Audiences are smart.
They know when you’re really invested in what you’re talking about or if you’re just trying to be interesting and convince them that you’re fabulous.
There are public speaking skills that everyone trots out like ‘Use humour…’ or ‘Imagine the audience naked…’ or my favourite, ‘Be authentic and be yourself.’. That last one is like saying, ‘Don’t be nervous’ when someone is panicking with anxiety right before they go on stage.
The thing is, there are simple skills right at your command that you might not necessarily think of as useful public speaking techniques that will turbocharge your speaking, pitching, and presenting right away.
I’ve targeted 5 of my best loved and not so obvious public speaking techniques that will not only make you feel like a better speaker but give you that special WOW factor that will make you memorable, credible, and inspiring.
- Don’t try to be inspiring… Be inspired!
There’s nothing more tedious that watching someone one stage at a conference and feel like they’re putting on a show because they love themselves and just want you to think they’re hilarious and brilliant.
Trust me. If you get on stage and try to be interesting and profound, your audience will buy it for about 30 seconds and then realize that it’s all about YOU and not about them.
When you make it about your audience and how you might be able to help them on the day, it becomes something much more authentic, deep, and emotionally connected. It’s the difference between making yourself the centre of attention or making it about your audience.
Yes, you’re on stage in the spotlight and are owning the stage but you have to turn the spotlight around and put it on the audience instead. What can you bring to the table that will help them?
When you allow yourself to be inspired by your subject, to feel an energetic link between you and your words, you automatically invest emotionally in what you’re talking about. THAT is sexy to an audience.
- Surprise and Delight
I have made my living as a performer, actor, singer, and writer for over 25 years and one of the tenants of great speaking, performing, and writing is to surprise and delight your audience.
Basically, this means thinking outside the box, off the beaten track, and giving your audience what they are not expecting. For example, what they’re probably expecting you to start with is, ‘Hi, my name is…. and I’m here to talk about blah blah blah…’. That’s what they’re expecting.
So give them something they’re not expecting. Anything that is going to be different than what everyone else is going to start with that day.
If you’re a musician, maybe it’s a piece of music. If you’re into art, an image of a painting. Or maybe a question, a story, a quote from one of your favourite leaders, or a startling statement. There are an infinite number of ways to keep your audience guessing so be creative.
Maybe you are coming from a specific perspective that most people aren’t coming from when you’re talking about a subject that has been talked about ad infinitum. Maybe you stand there for 5 minutes and say nothing. Anything that disrupts the expectations of the audience and gives them something they aren’t expecting will make you memorable and surprise the audience.
- The Power of Pause… But Not As You Might Think
Lots of public speaking coaches use the power of pause and it is one of the most effective, simple, and easily mastered techniques that we have in our arsenal of public speaking weapons.
But using pause isn’t just about slowing down and controlling the pace at which you speak. It’s also about creating space between your ideas, your words, and your thoughts so the audience has time to digest what you’ve just said.
The audience can’t take in too much information at once; they need to be fed your information or story one chunk at a time, in manageable pieces of content or data, so they can follow the thread of your story and not fall behind.
Remember: You know your story and words backwards and forwards (or at least you should…) but your audience is hearing them for the first time. Your brain will always be working faster than your mouth so use pause to slow down and keep your audience with you.
- Be Confidently Vulnerable
Let’s face it, you’re a human being, your audience is made up of human beings, so be a human being in a room full of human beings. And human beings are imperfect and vulnerable so use techniques that will show you audience that you’re a human being just like them.
You don’t have to worry about credibility if you’ve done your homework and created clear, creative, credible content and practiced your delivery. What you do need to focus on is being in the moment with your audience and have a conversation with them as human beings.
So create eye contact with your audience. This is one of the easiest and fastest way to make an emotional connection with them. When people feel seen, they automatically give you their attention. To be seen and understood is a fundamental need for human beings so when you make eye contact with your audience members, it triggers a willingness and desire to connect.
- Keep Them Wanting More
It was Ben Franklin who once said, “Be brief, be brilliant, be gone” and that was way before powerpoint! Say what you need to say, say no more, and keep your story and content clear, succinct, and distilled.
You don’t have to speak for hours to make your point. In fact, audiences love it when you finish before your allotted time and it leaves them with a sense that there is a lot more where that came from.
Brevity is brilliance. Mark Twain said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one instead.”. It’s easy to waffle on for hours saying a lot but never really pinching the nub of what you’ve come to talk about. The trick is to set out your stall right off the bat, be clear about who you’re talking to, and nail your words by catering them directly to your specific audience on that day.
One of the best ways to leave your audience wanting more is to create words and deliver them in such a way that gives the audience a reason to care. If they have a reason to care, they connect emotionally with your subject or presentation. And if they connect emotionally, they get to feel.
Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.”.
A feeling audience is a happy audience and a happy audience will always want to know more about your, hear more from you, and above all they’ll remember you.
