People with a true command of The Skills know that a large part of engaging the audience is simply being you. For some reason most people think that once you get up to speak, you've got to take on an entirely new persona. You have to be an entirely different person at the front of the room, because you're speaking to a group.
The reality is that people come to a presentation not to hear what you have to say, not to be impressed by your knowledge base. They're actually there for your humanness. They want to see and hear information delivered by a human. They're human. They know what it's like. They want to see what value you can add to information that they could just as easily obtain by getting a copy of the handout.
The more spontaneous you can be, the less "practiced" you seem, the more likely you will come across as the genuine person you are and the more impact you will have on your audience. And when you learn to forget the fact that there's 500 people out there, or 50 people, or even 5 people, because you're only ever speaking to one person at a time, well, then, what you realize is that public speaking is no different from having a conversation across a lunch table. Speaking to a group never needs to be any different from talking to your colleague on the same topic.
Do you feel uncomfortable talking one-on-one to people? Most people don't. Similarly, when you have a discussion with somebody about what's going on at work, do you prepare for it for three or four hours ahead of time? Do you go into a lunch with a co-worker with a written set of talking points, and a practiced set of word tracks, or do you just kind of let things happen?
You will become a master of The Skills only when you convince yourself that you must approach your presentation not the least prepared way, but the least practiced way. You don't want to be practiced, because it's going to flatten out your delivery. A flattened delivery has less passion, and it's passion that people come to feel and hear.
One last little bit of advice that you'll begin to notice quickly as you observe people when they speak: people with The Skills know that when all else fails, smile.
If you can't do any of the things that you've learned in your study of public speaking, if you can't do anything else right, learn to smile. People who are known as great communicators know how effective just smiling can be. People in the audience are hard-wired from birth to be receptive to a smile - and thus more receptive to your message when you do.
Think about the first thing you do when you meet a little baby. "Oh, look. Isn't she cute? Oh, look, [tickle, tickle] let me see a smile".
We conducted presentation skills training for The World Bank some time ago, and the group was comprised of people from every continent except Antarctica. Whenever we talk about the way we equate eye contact with veracity, we always preface it by saying, in Western cultures, we assign a lot of value to eye contact because we equate looking people in the eye with telling the truth. Well, a woman from Kenya told us that in many cultures in Africa, a little bit of eye contact is a good thing. Too much eye contact is a bad thing.
She explained to the group that if you avoided eye contact when talking to somebody, they didn't trust you. If you held eye contact too long, they would kill you. Evidently, the way that you ameliorate the threat from sustained eye contact is by smiling. So if you want to talk to somebody, have eye contact, but make sure that you smile. It disarms people. And when people are disarmed, they're more receptive to your message.
In our design classes we demonstrate that human brains process different forms of information differently. Speech is a form that our brains don't readily absorb. When we receive information in the form of speech or text or numbers or sequences, we don't just absorb them at face value - our brain first filters the information before it stores it or acts on it. So there's always a wall, there's always a barrier up there.
You've got to overcome that barrier. One way you can do that is smile.
J. Douglas Jefferys brings twenty-five years of corporate training experience to his role as a principal of PublicSpeakingSkills.com http://www.publicspeakingskills.com His firm changes presenters lives forever with their unique apporach to training presentation design and delivery skills. Discover how to design and deliver presentations that audiences actually listen to by visiting their website now. For a quick and entertaining video of Mr. Jefferys' unique style and approach, check out: http://publicspeakingskills.com/pages/Store-DVD-Videos.htm
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