3 Tips for Public Speaking

Last week, in the space of 24 hours, I had three unrelated experiences and each one reminded me of key elements of powerful public speaking and verbal communication.

Brevity
I attended a panel session with several reporters discussing the current crisis in the newspaper business. All were very articulate and made great points about the state of the industry and the direction it was headed. One week later, I remember three things, all of them quotes by one of the panelists.

"Blogging is just beat reporting."
"Investigative journalism is prize driven."
"The press pass is overrated."

The panelist went on to expand on all of those points but the brevity of those statements gave me a mental hook that I could remember (and have been quoting since).

Providing these brief, colorful declarative statements is critical if you hope to have your audience remember the content of your speech days, weeks and months after the fact.

Story telling
My wife Amy has been taking classes to improve her public speaking and she asked me to act as her audience the other night. She is smart and articulate and had a well structured presentation but she kept freezing up when she had to deliver. After a bit of trial and error, we discovered the problem was in her transitions. She was struggling with how to move the conversation from one point to the next. She ended up writing the first four or five words of each transition statement on her card which helped her smoothly move from one thought to the next in her presentation.

What she was really struggling with was story telling - how do I keep this presentation moving in a compelling way instead of reciting a string of unconnected information? Good story telling is critical to keeping an audience engaged, especially in an age where mobile devices can easily distract.

Imagery
I am working with the endowment committee of my parish grade school to create a compelling video to share with the school community explaining the importance of a gift to the endowment. While we could explain the technical details, we were struggling to find a compelling way to reach people on an emotional level. We were trying to link endowment gifts with their historical antecedent - the work of religious orders who literally subsidized the school with their labor. The decline in religious orders (in part) has led to the rise of endowments.

One of the committee members shared with the group the Prayer of St. Teresa of Avila (which she had heard at a grade school prayer meeting the day before) which says "Christ has no body on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours."
We instantly knew this was the connective tissue that we'd been searching for. Another member suggested having the video start with images of children reciting the prayer. From there, the video built itself.

Compelling imagery can activate the heart and passion of audiences to take a presentation beyond a cerebral level. Much of the compelling oratory in history has been centered on strong imagery.

What else do you have to add? Comment below.