If Woody Allen was right that 80% of success is showing up, how hard can it actually be to stand front-facing an audience and speak to them for a few minutes?
The answer, for many people, is ‘very hard’, in fact the stuff of nightmares. It doesn’t have to be that way: very few speakers are born gifted – they just learn how to do it. Using the ‘she finds it easy but I could never do it’ argument doesn’t wash and I know this to be true because at a certain point in my own career, I crossed the rubicon from the land of stage avoidance to the land of ‘give me the mic’. Given the opportunity to get a microphone in my hand and take to a stage, I am, quite frankly, raring to go. I genuinely enjoy it. But, although people who know me won’t believe it, nothing could be further from the truth than to say that I was a born public speaker.
There are two sides to a public speech, let’s think of it as a game of tennis. In this game, one player (the speaker) serves, whilst the other player (the audience) receives. Much of the success of a speaker depends upon the stories she makes up in real time about what is coming back over the net. Let’s stand on each side of the net in turn, and take the perspectives.
The view from the stage
I can still channel the fear I felt as a prefect in a small public school in England circa 1974. Being a prefect, I liked: special tie and badge; privileges; early access to the cream donuts in the tuck shop. However, becoming a prefect was making a pact with the devil. Looming ever larger, from the beginning of the year, was the moment when each of us had to take to the stage and read a passage from the Methodist Bible to a morning assembly. Now I’d sat through those assemblies for 5 years. I knew what was going on, out in the audience, during bible reading and it wasn’t listening. As the weeks passed and my time approached (‘S’ in the alphabet is sometimes a blessing) so the bad dreams started, the night sweats, the surging heartbeat. After I watched one of my friends being sniggered off stage, the tension became unbearable and I had no choice but to cashier myself – taking off the tie and returning the badge before the day of humiliation came. There was humiliation in resignation but it was a small pain compared to the dread of public exposure.
This story lived in my ‘can’t do’ locker for many years after that retreat. I avoided speaking in front of people at all costs. When it was unavoidable, disaster followed…my first best man speech (I was in the toilet when I was called for)…my second best man speech (Dutch courage overdone)…my third best man speech (fake cardboard waistcoat began to roll itself up as I was talking in a garden on the landing flight path to Heathrow airport)…my first address to a class of children (an audience free of the social pretensions to imitate listening)…my first assembly (overhead projector failure)…my first address to whole staff audience as a Headteacher (McVitie’s digestive crumb stuck on the tonsil)…I really could go on and on…and yet…
The view from the audience
And yet somewhere along the way I worked it out; worked out what good speakers do and worked out what good speakers don’t do. I worked out what a great privilege it is to be able to share your thoughts with a group of people who are all sitting ready to listen to you. I came to realise that my enemy was not the audience but my own projection of the audience.
A crowd – an audience – is not an entity. It isn’t a ‘thing’ that thinks collectively. If it contains malign elements, it also contains benign elements, usually in far greater numbers. Let’s cross over, for a minute, from the stage to the auditorium. From my experience in many, many audiences, ‘it’ is far less attentive, far less discerning, far less critical than I give it credit for when I’m on the stage. In many respects, when I’m in an audience, I’m pretty easy to please – if I’m paying attention at all.
What do I look for (after we’ve ticked the box of enough room for my legs)? I want clarity. Reasonable brevity. To leave with something I didn’t have when I came in. To feel the speaker is a human being who adds a little colour, warmth and compassion to their narrative. To be able to hear properly and see properly. Generally, I’m very satisfied with normal and regular.
Things I don’t need from a speaker include the following:
- Perfection
- Intellectual gymnastics
- Unwavering assertive confidence
- Whistles, bells and special effects
- Incontrovertible, unequivocal truth
- Slapstick or standup comedy
I don’t care a hoot, as a member of an audience, if a speaker stops to refer to notes; takes a sip of water, trips over a tongue twister, calls up the wrong slide, coughs, sneezes or is taken by a rumbling stomach. Those things are human, occasionally humorous and affect my estimation of a speaker not in the slightest.
Meanwhile, back on the stage
When we cross back from our slouched and undemanding audience to our speaker standing as rabbit-in-headlight on the stage, what’s going on? What triggers our reptilian defenses so severely that the memory of clumsily dropping some note cards on the floor during a presentation will haunt us for days after? The answer is pretty simple: we fear what people might be thinking of us as we step before them as Emperors without clothes.
So what’s the answer? It can be as simple as turning off your projector. Stop thinking about something over which you have zero control.
If that’s not enough, think about what you can do and can control:
- Speak to an audience as a collection of individuals, not as a group. It’s helpful to think of them this way. If you teach children, it’s the same deal as you face everyday with a class. You treat class members as individuals. Children are not all happy, sad, angry, distressed, inattentive, bored or inspired at the same time or by the same things and the same is true of adults (who are just large children).
- When you speak, don’t seek out the eyes of those whose faces may hold judgement; I either speak to a fixed point slightly above all of the faces watching or I talk to the friendly faces. That’s a choice you can always make.
- Before you speak, prepare properly and rehearse. Never try to wing a public talk, however small. Personally, I don’t need an on-stage rehearsal (some do) but I do need to hear the words to know them – so I never give a talk that I haven’t said to myself out loud at least once.
- USE NOTES. No one cares if you look at your notes during a speech – so many times I see people who believe it is a test of their character to memorise their delivery. The result of doing this can come across as a starey-eyed monologue or glib and over-prepared. Much worse, your brain gremlin is at red alert because, if you lose your way without notes, you really are in trouble. You don’t need to learn stuff, it isn’t a public exam, it’s information-giving to people who need the information: public service not public humiliation. Why do it? Take some notes in with you.
- ‘Notes’ can be anything that works for you – I use bullet points and I highlight with a yellow marker a number of orientation points that will quickly catch my eye if I lose my place. Some people use cards (always join them together in case you drop them), some full text. The danger of full text is the temptation to read it, which doesn’t always engage but if you feel you need to read it – read it well, with cadence, emphasis and energy. Most politicians are reading their speeches off invisible prompt screens – it can work but you have to put effort into delivery.
- I have learned never to extemporise during a talk – 90% of the time you don’t land the off the cuff remark or you make a faux pas. Even if you do land it, it can throw you off track completely.
- Pause. Pause. Pause. Pausing is perhaps the most effective way of appearing to be confident and in control of your delivery. A pause is a verbal paragraph. A pause is an emphasis. A pause is a wake up for the audience, drawing back their attention. You often see strong speakers pause before they even start to speak. Stand. Survey. Take your time. Begin…
- There are lots of other delivery tricks you can learn – the rule of three, deliberate repetition, a road map to orientate the listener…you can sharpen your practice as you become more composed in the space.
- If you use powerpoint, don’t cover the slides with words and then read them all out. This is so boring to listen to and kills attention faster than a hiccup.
- And if you use slides – look at your computer screen, don’t turn your back on the audience and talk to the projection – yes, you know people who do this, it is a really common nervous speaker reaction.
The day I crossed from anxiety to anticipation was the day I realised that I wanted to speak, wanted to show off a great school to prospective parents, wanted to salute graduates in a commencement, wanted to thank staff for their hard work, wanted to be the best man that my friends needed. I learned to do this because I wanted to.
