I’ve all faced a fear of public speaking, and it is the #1 reason why people look into my presentation education course, SpeakU, and the first thing I cover too. To no surprise, there are a lot of great fear of public speaking quotes out there. Some quotes are from well-known contemporaries, and others date back decades to the likes of Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Ford. Fear of Public Speaking Quotes “There are only two types of speakers in the world: the nervous and liars.” – Mark Twain, American author Twain is also quoted with a great line about preparing for speeches, “It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare for a good impromptu speech.” “Some introverts are perfectly comfortable with public speaking; I’m not one of them.” Susan Cain, author or Quiet and TEDtalk on introverts “If you’re not comfortable with public speaking – and nobody
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When beginning to prepare a presentation, I always emphasize the importance of strategy. The strategy being the backbone of your presentation, you should take the time to think about all the information you need to prepare. Part of the strategy you should consider for your presentation includes what is the physical location of where you will be giving the presentation, and asking questions about its description. What would you do with a presentation venue change? I had a client years ago that was expecting to make a presentation at a conference coming to town. He asked all the right questions, and the contact person explained that he would be giving a breakout presentation to an expected group of 50. With my help, we planned and practiced the presentation, and he was overall ready to go on stage in a few days time. I encouraged my client that since the presentation
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Any extraneous language that pads your sentences without adding any additional meaning equals a crutch word. Crutch words in presentations is bad because crutch words are also called “fillers”. Instead of taking those key pauses to let the audience digest what you are saying, those pauses are filled with empty words that weaken your overall message. Using crutch words takes away from the forcefulness and eloquence of your speech. It is thought that crutch words have been around since the beginning of spoken language and every person uses them on some scale and they vary depending on location and language! For example, umm if American’s favorite crutch word, the British use err, and Croats use ovay. Eliminating crutch words is the fastest way to improve oneself as a speaker! You become easier to understand and it will be easier for you to get your point across. It will also give you more confidence. Don’t
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I worked at my local zoo for five years, and I joke that I’ve seen just about every presentation situation you can possibly imagine. Including presentations where I had no voice. Could you survive presentation mishaps? The summers were the busy season for outreach programs at the zoo as education programs were in high demand for visits to summer camps and library summer reading programs. I was talking to a group of over 100 youth girls at an all-female summer camp in town. I had made it through three of the animals, and I was preparing to take the last of the animals, which was an elderly red-shouldered hawk named Squawker. Being elderly, Squawker tended to sit in her travel box so that she was comfortable, rather than be positioned to take her easily out of the box. Because she was sitting backwards, I had to reach in to get her to
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Presentation Strategy – Strategy is the backbone of your presentation. Your presentation should not proceed until the strategy is thought out and you consider all of the possibilities. Will you be using visual aid? If so, be sure to set up your slides using pictures to convey the message and use the visual aid for its purpose, as an aid instead of being your presentation. Will you be standing or sitting? Both options have their place in the workspace, however standing presenters are the expert and the authority, but it is harder to maintain energy throughout the presentation. Sitting presenters are commonly seen as a colleague and tend to mumble and read the slides, but have a much easier time maintaining energy throughout the presentation. Will you be in a large area or a small room? A strategy is needed on how to work the room based on its size, especially
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Presentations occur for many different reasons including bid presentations, educational presentations for thought leadership and content marketing, and informal presentations within the office. Most presenters feel thrown into speaking, and many do not realize the value presentations have on their personal brand. Regardless if you volunteered or were volunteered, your presentation means you are representing both yourself and the company where you work. Presentations are a demonstration of your brand; it’s the first impression of your brand and demonstrates your expertise. People now recognize the term brand, but they generally associate brands only with companies and products. People are brands too, including you and you need to know what is involved in the presenter’s brand. Let’s start with what is a brand. A brand is what people perceive of a company or product. It is a collection of experiences with that company, product, or person that creates these perceptions. People use their
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I am always researching and polling, and, therefore, listening to the answers people and other presentation coaches give about all things related to presentations. I am always interested to hear how people interpret the industry in a million different ways, and since there are no regulations, it’s all open to interpretation. I have done extensive research and written past articles about the Rule of 3 and its importance. Studies have proven that the human mind can only remember three to four chunks of information at a time. Three is also sticky; allowing the information to remain in the listeners’ minds far after the speaking engagement has ended. The critical error is that business professionals and public speaking coaches view the Rule of 3 as equivalent to simplification. In the process of narrowing your talking points down to a minimum of three, many others will tell you that you have simplified
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I’ve been participating in some discussions on the LinkedIn group Expert Witness recently by answering some questions about communication, in particular, about communicating one’s complex expertise to a judge or jury. I also posed the question, “What is your biggest challenge being an expert witness?” The group’s members had a variety of responses with a central theme of getting the jury to understand them. From there, the administrator of the Expert Witness Network blog asked me to write a guest post about expert witness presentations. Here is a snippet from my Expert Witness Network guest post entitled “How to Speak Simple in a Courtroom”: Simplifying Your Testimony One of the first steps to ensure understanding is to remove jargon, acronyms, and high-level vocabulary from your presentation. If you cannot eliminate these elements, then you need to explain them the first time you use them. Simply put, you cannot talk to a
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If you’ve read a presentation self-help book or two, you’ve probably seen the presentation advice to tell the audience your message three times. It’s repeated so frequently from articles to professional speakers passing along their best presentation advice to “tell ‘em what you are going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” Both public speakers and presentation coaches alike swear by this advice; they claim it makes a presentation successful and your message memorable. I’ve given, and I’ve listened to, my fair share of presentations, and over and over again presenters are telling me three times what I need to take away from this presentation. As a listener, this is the most frustrating situation! For one, I don’t need a presentation preface in which you are going to tell me what you are going to tell me. If that even makes any sense, I just
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Being a presentation coach and educator, I view things differently than the general public because of my keen eye for communication and knowing what audiences want. We are getting some bad weather at the moment and the news crews are covering the severe weather as it rolls in. The meteorologist on the local news station decided that the residents watching the media coverage needed to know that difluence is when the winds split and fan out in two directions. That’s fantastic to know that there are forces at work producing the severe weather and it’s not just bad luck or magic that we are getting severe weather. On the other hand, it doesn’t enrich my life at all to know what difluence means; I really only care that the winds are splitting and causing severe weather. (I am glad that he explained the term and not just using it like
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