Reading this headline you might be thinking, “Oh yeah, this guy says he is an expert? Is that really true?”. In this fake news world, that is an entirely reasonable caution. Would the following qualify me: this TEDx talk was my 546th public speech, I am a Master Trainer for Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan and I am a certified High Impact Presentations Instructor having taught thousands of people how to present over the last twenty plus years and I am about to publish my book Japan Presentations Mastery? I thought it might be interesting to pull back the velvet curtain and reveal how I prepared for this talk, expert or otherwise, but at least someone with substantial public speaking experience.
TEDx has certain restrictions around what you can talk about and how long you can talk for. The TED mission is to research and discover “ideas worth spreading”. I needed a topic which was a fit for the format and I had up to thirteen minutes to deliver my talk. There are many things I could have addressed on stage, but I thought “Transform Our Relationships” would have universal appeal, because TED talks are broadcast all around the world.
The first thing to consider was how to end the talk. I needed to clarify what was the central message I wanted to impart. The title was the central message, so “transform your relationships for the better” became my choice of the close. I also linked the close back to some remarks I made right at the start, so I was able to tie a neat bow on the talk. There are no questions in the TED format, so there was only need to design that one close.
I next did some research on what others were saying about transforming relationships. I found a report entitled “Relationships in the 21st Century”. When I read the report, I thought the findings were rather unremarkable and that it would be perfect for debunking at the start. Even a slightly controversial start can be an attention grabber. I left the final design of the opening until the end though. The start has only one aim and that is to grab audience attention to listen to what it is we have to say.
I had the end clearly in mind and a vague idea about the opening, so now I needed to build chapters for the talk. Thirteen minutes is quite short, so every word is gold. I thought Dale Carnegie’s human relations principles were the perfect tool which I could pass on to the audience to apply in their own relationships. There are thirty human relations principles, so that was too many. I selected seven.
Each principle formed a chapter, so that made the construction of the talk quite easy. I needed some flesh on the bones of this skeleton of the talk though, so I selected some easy to access examples of how to use the principles. Some of these story vignettes were created to make the point and some were actual examples from real life.
I needed a bridge between the start of the talk and the Dale Carnegie human relations principles, which would set the scene for what was to come. I drew on some well known influencers – Mahatma Gandhi and Isaac Newton. I wanted to make the point that the secret of achieving a transformation was to start with yourself, rather than expecting everyone else to change to suit you. Gandhi’s quote is well known: “become the change you wish to see in the world”. Perfect.
Also, every high school student has studied Newtonian Physics and so remember his proclamation that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. Perfect. I could make the point that if we want to transform our relationships, we can change the angle of approach with others and we will get a different reaction. This was extremely easy for an audience to grasp as a concept to transform their relationships. I made this a core message linking each chapter back to the central thesis of “start with changing your angle of approach”.
My final design task was to go back and polish the opening, so that it would grab attention. I selected the conclusion from the report and then denounced it as too obvious. By doing so I have now engaged the audience to anticipate what I am going to say, if I am not accepting this report’s conclusion as sufficient enough to understand relationship building in the 21st century. I wasn’t doing this for dramatic effect. I honestly thought it was all too obvious. If it had delivered some earth shattering insight, then I would have used that instead as an authority reinforcement.
Rehearsal is so critical in giving talks. I soon discovered I had too much material for the time allowed, so one of the human relations principles had to be jettisoned overboard. I had organised the talk into chapters, so each one was complete in itself. Rather than trying to water down the other chapters to squeeze in chapter seven, it was better to keep the others powerful and reduce one chapter. I then took all of that content and then wrote it up a complete script. I don’t normally do this step. However, I knew there was no way I would remember every single word of a thirteen minute talk, but this script gave me the core content to draw on. Obviously, I wasn’t going to read it to the audience – that would be a fake expert! I recorded it and played it over and over to myself about ten times, until I had absorbed flow of the talk in my mind.
I did another three live rehearsals with the cut down materials and kept editing to make sure I could get through it in under thirteen minutes. At the beginning I had toyed with the idea of no slides so that all of the attention would be on me. In the end, I decided that slides would help me with the navigation. This talk goes around the world, so my personal and professional reputations were on the line here, especially when you go around saying you are an expert on public speaking. I thought it was better to be smooth in my delivery and not to lose my place or have a brain whiteout while on live streaming camera, especially as that means no edit rescue capability.
Once I had selected the slides I wanted, I made sure I owned the use of these slide images. I could have just taken some images down off the internet, but there is a copyright issue right there. We all need to respect the IP of the owners of those images. I also made sure I had pictures with people in them where ever possible. This is always of more interest to an audience.
On the day before the talk, I did five full blood, full power rehearsals and recorded them, so I could check how I sounded. On the day of the delivery, I recorded ten full power rehearsals at home, one after another, checking the time to make sure I didn’t go over the thirteen minutes limit. Full rehearsal, full power, with many repetitions is key.
Of course this was very tiring, but I didn’t worry about peaking before the event. I knew my nervous energy would kick in once I was on stage under the lights, facing the live streaming cameras and the assembled audience.
On the day, there was a technical issue with the screen in front of the stage. It is located so that the speaker can see what is being displayed on the main screen behind them. I wasn’t worried. I had confidence thanks to my rehearsals, that I could do the talk without slides, if I needed to. For whatever reason it worked perfectly for me, so I reproduced my delivery as I had practiced it over and over and over.
In the Green Room I didn’t chat with the other speakers. I concentrated on slowing my breathing down to make sure I was calm and quietly read the full script again. When I was being wired up for the talk, I made sure the head attachment microphone was pulled out away from my cheek and mouth, because I knew I would be pr4ojecting a lot of power to my audience. I didn’t want any audio dissonance from my being loud, to find its way on to the recording.
As it turned out, four seconds before I was due to go on, they needed to fix a technical issue, so they decided to show a TED video instead. Naturally I was fully psyched up ready to go and then had to stop everything. This type of stop-start thing can throw your equilibrium off balance. I had had this experience before when I was a karate athlete in competition finals, when there was an interruption and a sudden delay before you go on to the mats to fight.
I immediately moved away from the people there in order to keep my concentration at full peak condition. I happened to notice there was a mirror around the corner of the back stage area. While they ran the video, I began quietly starting my talk while looking at the mirror, so that I could see my gestures etc., as I got ready to go on. We cannot allow anything to cause us to lose our concentration or peak energy levels, before we hit the stage.
I walked confidently to the round red carpet, which was my spot from which to talk, paused to enjoy the applause and create some anticipation. I then hit the opening hard with a strong voice and a big double arm gesture. The rest of the talk went pretty close to my plan. The key thing to note is, only I knew what the plan was! At the end I bowed, stayed there to receive the applause and then unhurriedly, I walked off, again showing confidence. First and last impressions are being formed as soon as we move to and from our positions and we have to have those planned as well. Someone rushing from the stage leaves a different impression to someone staying there momentarily and then walking off with purpose.f
Today we are going to look at Part Two of Opening our speech. In the last episode we used an analogy, the startling statement and starting with some good news. We also covered the dos and don’ts of how to use questions with the audience. Here are two more openings we can apply to our talks - storytelling and using compliments.
Start with an incident
Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in the speaker’s toolkit. Every day we are bombarded with stories. It could be dramas on television, novels we are reading, movies we are watching and even the news programmes. When we were children our parents read stories to us at bedtime and so we are incredibly open to stories, in a way we are not open to hearing opinions or statements.
Stories do not have to be long. Today, with an abundance of impatience, massive distraction everywhere and people’s ever decreasing micro concentration spans, the opportunity to tell a long story in business is gone. We can tell a short story and still take our audience with us employing their mind’s eye to be with us in the location, in the season, with the people and absorbed with the drama of the situation. Let’s look at some varieties of stories we can employ for a business context.
I think we would all want to hear how I lost the ten million, because that sounds more dramatic and we can learn from other’s mistakes. Relating corporate victory after victory and outlining the perfect coalition of circumstances to explain what a triumph it has been for our organization is reeking of propaganda and our audience cannot identify with what we are saying.
Telling them war stories of failure and redemption tend to work extremely well, because in exposing our failures, we have shown we are like everyone else and the audience can more easily identify with us.
We are exposed to third party stories all of the time, but we let them slip away. It may be something we saw on the news, or in documentaries or we read in magazines or in biographies. We come across a great story, but we just move on without thinking, “well that will be a great story for a talk, let me capture that and store it away for a future speech”. We should be trawling through whatever we are reading with a part of our brain looking for speech material and having a good system to be able to access it easily at a future point.
Pay a compliment
The speaker first impression is vital. We have to plan to make it a success and there are many tools available to us. Try the tools I have included in Parts One and Two of how to open your talk. Remember public speaking has never had this degree of difficulty ever in history. The internet is a click away and people will leave us in a heartbeat, if what we say doesn’t sound interesting or valuable. The way they determine if it is worth listening to, is from how we start. We must get the design right or our messages will not transmit to the audience and if that is the case, we have missed a great opportunity to build our personal and professional brands.
First impressions are now down to seven seconds or less. Our opening begins from the moment we are introduced, even before we get up on stage or move to the center of the stage. We must walk briskly, confidently and elegantly to our speaking position. I remember seeing US President Biden on television, walking very swiftly to convey he was still dynamic, despite the years and the grey hair. He was trying to control a narrative about his suitability to be the US President. He understood the power of first impression. As speakers we must understand the speech starts well before the speech. What we write for the event information and what we hand over to the MC to read about us on stage, all are setting up a first impression. The conversations we have with the attendees before we speak are all building a first impression.
What we do on stage is important. If there is a logistical change over of laptops or files, try to get someone else to do that, so that you can straight into your opening. We are wasting valuable “first impression” seconds with our head down looking at the laptop screen, rather than looking at the audience. We need to be able to move straight to the center of the stage and get going with our well designed opening. We have to be able to stay the hands of the restless in the audience to not go for their smart phones and disappear into the world of the internet.
The first words out of our mouth have to grab the attention of the audience, so we must raise the vocal strength of our opening, to break through the mental distraction of our audience members. We should walk to center stage and then purposely pause slightly before we begin. This raises the anticipation level of the audience and quietens any chatting that may be going on in the background. How can we start, what should we say, how do we do it – let’s explore some techniques.
The captivating statement technique uses three methods to get the audience engaged.
The opening has to be planned carefully. We only have one shot to make a good first impression and this is where we do that. We will continue in the next episode with other techniques we use to open our talk.
Every time we speak, we are representing our professional and personal brands. People judge us and then they project that same judgment on to our organization. If we are very professional, then they see everyone in our organisation in a positive light. If we are bumbling and disorganised, then they see our whole organisation the same way. If we want the audience to believe our message, then they have to believe in us first. This is why having credibility is so important when speaking.
If we overstate our organisation’s capabilities, it arouses suspicion and damages our credibility. Remember this is the Era of Cynicism and fake news. Any time we make a statement, then we need to back it up with evidence. The evidence has to resonate by being vivid, interesting and memorable. We have to show the benefits of what we are suggesting because facts by themselves cannot be enough. In particular, we need to show how they can apply these benefits in their own organisations.
We want to present a positive image of our organisation but how do we do this without it being rejected as corporate propaganda? Being confident when we deliver the key messages makes a tremendous difference. Uncertain speech, hesitation, struggling for words, using filler words like um and ah, all conspire to defeat our efforts to appear confident in what we are saying. Fluency in delivery is what we need and that takes practice. We don’t have to memorise great chunks of content. We can use the slide deck for navigation purposes to guide us through the flow of the talk. We just talk to the point of the slide, because we have designed this talk, so obviously we know what we want to say.
We must project tremendous enthusiasm. I am thinking of two speakers who surprised me with their total lack of enthusiasm for their own amazing companies. One was a luxury marque car brand and the other a resource captain of industry. Both had phenomenal sagas of defeat and triumph, of business breakthroughs and of spectacular R&D success. It would have been much more interesting if they had included these in their talks. They managed to replace these exciting stories with the bland and boring. If they had spoken as if possessed with total belief in the righteousness of their company’s contribution to the world, they would have had much greater impact with their audiences. They would have attracted fans for themselves and their companies.
The structure for a talk to impress an audience about our organisation looks like this:
Opening. The opening has only one purpose. That objective is to create a positive impression so powerful, it breaks through all of the distractions occupying the minds of the listeners. The first sentence out of the speaker’s mouth has to command our attention and interest. Pithy quotes, grabber statistics, total killer stories, will all do the trick.
Message. We need to clearly state the key messages. Within the first five minutes of the talk are the audience clear on where we are going with this speech? Have we honed our key messages down to the bone, to eliminate psychobabble, pap and make sure we have eliminated our data dump proclivities. We need to reiterate the most important message in the speech close, before we bridge to the Q&A and again, during the final close at the end, after the Q&A.
Evidence. We must establish credibility and inspire trust, respect and confidence in what we are saying by using powerful evidence. So often speakers make sweeping statements and audiences are left to ponder whether that statement about their company is true or are we listening to a re-incarnation of Joseph Goebbels, one of the most evil and notorious propagandists in history? Carefully inspect every utterance where you are making a broad statement and then check to see if there is sufficient evidence accompanying it. You will surprise yourself with how often we make statements and offer no proof whatsoever.
Closing. As mentioned there are two closes. Close number one, prior to Q&A is designed to capture the essence of your message, in order to reinforce its potency for the audience. The second close for after the Q&A is designed to leave the audience with a favourable, memorable impression of you, your organisation and your message.
The impress talk structure is not complex, but the delivery requires a lot of rehearsal. Practicing on your audience is self delusion in the making. So many speakers give their speech once – when they are in front of the assembled mass of sceptics, doubters, critics and cynics. Anytime you are talking up your own organisation, then you are really asking for trouble. Get the required fluency in the delivery, so that you are radiating confidence and credibility. If you do that your message will be bought by the audience. If you don’t, your personal and professional brands will take a big hit. The choice is embarrassingly clear.
Are we clear enough about our message? There are some common problems around getting the messaging right. We have no clear message and the audience don’t quite know what to make of the talk. Or we have so many messages, the audience are confused and cannot attach to any of the messages. This is an exaggeration, but we should be able to write our one key message on a grain of rice. The point is to make the message clear and get it down to the minimum number of words to describe it. This is really tough. Rambling and waffling on are easy, whereas being precise is hard work. This explains why most talks haven’t boiled everything down to one clear message and the presentation fails or misses the mark.
If we are thinking of a topic to speak on or if we are asked to speak on a certain topic, the first major effort will be to find the key message. This sounds straightforward, but there are so many angles from which to approach a topic, we need to select the best one and then clarify it. The best one will be determined by our audience analysis. Who are we going to be speaking to and what message will resonate the most strongly with them? If we don’t know who our audience is we need to find out. In episode number 260 we went into more detail on just how to do that, so please go back and listen to that episode.
Getting the key message clear is also important when it comes to promoting the talk. Our title will get sent out to the prospective audience and if we have done our audience analysis well, then there will be a high degree of resonance with our target group. Getting the title right makes such a difference and we all know that. We respond to certain titles more than others. If we can hone in on the key interest, then our audience numbers will fill up and we will set the stage to deliver our message. I was attending a talk recently and there were only about 30 people online. Given the speaker and the quality of the content, it should have been 100 people at least. The title let the talk down and didn’t grab attention, because the message and the audience analysis hadn’t been given enough attention.
Once we have crafted our one key message, we need to look for content which supports that key message. These are like chapters in a thesis. When you write your thesis, you have your central proposition, your key finding from the research and the rest of the document is set about backing up what you are pontificating about. We need evidence – hard evidence rather than broad statements about what we think. Nobody cares what we think. In this Era of Cynicism built on a fear of falling for fake news, evidence has become even more vital than in the past. A speech is a similar situation. We have a number of chapters in the speech which are crammed to the gunwales with evidence proving what we are saying is true. Inside these chapters there may be some sub-messages, again providing hard evidence, which when added together validate our one big key message.
The usual problem with messaging though is too many messages. We teach public speaking and we have a tool called the Magic Formula where we provide the context, background, data, proof, evidence, then the call to action and the benefit of that call to action. I notice that our participants are always adding and adding points to bolster the benefit, rather than grabbing the most powerful benefit. The effect is the key message about the benefit is being diluted by what follows. This is the Age of Distraction and when we pile on the detail our audience gets lost and loses interest. We need to make sure the sub-messages are supporting and proving the main message and not competing with it.
This is where pruning a speech becomes very important. We need to ask if we can reduce the content by 10% to see if the message becomes clearer. This is a lot harder than it sounds and I am as guilty as anyone in this regard. What we normally do is keep adding to the speech. We find a great slide and we add that. Then we find another and add that. We keep adding more slides or more messages and we create confusion for our audience. Being forced to chop out 10% is a good discipline to force us to be as clear as possible. This is painful, but it will improve the whole presentation by adding more clarity to what we want people to absorb.
So have one central message and look for a number of ways to get that one message across. If we can do that, then the audience will absorb what we are saying and we can count the talk as a success. Go for quality rather than quantity of messages when presenting.