TJ’s Insights

One huge difference between average speakers and great speakers is that excellent speakers consistently display their personality when they are speaking. It’s not just that great speakers are highly successful people with huge egos—that’s not it at all. It’s just that great speakers know that bland speakers are ineffective because no one remembers them or their messages.

Many executives are afraid to inject their own personality into a speech because they feel that because they are a part of a big organization, they wouldn’t want to do anything that could be offensive or that takes the spotlight off of the organization. While I have sympathy for these concerns, I have even more sympathy for audience members who have to sit through boring speakers plowing through boring PowerPoint bullet points filled with facts and figures.

Celebrities’ get in trouble all of the time and are then forced to apologize. Whether it is TV preachers who claim to know why God strikes some people down or Olympic athletes who brag about skiing while drunk, big shots are often forced into the role of the contrite. Few pull it off well, because they don’t seem to be sincere and they don’t seem to grasp why what they said or did it offended anyone.

Anytime you speak, whether to audiences or the media, you have four specific and distinct goals to accomplish.

I am a bit of a techno-geek. I own the latest all-in-one PDA-Internet cell phone, an old iPod, new video iPod, PCs, laptops, Apple computers, VHS video cameras, mini-tape video cameras, DVD video cameras and broadcast quality cameras. I own TelePrompTers, regular TVs, flat screen TVs, and three LCD projectors, not to mention numerous DVD, CD and VHS players. And, of course, MS PowerPoint software programs on every computer. I like tech toys a lot!

When top executives rehearse their speeches, they often make the mistake of rehearsing in front of the same assistants who helped write and re-write numerous drafts of the speech. The problem is that everyone starts to develop the same blind spots because they become too familiar with the speech and the subject after awhile. Part of the difficulty stems from the way eyeballs process information differently than the way ears do.
If you write, “I bought the stock at $10 per share,” in the first paragraph of your speech on page one and then write that, “I sold the stock three years later for $60 per share,” on page four of your speech, it is very easy to figure out that this was a huge success—you made a 500% return on your investment!

More and more people and corporations are hoping onto the podcasting bandwagon. If you want to make a favorable impression in this medium please keep the following tips in mind:

Don’t try to read a cold script into a microphone without rehearsing several times in advance.

Do focus on a handful of key message points if you are a part of an audio or video interview format.

Don’t try to script out entire answers word-for-word when you are being interviewed for a podcast, (you will seem wooden and phony, even if you get all the words out in the right order).

Few speakers in the business world will ever be heckled, but politicians and comedians can face this possibility every time they speak. Unfortunately anyone can be heckled at some point in their career, especially if they are in front of an audience that is not enthusiastic about being there.

Back in my political talk show host days I was heckled during speeches by avid listeners who didn’t agree with my views (some even threatened bodily violence). But most corporate audiences are more genteel.

A lot of my clients spend time thinking about how to frame a message for the media, or a message for their speeches, but they don’t give much thought to how they frame their preparation process. One of my presentation training clients told me recently:

“TJ, I came to this 2-day training course thinking you would teach me how to hide my fears of public speaking. But now that we finished, I realize that isn’t what we did at all. What you really did was simply show me how to reveal my confidence when I am speaking.”

What do you do if you are in the middle of giving a presentation and you hear yourself saying lots of “uhs” “ums” and “ers?” You know you shouldn’t. You know people are beginning to wonder if you are an inarticulate ninny; and yet the “uhs” and “ums” keep flowing out of your mouth as if they had a mind of their own.

The 2006 Golden Globe Awards featured some great acceptance speeches and some awful ones too. I hold the award winners to very high standards for the following reasons: 1. This is an entertainment show and they are in the entertainment business. 2. Actors are, in a sense, public speakers. And they are the highest paid public speakers in the world, so why shouldn’t they be great? 3. Every winner knew in advance that there was at least a 20% chance of winning and therefore having to speak that night, so there was zero excuse for not being prepared (these are not true impromptu speeches.)