Every one of us can recall a teacher or speaker we’ve watched whose intellectual message was lost because the hapless performer’s fly was unzipped, or he paced back and forth in oblivion until we thought we would go mad, or, more subtly, the presenter’s monotonous voice merged with the white noise from the slide projector until all we could hear was an undifferentiated roar. The next thing we know, we’re snapping back to alertness and realizing we haven’t been truly present in the room for some uncertain length of time and we’ve lost the thread of the talk.
The goal in performance, then, is to support the core message you’ve crafted with voice and expression and gesture and motion so that both verbal and nonverbal unite in a powerful expression of your ideas. That is what making a kinesthetic connection is all about.
Great public speakers listen to their audiences.
In reality, your job as a public speaker is to listen. Does that sound odd? How can I listen, you say, when I have to do most of the talking? But the opportunities for listening abound throughout a presentation. Remember the two CEOs I described in the introduction? Which one do you most closely resemble? When you first begin to speak, saying something along the lines of “hello,” do you wait for a response, or do you plunge on regardless of what the audience says back to you? If you wait, and genuinely look for some kind of response from the audience, even in that little moment, you will begin to create a real bond with the audience. The people in front of you will say to themselves, “Oh, she really cares about this audience or this talk.” If, on the other hand, you utter your opening phrases and instantly launch into your talk, the message the audience receives is, “This person is too nervous to connect with me, or too indifferent, or too programmed. He just wants to get done.”
A successful connection with the audience comes from countless little moments like this. You don’t have to be a Patrick Henry or a Daniel Webster or a Ronald Reagan to become a charismatic speaker. You do have to connect with the audience. And you do have to express your passion to them. Oddly enough, openness to the audience fosters both impressions.
Think about it from the audience’s point of view. You’re the expert. The audience has granted you the power, for now, of informing and persuading it, and that audience is very curious about what kind of experience the next hour is going to be. An audience expects you to be a little nervous at first—everyone in that audience has some idea about just how hard it is to do what you’re doing. Imagine if you seem genuinely interested right from the start in whether or not the listeners are getting the message. You must really care; this speech must be important to you. That’s the real beginning of charisma: caring. The word itself comes from the Greek (naturally), meaning favor or grace, as in someone divinely infused with passion. And how do we detect passion? When it can’t stay contained within one individual. When it overflows and threatens to engulf us, too. When it causes someone to grab us and not let go.
That person cares, we think. That person has passion. That person is charismatic. And unless those impressions are undercut by nonverbal communications during the course of a presentation, they will be what people take away from the event.
Ultimately, great public speaking comes from passion.
Later on, we’ll talk about some technical details of voice, face, gesture, posture, and motion during delivery. We’ll talk about the notorious Mehrabian study that many speech coaches use incorrectly to suggest that “93 percent of communication is visual.” Thus, they argue, the content hardly matters. It’s all about looking good. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Mehrabian study assumed that content was the most important element of communication. But we’ll look at the range of modern communications research for what it can tell us about how to communicate consistently and powerfully, with your verbal and nonverbal messages coherent and strong. We’ll also look at what the Greeks had to say about delivery and audience—how to think about them, woo them, trick them, move them. And how to avoid being wooed, tricked, or moved—about which the Greeks, as cynical and practical as we are today, also had much to say.
In addition, we’ll learn how to “read” an audience so that you can listen and watch the people in front of you as you’re presenting, to ensure you and your audience both become and stay powerfully connected. We’ll study the five continua of audience connection I’ve developed for use in special situations such as sales presentations, as well as generally for persuasive speeches. And we’ll look at Q&A sessions and other kinds of audience involvement in some detail.
The key to remember is that all of the technical details are only worth paying attention to if they allow you to focus better on the audience and to eliminate the contradictions that too many speakers portray between verbal and nonverbal communications. To enable you, in short, to give an audience-centered speech.
All too often the focus is somewhere else, and the result is boring. The presenter’s content speaks of how vital this marketing plan is to the future of the company, for example, but the voice is a monotone, so that the stronger, nonverbal message is, “I say this is important but I don’t really mean it. I’m bored with it, too. If I really cared, my voice would be rising in excitement as I talked about it.”
Or again, the content says this is the essence of how we’re going to turn this company around and become profitable again, but the speaker is backing away as she says it, visibly signaling a lack of real commitment to the turnaround.
I once saw a consultant give a speech to a meeting of a client’s board. He had some hard truths to present about the ability of the company to cope with the conflict and the difficulty that lay ahead. His message, essentially, was that the company was not facing up to its situation, but that the consultant and his team would help the client really wrestle, for the first time, with the core issues. As he said this, he moved backward until he was leaning comfortably against the wall of the conference room! The nonverbal message, that the consultant wasn’t really keen to grapple with the tough issues, was the one that the board retained. It quickly moved to terminate the contract and hire someone else.
Great public speakers communicate enthusiasm at some level to their audiences. Even if the topic is serious, underneath that emotion lies a real enthusiasm in having the chance to talk about it. To put it simply, if you’re having a good time, the audience will, too.
To get to that point, we have a lot of work to do. You will need to develop great audience-centered content. You will need to rehearse that content. And you will need to learn how to rise above self-absorption to deliver a speech that is truly “given” to the audience. But the good news is that it begins with you and your passion for the subject you want to talk about it. If you have that, all the rest will follow. You can be compelling, you can achieve a powerful connection with your audience, you can be memorable. You can even be charismatic, by being most resolutely and honestly yourself. Successful public speaking is not, in the end, trickery or technique. It is passion.
Remember
Public speaking is structured conversation.
Audiences come into a presentation asking, “Why am I here?”
If you’re successful, they will leave asking, “How do I implement these ideas?”
Focus your speech on one key message.
Connect with your audience by telling them stories.
Give your speech to the members of the audience by allowing them to become active.
The single most important thing you can do to prepare a speech is to rehearse.
The speaker’s focus should be on the audience; the audience’s should be on the content.
Great public speakers listen to their audiences.
Ultimately, great public speaking