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This article will help you stand out when you next have to participate in public speaking while using PowerPoint slides.
One of the scourges of modern meetings, conference and corporate get-togethers is PowerPoint. While we all hate sitting through PowerPoint presentations, for some reason the program has not died out. The program is a success despite its lack of popularity!
There are three reasons for this:
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There are three areas of business where poor communication wastes resources. These are:
Rework is caused by miscommunication – particularly in public speaking. It’s when I don’t explain myself clearly, or you misinterpret what I say. Rework corrects the mistake and wastes effort.
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It is frustrating to hear the arguments about Holden pulling out of Australia. Every single word of it is a lie, and every single word of it is true. Public speaking courses can sort this mess out.
It is true to say that labour costs are high. They are and they have to be. Australia is a high cost country. If we have low wages in one sector, one of two things happens. The Government (you and me as tax payers) will have to support the workers through increased social security. This is bad for all of us. The other and more likely problem is the working poor – people who work hard, but don’t have enough to live. This creates social
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Lies, Dam lies and Statistics
How to make statistics interesting…..
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1Op6pmwOHE]
Real Leaders know how to uncover the humour in their message to make their audience laugh.
When speaking to any audience, it is important to build a rapport with them as quickly as possible—and humour can be a great way to make this connection. However, it’s often best to leave the punch-line jokes aside and focus on more subtle types of humour.
It’s a misconception that beginning a presentation with a joke will get the audience on your side. In fact, jokes will fail far more often than they will succeed. There are several reasons for this unfortunate outcome:
• The funniest jokes are usually not appropriate for the work environment.
• Most jokes rely on a victim—and chances are that someone will identify more with the victim than with you. If the audience identifies with you more than the victim they will find the joke funny. However, there will be people in the audience who identify with the victim and will think your joke is in poor taste. If there are too many of these people in the audience, the joke will fail.
• Jokes require exact wording, good delivery, and perfect timing. If you don’t carry off all three of these things, your joke will fall flat and leave you struggling.
• If you are constantly opening with jokes, you will get a reputation for it. You would be better off building a reputation as someone who has something important to say than as someone who cracks jokes.
• If you do happen to find the right joke and deliver it properly and everyone thinks it’s funny, they will probably remember the joke more than what you had to say. If your joke overshadows your content, it will prevent you from delivering your message.
Although structured jokes with punch lines are almost always a poor choice for your a presentations, humour is an important aspect of all public speaking presentations.
One type of humour that works well when applied to speeches is situational humour. Situational humour can involve making observations on what is going on around you at that moment. Chances are good that if you find something in your immediate environment is funny, others will too. Situational humour can also be used in the stories that you tell.
Another type of humour that works well in a speech or presentation is self-deprecating humour. In this case, you are the only victim of the joke and no one else is hurt or offended. More than that, self-deprecation shows the audience that you are not taking yourself too seriously and helps them build a fondness and respect for you.
Remember: even though humour can be a useful and fun tool to utilise, it is not required to successfully communicate with your audience. If you know that you are lacking a sense of humour, don’t try and force humour into your presentations—focus on your strengths instead. If you are unsure of whether or not a line is funny, try dropping it into a casual conversation and gauge the reactions—even if it doesn’t meet with laughter, it’s a better option than having a bit of humour flop in the midst of a speech.
Many speakers will share a quote in a presentation to add power to their message. Here is how to use them for greatest impact.
As always your thoughts appreciated below.
Cheers
Darren Fleming –
When you want to have more power in what you say or write, what do you do?
There are two ways people try to increase the strength of what they say or write. The first is to increase the word count. They put in a whole bunch of adjectives to give their message more weight. These include words very, exactaly, precisely, huge etc in the hope that it will give their point more weight. The better approach is to take the Zen path and reduce the word count. Cut the adjectives and excess words that do not add value. Pay particular attention to any adjectives ending in the ‘ly’. Words ending in ly weaken your sentence and reduce the strength of your message. The next time you see an e-mail with an ly word in it, re-read it without the word and see the sentence change.
As always, your thoughts appreciated here
Last weekend I attended a conference where the presenters would just not stop talking. Each person on the agenda felt they had a duty to congratulate the last and next speaker for the job they had done. Then there were other speakers who to 20 minutes to say what could have been said in 5.
What was the result of this? because there were so many speakers (5 in 20 minutes) the whole event lacked rhythm. We could not settle into the speakers and listen to the message they had. It was like trying to watch TV with the ads coming thick and fast. Those that did have extended times to speak lacked substance and the audience stopped listening.
What is the solution?
Make sure that every person who gets up to speak will add value to the event message and deliver value to the audience. If they don’t add value, do they really need to speak? Just because someone can speak, doesn’t mean that they should. As the great philosopher Groucho Marx put it, ‘Very few sinners are saved after the first 20 minutes of a sermon.’
Cheers
Darren Fleming
Why do people fear Public Speaking?
There are many statistics that state public speaking is our greatest fear. Apparently it is higher than the fear of spiders, snakes, flying and even death itself (though there are not stats on the fear of dieing from a snake or spider bite while flying)
Why do people fear public speaking so much?
It is something that was conditioned into us in school and we live out in the workplace.
As teenagers at school, the teacher forced us to stand in front of our classmates and deliver a book report. We were given no practice or advice on how we should do it. Being self-conscious teenagers, we stood up and immediately thought everyone was judging us – and judging us poorly! Is it any wonder why there is such a real fear of public speaking. Now at work, when we have to stand and speak, we relive those school day fears and tell each other how much we hate public speaking.
But the reality is far from our school experience. People want to see us succeed. After all, who wants to have to sit through a boreing presentation?
Overcoming your fear of public speaking is very easy when you are shown how to do it. Just like learning to drive a car, it was easy to learn how when someone showed you! How do you do it?
Now, imagine yourself commenting on this.
Cheers
Darren
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