MLK, Jr. was effective at delivering his message by making people feel the problem
Another speech with boring slides and another session where you can only recall the beginning and the end, why make your training speakers’ audience suffer through it? During champagne roundtable discussions at ExL Pharma Summit, a discussion on speaker training facilitated by Jeanette Pascuzzi-Heacock of GE Healthcare walked through the best practices and do’s and don’ts of training speakers.
- The best speakers practice improv – Take acting or improv classes to deliver the content in a speech. Rather than presenting in an expected cause-effect, surprise your audience. Start by present the problem you first faced, get them to feel the problem/undertake the emotions and overcome the problem with you.
- Don’t tell the perfect story – People enjoy the happy ending story but more than all, people enjoy hearing stories of triumph. Recall moments of research or during a project that were most frustating. Convey the bumps in the road and make it emotional/psyschological for the audience.
- Do it backwards - Start with the conclusion and go backwards with it. The audience usually only remembers the end of a story so start with the end, end with the beginning and your audience will have heard the entire story.
- Explain why – Follow the phrase “Tell them what they’re going to learn, tell them why they’re going to learn, then show them what they’re going to learn.” Jeanette brought up a great Chinese proverb, ““Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”
- Stop to poll – use audience polling devices and stop to get their perspective during the presentation. Present scenarios and ask questions like, “What would you do in this case?” The audience participants learn more by talking through it.
Other great suggestions on a personal level were to join a local Toast Masters chapter which trains you how to be compelling to listen to and helps you answer questions on the fly. Pecha Kucha was another discussed topic originally from Japan, it’s a format for presenting an idea to your audience on 20 slides in 6 minutes and 40 seconds.
What other tips would you add to this list? What tip excites you or concerns you the most? Are there ways you would add these to your conferences to effectively delivery content?
Tags: speaker training, speaking tips
