Hello and welcome to this second instalment where I will be guiding you through giving more confident and professional speeches.
One of the biggest misconceptions – and I am going to break it here today – about speeches is that they need to be memorized, that they need to be in there only. And it is a great, a great contributor to people feeling unconfident when they get in front of an audience. How are they going to remember all of that information? How are they going to remember those facts and figures?
Well, you don’t have to. They can be written down. And there are many different ways to do this.
Now for some people they are going to be thinking: Referring to notes? That is not going to look very professional. But you couldn’t be further from the truth. There are some great speakers in history that have given their speeches with their notes on the lectern and referring to those notes. Of course in modern days you don’t see it as much because they are referring to their notes on an auto queue or teleprompter and a screen that is in front of the camera that the camera can see through, but is reflecting all of the text that the speaker needs to say.
But even if they are physical notes, they are on a lectern or even cue cards, small pieces of cards with key point and salient information. Use them. Let them guide you through your talk. I mean, some people like to be really structured. They like to have a massive A4 sheet or lots of A4 sheets with their entire talk on there. That is fine. And they want to move through all of those points. If you are doing that technique, just make sure that you literally don’t bow your head for all of the talk and don’t engage with your audience, because, I mean, you are giving a talk. You want to engage with people. You want people to connect with you. People take in information better when they feel like they are connecting with the speaker. So you want to do that anyway. So try not to look down at the paper too much.
But if that is a bit too structured for you, then use cue cards. Again, small pieces of information on small sort of post card sized cards. And you can just go through them, refer to them as you need them. Use them as sort of marker stones, milestones, if you will, throughout your speech so that you can move to the next salient point. And you can still have a bit of freedom to say what you want, to answer questions and go off topic if you will. But don’t be scared to refer to notes.
When I first got into speaking in front of public audiences, it was as an entertainer. And as an entertainer I had a pretty, sort of set structure and a script that I stuck to. So that helped a great deal. But then when I started to move into the more after dinner speaking, presenting field, it… it all really did kick me as… as something being different, because companies would ask me to deliver key information, to talk about certain things. And I would try to remember it, because as an entertainer I learned scripts and I fixed them in my mind and then I sort of put my own spin it and regurgitated, if you will. And I was trying to do this with information that I was given a week before and it just is not possible.
So make sure that you use these things, these… these tools. And don’t try to memorize the speech. And when you realize that you don’t have to memorize all that information, it opens up the next great thing. It enables you to focus on the delivery of that information and being able to look at your audience, engage with your audience. And that is very powerful.
Until part three, take care. Bye, bye now.