The true worth of a man is to be measured in the objects he pursues.
—MARCUS AURELIUS
Fully 90 percent of your success as a speaker will be determined by how well you plan your speech.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “You must know ten words for every word you write, or the reader will know that this is not a true thing.” In speaking, however, you must read and research 100 words for every word you speak, or the listener will know that you are speaking off the top of your head. The listener will immediately sense that you lack a depth of knowledge in your subject unless you are not only prepared but overprepared.
Poor preparation before an intelligent, discerning audience automatically downgrades your credibility—your ethos. If you are unprepared, or even worse, if you tell listeners that you are “not an expert on this subject,” they immediately turn off to your message, no matter how good it is.
On the other hand, excellent preparation is immediately obvious. It increases your credibility. Preparation impresses your listeners and makes them more open and receptive to your message.
The starting point of preparation is your audience. Remember, it is not about you; it is about them.
Begin as if you were a market researcher and you are determined to understand your customers fully. Who are they exactly? Who will be in the audience? This is the key to an effective talk and to excellent preparation. Here are some demographic particulars that you can use to tailor your speeches.
How old are your audience members and what are their age ranges? Younger audiences have different understandings, different cultural knowledge, and different backgrounds from older audiences. Knowing their age is very important.
What is the gender mix in your audience? Sometimes my audiences will be 50:50 males and females. Sometimes my audiences will be 95 percent men or 95 percent women. This gender breakdown will influence how you design your remarks and make your points.
What are the incomes of the people in your audiences? How much do they earn on average? What is their income range, from the lowest to the highest? In particular, how do they earn their incomes, and what influences those incomes? Knowing this can help you to refer to money and income-related topics in a way that it is more acceptable to more of your listeners.
What is the educational background of the people in your audience? Are they high school graduates? Are they university graduates? Do they have liberal-arts degrees or engineering degrees? Knowing the type of education your listeners have helps you choose relevant examples, illustrations, and vocabulary.
What do your audience members do for a living? How long have they been working in their particular fields? What is happening in their particular fields today? Is this a boom time or a bust time for the work that they do?
What is the family status of your audience? Are audience members married, single, divorced, or widowed? Are they mostly married or mostly single? Do most have children? These are essential facts for you to discover.
What is the audience’s familiarity with your subject? How much does it already know about what you will be saying? Are audience members beginners, or are they somewhat knowledgeable? This will decide how complex or simple you make your talk.
Analyze what your audience members think by asking these questions:
Understanding the emotional context people bring to your talk can be very helpful in connecting with them. Asking meeting planners these questions in advance and studying their websites and published materials will help you get the answers you need.
It is important to understand what dreams, goals, or ideas unite your audience. Let me give you an example. I speak to many audiences of sales professionals, entrepreneurs, business owners, and network marketers. The common denominator is that they all want to be financially successful. Therefore, everything I talk about relates to how they can use certain ideas to increase their incomes and their profitability. As a result of taking this approach, my audiences lean forward, listen closely to every word I speak, and often give me standing ovations. You can do the same.
Once I was booked to speak for a large national corporation that sold its products through retailers and distributors across the country. I was brought in to speak just after the organization’s executives had made a major announcement. The announcement was that in 30 days the company was going to begin selling its products directly to customers, and it was going to do so at the same prices that the salespeople would be offering. The difference was that the company would credit the sales commissions it would normally pay to its salespeople back to the customers if they bought directly from the factory.
As you can imagine, the salespeople in the audience were in a mild state of shock. Their entire lives and incomes were dependent upon the commissions they earned from selling through the distributor network. Now, with the change in company policy, the distributor network could purchase directly from the company at the same prices or with commissions credited back. The salespeople had had the chair kicked out from underneath them.
The company brought me in and paid my fee to motivate the salespeople to go out and work harder in any case, even though their primary source of income had been dramatically diminished. I still remember looking out at the audience. They looked stunned and unbelieving. They looked at me as though I were an enemy, conjured up by the corporation, to smooth over what the company had just done to hurt them in their pocketbooks. Because I knew all of this, I was at least prepared to speak effectively to an unresponsive and, in many cases, negative audience. It pays to take the time to find out what is going on in the company or group.
When you are speaking to people in a specific industry, business association, or other organization, you must find out everything you can about what is going on professionally with those people before you get up to speak. Is the market good or bad for what they are selling? Are they growing, staying flat, or are they declining in the current market? What are the business and political trends that are affecting them at this moment? Here are some other things to check on when planning a speech or presentation.
I was once called in to speak to a large group of managers of a major multinational corporation. The company had just announced a series of layoffs of managers at all levels, and I was speaking to the survivors. However, just before I arrived to give my talk on personal productivity and leadership effectiveness, the company announced even more management layoffs and that many of the people in the audience would be cut within the next 30 days. As a result, my audience was less than responsive and enthusiastic. The only things that listeners could think of while I was talking was that they might be next. This is not a good situation. But it is essential that you know about it. Take the time to find out.
Know what is going on in the city in which you are speaking. For example, in several cases, I’ve spoken in cities where the local team either won or lost a championship within the last day or two. It is important that you are aware of this and that you mention it in your introductory remarks. Otherwise, the audience will often be preoccupied with the sporting event and will feel that you are an outsider who does not know or understand them.
Another part of preparation is to learn about your audience’s other experiences with speakers. Who else has spoken to this audience and on what subjects? How did listeners react to the other speakers and to their subjects? Did they like what they heard? Were they disappointed with a previous speaker? If so, why? If they liked the previous speaker, what was the reason? What did he or she say?
At a longer meeting, it’s important to know who will be speaking before you. What subjects will they speak on? You should also know who spoke to the audience at the last meeting and how it reacted to those speeches.
Recently, I was speaking to a group of 4,000 people. I spent considerable time preparing my remarks, based on in-depth discussions with the key meeting organizers. As a result, my 90-minute talk wove all the main company themes, concerns, competitive challenges, and future directions into a single fabric.
After the talk, the president of the company took me aside and told me that this was one of the best talks she had ever heard. The company had hired previous speakers, at high rates, who had promised to customize and tailor their remarks to the audience but had made no effort at all to do so. She said it was immediately obvious when they began speaking that they had spent little time incorporating the company’s concerns into their speeches. As a result, they were never invited back.
Remember the “objective question.” If you could interview the audience participants afterward and ask, “What did you learn from my talk, and what are you going to do differently as a result?” what would you want them to say? The more specific you can be regarding your answer to this question the easier it will be for you to design and structure your remarks so that you achieve this objective in the time allotted.
In addition, you must be absolutely clear about the amount of time you have and the expected structure of the talk. Sometimes, audiences expect you to speak for 75 percent of the time and then conduct a question-and-answer session afterward. In other cases, the meeting planner will want you to speak for the whole time. In either case, it is important that you end exactly when you say you will.
Many talks, conferences, and meetings are carefully choreographed with regard to time. For example, once I was invited to give a talk at a meeting of 5,000 people. The meeting planners were so fastidious that they asked me to write out the talk in detail, and then they paid me to present my talk to a small group of executives who would advise me and comment on the talk. Their primary concern was the exact number of minutes I would use.
When I gave the talk, the speaker before me, who had been allocated 22 minutes, spoke for 28 minutes. As I stood behind the stage, waiting for my turn to go on, I noticed that the meeting planners were beside themselves with stress, anxiety, and anger. They did not even care what the speaker said. All they cared about was that he was complicating their schedule by speaking longer than he had promised. He was never invited back.
There is a powerful method of preparation that I have used over the years. I start with a clean sheet of paper. I write the title of my talk at the top. I then write a one-sentence description of the purpose or objective of the talk. What is the “job” it has to do? Then, I discipline myself to do a “down dump” of every single idea, insight, phrase, statistic, example, or illustration that I could possibly use in the talk. I write and write and write and write.
Sometimes, I end up with two or three pages of notes. From those notes, I will then begin selecting particular elements and putting them in a logical sequence so that they make up a talk that flows from beginning to end. You can do the same. It is amazing how many ideas you will come up with when you force yourself to write 20 or 30 or 50 points that you feel would be appropriate for a talk.
Once you have all these points organized, go back through with a red pen and circle the points that would have the most impact in your talk. Organize these points in sequence and you will see your talk start to form naturally.
Once you have chosen your points, you can use what is called the “PREP” formula for each point that you want to make in your presentation.
P: Point of View
State your thought, idea, or fact at the beginning. For example, you could say: “More people are going to make more money in the next 10 years than in the last 100 years.”
R: Reasons
State your reasons for holding this point of view or idea. For example, you might say: “The number of millionaires and billionaires, most of them self-made in one generation, has increased by 60 percent in the last five years, and the rate of increase is accelerating.”
E: Example
Illustrate, reinforce, or prove your point of view. For example, you could say: “In 1900, there were 5,000 millionaires in America and no billionaires. By the year 2000, there were 5,000,000 millionaires and more than 500 billionaires. By 2007, according to BusinessWeek magazine, there were 8,900,000 millionaires in the United States and over 700 billionaires worldwide, most of them first-generation.”
P: Point of View
Restate the first “P” to emphasize your idea. For example, you might say: “There have never been more opportunities for you, the creative minority, to achieve financial success than exist today—except for tomorrow and the years ahead.”
Here is an example of how the PREP formula comes together:
This is the very best time in human history to be alive (point of view). We have the highest rate of home ownership, the lowest level of unemployment, and the fastest growing economy in the industrialized world (reasons). Last year alone, more than 1,000,000 Americans started their own businesses and launched onto the seas of entrepreneurship to take advantage of the current economy (example). Because this is such a great time, more people are going to make more money in the years ahead than in the last 100 years put together (restate point of view).
You can organize every key point of your talk using this simple formula. It is incredibly powerful and influential in persuading your audience to accept your message.
You can use the “windshield-wiper” method as well in designing your talk. As you know, you have both a right brain and a left brain. Your left brain is activated by facts and information. Your right brain is activated by feelings, stories, quotes, and examples.
The way you use this method is simple: You state a fact and follow it with a story. State another fact and follow it with a quote. State another fact and follow it with an example. State a fact and follow it with a numerical illustration. You go back and forth, like a windshield wiper.
To use this method of preparation, take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the center. On the left side of the line, you write the fact or point that you wish to make. On the right side, you write the example, story, or illustration that proves or demonstrates the fact. For each item on the left-hand column, you have a fact or story on the right-hand column.
When you give a talk using this method, you will activate both the left and right brains of everyone in your audience. They will lean forward and hang on every word. You will keep them totally engaged the entire time.
To plan your talk on paper, you can use a picture or a visual illustration. What I do is draw a series of five large circles down the center of a page. Each circle represents an element of the talk. The first circle will be the introduction and the comments that I will use to get attention and to set the stage. The second, third, and fourth circles will be the key points that I intend to make. The fifth circle will be the wrap-up and close.
If I am giving a longer talk, I sometimes have seven circles down the page, and I even use another page if necessary. In each case, the first and last circles are my opening and closing. The middle circles are the key points I plan to make in an orderly sequence.
Planning your speech’s opening is important. Plan your opening word for word, and rehearse it over and over again in your mind, aloud, and in front of a mirror. Your opening comments set the stage, build expectations, and communicate a clear message to your audience. They must not be left to chance.
You should plan your closing comments word for word as well. Think about exactly what you are going to say to wrap up your talk. If for any reason your speech length is cut back because of changes in the schedule, at least you know how to end your talk in an effective way.
In the course of giving your talk, you should think about the visual elements that you can use to illustrate your points and to make them come alive for the audience.
One of these elements is what I call the “Magic-Wand” technique. As I am speaking, I will take a gold pen out of my pocket and say something that incorporates the pen, such as, “Imagine that you could wave a magic wand over this situation and make it perfect in every way. What would it look like?”
I wave the “magic wand” and pause to allow each person to imagine what this situation would look like if it were perfect. I then discuss a series of strategies and techniques that the listeners can use to improve their current situation.
Whether you use PowerPoint depends upon many factors. In the professional speaking industry, there is an expression: “Death by PowerPoint.” Many speakers have started to rely on PowerPoint presentations so heavily that their personalities and the essence of their talks get lost as they go from point to point on the screen.
If you are going to use PowerPoint, which can be ideal in certain situations, it is best to follow a few rules.
First and foremost, you should never have more than five lines on a slide, and each line should never have more than five words. Any more than this can distract and even confuse your audience. With a smaller room or group, you can use more lines or words than the rule permits.
Regardless of how many points you use, bring them up one at a time as you are commenting on them. Don’t make the mistake of bringing up the entire slide full of information so that the audience is busy reading and not paying any attention to you.
Not long ago, when I spoke for a multinational company, the president spoke to the audience for an hour before it was my turn to speak. His PowerPoint presentation consisted of a single slide with hundreds of numbers in rows and columns, none of which were clear to anybody in the audience. He spoke to the screen, commenting on the numbers for a full hour. Because he was the president, everyone in the audience sat politely, but it was excruciatingly painful for all the participants. Don’t let this happen to you.
Second, face the audience when you use PowerPoint. You should have your laptop in front of you illustrating what is appearing on the screen behind you. As you click through your PowerPoint presentation, keep your eyes on the audience members and speak to them the whole time.
When you are not referring to a point on the screen, push the “B” on your laptop to blank out the screen. Remember, your face is the most important element in any presentation, and while there are words on the screen, people’s eyes will be darting from your face to the screen and back again, like spectators at a tennis game.
When you use PowerPoint, it is essential that your face be well lit throughout. I am continually dismayed at the number of times that I see senior executives allow themselves to be put in the dark in order to ensure maximum clarity for the projector and the screen. The senior executive, who has traveled a great distance and invested a good deal of time in this presentation, is often standing in the dark, difficult for the audience to see or relate to.
Only use PowerPoint as a prop or as a support. It should not be the main focus of the talk. You are the main focus of the presentation, and PowerPoint is there merely to assist you and to illustrate your points more clearly to your audience.
When you use PowerPoint, practice and rehearse. Go through a dry run three to five times before you make your presentation. Do a complete dress rehearsal to ensure that the PowerPoint and projector are properly hooked up and working smoothly before you begin.
You have probably seen situations where the entire talk is built around PowerPoint, and then PowerPoint somehow fails to function. The speaker stands up, begins clicking, and nothing happens. People come running up on the stage to tinker with the machine to try to fix it. They call the technician from somewhere else in the hotel. The entire seminar or presentation grinds to a halt while everyone stands around the stage looking sheepish and foolish. Doing a complete run-through before your presentation will help ensure that this won’t happen to you.
In any case, when you use PowerPoint, start off with a strong, clear statement that sets the stage for your talk. You can then use PowerPoint to illustrate critical numbers, points, and relationships. When you have finished using PowerPoint, blank out the screen, and be sure to end with a strong focus on your face and your verbal message.
Every speaker has three talks for a particular occasion. First, there is the talk that the speaker plans to give. Second, there is the talk that the speaker actually gives when he stands up in front of the audience. Third, there is the talk that the speaker wishes he had given as he thinks about it afterward on the way home.
The very best talk of all is when the talk you planned, the talk you gave, and the talk you wish you had given all turn out to be the same. This gives you a deep sense of pleasure and satisfaction.
In planning and preparing your talk, design your transitions from point to point so that it is clear to the audience that you have finished with one point and you are moving on to the next.
Go over your material repeatedly, and continually look for ways to improve the quality and smooth delivery of your message.
Some years ago, I was commissioned to give an important talk to an audience containing people who could book me as a speaker if they were sufficiently impressed. I therefore spent an inordinate amount of time practicing, preparing, and rehearsing my speech, finally reviewing the speech about 50 times before I stood up and gave it to the huge audience at the convention center.
The practice paid off. The speech was recorded on both video and audio tape. It was distributed worldwide and was eventually viewed by tens of thousands of people in multiple languages. Some years later, this speech was rated as one of the twelve best speeches ever given out of more than a thousand speeches to this particular organization over a 37-year period. Preparation really paid off.
Another way that you can prepare yourself to give a great speech is to use a mnemonic. This is where you design your talk in your mind around a particular phrase or series of letters or numbers.
You have probably heard of the mnemonic used by many memory trainers. They will use the word one to rhyme with the word gun. When they think of their first point, they think of their opening statement coming out of a gun.
They will then use the word two to rhyme with the word shoe. They will then think of their second point as if it were coming out of a shoe, or under a shoe, or associated with a shoe in some way.
In a like manner, the word three rhymes with tree, and the speaker will think of his or her third point as hanging from the branches of a tree.
The word four rhymes with door and the speaker will think of his fourth point as though it were posted on a door.
The word five rhymes with the word hive, and the speaker will think of her fifth point buzzing around a beehive, and so on.
Six rhymes with sticks. Seven rhymes with heaven. Eight rhymes with gate. Nine rhymes with tine (as in a dinner fork), and ten rhymes with hen.
In each case, by imagining the number and its rhyming symbol, you can connect a part of your talk to it and thus remember ten points in a row without missing a beat. This is a common trick used by speakers who want to stand in front of an audience and speak without notes.
My favorite way of organizing a talk is to build it around a word that is relevant to the talk and important to the audience, such as success. You can do this with almost any word. Here is an example of this method of organizing.
The first letter, S, stands for “Sense of purpose.” I then explain the importance of having clear, specific goals before you begin.
The second letter, U, stands for “You are responsible.” I explain that you must take charge of your life and career, and you must refuse to make any excuses.
The third letter, C, stands for “Customer satisfaction.” You must clearly identify your ideal customer, decide what you can do to win her over, and satisfy her better than your competitor can.
The fourth letter, C, stands for “Creativity.” I explain the importance of finding better, faster, cheaper ways to promote and sell your product in today’s market.
The fifth letter, E, stands for “Excellence.” You must become absolutely excellent at what you do and continually strive to improve.
The sixth letter, S, stands for “Sensitivity to others.” You must think about other people and how what you do and say can have an effect on them.
Finally, the last letter, S, stands for “Stick to it.” You must resolve in advance that you will never give up and that you will persist in the face of all adversity and difficulties.
Using this word, and elaborating on each letter, I have been able to speak without notes for 60 or 90 minutes and never lose my place. The audience loves it and looks forward eagerly to the meaning of each letter as I explain it.
You can use this method with a three-letter word or a 10-letter word. It is an effective way to organize your thoughts and impress your audience by speaking fluently without notes.
If you are using a podium, one of the best preparation techniques is to put your key points onto three-by-five-inch or five-by-eight-inch index cards in large letters. Rather than writing out your material word for word, write out key sentences, ideas, and phrases, and then shuffle the index cards from one to the next as you speak.
I have seen quite competent and highly respected speakers stand in front of a large audience with several index cards in their hands, using them as props as they give their talk to the audience. The audience seldom objects to this method of presentation. They all know that this is how the speaker is keeping his thoughts organized. They also recognize that the speaker has done considerable preparation to reach this point.
One way that you can prepare is to give your talk to smaller, friendlier groups as many times as possible before you get in front of a larger, less personal audience. Not long ago, I attended a board meeting that was to be followed by a major dinner. One of the board members began speaking extemporaneously about a particular subject. Because he was so well organized, the entire board listened to him as he spoke and developed his theme, point by point, for 20 minutes. At the end, everybody was impressed with his thoughts and ideas.
That evening, in front of 500 people at the dinner, he stood up and gave the identical speech he had given at the boardroom table. I only realized in retrospect that the board meeting had been his final dry run for what turned out to be a very important and consequential talk to a large group of important people.
One way many people prepare for a speech is to go for a walk and give the talk as they go. As they walk along, they use their hands and faces and develop the talk. They use a mnemonic so they can remember every part without notes. Some even raise their voices on certain points and pretend that they are speaking loudly to people in a large audience. Walking and talking is one of the most effective ways to prepare for a speech.
When you are speaking to a specific industry group, it is important that you at least appear well informed, if not an expert. You can achieve this by using Google to find all the information available on that industry. You can also go to Hoovers.com and look up industry statistics and trends, the major players in an industry, and the major events taking place in that industry group.
When you weave this “inside information” into your talk to a specific group, you sound like an insider. You sound like someone who works in the industry, if not somewhere in the company. People are greatly impressed by a speaker who seems to know a lot about what they do for a living and the challenges they are facing in the current marketplace.
Finally, one of your best forms of preparation is to find out about the key people in the organization that has asked you to speak. Look up their biographies on the Internet. If a key person works for a corporation, her biography is often on the company website. Sometimes, you can ask the meeting planners for background information on the key people who are in the audience.
When I speak to a group, I make it a point to learn the names and backgrounds of the key people, and then I weave their names into my talk as I go along. I will say something like, “You’ve probably heard Ralph Wilson make this point many times—that you have to persist in the face of all adversity. That’s the sort of thing that he believes and that’s the reason for the success of this organization.”
I can confidently say that I have never been contradicted afterward. When you put positive words, thoughts, and ideas into the mouths of the key people in your audience, they will always be flattered and happy as a result, and you will look like a hero.
People often ask me what the secret is to effective public speaking. I always tell them that it starts with preparation. Fully 90 percent of your success as a speaker will be determined by how well and how thoroughly you prepare. Within a few minutes of opening your mouth, the audience will know how well you have prepared and either grade you up or grade you down. Your job is to prepare and overprepare so that you sound like an authority from the first moment you begin to speak.
The best news is that the more you plan and prepare, the more confidence you will have when you finally stand up to speak. When you have practiced your talk over and over again, you will feel a tremendous sense of personal power and calmness when you finally stand before an audience.