Fellow Leaders,

Remember the chapter on Public Speaking? Learning public speaking is part science and part art. The science part can be taught, and the art can be discovered and developed through experience. If you are like me, I tend to learn the most from experience—and those experiences aren’t always the most pleasant at the time. 

Here are two experiences that taught me important lessons about public speaking. One happened over 30 years ago, and one happened a couple weeks ago.

30 years ago, I was living in Los Angeles and working in Long Beach. There was a group there that I was speaking with once a week. And each week I would prepare, pack my notes, and make the one-hour drive to Long Beach. 

I thought things were going well…until the one day I arrived in Long Beach, reached for my notes, and realized I had left them up in Pasadena (I’m sure that internally I said two words in that moment and the first was “Oh”!) These are the kinds of experiences that tend to produce nightmares. At first I panicked. There was no way I was going to remember what I had prepared without those notes. I was going to bomb and my fragile ego was going to take a real blow. Well, my ego took a real blow that day, but not in the way I imagined.

After taking a  few minutes to pull myself together, I walked in and delivered what I had prepared as best as I could from memory. I was really nervous, and I knew I had not remembered all the points I wanted to make. When I finished, a young woman who had heard me speak in the previous weeks came up to me. She asked me what was different about my speaking today. I immediately went into full-blown confession and apology mode. I told her I had forgotten my notes, which made me forget a lot of what I wanted to say, which made me very nervous, and really hurt my speaking. 

She didn’t accept my apology. In fact, I could not have been less prepared for what she said next: “Don’t ever bring your notes again!” I may have not remembered everything I had prepared, but she thought the quality of my speaking was greatly improved because of the freedom it gave me and the increased engagement and eye contact I had with my audience. I needed that feedback.

Please don’t misunderstand—There is nothing inherently wrong with notes, and we SHOULD prepare ourselves for public speaking. However, in our desire to be complete and polished, we may be forfeiting the impact we could have had if we didn’t have notes. Lesson learned.

A couple weeks ago, I was asked to speak about coaching. While I was preparing, I thought of the perfect illustration for explaining the help a coach gives in grounding the one they coach in reality (their real Point A or starting point). 

Here was my amazing illustration: The “Find Friends” function on an iPhone. If someone is in your contacts, all you have to do is look up the contact, scroll down, and choose the “Share My Location” option. Once you do that, the other person can immediately, on their iPhone, know right where you really are.

In coaching it is vitally important to know “where you really are” if you are to make any progress on where you want to go.

My PowerPoint was great. I took screen shots of everything: a sample contact in my phone, as well as the step by step process of going in to a phone’s settings, then privacy, then location services, and finally to “Share My Location” in order to do all of this. The perfect illustration!

Then I showed up to speak. It was a great crowd for a coaching presentation: my guess is there were close to 100 people. Except one thing wasn’t so great: I was 15 years YOUNGER than the youngest person in attendance. Everyone looked north of 70. And my great high-tech illustration (and accompanying slides) was going to be meaningless for them. 

That sent me scrambling. I quickly removed the first ten slides of my presentation, replaced it with a simple title slide, and never used my great “Find Friends” illustration.

One of the science strategies for public speaking is “Know your audience.” A younger crowd would have probably connected well with the “Find Friends” App on an iPhone. But not the real crowd I had. Also, I dropped the ball because I could have found out from the event organizer the general age of participants. I didn’t do that either.

You can have great material for public speaking, but if you are not speaking the audience’s language, your public speaking will take a huge hit. I’m still learning to put myself in their shoes when I speak publicly—another good lesson from LEAD 365. Lesson learned.

What have your experiences with public speaking taught you? What ego-busting experiences or feedback have you received? When could you have done a better job with knowing your audience? 

We are all learning—both the art and the science!

Lead on!
Jeff

Image by jot.punkt. Used under CC by 2.0 license.