Developing Expert Judgment for Your Public Speaking and Presenting Opportunities

• 00:04 Let me ask you, think of the best speaker,
• 00:07 the best presenter you've seen in the last year in your business, your line of work,
• 00:12 not a professional comedian, or politician but someone in your industry.
• 00:18 Now tell me every message, think of every message you remember from that speech,
• 00:24 that presentation, go ahead, give it some thought.
• 00:28 Maybe nothing comes up, think of the last five years, ten years,
• 00:32 maybe think of your entire life.
• 00:35 Think of the best speaker you've ever heard,
• 00:40 now try to write down on a sheet of paper, or a computer screen,
• 00:45 every message you remember from that presentation.
• 00:50 I don't mean that you liked their style, or that they were funny, or
• 00:54 they were commanding, I don't care about that right now,
• 00:58 I just want to know what messages do you remember?
• 01:03 Look down at your sheet, how full is that?
• 01:06 Did you write down 15, 20, 30 messages, I doubt it.
• 01:10 That's a question I've been asking my clients all over the world, because for
• 01:14 30 years I've trained presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel peace
• 01:19 prize winners, lots of business executives in every industry, athletes.
• 01:23 I ask that question and typically quite often people say, Teach,
• 01:27 everyone's boring in my industry, I don't remember anything.
• 01:31 Or they'll say yeah, Teach, I remember this one speaker,
• 01:35 I remember this one idea.
• 01:37 Occasionally it's two, sometimes it's three ideas,
• 01:41 three messages from the greatest speaker they've seen,
• 01:45 every three months or so someone will remember four ideas.
• 01:50 And every six months I'll have one of my clients from an in-person training
• 01:55 tell me they remember five ideas from the best speaker they've ever seen,
• 02:01 and they may have been in the audience with Steve Jobs unveiling an iPod or
• 02:06 something like that.
• 02:08 In all the years I've asked that question guess how
• 02:12 many times someone has remembered more than five ideas from
• 02:17 the best speaker they've ever heard in their industry.
• 02:23 That's right, never.
• 02:26 So my first really big rule for you, after you've narrowed down what you want your
• 02:31 audience to do is you gotta ask yourself of all the messages you could tell your
• 02:35 audience what are the five most important?
• 02:38 Five or fewer, you are not being asked to speak to be the Wikipedia for
• 02:44 your audience, they can just stay at home,
• 02:47 go on their cell phone, and go to Wikipedia or use Google.
• 02:52 So much of being a good speaker, a good presenter, a good communicator, has to
• 02:58 do with judgment and really figuring out out of everything you know what does your
• 03:03 audience need to know in order to make the decision to do what you want them to do.
• 03:09 So you have to have focus, so much of being a great speaker, a great presenter,
• 03:15 has nothing to do with your hand gestures, your eye contact,
• 03:20 or voice, or whether you say or it's about judgment and
• 03:25 figuring out how to eliminate most of the garbage that gets in most speeches.
• 03:32 Most people, adults in the business world, political world, government world,
• 03:38 make the fundamental blunder of simply trying to convey way too many facts,
• 03:44 way too many numbers, way too many data points, and it's boring.
• 03:50 Your audience doesn't have to know everything about what you do in your job,
• 03:54 if they did they'd have your job.
• 03:57 When you're giving a presentation it's your job to focus
• 04:02 just on the ideas that are most interesting, most relevant,
• 04:07 most important and useful to your audience.
• 04:11 So what you've gotta do is brainstorm on every possible idea and
• 04:16 message you could say in this presentation, in this speech, and
• 04:21 then eliminate anything that doesn't make it to the top five.
• 04:26 If you have a message that's just a boring fact and the audience isn't going to find
• 04:31 it interesting or useful, get rid of it, you can always give that as a handout,
• 04:35 it's not something you have to spend your time speaking about.
• 04:39 More tips in a moment on how to really figure out what the best messages will be.

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