Presenting for Humans: Insights for Speakers on Ditching Perfection and Creating Connection

Contents

Introduction

ONE | Make Preparation a Priority

1 — Build your public speaking immunity

2 — What can a speaker learn from a tattoo artist?

3 — Improve your presentation with a strong opening

4 — Is your presentation like a flea market?

5 — Don’t overwork your presentation

6 — What’s hiding in your presentation closet?

7 — Don’t crash and burn

8 — To reap the benefits, you have to put in the work

9 — Lessons from driving: don’t be a mechanical speaker

10 — You can’t harvest until you cultivate

11 — Good things take time

TWO | Exude Confidence

12 — Pressure to perform

13 — You’re good enough as you are

14 — Don’t let the confidence-suckers get you down

15 — Magnify your flaws: try public speaking!

16 — You deserve to shine

17 — Surprise your audience—and yourself

18 — Remember your courage and move forward

THREE | Make It Fun

19 — Turning a failure into a win

20 — There is no such thing as a dry topic

21 — Four lessons for speakers from Broadway

22 — Add some fun to your presentation with a skit

23 — Can you laugh at yourself?

24 —  Lessons from a drag queen

25 —Nine ways to use props for maximum impact

26 —A public speaking lesson from NORAD

FOUR | Create Connection

27 —Are you sleep-presenting?

28 —Is your speech too speechy?

29 — See, hear, and taste your audience

30 — Five public speaking lessons from a college president

31 — Don’t lose yourself in the adoration of the audience

32 — Perfection is the enemy of authenticity

33 — Make your audience feel special

34 —How is a speaker like a cinnamon roll cake?

FIVE | Focus on Service

35 — Serve without being asked

36 — Doing the bare minimum

37 — Public speaking touchdown

38 — Be willing to throw away your speech

39 — Six customer service tips for speakers

40 — Five things speakers can learn from event planners

41 — What a Vitamix demo can teach you about public speaking

SIX | Deliver an Experience

42 — They either like it or they don’t

43 — Make your audience feel like rock stars

44 — What kind of sandwich are you serving?

45 — Do you know what you’re saying—and why?

46 — Are you speaking your audience’s language?

47 — Play for the people

48 — How is speaking like a dinner party?

SEVEN | Stand Out

49 — Meet my allergy doctor

50 — What’s on your cheese plate?

51 — Don’t miss a chance to be memorable

52 — Who are you trying to be?

53 — It only takes one sentence to stand out

54 — Falling in love with the real you

EIGHT | Change Your Mindset

55 — Big brown eyes

56 — In speaking, as in sports, the reward outweighs the risk

57 — Get all of the results with none of the effort

58 — Is your mental game up to par?

59 — Want to improve as a speaker? Change your attitude!

60 — What self-doubts are keeping you from the stage?

61 — Optimism: finding the upside of the inevitable

Final Thoughts

About The Author

Introduction

In 2005, I started my public speaking coaching business. It was out of necessity, really; I had been laid off from three nonprofit jobs in four years, and I was getting a little peeved about not having control of my own destiny (and paycheck).

Within a year, I was blogging, because in 2006, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, only blogs and forums. And if you had a message to share and you wanted to engage with a wide – even international – audience, blogs were the way to go.

One of my earliest blog posts referenced Steve Eggleston, aka The Eggman, with this quote:

"I stopped worrying about what people would think about me when I realized

how seldom people think about anyone but themselves."

There it is, in a nutshell. It’s the concept behind everything I teach, although I’m not sure I could have said it so eloquently.

Your audience isn’t thinking about you; they’re thinking about themselves – whatever that means at any given time.

They’re thinking, I hope this presentation isn’t a drag, because I have a ton of work to do.

They’re thinking, I hope there’s a gluten-free option for lunch, because I forgot to list my dietary preferences.

They’re thinking, I hope there’s a break soon, because I really need to pee.

They’re thinking, What am I missing on Facebook?

And yes, sometimes they’re even thinking, I hope I learn something really mind-blowing from this presentation that will change the way I think, the way I live, or the way I work.

As speakers, whether advanced or inexperienced, whether speaking in ballrooms or in board meetings, we all face the same challenges.

How do we create compelling, relevant, and useful content for our audiences in a way that they are able to take our messages and use them to transform their work or lives?

How do we engage our audiences and make a human connection, so that they can envision for themselves the possibilities we present and take steps to achieve them?

And what kind of growth and personal development do we have to embrace to get ourselves into the right mindset with the right attitude to support and encourage our audience’s growth?

It’s not as hard as you think to make these shifts and transformations, both for your own benefit and for that of your audience. In fact, it’s as easy as having lunch at your neighborhood deli.

If you’ve ever had a stimulating conversation with a fellow customer in line at the grocery store, you know what I’m talking about. Looking at our everyday experiences and encounters with fresh eyes gives us new perspectives on all aspects of our lives, including speaking.

For me, being open to learning – wherever and whenever it chooses to find me – has allowed me to stretch and expand what I used to think about speaking.

There was a time when I thought the most important things about speaking were artfully using my hands, or impressing people with big words, or heroically avoiding saying um. (I will confess here that I was on the speech team in high school, and perhaps some of the habits I learned there needed to be unlearned.) Yes, I thought speaking was all about me.

But presenting is so much more than just standing in front of a group of people and pontificating. It’s so much more than telling, or lecturing or conveying information.

Unfortunately, most of us spend our time in rooms where the presentations have no energy, no life, no engagement, no love, and no soul. We could easily replace the human on stage with a robot, and who would know the difference?

We sit through presentations that are irrelevant, boring, and tedious, and sometimes we feel like the life is being sucked right out of us. As a friend described to me once, pointless presentations don’t just waste our time, they steal our time. I don’t want to spend one more minute listening to a presentation that is going to steal time that I will never get back again, and I don’t want to inflict such presentations on other people!

We are humans, speaking to humans, and we neglect to take the full scope of this into account. We are thinking beings, yes. But we are also feeling beings. We are imperfect beings. We are impulsive and annoying and funny and rude and thoughtful beings. And we are infinitely creative beings.

I want to help you view speaking in a new way, through my eyes and through my everyday experiences, so that you can go apply your life experiences to your speaking and bring your own unique perspective to your audiences. And whether you’re trying to master this skill so you can make a living at it or just trying to get through those team updates your boss keeps asking you to do, you will find new perspective here.

The book is divided into themed chapters: Preparation, Confidence, Fun, Connection, Service, Experience, Standing Out, and Mindset. These are the core themes that I teach and coach on, and the public speaking concepts that I find to be most critical to a speaker’s success.

Feel free to jump around and find the chapters that are most relevant to your needs in the moment. Each section within the chapter was written to stand alone, and also further fleshes out the main theme of the chapter.

This book also poses self-reflection questions for you to consider. No one can answer these questions for you, because only you know what your goals and intentions are for being a better speaker. But I hope these questions will help guide you to finding your own objectives for speaking, your own intentions for your audiences, and your own desired results for the personal and professional development goals that you can achieve through speaking.

You’ll find downloadable worksheets and checklists at www.coachlisab.com/pfh-form.html that you can use to answer the questions and make additional practice notes. I’ve highlighted those tools throughout the book.

Enjoy this guide to how everyday encounters and experiences can make you a better speaker, a more joyful speaker, a more captivating speaker, a more effective speaker, and, most important, a more human speaker.

Chapter 1

Make Preparation a Priority

Ahhh, preparation. The bane of every speaker’s existence.

I have a theory about why preparation is so painful and difficult for speakers. I think that speakers who wing it are far more afraid of failure and rejection than those who prepare, although it might seem to be the opposite.

See, if you wing it and succeed – your audience applauds, your jokes land, you come across as articulate and compelling, and people want to meet you afterward – then you can be relieved and pleasantly surprised. You can even tell yourself, I’m good at winging it.

If you wing it and fail – your jokes bomb, you lose your focus, your ideas aren’t organized, the audience is polite but bored – you can always tell yourself, "Well, I didn’t really prepare. If I had prepared, it would have been so much better."

What happens if you prepare and you still fail? That’s the ultimate reality you’re trying to avoid, because perhaps then you’ve really wasted your time. You think, What’s the point? If I prepare, I still suck, so why bother?

We tell ourselves so many stories about ourselves. And many of them are based on creating the hard armor of protection. We (try to) protect ourselves from looking foolish, from looking like we tried too hard, from looking like we might be human, with visible flaws. So we hold ourselves back, afraid to take too big a step or put ourselves too far out in front of the crowd. If no one notices us, we can’t get hurt.

But what if you changed your whole mindset about speaking, or your whole mindset about the audience? What if you actually made a sincere effort and committed yourself to excellence, connection, engagement, and transformation?

What if, through failing (although there’s no such thing in speaking or life – just learning), you were able to grow and expand and become a more compelling speaker than you ever imagined? What if you were able to touch your audiences and move them to action in ways that only seem like fantasy right now?

If you care about making a difference to your audiences and not just getting your presentations over with, you’ll have to push yourself further than you ever have. It’s not as easy as