Should I tell my audience how happy I am to be speaking here in front of them today?The following comes from TJ Walker’s upcoming book “The Wisdom of Your Audience” Your Speechwriter: “This is a classy way to begin a speech. It shows a proper level of respect for your audience.”Your Director of Business Development: “You must tell your audience how happy you are to be there. We don’t want to offend anyone.”You: “I would feel rude if I didn’t tell everyone how happy I am to be there today. Plus, this will give me time to calm down and figure out what I want to say before I really get going into the speech.”Your Audience: “We don’t give a d*%n if you are happy to be here at this stage of the relationship (we just met you a few seconds ago). Why don’t you forget talking about yourself for a few minutes and tell us something that is interesting to us. And if you do talk about yourself, make sure it is actually interesting and is not a boring, mundane, trite cliché like “I’m happy to be here this morning.’”

Tags: introduction, presentation skills, public speaking, TJ Walker

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under PowerPoint, Presentation Skills Training, Public Speaking Skills, Speaking, keynote speaking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.