Public Speaking Tip: Last Minute Practice

If you happen to be staying in a hotel in a room next to mine, it is very likely you would hear parts of my upcoming speech bellowing through the walls.

Even after the enormous number of presentations I've done I still practice my stories and various bits of material the night before my event. I heard Zig Ziglar saying that he does the same thing.

Unless you are speaking every day, it is almost impossible to stay razor sharp with your delivery. Being a keynote / large event speaker, I may go 90 - 120 days between times when I tell certain stories on stage. The last thing I want to do is flub up a line or bumble through a piece of material because I hadn't thought about it for a couple months.

Don't get cockey! Practice your material several times right before you do your speech and you'll have a much greater chance that each word will come out perfectly.

Public Speaking Tip: Dueling Flip Charts

Here is a very interesting way to use flip charts. Put one on both sides of the stage and pop back and forth between them. You can have an audience member volunteer at each flip chart helping your record input from other audience members. This has a tremendous Wake em Up value because

1. You have audience members on stage,
2. You are in the audience, and
3. Audience members are providing the input.

You are not limited to doing this with flip charts. You could have duel overhead projectors for larger crowds. You could still even have your darned old PowerPoint on a screen in the middle. You could even have flip charts placed all around the room so they are ready when you break up into smaller groups. Then the results pages could be torn off and taped in a row on the wall.

Public Speaking Tip: What if the Banquet Staff are No Shows?

Thank goodness this doesn't happen often, but it happened to me recently. I had my full day Electronic Marketing camp scheduled for a 7:00 AM setup with attendees to show up around 8:30 AM. I showed up in the room and no one was to be found anywhere.

Here's a checklist of what to do:

1. Immediately use the house phone to call the front desk and ask for the "manager on duty." Start raising a little h _ _ _. I do this simply to get their attention. You might mention something like "breach of contract" which usually gets extra attention.
   
2. Start opening side doors in the meeting rooms and looking at all the other meeting rooms to see what you can scrounge, tables, extension cords, chairs, etc. Drag them into your meeting room so you can take ownership. (I'm not saying ruin someone else's setup, I'm just saying if no one else's room is set up, then it's their fault if they didn't come down to double check things early so grab what you can.)
   
3. If you need a screen and none has shown up, (this also happened this weekend) find the most usable section of a white or light colored wall and set the room around that area.
   
4. If you have a breakfast scheduled or coffee/tea service go directly into the kitchen and start yelling "HELLO." Always have a copy of your contract with you if you have one. Go directly to the chef on duty and see if they can get something going quickly.
   
5. Don't be afraid to jump in and do things yourself. Move quickly with a stern look on your face. If someone eventually does show up, this demeanor should transmit the idea that you are miffed and there is not time to play games.

Yes, I know some people will say that you should be sickening sweet to get things done, but I'm afraid that when there are deadline time constraints you must get action quickly and many hotel staff people are not in any kind of hurry, so if you want to be ready when those attendees roll in, you have to move people to action.

Oh, one last thing. Always have cash bribes on you to get fast action when you really need it.

Public Speaking Tip - Laptop Volume

More and more people are playing multimedia clips through their laptops. Here's a quick way to handle the volume when you do not have a sound person in the room. Purchase a tiny headphone volume control (Radio Shack) and plug it into the output of your laptop. Then plug your output wire going to the sound system into the volume control. You can then adjust the volume of your multimedia clip quickly without the need to use the internal volume controls of the laptop which is usually a little bit of a hassle.

Public Speaking Tip - Bounce Around

I recently had one of the toughest speeches of my career. It was a three hour afternoon session on Martin Luther King day in Baltimore, Maryland. It was difficult for many reasons, but one of the most trying was that the audience consisted of all the employees of one company. They ranged from the lowest level to the highest level in the company. When you have all managers or all executives, it is relatively easy to hone in on their interests and concerns. When you have such a varied group you have to "bounce around" and not spend too much time on the interests and concerns of any one type of audience member.

If you do, you will lose the interest of all the other groups.

Public Speaking Tip: Prepare but Avoid Scripts

PREPARE BUT AVOID SCRIPTS by Terry Paulson, Ph.D.,CSP,CPAE

Some people script out their entire message. Some people are even successful doing it that way. But most speakers lose far more than they gain by preparing exact wording for an entire speech. Craft and shape your opening and closing, but don't fall victim to scripting the whole thing. As a pilot, you plan and execute with precision your takeoff and landing, but once airborne know how to enjoy the ride taking people to the locations they want to see. Once you are soaring on the wings of words, don't be trapped by the words you have deposited on any page. You don't take cue cards to a party. Prepare, but make your presentation a party for all involved.

Speak from you passion and preparation to serve in the moment. Look into their eyes. Come from experience and make sure you and your audience enjoy the ride. Keep an eye on the fuel gage and when the clock says you're nearly out of time, go back to that targeted and prepared close. Don't be a slave to a speech when everyone wants to soar along with you!

From 50 Tips For Speaking Like a Pro by Terry Paulson http://www.terrypaulson.com/resources.html

Public Speaking Tip: Go Early

I recently spoke to about 450 people at Mark Joyner's Survival Tactics Marketing Seminar. I spoke on the last day after many fine speakers had gone before me.

My tip here is to listen to all the speakers before you whenever you can. That way you can either refer back to what they said or avoid duplicating things they said which would reflect poorly on you.

In this case I was also able to pick out things from the other speakers and play off them.

EXAMPLE: Superstar speaker Ted Nicholas said that advances in health care and longevity would soon allow people to live to be 120 years old. He said he was going to throw a $10,000.00 seminar on his 120th birthday.

I came on and said that not only was I going to throw a $10,000.00 seminar on my 120th birthday, but that I was going to give the audience members a big discount if they gave me a deposit today. -- Everyone cracked up.

So go early when you can and pay attention to the other speakers.

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Public Speaking Tip: Douuble Check Your BackUps

I was assisting a friend of mine in making CD backups of his powerpoint presentation. I was to Fed Ex them to his hotel as a double protection in case his program got stolen or damaged.

A very interesting thing happened. He was emailing me the files to burn on CD for him and many of his photos were not showing up. I kept getting the message on the bad slides, "QuickTime and a Jpeg decompressor needed to view this slide" I already had Quicktime on my computer and never have any trouble looking at jpegs.

He had produced the presentation part on a Mac and Part on a PC and had thoroughly tested the entire presentation on both the Macs and PCs he had in his office. It's still a mystery what actually happened, but to fix it he had to open the photos I was having trouble with in Photoshop and then resave them.

Bottom line. It's a good idea to have a separate backup CD with your presentation on it, and it's a GREAT idea to double check those backups so you never get caught with your pants/skirt down.

Public Speaking Tip: Doors

One of the biggest sources of distraction has to do with something every meeting room has and that is a door. Doors squeak, they slam shut, and they allow people to walk in the audience's line of sight. According to Tom's Law of Presentations, these three things are only allowed to happen at the exact moment of your best punch line or most dramatic statement.

Doors are very easy to deal with if you can gain access to the room early. The first thing I do is check to see if the doors squeak. If they do, I call maintenance or find a little oil can and oil the hinges. If it's an old hotel,this probably hasn't been done in 30 or 40 years. Then I let the door swing shut on its own. This tests the closing mechanism. If it is hopelessly weak and allows the door to slam shut, I either ask for it to be adjusted (which no one ever knows how to do) or I have someone stand at the door to open and close it for latecomers. The latch of the door can make lots of noise to, so you simply tape the catch mechanism shut.

Door location can also be a pesky problem. Sometimes the room is set so there is a door behind or very close to the stage area. If someone would enter this door during your presentation, it would be very distracting.

You can usually tape up a "Please Use Other Door" sign to help with this. When you know you have any kind of door problem, try to alert the planner or recruit people from the organization to police the doors for you.

Excerpt from the "Wake 'em Up Professional Speaking System"
http://www.antion.com/speakervideo.htm

Public Speaking Tip: Last Minute Practice

If you happen to be staying in a hotel in a room next to mine, it is very likely you would hear parts of my upcoming speech bellowing through the walls.

Even after the enormous number of presentations I've done I still practice my stories and various bits of material the night before my event. I heard Zig Ziglar saying that he does the same thing.

Unless you are speaking every day, it is almost impossible to stay razor sharp with your delivery. Being a keynote / large event speaker, I may go 90 - 120 days between times when I tell certain stories on stage. The last thing I want to do is flub up a line or bumble through a piece of material because I hadn't thought about it for a couple months.

Don't get cockey! Practice your material several times right before you do your speech and you'll have a much greater chance that each word will come out perfectly.