The Jeff Pulver Blog: Public Speaking 101: Jeff’s Tips for Being a Better Public Speaker

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September 29, 2008

Public Speaking 101: Jeff’s Tips for Being a Better Public Speaker

Back in June, 1987 when I spoke at the Lotus Developers Conference it was the first time I ever spoke in front of an audience. And looking back at how I approached that moment, I would have been a great example of all the things someone should not do when speaking to a crowd. From writing my words in advance and reading my script to the audience and becoming a “Talking Head”, I can only appreciate how much the audience tolerated me as a first time speaker.

Ever since that moment, every time I give a talk I look for feedback from both friends and strangers to get a feeling of how I did. I am someone who is always looking for ways to improve the experience for the audience for the next time I go on stage.

Below are some of my tips for Public Speaking which may be useful to you the next time you find yourself in front of a crowd.

Be Prepared - If you are giving your speech and using Powerpoint, make sure your presentation is set to go before you get to the stage. And if you are doing a live demo, make sure your internet access is working in advance of your talk. Be prepared with a backup strategy if either your powerpoint doesn’t appear and/or your Internet access isn’t available.

Be Confident - When you take the stage, the attention is on YOU. So embrace the moment and be confident and you will have the confidence of the crowd.

When I started giving speeches on a regular basis, I never thought about the speaking opportunity beyond having a platform to share information. It took me a while to realize there were ways to both share information and leave a positive impression with the audience and get myself invited back.

I used to get nervous before I gave a speech. Sometimes I still do. Regardless of how I feel inside before walking on stage, I have the confidence I will give a great talk, or at least I would have an opportunity to. If I mess up, that is my issue and maybe no one will be as hard a critic about myself than me. But if I didn’t feel confident, there is just about no way I could ever go on stage.

Speaking of which, one of the hardest talks I ever had to give in my life happened in April, 1998 at the Spring 1998 VON Conference in San Jose. This event took place about two weeks before my father died from complications of Brain and Lung Cancer. But my father wanted me to continue with my life and insisted that I go to VON and give my talk and I did. I decided my talk to him. After say this, It took all of my energy to regain my composure and give a talk about the state of the nascent VoIP industry. But I got through it. And when I need to find inner strength before I give a talk, I sometimes look back at that moment and then give my talk.

Getting that confidence is up to you. It doesn't come only from preparation. That only gets you so far. You need to project yourself in a way that you will know it when it is working and also when it isn't. You can feel the audience.

Connect with the audience. Find a way to hook yourself with the people sitting in the audience. When ever you talk about yourself and your vulnerabilities or something else, you need to be real. I've seen this done well and not so well. Part of this comes from the sincerity of your voice and the passion in your eyes. If you just talk but not emanate something your audience can connect with, you will fail, and fail fast.

Learning how to connect with the audience is the single most important lesson I have learned as a public speaker. And I had no idea I was connecting with the audience by sharing a personal moment with the audience. I only discovered I was doing this when I was in Singapore in November 1997 speaking at a Lucent customer event and a professional speaker came up to me after my talk, pointed this out to me and I have kept this in the back of my mind ever since.

Connecting with the audience will almost guarantee that people will remember you as a speaker. Which in a world which what happened seconds ago is part of the blur, is a good thing. And with practice, you can leverage your audience connection into building your own network, your own community.

Be Passionate. Be real. Share you passion for your topic. Feel it emanating from your pours into the air. Sweat the passion until everyone in the room feels it and use it to make your points.

Be Remarkable. Stand out. Once you are on stage find a way to break through the noise of everyday life and share your pearls of wisdom with the group. Try to give the people something to think about long after the event.

Brand Yourself Sometimes dressing differently gives you a visual tool you can leverage to separate yourself from most of the other speakers at the event. Sometimes this leads to the way you can brand yourself. Almost anyone can walk on stage wearing a suit. Walking on stage wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans isn’t as easy. But when you do it with confidence it becomes part of your personal brand. Discover YOUR brand. Discover YOUR style. Find a style and make it your own.

Have fun. Share a laugh. You don't need to be a stand up comic to make an audience laugh with you. And when you are able to do it, it means you are connecting with them.

Meet your audience. Usually you will have a chance to mingle with your audience before your talk. Don't be shy. Look at the schedule. Put yourself into the mix during the break and use the time to get a better understanding of the people who are there and try to learn what they hope to learn from you.

Make yourself accessible. Sometime I share my cell phone with the audience. And when I remember, I ask the audience to consider following me on twitter or finding me on Facebook.

Don't hit and run. After you speak, make it a point to be available and talk to the people who want to meet you. Exchange business cards. Be friendly. You owe it to yourself to speak with the people who may have just connected with when you were on stage.

Listen. Address the questions people want answered. Don’t avoid direct questions.

Be Real. You are a person. Share yourself.

Don't be a talking head. Don't stand up and blindly give your company's marketing pitch without realizing this is what you are doing. Just like how Simon Cowell reminds would be American Idols - “take a song and make it your own”. In this case, take the powerpoint pitch and morph it into something that is a reflection of YOU. (And if you need to be a Talking Head, well be the best dam Talking Head you can be.)

Be Dynamic. Be prepared to change what you are saying and how you say it based on what was said before you. (Don't be the third person in a row of speakers who say the same thing.)

Watch the time. Make sure you give your talk during the allocated time. Don't run over and try not to run too early. Both can affect the flow of the event.

Don't read your talk. Talk your talk. There is nothing more painful than being in a room and listening to someone who is looking down at their speech and reading it to the audience. And if you have to read your talk, talk slow and not fast. And don't be nervous. Only thing worse than someone who reads their talk is someone who does so in a nervous voice.

Look into the audience and connect with some of the people sitting there. If there are lights blinding you, do it anyway. People won't know you can't see them.

Don't be nervous. When you are in front of the room, you are the subject matter expert for whatever it is you are talking about. Your confidence will build as you recognize this.

For me, connecting with the audience and sharing my passion are the two goals I have whenever I give a talk. When it feels like I am not connecting I have will try different things before giving up. And should I connect, I use that energy to bring my talk to a new level.

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Good luck with your future talks. I hope these tips help you.

Tags: conference, Public Speaking, speaking, Social Media, Jeff Pulver

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I would appreciate learning from you some of the techniques that you follow when preparing for and giving a talk. Please take a moment and share some of your stories.

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Posted by jeff on September 29, 2008 07:37 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Posted by: injection molding at June 16, 2009 10:27 AM

Jeff, after seeing a tweet about Greece, I took a look and found your helpful blog post. I'm in organization development and have also done many presentations with large audiences over 20+ years. For the large audience, the key element you feature, and I find central is your "connect with the audience." Many of the other items come with getting to the place of being ASKED to present - passion, dynamism, talk your talk. Connecting with your audience can be variable, however. Audiences can be fickle. If you take "you" (knowledge, expertise, honed platform skills, your brand, etc.) and then make that audience connection, each presentation can have a sense of unique story and freshness each and every time - handling the crazy comment/question with respect, connecting with the mid-rows deadzone by asking where they were from (yellow shirts, Brazilians!), bringing out an obscure point and seeing how it could be mainstream in 6 months via conference vendors X and Y in the audience, and so on. Thanks for the inspiration for the craft of connection.

Posted by: Deb Nystrom at October 4, 2008 11:59 AM

Hi Jeff....always thought you were an excellent public speaker...I have seen you several times and you have a particular skill which I think is termed engagement. You really engage with the audience and have a strong emphatic delivery. I used to hate public speaking and my voice got so nervous I used to start to mumble - to the point the audience couldnt hear me!. I went to get some training off Paul Mckenna and he told me I wasn't creating empathy with the audience and had a fear that they weren't actually listening to me (a thought that shakes me to the core) - creating a downward confidence spiral. After talking further we revealed that I was "petrified" of the audience...I was mentally and physically scared of what they "thought" of me....and although I started my speeches with gusto they used to peeter out as I became more conscious of what they were thinking of me even though it was without foundation. It was my own self belief that was my worst enemy. So Paul gave me this little trick....if I felt my confidence tumble during any point in the presentation - I would focus on a group of 4 people in the back row and imagine they were all wearing clown costumes (bizarre I know), or,even The Beatles. This small strategy had several benefits...usually it would force me to slow down my talking and pace, it would make me smile inside and distract me from being increasingly scared and it reminded me that the audience aren't that scary after all which boosted my confidence. Obviously don't do this if you are scared by clowns or think The Beatles were rubbish.....and dont imagine a team of naked girls - you'll forget what you are talking about completely!.

Posted by: Paul Buchanan at October 3, 2008 01:11 PM

Great tips, Jeff, and I want to suggest a tool for helping with one of them: watching the time.

I wrote a blog post about one of my favorite tools for speaking -- the countdown timer! It's so much easier to see how much time you have left in concrete numbers rather than looking at the clock or your watch and figuring it out from there. Never mind that looking at your watch every two minutes is mighty distracting!

The post is here: http://coachlisab.blogspot.com/2008/08/run-out-of-time-never-again.html.

Of course, when practicing your presentation, you must be aware of your timing, and build it into the practice in the first place.

Posted by: Lisa Braithwaite at October 2, 2008 05:48 PM

One thing that you should do is to build camaraderie by tailoring your presentation to your audience. Its common sense, but I've been to presentations where it's obvious that the speaker didn't do his/her homework about the audience.

Posted by: Mimi at September 30, 2008 04:20 PM

Hi Jeff,

Great topic and tips! I started out on the technical side of presentations (freelance audio-visual technician) and learned by 'osmosis' what separated great presenters from the not-so-good presenters.

I've since hopped over the fence and started applying what I've learned in front of audiences, rather than from behind the booth.

Here are a couple more tips to add...

1. Practice, practice, practice: Prepare early, and rehearse as often as possible, by yourself, in front of friends/family members. Record your practice presentations and listen to yourself while driving, etc. to help internalize it.

2. Take advantage of tech rehearsals/dry runs if possible: Try to visit the meeting room the day before or a few hours before your scheduled presentation, to get a feel of it. Walk around the stage area, do a sound check, find out about lighting, temperature controls, walk out into the audience seating area to see what they will see.

3. Have your presentation videotaped: even if you have to hire someone to tape it. Two benefits: edit to use as a demo tape and post on web; review it to improve yourself.

4. Remember to smile during your presentation: this gives a friendly, approachable impression to the audience.

5. Speak slower than you usually do, repeat key phrases to bring it home. The natural tendency is to speed through your presentation and get it done and over with. This can be frustrating for the audience because they might miss your key points.

6. Remember, you're in control of the presentation: If you get asked a difficult or off-topic question, it's ok to say, "I'm glad you brought that up. Let's talk about that after the presentation" or better yet, "That's a topic that I cover in a follow-up presentation called "XYZ" and I'd love to come back again to speak to your group".

7. Have your own evaluation forms to hand out, with space for attendees to fill out their contact info & checkboxes of your products, services, offerings that they would be interested in.

Public speaking is a great way to market yourself, to connect with and to help others, and to give you that extra push so that you can take a step out beyond your own comfort zone in order to grow on a professional level and on a personal level.

Posted by: Eva_Abreu at September 29, 2008 11:55 AM

Hi Jeff,

Really good ideas here. I've developed some similar (some different) tips for boosting presentation performance as well. You can read my expanded article here (http://tinyurl.com/ahg3-boost-preso-performance), but here are the basic tips:

1. Focus on one idea

2. Give it some structure

3. Be flexible about time

4. Say something interesting (to me)

5. Stop repeating yourself

6. Ditch PowerPoint

7. Practice, really practice

ahg3

www.GoCSG.com
www.Brandtelling.com

Posted by: @ahg3 (Arthur Germain) at September 29, 2008 10:41 AM

How about "Enjoy yourself"

Probably not an easy thing for the first speech, but after a few attempts, it's pretty enjoyable, something close to the fun of being an actor on stage.

and "Let your slides be part of the show"

Learn how Steve "God" Jobs makes his shows by interacting with his slides. This is a three actor show : you, your audience, and your slides. Those can add a lot to the show: they can be funny, surprising, create some drama...

Posted by: Fabrice Epelboin at September 29, 2008 07:41 AM

There are a lot of good tips and reminders in the above, Jeff. Thanks for sharing them. One technique that I try to use and appreciate in a speaker is the concept of "This is ME doing this and ..."

It's one thing to stand and give the party / promotional line about how this product or technique will change your life.

You raise it to a new level when you explain how YOU use the product or technique personally. You now move from the realm of the prophet to user or consumer and at that point you connect at the audience level. You still have the expertise as you've undoubtedly got experience that the audience doesn't but you've proven that a little work makes you the success that you are today.

As you note above, if you can do it with passion, you've succeeded.

Posted by: Doug Peterson at September 29, 2008 07:28 AM

September 29, 2008

Public Speaking 101: Jeff’s Tips for Being a Better Public Speaker

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