By Craig Valentine, MBA
World Champion of Public Speaking
Craig Valentine will be the opening keynoter for the big LERN Annual Conference in Baltimore Nov. 16-19, 2016.
There are four public speaking pitfalls that trap most presenters. If you want to drastically improve your very next presentation, it is important to understand 4 of the pitfalls that keep most speakers in a ditch out of which they can never seem to climb. If you see where these traps are, you can easily avoid them. As a result, you will clear your pathway to a powerful and persuasive speech.
Here are the four costly mistakes:
- They close their speech with the question and answer session.
Never close your speech with the Q&A session, because people remember best what they hear first and what they hear last. If you end with the Q&A, you lose control over the last message your audience receives and much of your hard work is undone. It is still a good idea to have a Q&A session, but it is not a good idea to end your presentation with it. Instead, hold the session about 80-90% into your speech and then close the speech in your own powerful way.
- They open their speech with a whimper.
Most speakers open with statements like, “I’m so glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me to speak at this prestigious occasion. First I’d like to thank Bob…” What is wrong with that kind of opening? Frankly, it’s boring. It’s boring because it’s expected. Instead, come out in an unexpected way by jumping right into your message. Take the “sitcom” approach and start the show first and then transition to the opening theme song.
One good way to do this is to immediately dive into a story. That will catch your audience off guard and you will have their attention. Another effective way is to ask a question. For example, I start some speeches with the following question: “What do you think is the number one thing that stands in the way of most people living their dreams?”
This immediately gets my audience’s attention and prompts them to think and to get involved with the speech. Questions work extremely well because they take your audience members from passive spectators to active participants and that definitely raises the energy. Once you finish your planned opening, it is then fine to go back and thank the people who brought you there.
- They lip-synch.
I once had a CFO of a biotech company say, “Craig, we need you to coach us with our presentation. We already have the presentation, but we just need to know what to say.” That might seem confusing but I knew exactly what he meant. He meant that the company already had a slide presentation but they needed to know what to say between those slides. Once I worked with them, they came to realize that they had to look at their major points first and then determine if slides were even needed to reinforce them. We went from 83 slides to 19.
Most presenters who use slides simply verbalize the same points that are made on the slides. The key to understand is this; if you say the same thing as your slides, then one of you is not needed! You are doing the equivalent of lip-synching your presentation. The best time to use slides is for real visuals such as charts, graphs, and diagrams that help clarify what you say verbally.
- They don’t master the essence of public speaking.
Bill Gove, the first President of the National Speakers Association, once said that public speaking is being able to “Tell a story and make a point.” That indeed is the essence of public speaking. If you want to become the kind of speaker others line up and sign up to see, then make an effort to master storytelling. People make decisions with their emotions backed up by logic. Stories reach those emotions and get people in a frame of mind to take action. When you become a master storyteller, you help other people see new stories unfold for their own lives. Like the old saying goes, “Facts tell and stories sell.” You must travel through the heart to change the mind.
If you avoid the four pitfalls that trap most speakers and you work on the suggestions above, you will find yourself far ahead of most of the people who ever stood up to say anything.
Craig Valentine, MBA, is a World Champion of Public Speaking. He is author of The Nuts and Bolts of Public Speaking and World Class Speaking. Within one year, you can be three-times better than the presenter you are today by visiting the free site www.52SpeakingTips.com
