If you ask me, I think that all too often we speakers tell our audiences too much. We get all caught up in importance of public speaking and we focus on what we want to say to our audience and we forget to spend enough time working out how we want to communicate our information. Good news for you, I’m going to tell you about the revelation technique and you can use it in your next presentation to make your message that much more powerful…
What The Revelation Technique Is
One way to think about any speech that you give is to view it as a power struggle. It’s you versus the audience – who has the power? As long as there is a sense of mystery about what you are going to be saying next, then you have the power. If the audience can predict what you are going to be saying, then forget listening skills — they have the power.
That’s why it’s so important that you take steps to make sure that you retain the power throughout your speech. What this means, to put it simply, is that you don’t want to give too much away too early on.
That’s where the revelation technique comes into play. This is one of the best presentation tips that you’ll ever be given. This simple technique simply means that you control what you show to your audience and when you show it to them. Instead of presenting a fully detailed slide for your audience to pour over instead of listening to you, you need to take the time to reveal parts of the slide one by one. In this way you retain control over your presentation and you have the power.
How You Can Use The Revelation Technique
The revelation technique is based on the simple fact that if I can control what you can see, then I have a very good chance of being able to control what you are thinking. You must realize that the opposite of this is also true – if I don’t control what you see, then I have no control over what you may be thinking.
If I present a slide that is filled with a great deal of information, then no matter what I may be saying, my audience will be racing ahead of me. As they tear through the slide that I’m presenting, they won’t be hearing what I’m saying.
As a presenter, you want to have control over what your audience is thinking. The way that you can do this is by taking a large amount of visual information and feeding it to your audience in bite-sized pieces. Since you know how much you are presenting at any given time, you can control what they are thinking and when they are thinking it.
What All Of This Means For You
Realizing that you need to control what your audience is thinking at any given point in time during your presentation means that you need to control what you are showing to them. This is where the revelation technique comes into play.
Using the revelation technique is very simple. Instead of presenting a great deal of information to your audience and then taking the time to talk through it, you take a different approach. Instead, you present some information and then you talk about it. You then present more information and talk about it. You continue doing this until all of the information has been presented.
As the speaker, one of the benefits of public speaking is that you do have the ability to retain the power during your next speech. In order to make this happen, you are going to need to use the revelation technique to dole out pieces of information to your audience. By controlling what you tell them and when you tell it to them, you’ll retain power and will be able to deliver an even better presentation.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: How big of a chunk of information should you reveal – how long should you plan on talking about a single piece of information?
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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!
What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
I’ve got a question for you: what’s the fastest way to lose an audience? Answer: start to present numbers or statistics. Sorry, even though numerical information can be a very powerful way of backing up what you are saying and lends a lot to the importance of public speaking, when you start to present it, your audience is almost guaranteed to stop using their listening skills and check out. Looks like we’re going to have to have a talk about how to keep them around…