Olivia Fox Cabane’s information on improving your public speaking abilities is among the best tips and techniques in her book, The Charisma Myth. I found myself noting line after line and will encourage clients to add it to their reading list. Cabane emphasizes how much preparation it takes to give a great speech. This isn’t always obvious because we can often think speakers are born with the gift. It can appear to us that they’re stepping up and speaking so fluently with little to no preparation. But that is rare, and for those who can, it’s only after years of practice and experience as a public speaker that they are able to do so. That’s why I want to frame this quote from the book and hang it in the classroom:
“Just as a duck appears to be sailing smoothly on the surface of a lake while powerfully paddling below the waterline, it takes a whole lot of effort for a presentation to appear effortless.”
Amen!
She reinforces the importance of preparing your content for a specific audience. With a focus on your audience and what your audience needs from your speech, she explains how important it is for presenters to know exactly what the purpose of their talk with be. That sounds simple enough, almost so much that it wouldn’t need to be mentioned. But I know from my own experience working with clients and in my own presentations, that this isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. You might know the content or the title of your talk, but not how to explain it in a sentence or two. She says you should know the single idea you want to convey in your speech and make it as clear and easy to understand as possible. You should be able to say it in one sentence. Once you have this main message – your key idea – the rest of your material should support it. She recommends supporting it with three points because the human brain processes information in three’s.
Once you have that framework, it’s easier to step back and evaluate how your content, the information you’ll be providing to your audience, can give them value. This is what she recommends being front and center in your speech preparation — delivering a good return on investment to your audience. They’re spending one of their most precious resources to be in your audience – – their personal time and also – we hope – their attention to your speech. For that, we owe them value.
Key Takeaways for Becoming a Better Public Speaker
- Get graphic with your information. The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is true because of the way our brains process information. Our brain’s ability to process words is newer and less hard wired than our brain’s ability to process visual images.
- Use stories to relate the information to your audience and increase the likelihood they’ll remember your message. For the stories to be effective, the people in the story should have things in common with your audience.
- Practice, practice, practice! She emphasized this by sharing that when Jerry Seinfeld got his first big break with an appearance on The Tonight Show he prepared for those 6 minutes for 6 months.
- Pay attention to the tempo of your speech. The slower you speak the more thoughtful and deliberate you will sound, causing your audience to pay more attention to what you have to say.
- Make use of pauses and make them deliberate. “Have the confidence to make your listeners wait for your words.”
Check out Bane’s Voice Fluctuation and Vocal Power exercises at the end of the book and on her website www.askolivia.com/exercises.