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Great Public Speaking A Matter Of Great Storytelling
At T.J. Walker Media, our media training classes, speech training classes, and public speaking workshops come down to one goal: passing on the art of great public speaking. At the end of the day the difference between a great speaker and boring one comes down to one thing: stories. It doesn’t matter if you are a motivational speaker or a chemistry teacher, a preacher or a physics professor. Great presenters tell interesting, relevant stories to their audience; boring speakers stick to making abstract points with lots of facts and numbers.
If you are a presenter who is doing 99 technical things well, i.e., good eye contact, neat appearance, great hand motions, etc, but you fail to tell stories, you will quickly be forgotten by your audience. On the other hand, I have seen presenters break every single rule of speaking mechanics, i.e., poor eye contact, stiff body movements–even their shirt tail is hanging out! And yet, these presenters had a message that really resonated with their audience because of the use of interesting, relevant, and real stories.
So being a great presenter isn’t necessarily about putting in the most hours of rehearsal time or the fanciest suit. Some so-called speaking experts will try to convince you that you need to rehearse one hour for every minute of your speech. Some will want you to record your speech, transcribe it and then re-record it until you have eliminated every unnecessary word. These are all bad ideas, as they are irrelevant to whether you will ultimately be seen as a great presenter or a mediocre or lousy speaker by your audience. Greatness really is about having relevant stories for your audience.
Unfortunately, it is practically impossible for you to delegate story creation to staff members or writers in the corporate communications department. Your stories have to come from you. Even someone like President Reagan, who had a whole team of professional speech writers, had to write his own stories. The first thing every member of his speech writing staff did when they were hired was to read old radio and TV commentaries that Reagan personally wrote before he was President. These stories were then recycled into Presidential speeches.
Great speakers are great story gatherers and story re-tellers. They aren’t necessarily more creative or original thinkers or writers. Bad presenters focus their energies on gathering more facts, more data, more numbers and more bullet points for their audiences.
If you truly want to prepare yourself to be a great speaker for every presentation you give and you could only ask yourself one question before each presentation, you shouldn’t ask whether your PowerPoint slides are in the right order, or if your handouts are copied correctly, or if your tie has a perfect dimple in it. It should be “Do I have an interesting and relevant story for each point of my presentation?” If the answer is yes, then you are ready to be great. If the answer is no, then you are prepared for mediocrity.
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