Image Credit: Kent Fredric
Speakers give speeches because we want what we say to have an impact on our audience. However, we know that there are only so many people who will be willing to come and hear us speak. That’s why we also want something else. We want the words that we share with our audience to make them want to leave our speech and go spread what we’ve told them with others. This is a great goal to have; however, the challenge that we all face is that we don’t know how to get an audience to spread an idea. What do we need to be doing?
Every Speech Needs To Contain Humor
I believe that many of us don’t think that we can tell a joke. It turns out that that is ok – in order to include humor in your next speech you don’t need to be a comedian. We do need to realize that the audience’s brains love humor. You need to give your audience something to smile about during your speech. Humor lowers an audience’s defenses, making them more receptive to your message. It also makes you seem like a more likable speaker, and people will be more willing to do business with or support someone that they like. The good news for us is that you don’t need to tell a joke to get a laugh. Your goal should be to package your material around humorous anecdotes and asides that can endear you to your audience. Lighten up. Try to not take yourself (or your speech topic) too seriously.
Don’t Overload Your Audience
We need to keep in mind that every speech that we give has a time limit associated with it. Researchers have discovered that an audience can develop a “cognitive backlog,” or too much information, and this will prevent the successful transmission of ideas. Your goal for the next speech that you give is to make it long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention. Since we are living in modern times, we need to make sure that this also works well online. Remember that the popular social media tool Twitter forces people to be disciplined in what they write. Speakers who are used to going on for a long time need to be able to reduce their speech length to just the required amount. If we can do this, then we can really think about what we want to say. What is the key point we want to communicate? Keeping our speeches concise has a clarifying effect. It can bring discipline. We need to clarify our key points. We need to keep it short.
Speak To Engage All Of The Senses
As speakers, we need to realize that during a speech we want to be able to reach out to our audience using all of their senses. We want our next speech to truly be a visual and multisensory experiences. The audience brain does not pay attention to boring things. We need to deliver our presentations with components that touch more than one of our audience’s five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. It’s nearly impossible for your audience to be bored if they’re exposed to mesmerizing images, captivating videos, intriguing props, beautiful words, and more than one voice, which will bring your story to life. Nobody will ask you to build multisensory elements into your speech, but once audience members experience it, they’ll love every minute of it. Incorporating a video into your speech is also “multisensory.” Don’t make it too complicated but remember to go beyond the slides every once in a while in order to keep your audience engaged.
Use All Of Your Communication Channels
When we give a speech, we are communicating with our audience using much more that just the words that tumble out of our mouth. What we need to do is to practice our verbal delivery and body language. What this means is that we need to practice relentlessly and internalize our content so that we can deliver the presentation as comfortably as if we were having a conversation with a close friend. True persuasion will only occur after we have built an emotional rapport with our listeners and have gained their trust. If our voice, gestures and body language are incongruent with our words, then our listeners will distrust our message.
Be Your True Self
When we give a speech, it is going to be important that we make sure that we are authentic, open and transparent with our audience. Understand that most people can spot a phony. If during your speech you try to be something or someone you’re not, you are going to fail to gain the trust of your audience. Make no mistake about it, your ability to persuasively sell yourself and your ideas is the single greatest speaking skill that will help you achieve your dreams and get your message to spread.
What All Of This Means For You
When we go to the effort of delivering a speech, we do it for a reason. We want to find a way to light a fire beneath our audience and get them to become willing spreaders of our message. In order to make that happen, our speech is going to have to both connect with them and motivate them. As speakers, this means that we are going to have to learn how to create speeches that can cause our audiences to feel this way.
Our speech has to contain humor if we want to be able to connect with our audience. We need to realize that every audience has a limited amount of information that they can absorb. This means that we need to limit how much content we put into our speech. In order to connect with our audience, we need to allow them to make use of all of their senses during our speech. During our speech we need to use all of the different ways that we have to communicate with our audience including body language, voice, and gestures. We also have to make sure that our audience is going to see our true self – they will be able to detect it if we are not being honest with them.
We give speeches for a reason. We will only be addressing the people who are sitting in the room before us (or who are watching us online). We want to be able to get our message out to more people than will be hearing our message right now. If we can find ways to get our speech to motivate our audience to spread our message then we can make this happen. Use these tools the next time that you give a speech and then watch your message spread.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: How can we determine if our audience believes that you are being authentic?
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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
Speakers give speeches because we want what we say to have an impact on our audience. However, we know that there are only so many people who will be willing to come and hear us speak. That’s why we also want something else. We want the words that we share with our audience to make them want to leave our speech and go spread what we’ve told them with others. This is a great goal to have; however, the challenge that we all face is that we don’t know how to get an audience to spread an idea. What do we need to be doing?