Let’s say your child’s teacher calls and asks if you’ll present a talk about your work to her class. Or your boss wants you to present at an event she can’t attend. In a moment of enthusiasm, or maybe because you can’t think of a good excuse not to, you agree. Whatever the case, you hang up the phone and immediately start to panic. “What was I thinking? I HATE speaking in front of groups.” And you begin plotting a way to get out of it.
Stop right there. Why not use that energy for something more productive? In the last Networker, (READ IT HERE!) I promised to share some tips from my class, Public Speaking for Chickens: The Class for People Who Have Something to Crow About but Are Too Afraid to Do It. The following all help ease nervousness, but they also make presentations more effective, even for people who don’t suffer from speech anxiety.
What you do to prepare is as important as what happens the day of the speech. The more you sweat up front, the less you sweat on stage. With that in mind…
(1) Learn all you can about your audience, then tailor your speech to them.
You’ll want to use different tactics for the school board than you will for your bowling league. They’ll want you to also, even if you’re talking about the same topic. Every group has different needs, different levels of understanding and even different language. The more appropriate you make your presentation to your audience, the more comfortable they’ll be. And the more comfortable they are, the more comfortable they’ll make you with their interest.
(2) Learn all you can.
Learn all you can about the occasion, the rest of the agenda, and the equipment, if any, you’ll be using. This will help you feel prepared.
(3) Organize your talk in logical order.
This makes it easier for you to learn and remember and also keeps you from rambling, a real danger when we know a topic well but are not organized. If you’d like, make some notes to use the day of your talk. Using notes is fine as long as you only use them as a reference. Never read your presentation to the group.
(4) Practice.
It’s better to practice once or twice a day over a few days than to practice ten times the morning of a talk. It helps get you past memorization to a point where your presentation becomes part of you. Practice also helps keep you from rambling and allows you to time your talk so you stay within the time limits the group has set for you. When an audience thinks you should be done talking, they stop listening.
(5) Stop the negative self-talk.
Tell yourself, “I know this topic. That’s why they invited me.”
Your audience deserves your preparation, and so do you. In the next issue, I’ll share some tips for the day of your talk, or what I like to call the “Wake up and hope there’s a blizzard,” phase of speech preparation. Hint: There almost never is.
(Dorothy Rosby is a speaker, author and syndicated humor columnist.)
Dorothy Rosby