Have you ever eaten at a Japanese restaurant? Japanese cuisine is among my favorites, and I love getting a bento box. With a bento box, you’ll get a small amount of several types of food, each neatly separated from the other in their own little compartments.
One mistake that a novice speaker often makes is thinking of their speech as five disparate parts, like a bento box: introduction, three main points, and conclusion. But if you deliver your speech to your audience in bento box style, it will sound choppy and unconnected.
The way to fix this is by carefully planning your transitions in your speech, leading your listeners smoothly from your introduction through to your conclusion. Read Lisa B. Marshall’s tips on incorporating transitions into your speech at How to Create Stronger Transitions in a Speech.
What tips on transitions do you have to share? Please let us know through your comments below.
Yesterday, I went out to lunch with my son before he went to work at a doggy day care. We had been looking forward to eating at the newly reopened Melts With You, which is now part of The Green Room in De Pere, WI.
James wanted a burger. And I was craving a grilled cheese sandwich, so I ordered the house special. The Grilled Cheesy has not one, not two, but three (count ’em: three!) cheeses in it. I love the melty goodness that comes from their recommendation of sharp cheddar, havarti, and gouda cheeses on sourdough bread.
The Grilled Cheesy (Photo credit: Barbara Nixon, 2018)
So what in the heck does this have to do with public speaking? Here’s what.
The bread and the three cheeses in the Grilled Cheesy reminded me of what goes into a great speech. Bear with me.
The two slices of bread are like your introductionand conclusion. If they are not included, things get messy and sloppy. They hold the sandwich — and your speech — together.
The three cheeses are like your three main points in your speech. You could have just one cheese / main point, but that would be pretty unsatisfying. With two, they’d just be competing with each other. But add in that third one . . . that’s where you get perfection. (And three main points are recommended for most speeches.)
Then, when you melt the cheeses together, that reminds me of how important transitionsare to your speech. Without the melting, the three cheeses stand hard and alone; they don’t even stick to the bread. But with transitions (where you smoothly lead your listener from one point to another), your main points flow smoothly and become more cohesive.
Is this a stretch? Maybe a little. Just like the cheese in my Grilled Cheesy when I ate it yesterday. It was truly devine.
Unless you’ve been under a rock instead of on the Internet, you’ve likely heard about an audio clip that’s been going around, where some people hear the word “Laurel” while others hear the word “Yanny.”
If you haven’t yet heard the 5-second audio clip, do it now:
Need to prepare a presentation for work or a community group, or maybe even a conference? Follow my best practices to ensure a knockout (in a good way).
Photo Credit: “brinkley at dovedale” by Vicki Hughes
[Originally published Fall 2010. This post was featured by Lisa B. Marshall in her The Public Speaker podcast. Thanks, Lisa!]
When you’ve been invited to be a guest speaker for an organization’s luncheon or other meeting, you don’t want to be that speaker. And it can be terribly easy to be that speaker: You know, that high-maintenance one, or that boring/irrelevant one. You want to be the one who is memorable for positive reasons. Here’s a list of 14 ways to NOT suck.
Learn as much as you can about your audience before you speak. (This is a good tip for any public speaking situation.) Even if you don’t know much about the organization beforehand, you can learn a lot during the mealtime, if that’s part of your engagement with them. During the meal, listen more than you talk. When your presentation begins, weave in examples that you know are relevant to this group.
Find out from your contact at the organization what the norms are for speaking engagements like this one. Will the audience members expect handouts? Is there usually a Q&A session? What’s the best way for you to share your contact information with every audience member?
Let your contact know what your A/V needs are as far in advance as possible, and only request what is necessary. Avoid last minute surprises, as they often cannot be accommodated — and they turn you into that speaker.
Plan your presentation so that you can expand it or contract it as needed. Even though you may have been told you have 45 minutes, you may discover that the business portion of the meeting has run long, and you end up with just 30 minutes. Make no mention of shortening your presentation to your audience; just do it. Gracefully.
Allow extra time in travel to arrive at the meeting location, especially if you have never been there before. Some things to keep in mind: Is there construction along your route? Do you cross train tracks on the way? When do the trains typically stop traffic? Do you know how to get into the parking lot? How far is it from the exterior doors to your meeting room? And never trust your GPS 100% to get you to a new location.
Know how to use the technology you will be using, inside and out. Practice hooking up all the cords and cables and know how long it will take you. Know how to easily blacken the screen during your presentation when the slides are not needed (in PowerPoint, simply press B to blacken the screen, and then any other key to bring the slide back up). Do you have something new with you? In front of your audience is not the place to learn how to use your new presentation remote.
Plan for the technology to fail. Always have hard-copy notes for your presentation, just in case you cannot rely on a PowerPoint slide to jog your memory for what to say. Save your presentation as a PowerPoint and as a PDF, and store it on your computer and a USB drive. (Yes, it’s like wearing a belt with suspenders. Twice. And I’m okay with that.)
Never let your audience see anything on your computer other than the slide deck or other information you intend for them to see. They don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have any interest in watching you boot up your computer, open your file and put it in presentation mode. Keep the projector screen blank until you have your opening slide up. (And never be that speaker who preps her presentation in full view of the whole room while someone else is still speaking; I find this terribly rude to the other speaker.)
Don’t count on the Internet working 100% perfectly. If I plan to show a YouTube video clip, I always download the video to my computer and show it from there. (I’ve recently been using YouTube Downloader, a free app, and it works quickly and easily for me on my PC.) If I plan to demo a certain website, I’ll use Snag-It to take and save a few screen captures to show in case I cannot access the site during my presentation.
Provide contact information on each slide or at the end. I like to have a detailed contact info slide as the last one in my slide deck, and I leave that slide up during the Q&A session.
If you refer to websites or blogs in your presentation, create a set of social bookmarks for your audience so they can go to one URL to find all the links and not spend time during your presentation attempting to furiously scribble down all the addresses. I now use Pinterest for my social bookmarks. Let your audience know early in the presentation where they can find all the links.
Upload your slides to SlideShare at least a day before your presentation if you want your audience (and others) to have access to them. You can choose to keep the slides private until just before or after the presentation, if you wish.
The show must go on; be prepared to speak even if you don’t look quite perfect. For example, yesterday, I got caught in a deluge just as I opened my car door arriving at a speaking event. Even with an umbrella, I was drenched (kind of like the cute, wet puppy at the top of this post — at least in my mind). My shoes and blazer sleeves were literally dripping when I entered the venue. What did I do? Dashed into the restroom, grabbed some paper towels, mopped up what I could, and put a smile on my face.
Arrive with your speaker’s toolkit in tip-top order. I think I almost got a hug from the conference room tech guy at my last speaking event because I had everything I needed, and more. What’s in mine? Here’s what I typically carry with me:
Computer & power cord
Power strip
External speakers with their power cord (just in case there’s no sound system attached to the projector)
3.5mm cord to connect speakers to computer (even if I have my Bluetooth-enabled computer and speakers with me, I have the cord as a backup)
Projector (only if I know that there is not one available for me onsite)
Presentation remote
Extra set of batteries for anything that uses batteries
Hard candy or throat lozenges
More business cards than I think I could possibly need
So in a large nutshell, these are my 14 best tips on how not to suck as a guest speaker for an organization. What additional tips would you offer?
In the Honors Speaking and Writing class at Southeastern University, the students have been analyzing Martin Luther King’s speech “I Have a Dream.”
Slideology and Resonate author Nancy Duarte provided a unique visualization of the Dream speech, along with her commentary. Take a few moments to see how she breaks down the speech.
For my Honors Speaking students: Please provide your reactions to the visualization of this speech as a comment below.
NOTE: And in a true case of small world, it turns out that Nancy Duarte is the sister of Southeastern University’s Dean of the College of Business and Legal Studies, Joe Childs. Nancy will be coming to our Southeastern University campus in late March. I truly look forward to meeting her in person.
As a professor, I'm not ROTFL about cell phones in class
A colleague and I were having a discussion today about cell phone use in class, especially during student presentations. We were of the same mindset that it’s especially rude to be texting while a peer is doing a presentation for a grade. It’s tough enough to be standing up in front of a room full of peers; it’s doubly or triply tough to do it when your peers are (apparently) more interested in a tiny electronic device in their hands than whoever is baring his/her heart and soul by doing a presentation. A great majority of student speakers I have worked with would prefer eye contact and other forms of engagement to the appearance of boredom by the audience. Wouldn’t you?
NOTE: I do have a different view of tweeting in class, if the students are distilling the presentation and sharing soundbites in 140-character segments so that others can also benefit from the presentation. At times, I even encourage tweeting in class.
Like many educators, I have a short statement in my syllabi stating that I do not want my students to be spending time in class text messaging or surfing the web. But many of my students probably believe this is just because I want them focused on me instead of elsewhere. And that’s partially true.
Why don’t I want them doing other things in class? Read this syllabus excerpt by Professor Cara A. Finnegan. (Cara gave me permission to reproduce her article from her First Efforts blog.)
Technology and the Problem of Divided Attention
In recent years the saturation of cell phones, text messaging, and laptops, combined with the broad availability of wireless in classrooms, has produced something I call the problem of divided attention. A March 25, 2007, article in the New York Times summarized recent studies of productivity in business settings. Researchers found that after responding to email or text messages, it took people more than 15 minutes to re- focus on the “serious mental tasks” they had been performing before the interruption. Other research has shown that when people attempt to perform two tasks at once (e.g., following what’s happening in class while checking text messages), the brain literally cannot do it. The brain has got to give up on one of the tasks in order to effectively accomplish the other. Hidden behind all the hype about multi-tasking, then, is this sad truth: it makes you slower and dumber. For this reason alone you should seek to avoid the problem of divided attention when you are in class. But there’s another reason, too: technology often causes us to lose our senses when it comes to norms of polite behavior and, as a result, perfectly lovely people become unbelievably rude.
For both these reasons, then, turn off your cellphones or set them on silent mode when you come to class; it is rude for our activities to be interrupted by a ringing cellphone. Similarly, text messaging will not be tolerated in class; any student found to be sending or checking text messages during class will be invited (quite publicly) to make a choice either to cease the texting or leave the classroom. You are welcome to bring your laptop to class and use it to take notes, access readings we’re discussing, and the like. You are not welcome to surf the web, check email, or otherwise perform non-class-related activities during class. Here’s my best advice: If you aren’t using it to perform a task specifically related to what we are doing in class at that very moment, put it away.
