element of communication. But we’ll look at the range of modern communications research for what it can tell us about how to communicate consistently and powerfully, with your verbal and nonverbal messages coherent and strong. We’ll also look at what the Greeks had to say about delivery and audience—how to think about them, woo them, trick them, move them. And how to avoid being wooed, tricked, or moved—about which the Greeks, as cynical and practical as we are today, also had much to say.
In addition, we’ll learn how to “read” an audience so that you can listen and watch the people in front of you as you’re presenting, to ensure you and your audience both become and stay powerfully connected. We’ll study the five continua of audience connection I’ve developed for use in special situations such as sales presentations, as well as generally for persuasive speeches. And we’ll look at Q&A sessions and other kinds of audience involvement in some detail.
The key to remember is that all of the technical details are only worth paying attention to if they allow you to focus better on the audience and to eliminate the contradictions that too many speakers portray between verbal and nonverbal communications. To enable you, in short, to give an audience-centered speech.
All too often the focus is somewhere else, and the result is boring. The presenter’s content speaks of how vital this marketing plan is to the future of the company, for example, but the voice is a monotone, so that the stronger, nonverbal message is, “I say this is important but I don’t really mean it. I’m bored with it, too. If I really cared, my voice would be rising in excitement as I talked about it.”
Or again, the content says this is the essence of how we’re going to turn this company around and become profitable again, but the speaker is backing away as she says it, visibly signaling a lack of real commitment to the turnaround.
I once saw a consultant give a speech to a meeting of a client’s board. He had some hard truths to present about the ability of the company to cope with the conflict and the difficulty that lay ahead. His message, essentially, was that the company was not facing up to its situation, but that the consultant and his team would help the client really wrestle, for the first time, with the core issues. As he said this, he moved backward until he was leaning comfortably against the wall of the conference room! The nonverbal message, that the consultant wasn’t really keen to grapple with the tough issues, was the one that the board retained. It quickly moved to terminate the contract and hire someone else.
Great public speakers communicate enthusiasm at some level to their audiences. Even if the topic is serious, underneath that emotion lies a real enthusiasm in having the chance to talk about it. To put it simply, if you’re having a good time, the audience will, too.
To get to that point, we have a lot of work to do. You will need to develop great audience-centered content. You will need to rehearse that content. And you will need to learn how to rise above self-absorption to deliver a speech that is truly “given” to the audience. But the good news is that it begins with you and your passion for the subject you want to talk about it. If you have that, all the rest will follow. You can be compelling, you can achieve a powerful connection with your audience, you can be memorable. You can even be charismatic, by being most resolutely and honestly yourself. Successful public speaking is not, in the end, trickery or technique. It is passion.
Remember
Public speaking is structured conversation.
Audiences come into a presentation asking, “Why am I here?”
If you’re successful, they will leave asking, “How do I implement these ideas?”
Focus your speech on one key message.
Connect with your audience by telling them stories.
Give your speech to the members of the audience by allowing them to become active.
The single most important thing you can do to prepare a speech is to rehearse.
The speaker’s focus should be on the audience; the audience’s should be on the content.
Great public speakers listen to their audiences.
Ultimately, great public speaking comes from passion.
PART II
Preparing the Content
CHAPTER 3
Understand the Audience
A STANDARD MODEL OF COMMUNICATION has the following parts: sender, medium, message, receiver, feedback, and noise. During a presentation, the first five elements have to be performing optimally, and the last minimally, in order for communication to take place. And yet, if you think about how most people approach the onerous chore of presenting, it often appears that they only consider the first two elements, perhaps the first three. They obsess about themselves and the technology. They worry about the content. But the receiver—the audience—gets scant attention, except perhaps as a faceless, scary mass. Feedback is a subject usually avoided altogether, or thought about briefly with true terror (“What if they ask me a question I can’t answer?”). Noise, the sixth element, is the result, usually compounded by a lack of rehearsal.
Great speakers listen to their audiences.
The successful presenter reverses this unfortunate polarity and instead focuses on receiver, feedback, and noise suppression. You can only do this if you’re well prepared. You can only be forgetful of the sender and the medium if you’ve got the message down cold and you know exactly how you’re going to put it over.
In this context, think of a speech not as a presentation but as an opportunity to listen to your audience. I will keep returning to that dictum as we work through the process I have developed for creating powerful content.
Here’s the process as a quick list:
Understand the audience.
Craft the elevator speech.
Pick the level of need.
Find the story.
Structure the content.
Make the journey.
Involve the audience.
In order to be a successful public speaker, one who connects with audiences powerfully, makes an impact on them, and moves them to action, you have to shift your orientation. You need to think of yourself as a strong listener who carefully guides the audience where you want it to go, rather than as an orator who declaims like a professor, or a politician on the stump, or a lawyer summing up before a jury. You need listen to your audience.
What does this bold statement actually mean?
You are there because of them. A presentation doesn’t happen unless the audience gets it. Literally. Let me say that again another way: Your speech has mattered only if the audience has heard it. So you won’t actually know if your speech making has been a waste of time or not unless you do listen to your audience.
How does this work in practice? You have to let go of your own adrenaline-filled self-consciousness and begin to look at your audience. How are they doing? Are they attentive? Are they looking at you or out the window? Are they rapt, still, comfortable, or are
