TJ’s Insights

I don’t mean this to sound condescending, but audiences really are like small children: they love attention and will reward you, the more of it you give to them.

So how can you give an audience attention? Here are 15 ways:

1. - Call several audience members before your presentation and ask them what they want you to talk about.
2. - Get to the venue for your presentation at least 30 minutes in advance of your talk. Introduce yourself to as many audience members as possible and ask them about their concerns.

I am often asked, “TJ, what do I do about interruptions during my presentations?” I get rattled when people start asking me questions before I am through with my presentation.”

I believe the first thing any speaker should do when a question is asked from an audience member is to stop and do a little dance of joy (at least in the speaker’s head). Here’s why. If an audience member interrupts a speaker to ask a question, we know the following things are true:

1. The audience member is not asleep
2. The audience member is not daydreaming or playing with a Blackberry.

When I work with media and presentation training clients in a group I always ask each person to rate him or herself on the strengths and weaknesses of the speech. Invariably, someone will say “I hate the way I am flailing my hands around,” or “I hate my high pitched voice,” or “I look really scared.”

But then I turn to the group and ask them if they see the same problem. Typically, no one else agrees with the negative self-assessment of the speaker. Next I receive these comments, “I like the nice, natural hand motions,” and “Jane has a great voice,” and “Stan seems very composed and comfortable.”

You are about to do a conference call with one or two people in your own office (or home) plus a client or colleague at another location. The easy thing for you to do is share the same line with the people who are in your home or office. Here’s the problem: if you have more than one line off of the same hook, you cut the quality of your own sound and voice dramatically. Don’t do it!

It has been said that the enemy of the great is the good, but when it comes to public speaking, the enemy of great speaking is that quest to be great at everything. I work with business people, politicians and celebrities at every level of speaking skill, and the one problem that occasionally cuts through all classes of communication is the desire for some form of perfectionism in speaking.

Guess what?—Perfect speaking doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as a perfect speech or a perfect speaker. Something could always be better.

The world of media is continuing to explode. The other day I saw a homeless person on the New York City subway selling a book—it was his own self-published book and it looked pretty good!

Old media outlets like book publishing have fewer barriers to entry than ever, and each day new media outlets like blogs and RSS feeds seem to multiply. So the barriers to entry when it comes to publishing and distributing ideas in the form of text, video and audio have never been lower. However, I would contend that the barriers to successful communication have never been higher.

Andrew Young has had a distinguished career as a civil rights leader (he worked along side Martin Luther King, Jr.), the Ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter and as the Mayor of Atlanta. His style and demeanor have always been thoughtful, mild-mannered and temperate. He’s as far away from an 80s Al Sharpton as you can get.

So it was a little surprising to see him quoted in the New York Times on August 18, 2006 saying that Jewish, Arab and Korean shop owners were guilty of “selling us stale bread, and bad meat, and wilted vegetables…You see those are the people who have been overcharging us… and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”

A common mistake made by speakers is assuming people can spell what they hear. For example, I received the following voicemail on my home phone.

“Hi, I’m Tom “Swaz-E” and I’m running for governor. I’m running because… …for more information on my campaign, go to my web site. www.tom ‘swaz-E’ .com”

There is only one problem with this voicemail message. I have no idea how to spell this candidate’s name. It is actually spelled Tom Suozzi. But unless I am Tom’s brother, a member of the Suozzi clan, or a true state politics political junkie, there is no way I could guess how to spell this candidate’s name even if I were willing to type in 50 guesses in a URL address.

The easiest way to spot an insecure public speaker is to look for someone who is dumping an endless supply of facts and details, but without the context of real examples and stories. Insecure speakers are afraid of looking stupid, so they always overcompensate by larding excessive facts into their presentation.

The insecure speaker uses the sea of facts as a protective covering to mask his or her insecurities. Only it doesn’t work.