Give Your Speech, Change the World. Nick Morgan
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it in a context that connects with an audience at a deep, intuitive level.
Fifth, you’ll structure the arguments and information you will actually present in ways that are as time-honored as the ancient Greeks’ understanding of speech structure, and as modern as recent psychological insights into the way the brain works and what motivates people to action.
Finally, as part of that structure, you’ll figure out ways to involve the audience kinesthetically, visually, and aurally.
Now, let’s get down to the details.
Determine everything you can about the audience.
First, you need to spend some time thinking hard about the audience itself in very basic ways. Who are they? What do they fear? What do they want? Spend some real time developing detailed answers to these key questions. Note that the first questions we ask involve emotions—fears and wants. If you don’t understand those key motivators, then you’ll never be able to connect with the people in the audience. As I will say more than once, great presentations are both emotional and intellectual journeys that you, the speaker, and the audience take together. You can’t take an audience on that journey unless you know what its hopes, fears, and motivations are.
How do you get that information? If you don’t know already, if you’re presenting to a group of people who are relatively unknown to you, begin with the person or group that talked you into giving the presentation. Then research the group or the audience in all the ways you can imagine—the Internet, periodicals, books, whatever seems likely to be useful.
Then gather the rest of the information:
What is the age range of the audience?
What is its socioeconomic makeup?
Are you speaking in your first language? Theirs?
How different are you from them?
What do you have in common?
What is their status compared to yours—higher, lower, the same?
Have they had any bad news recently? Any good news?
Do you know anyone in the audience? Would it be appropriate to address them directly?
Each of these questions has implications for how you will shape your comments. You want to match your talk to the age range of the audience without talking down to the young. You need to give thought to what you may have in common with a group that comes from a very different socioeconomic group than your own. Everyone has fears and dreams. Start there.
If you’re speaking to a group for whom your language is nonnative, then eliminate as many of your colloquialisms as possible, and slow down a little. It’s the colloquialisms and jokes that give foreign speakers the most trouble.
The most important act of imagination, however, is to figure out what the audience’s emotional state is. If you know what they wish for, and what they are afraid of, you can talk to any audience with a chance at making a real connection.
Get with the program.
Once you’ve figured out the emotional state of the people in front of you, ask questions about the event:
When is the speech to be given?
Who comes before you?
Who comes after?
What kind of an occasion is it?
How many people will be in the room?
What are they expecting?
Are you the after-dinner entertainment, or a keynoter?
If you’re speaking after dinner, plan to speak for about twelve minutes at the most. If you’re the keynote speaker, you can go longer. I like hour-long time slots with time left for interaction, say, forty-five minutes of planned talk, interrupted occasionally with about fifteen minutes of unscripted interaction. Some events and conferences plan segments that go as long as ninety minutes. I find that, in most cases, what can be said in ninety minutes can be said more succinctly in sixty with a little more preparation and thought. I have rarely witnessed a ninety-minute talk that truly had a half-hour of extra meat in it. No one ever wishes a speech would run longer, or is sorry if one ends early.
And while I’m on the subject, if the typical attention span is something like twenty minutes, then in an hour’s presentation, there should be at least three opportunities for questions—after twenty minutes, forty minutes, and near the end. Breaks like that not only allow audiences to catch up and clarify anything they may have missed, but the pauses also allow audiences to recharge and refresh.
All of these questions, and any others you can think of, will help you develop a sense of who the audience is that you’ll be addressing. The more you know about the people in front of you, the better you’ll know how to connect with them. One of the best ways to warm up the connection with an audience, for example, is to personalize your presentation so that you refer to specific members of the audience and specific events that are important to them, not to mention cultural touchstones and inside references. Of course, all this can be carried too far, and must be done with tact. But more speeches err on the side of impersonality than on the excessively cozy and intimate. Connecting with your audience begins with knowing as much about them and the occasion as possible.
Make an effort, too, to think consciously about how you and the audience are alike. What hopes, fears, dreams do you share? Are you similar in outlook, age, experience? One of the simple ways to connect with an audience is to bridge the gaps between you and it by finding ways in which you are similar. The results can be extraordinary. Former First Lady Barbara Bush connected powerfully with some inner-city children during one of her literacy tours by sitting down with them and openly discussing her own childhood dreams and fears. Soon they were opening up and telling her about theirs. She had managed to find the universal connection between a privileged woman of power and rank and a group of poor elementary schoolkids. With a little work and imagination, it can be done.
Remember
A standard model of communication has the following parts: sender, medium, message, receiver, feedback, and noise.
Each is important to successful public speaking.
Think of a presentation as an opportunity to listen to your audience.
Find out everything you possibly can about your audience and plan to communicate with that unique group, no other.
CHAPTER 4
Craft the Elevator Speech
ONCE WE KNOW THE AUDIENCE AS intimately as we can, then it’s time to begin to focus the content in terms of the audience. We begin with the elevator speech. Recall that audiences only remember something like 10 percent to 30 percent of what they hear. If we think of a speech as a very limited act of persuasion, then it follows that we need to be very clear what we’re trying to persuade the audience of. The elevator speech will help us do that. It is, simply, a one-sentence expression of the main reason that you’re giving the speech—on the audience’s terms.
Here’s the scenario: You’re the keynote speaker at a conference. You’re up early on the day of the speech, a little nervous (perhaps more than a little), and a little early getting down to the mezzanine floor of the hotel where the ballroom and your appointment with destiny are. You get on the elevator at the fourteenth floor and hit the button for mezzanine. As the elevator heads down, it stops on the twelfth floor, and a cheery-looking convention delegate with a similar name tag gets on. He determines that the elevator’s heading to the floor he wants, and faces forward.
His eyes shift over to you and your name tag. There’s an immediate (and gratifying) look of recognition in his eyes. “Oh,” he says, “You’re the keynote.”
“Yes,” you admit.
“I’m a golfer, and there