Sitting in a training class, I found myself starting to wonder about the point of the class. We had an agenda, workbooks, and trainers but the point was slipping away. You could see the attention of the audience slip and the trainers begin to go on to autopilot. What was one thing that the trainers could have done to get our attention from the start and keep it through the two days of training?

Ed Tate in one of his lessons on the Champions Edge shared with me a technique that gets the audience interested in your presentation, and keeps them engaged in long speeches or training sessions. Before we get to the lesson, let me share with you how our facilitator started the class I attended.

She first reviewed the agenda for the next two days. After reviewing the agenda, she gave an introduction to the HR department and talked about the resources that the HR department had available for managers. Though the speaking was pleasant, it didn’t get my attention or keep me engaged. I have attended many classes, presentations, and workshops where the opening did not compel us to be engaged. Not engaging the audience reduces the value of the information you will share and makes it more difficult to sell your message over the length of the presentation.

The lesson that Ed Tate shared was to sell the benefits of the training at the beginning of the class. Don’t review the agenda, which only describes the content of the training, but share what the expected outcome of the training will be on the participants.

Think of how this could have been accomplished in the class I attended recently:

“At the end of this training course, you will have the tools to save at least an hour a week that you would have spent looking for the information we will share with you. In one hour, we will share with you nine HR pitfalls that managers trained in avoiding, have saved 10 million dollars of litigation expenses for our company and they will help you keep your. Managers that have taken this course previously, have saved the company over three million dollars in expenses related to employee medical affairs.”

In order to capture the attention of an audience, you have to sell them on what they are going to learn. If you demonstrate to them that this information can be used to have a positive impact, then you will get your audience to pay attention to what you have to say. Not selling your major points can cause confusion and it will make it harder to sell your points when you get to them in the presentation.

As you work on long presentations, training sessions, and workshops be aware of the benefits that your attendees will gain. Then when opening your session, share specifically what monetary, time, or other benefits can be had from paying attention. Sharing the benefit will increase attention, engagement, and give people a sense that you are providing value which makes them engaged.

Leave a comment and let us know the last time you heard an engaging or disengaging opening to a speech.

Why don’t you practice your speeches more?

photo credit: S.Su

I have observed hundreds of speakers in the past four years of my Toastmasters membership. It hasn’t mattered if those speakers are brand new or old-timers, you can always tell when they have not practiced. I see it in the reliance on their notes, the overuse of filler words, or the lack of structure in the presentation. If I can tell, your audience can tell, and you are going to lose them.

So why aren’t you practicing?

Do you feel that you do not have enough time? Do you not know what you really want to say? Did you sign up to give a speech, so now you are going to give one whether you are ready or not? Do you think that it is just not your style?

My favorite excuse is, “I am not going to be a professional speaker, so I don’t need to practice. I want to keep it real.”

So you think that only professionals practice? You think practicing will make it seem unnatural? What about Steve Jobs? He is not a professional, but he spends hours practicing his presentations. So do successful sales presenters, pitchmen, and professionals. They have all taken to heart the advice, “Practice until it looks natural.”

The most “natural” speakers spend hours practicing for a 10 minute speech.

You have to practice.

If you want to be effective as a speaker, then you must schedule time to practice your presentations. It doesn’t matter if it is in a Toastmasters club or for a presentation to a trade group. The habit is important to develop, because it will allow you to get your point across, make your audience believe your message, and deliver value to the listeners.

Most speakers have a 5 to 1 rule for practice. That means that for every minute of your speech, you practice for 5 minutes, so a 10 minute speech would be practiced for 50 minutes. Is this the most important speech of your life? Then maybe you should make it 10:1 or more. The point of the ratios is to give you a time to schedule to get up there and give your speech.

Is practice boring, silly, or downright painful? Yes it is, but everyone that has ever done anything important in life has practiced. Whether it is in sports, music or art, every profession requires a level of practice. It doesn’t matter if you are an amateur or professional; if you are passionate about what you are doing…practice.

You audience will thank you.

I often get asked why I care so much about speaking. I will have people tell me, “Chris, why does being a ‘great’ speaker matter so much to you? Our speaker John is a ‘good’ speaker, why does he have to be a ‘great’ speaker?”

As a speaker devoted to learning the art of public speaking, I have hung around a lot of awesome speakers. Through the Champion’s Edge, I have had the opportunity to spend time with and learn from the speaking awesomeness of Patricia Fripp, Craig Valentine, Darren LaCroix, and Ed Tate. In my interactions with them, I have realized something…they have their lives together. I cannot directly credit speaking, but when you meet them, you realize that they have got it together and are moving forward in their careers.

I know what you are thinking, “Chris, you don’t have to have your life together to be a great speaker.”

Oh really? I disagree.

In my opinion, to be truly great on the platform, you have to be great off the platform. That means that you have to have a level of self confidence that comes from being someone who has their life together.

“But Chris,” you are saying, “what if they are just acting? They don’t need to have their lives together if they are just acting.”

That is true. You don’t need to have your life together to be a good actor; however, I think that you can tell when someone is acting on or off of the platform. Now, don’t get me wrong, a good speaker that is a good actor can get away with a lot of your time and money; however, many of those ‘actors’ are found out or after awhile or the spell wears off and you see the speaker of being nothing but the hollow platitudes they repeat.

This is why I push so many people to attempt speaking greatness, because I know that improving your speaking improves the quality of your life. As a Toastmaster, you see it in prison clubs, in retirement homes, and in corporate environments. Becoming a great speaker pushes your self confidence up, and in doing so allows you to know that you can do more than you ever thought.

So for those of you that ask, “Why does being excellent matter?”

I say it is because the pursuit of speaking greatness changes lives…for the better.

Think about it.

With vast amounts of information just a few finger strokes away, the audience you are speaking to can sometimes feel that they are trapped in Borges’, “The Library of Babel”, where all of the information that has ever existed or will ever exist could reside somewhere in the library. It is your job as a speaker to provide your audience with the “Crimson Hexagon”, which provides them a catalog to which it all makes sense.

I was reminded of this while listening to a recording of a speech by Patricia Fripp. What she does that is so amazing, is to take information about what the audience is learning that day and make it relevant to their career and their lives. Where many speakers in the industry share platitudes that don’t leave the room, a master like Fripp shares stories that make a point and are reinforced with techniques that the audience can implement in their daily lives.

Though a speech consisting of motivational platitudes might get you a “good job” and a pat on the back, in Toastmasters. If you are looking to move beyond Toastmasters and into the professional speaking world, then you need to be able to provide value from the stories in your speeches that are reinforced with techniques that the audience can implement.

Providing techniques in your speech was the lesson shared this week from Craig Valentine on the World Champion’s Edge. Craig shared his thoughts on how to implement this in your speech, but after listening to Fripp, I had an additional thought on the mindset required by a speaker to make this happen.

In order to be a successful speaker like Craig and Fripp, you need to be able to be a filter for your audience and provide relevant stories that are reinforced with techniques that can enhance their lives. Today’s audiences have vast amounts of information available to them from libraries, research databases, and search engines such as Google. You would think that with all of this information available, that everyone would weigh their ideal weight, be rich beyond their wildest dreams, and be in a relationship with quite a catch. This is where a good speaker comes in and saves the day.

A good speaker, that has practiced and has been well coach, can be the “Crimson Hexagon” for an audience that has been inundated with too much information. What this means, is that as information becomes more widely available in more formats than ever before, the role of the public speaker becomes more important. It will be your job, if you so choose, to help audiences take the vast amount of information available on the topic, and make it interesting and relevant to their lives.

So as you are preparing your next speech, study the topic with intensity, find the relevant stories that illustrate the topic, and deliver those stories accompanied with techniques that enhance the lives of the audience. Be a relevant and interesting information filter, and you can become a high paid and much sought after speaker, like Valentine and Fripp.

One of the complaints that new speakers have is not having anything to speak about. Three and a half years ago, when I started my speaking voyage in Toastmasters, I agreed with that complaint. Now however, I see speech ideas everywhere and after you read this post, I hope that you agree with me.

Today was a great example of how my mindset as a speaker has changed. I had been having a bad day and not feeling very creative. Then as I walked into the break room of our office, I saw the weather forecast on the monitor. For tomorrow’s forecast it said, “UNKNOWN.”

At that moment, something clicked and within three minutes I had written the introduction, a short part of a story, and the message that I wanted someone to get from that part of my speech. The title of the speech is, “Tomorrow’s Forecast.” All of that from a missing forecast on the television.

The mind shift that I want you to try to take is to not look at the world as devoid of things to speak about, but instead look at the abundance. Some of the greatest speeches start from humble beginnings. Though small events that happen in your life might not seem relevant in a speech, it is the similarities that you have with others that makes you connect with audiences. So pay attention to small failures, a small bit of good luck, or just listen to your inner monologue. Ideas on what to speak about are all around you and sometimes it is the most simple of stories about your life that resonate with those that will listen.

Still you still not convinced? Then humor me for one more minute.

Stop reading and look around your current environment. What are the objects that are around you? How did they get there? For example, what stories are attached to the quote on the wall of your office, to the person sitting next to you at work, or to the place you happen to be sitting? What brought you where you are today?

Just answering those questions and noticing the world around you will open you to infinite speech ideas. It is now up to you to use them. Will you speak about why that quote appealed to you on that day? Will you tell the story of your coworker’s triumph over cancer, or will you talk about the people sitting near you in the airport. What story do they have and what story will they allow you to create in your next speech?

This post ended up being so long, that I am breaking it into two parts. Part 1 was posted yesterday and part 2 follows:

If you didn’t catch my post from Saturday, the Lady and the Champs workshops give you the opportunity to hang out with four Toastmasters World Champions of Public Speaking and NSA Hall of Fame Speaker Patricia Fripp to learn more about the art of speaking and gain specific knowledge to make you a better speaker. The workshops also teach you about the business of speaking and how you can develop more opportunities to speak.

Allow me to continue my review of the remainder of the seminar.

Craig Valentine

“How to Create Killer Content”

WOW! This presentation rocked. It provided so much value to everyone in the room, that Craig had sold out of all of the physical copies of his home study courses before he got to the back of the room. Not only did I walk away with some killer content pointers (and a home study course), but it demonstrated a point Darren made during his keynote on developing product to share with people that want to be trained by you. Craig demonstrated that this knowledge was valuable and he did it in a way that made us all want to take a piece of him home. This is one program that you have to see at some point in your life.

“How to Master Delivery: A Coaching Program”

This was a great breakout, because it addressed how you perform on the platform. After this session I felt that I better understood what techniques that when internalized, separate the good speakers from world class. In this session, I learned how to use questions to the audience better, move on stage, and how to get the audience to connect.

Darren LaCroix

“Got Mentors? Mentors Made Me Who I Am! Who, What, and How?”

Darren is one of my favorite keynote presenters, because he has such a great presence during his keynotes. He is one of the few speakers that manages to touch your heart and soul making you laugh and cry. I am go grateful for the opportunities I have had to meet with him over the last few months and he always provides the best content and is a wonderful person to be around.

I am lucky, because I got to see this presentation at the District 40 conference in November. Mentoring is a very important topic for me, because I have always struggled with being coachable. Many times my ego gets in the way of being coached, and this keynote highlighted for me the reason why I have to open up and allow myself to be coached. This keynote helped me see where I am still closed off to feedback and gave me some ideas to put into practice in my life.

“Got Humor? Comedy Secrets for Professional Presentations”

This was an important session for me, because I am not funny. I am not joking, I have been working the past few months to become less like a robot on stage and work on my humor. This session gave me a great introduction to the basics of comedy in presentations and I look forward to testing new material in upcoming Toastmaster projects.

In Summary

I really enjoyed this conference. Having attended another camp a few months ago, I understood the value of attending a live seminar but this was really a step above other workshops I have attended. Not only were the sessions with Patricia and the Champs awesome, but everyone in attendance was positive, focused on improvement, and willing to talk about their experiences.

One of the most valuable experiences during this camp was the EdgeNet Summit. Being a Champions Edge member gave us free access to Fripp and the Champ the day before the main event and it was an amazingly useful session. For more information on the Summit, check out my post from Saturday where I talk in more detail about the value I got from the Summit.

I look forward to my next opportunity to attend the EdgeNet Summit, Lady and the Champs, or other live seminars as my budget will allow.

This post ended up being so long, that I am breaking it into two parts. Part 1 will be posted today and part 2 will come tomorrow.

WOW! Last night I returned from the Lady and the Champs Seminar with Patricia Fripp, Craig Valentine, Darren LaCroix, and Ed Tate. The seminar was an amazingly valuable for a speaker, and I enjoyed both the Friday Edge Summit and the Saturday and Sunday workshop. From keynote to breakout session, I learned an amazing amount from the presenters and the other participants. A big thank you goes out to Cynthia for answering all of my questions about the seminar and Guy Burns for giving me a ride on Sunday.

If you didn’t catch my post from Saturday, the Lady and the Champs workshops give you the opportunity to hang out with four Toastmasters World Champions of Public Speaking and NSA Hall of Fame Speaker Patricia Fripp to learn more about the art of speaking and gain specific knowledge to make you a better speaker. The workshops also teach you about the business of speaking and how you can develop more opportunities to speak.

Rather than give a rundown for each of the two days, I thought I would write about each person’s presentation and the value that it provided in that order that their general sessions were presented.

Patricia Fripp

“It’s Not a Conversation… It is Conversational! Learn the Little-Known Secret to Dynamic Speaking”

In this keynote, I walked away with a framework for presenting I had never considered, how creative people can help their clients, and a methodology for collecting new stories where I am not the hero. One of the biggest problems that speakers have is finding new stories and Patricia shared one of the many different methods that she uses to find and develop stories.

“Good to Great! A Live Coaching Program”

WOW! Patricia’s coaching sessions are a rare chance to have elements of your speaking improved by the world’s top speaking coach. After only a few sentences, Patricia is able to give you detailed feedback on how to open, develop punch phrases, and structure your speech for maximum impact. I was enthralled by her ability to provide so much feedback in such a short time.

Some of the most “valuable” techniques I learned from Patricia this weekend were around negotiation. In a few short minutes during one of the session, I learned two valuable tips. One tip that allow speakers to turn the end of a google search into a gig and another that helps you exchange your speeches for other tangible goods that are not always checks.

Ed Tate

“The Story Finder™ – How to Create Stories that Lead, Motivate, and Inspire in 10 Minutes or Less!”

This presentation was adapted from a small part of Ed’s program Energize, Educate, and Entertain. The “ah-ha” moment I had during Ed’s program was that I should be performing this exercise at the end of every day. Then when I need stories for my keynotes, I have a well developed story file from the many days I have been doing this activity.

Ed is by far the greatest facilitator I have ever met and throughout the weekend, he shared not only how to be a better speaker but how to facilitate, grow your business, and market your business.

“From Free to Fee: How to Use Public Speaking to Promote Your Business”

This breakout helped people that want to speak professionally develop their plan for speaking more to local audiences. In this session, I learned about how to follow up with speaking leads, organization to speak to, and the basics of marketing a speaking business.

Ed Tate and Craig Valentine

“Guerrilla Marketing for Turbulent Times: 10 Ways to Market Your Business & Make Money in this Economy!”

I enjoyed this session, because I have been studying Guerrilla Marketing and applying the principles to my business. Having an hour with two certified Guerrilla Marketing Coaches gave me the time to learn more about the system and motivate me to continue to refine my approaches to marketing. For me it was a great reminder of all the tools that I have already taken advantage of to grow my business, and a motivator to improve the tools that I am using.

Stay tuned until tomorrow, when I post part two of my review of Lady and the Champs.

Lady and the Champs – The EdgeNet Summit

Day 1 of 3

This weekend, I am attending the Lady and the Champs Speaking Spectacular in Las Vegas, NV. The Lady and the Champs workshops give you the opportunity to hang out with four Toastmasters World Champions of Public Speaking and NSA Hall of Fame Speaker Patricia Fripp to learn more about the art of speaking and gain specific knowledge to make you a better speaker. The workshops also teach you about the business of speaking and how you can develop more opportunities to speak.

As a member of the World Championís Edge, you also get a free member only workshop called the EdgeNet Summit the day before Lady and the Champs. This summit is a great opportunity to ask a lot of questions, get feedback on the speaking process, and get insights into want makes a good speaker great. The EdgeNet Summit was on Friday the 20th of February, 2009, and it was an amazing workshop to attend. The energy in the room was electric, and it made for one of the most positive learning environments that I have ever encountered. Because of the environment that the Champs and Patricia Fripp established, we learned very specifically what makes a speech flow, how to develop a speech, and how to play with the language to make our speaking better.

For example, I got an amazing lesson from Patricia Fripp on how to think about saying certain “punch phrases” in my speeches. She made me think about how to taste the language and what I needed to do to develop the flow of the opening of my speech. That evening at dinner, one of my friends told me that that one tip changed the entire feeling of the speech and made me more relaxed and got me into the proper state for speaking.

As someone who facilitates meetings for groups that I work with, I found Ed Tate’s description of how to work a cold meeting room invaluable. Being able to get ideas flowing in some groups can be difficult, but Ed demonstrated many tactics throughout the day that gets brainstorming sessions started, keeps the energy levels up after lunch, and how to get people back on track if they deviate too much from the intent of the meeting.

During Craig Valentine and Darren LaCroix’s sessions, I picked up a ton of tips on humor, storytelling, and delivery of speeches. The ah-ha moment I got from Darren was on how to use a change in my voice to develop an emotion on a word that is repeated in one of my speeches. Craig also helped me take a here, now, and how story in a speech and really make people want to find out the how in the speech.

During the first day of the event, I was struck about dollar for dollar, how much value I was getting out of the event and my membership in the World Champion’s Edge. The summit and the Edge is such an amazing speaking resource, and it has provided me with an amazing forum to develop my speaking and the thoughts about what I want to accomplish as a speaker. I canít wait to see what the rest of the weekend will bring.

Thursday night during the closing session of our Winter Toastmasters Leadership Institute, I was singled out by the 2001 Toastmasters World Champion of Public Speaking Darren LaCroix as someone who wanted to improve. In an instant, everyone in the room knew that I had been working with Darren, Patricia Fripp, and other World Champions to improve my speaking abilities. For better or worse, I was put into the spotlight that night and I felt that while some of the people in the room supported what I was doing, others focused a poisonous vitriol at my appearance.

I am going to make some of you very angry right now.

If you want to be a better speaker, if you want to win the World Championship, or you want to go “pro”…just going to Toastmasters for one week or twenty years is not going to get you there. Standing in front of the same people for twenty years making the same mistakes is not going to get you any closer to your goal. If you really want to get good, then you are going to have to do what I have done and get help.

One of the problems is the common belief that just showing up is half the battle, but just showing up is not going to make you a better speaker. Just showing up is what many of us do at work and at play everyday, but out of the millions of people that do what you do, how many are so good that you would call them an expert?

The answer is very few people are experts at speaking or any other pursuits. So what separates the expert speakers from the rest of us?

The experts do what you won’t do to get good. They practice, they get a coach (or multiple coaches), and most importantly…they follow their coach’s advice. So if your coach tells you to practice giving your speech, videotape your speech, and then watch it…do you do that?

Current research into high performance would say no, most people don’t follow their coach’s advice; they don’t practice correctly or take the steps that improve their abilities in their endeavors.

If you can now admit to yourself that need help to improve you’re speaking, then contact Lisa . If you want to be more competitive or know what it takes to go “pro”, then work with the World Champions.

Because just showing up is not getting you where you want to be.

This week, I am re-reading “The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance“, by Josh Waitzkin. I am glad I picked it up during Toastmaster’s International Speech Competition season, because it provides a wealth of information for anyone that is involved in competitions that require mental and performance skills.

This book will appeal to competitive speakers, because is that it gives an easily understandable overview of what it takes to perform at a high level under amazing stresses. What I have tuned into during my second read is how Josh describes the path to high performance through his life story in a similar manner that great speakers present. It is fascinating to see the parallels between chess, tai chi, and then compare that to the competitive speaking world that I am currently involved.

You might remember that Josh Waitzkin was the subject of the book, “Searching for Bobby Fischer” and movie of the same name. In The Art of Learning, Josh discusses his development as a Chess master and then as an International Champion in Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands. It is amazing to read about the journey from child chess prodigy, to champion teenager, and then becoming an international champion in martial arts. Through this story, Josh weaves the fundamentals of the concept flow, how to trigger the flow state, and how to develop as a high performer. They are useful concepts for speakers to understand when perusing competitive speaking as a pastime.

Whether you are looking to develop a passion for learning the activity in which you want to compete, develop your ability to enter into the flow state, or develop the tactics needed to compete at a high level, I think you will find the “The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance“an excellent addition to your reading list.