, whenever you are addressing others with a strategic communications goal, think about your audience’s journey. How will you move them from A to B? The structure of your talk is like a road map that helps your audience make the journey with you:
• The purpose of the introduction is to get and keep the audience’s attention
• The purpose of the content is to transmit your information so that it sticks
• The purpose of the conclusion is to move the audience from information to action.
When you master this simple structure, your audiences will stay with you every step of the way.
Part II
Communicating with Authority
When you speak, you want your audience to see you as an authority, as someone who is confident about their topic. This confidence, when coupled with warmth and authenticity, inspires trust and motivates audiences to act. As humans, we are instinctively tuned to pick out alpha behavior in groups, and we unconsciously pay more attention to those who display this kind of leadership behavior when they communicate. These alpha behaviors are transmitted through our body language, voice and powerful words.
Conveying leadership is especially important when you are not in fact the alpha in the room. What if you are delivering a report to a room full of your bosses? Your behavior while you are speaking needs to portray confidence and authority; otherwise your audience may not listen to you at all. You can think of it like this: you may not be the boss, but you are the authority over what you have to say.
Chapter 4
Authoritative Body Language
Body language covers everything from our posture and gestures to our facial expressions. As babies, our first language was non-verbal. We stared at and learned to read the facial expressions and gestures of those closest to us before we were able to decipher words and make our own sounds to add to our communication toolkit. We all still have programmed within us that channel that processes non-verbal communication, and that channel is constantly sending impressions about others to our conscious minds. Reinforce your message with these body-language patterns that convey your confidence and authority:
Open Body Language
The most basic lesson in body language is knowing the difference between closed and open body language. Closed body language means you look as if you are physically protecting yourself or concealing something, for example by having your arms crossed over your chest, your hands folded in front or behind you, or hands in your pockets. Open body language means you are confident so you feel no need to protect yourself. You stand with your arms at your sides, and sit with your hands apart and on the table.
Studies of both human and mammal groups show that alphas in a group display the most open chest posture. We notice that when speakers get nervous, one of the first things they do is roll their shoulders protectively inwards or upwards towards their ears. As humans, we unconsciously detect this body language and read it as nervous and un-authoritative. Make sure your chest is up and forward, your shoulders down and relaxed, and your arms separate, not glued to your torso but relaxed by your sides and ready to gesture.
The most common question we get from our participants is “But what do I do with my hands? They feel so awkward just hanging there by my sides!” It doesn’t matter how you feel. It’s what you look like and what you are conveying to your audience that matters. You are welcome to feel anything you want after your talk is done. In the meantime, you have a job to do, and people to influence. Your arms and hands should stay apart and be used to gesture naturally.
Open body language is especially important at the very beginning of your talk. People make up their minds quickly about speakers in the first few minutes. Will this speaker be nervous? Will this speaker be someone I want to listen to? Is this talk going to be boring? Open body language communicates candor, comfort and confidence. Arms crossed or hands folded can communicate aloofness or insecurity.
Gestures
Natural gestures enhance your messages. Even without thinking about it, we use our hands to illustrate the meaning of our words. If we say a “trend is on the rise,” it’s likely one of our hands will go up as we speak about it. This creates more impact than your words alone. It will be useful to take a video of yourself delivering a talk, so you can see if you are gesturing too much or too little. Interestingly, many of our participants come to us certain that they are using their hands too much when they speak, yet we very rarely see cases of over-gesturing. We have had to tell people not to touch their faces or their hair.
Gestures you should avoid: Pointing or jabbing at people, using fists or banging a table to make a point, brushing your hands dismissively at the audience, putting your hands over your mouth, fidgeting with rings, pens or watches.
Your Head
Confidence is literall
y displayed by keeping a “level head.” Hold your head straight when speaking to be at your most authoritative. A tilted head signals receptivity and submissiveness. This is fine when you are having a collaborative conversation and want to convey that you are listening. When you are an alpha delivering information for impact, you want to convey leadership.
Facial Expressions
You want to appear relaxed and natural – your genuine self, and warm, open facial expressions convey your engagement and rapport with an audience. In general, we tell clients to overemphasize their facial expressions if they’ll be speaking to large audiences or on video. The camera sucks energy from you: you have to put out more energy, and use more expression, to look awake and enthusiastic. Some people have very few facial movements when they speak, and that looks robotic and cold. We’ve also seen some clients who have no idea they frown while speaking, or grimace instead of smile.
This is why it’s imperative that you watch a video of yourself speaking. Yes, we know you don’t want to. Very few people enjoy this. If it makes you feel better, the video is not exactly what you really look like: it will add pounds and you definitely look much better in person than you do in that little monitor that changes your skin tone and flattens your features. Watching yourself will show you what your face is doing when you speak, and allow you to improve. It’s the only way you can become the best public speaker you can be. If what you have to say is important, learn to leave your self-consciousness behind.
The Master Communicator's Handbook Page 3
