More and more speakers are being asked to deliver their speeches remotely.
On one hand this is a good thing – we are being asked to give more speeches and we can share the importance of public speaking. On the other hand, it can be challenging to transform our in-person speech into a speech that works when presented on a computer screen. The good news is that this can be done. You have the ability to give a speech that will connect with your audience and you just may change their lives even though you are not there with them.
However, in order to make that happen, you are going to have to change how you give your speeches.
I think that we can all agree that we are now living in the 21st Century.
The old school way of giving a speech required us to show up at a location, take the stage, and deliver a speech so that we could demonstrate the importance of public speaking. In our modern time, we no longer have to travel to a location in order to deliver a speech – we can do it virtually.
However, with this new found flexibility comes the responsibility of knowing what it takes to successfully deliver a virtual speech.
As speakers, we are always looking for ways that we can use the importance of public speaking to make our next speech have more of an impact with our audience.
We’ll consider what we can do with our body language, the use of props, and many other things. However, it turns out that one of the most powerful things that we can do to give our next speech a better chance of connecting with our audience is to enhance the words that we use when we are creating the speech.
Great idea, now just exactly how can we go about doing that?
If you are like most speakers, the next time that you give a speech you are going to be hoping that your audience understand the importance of public speaking and puts their phones down while you speak.
I mean really, you’ve spent time creating and rehearsing this speech, the least that they can do is to give you their undivided attention. Unfortunately, I think that we all know that this probably is not going to happen. Perhaps a different approach is called for. Maybe you should be telling your audience to take their phones out.
Let’s all agree on one thing: you’ve worked hard to prepare for the next speech that you will be giving.
When you take the stage, you are assuming that your audience will be interested in what you have to say and they will pay attention to you while you are speaking. However, in this day and age, there is a very good chance that some of the members of your audience may not be giving you all of their attention. Instead they may be using their mobile phones to text or tweet while you speak.
What’s a speaker to do?
So just exactly what does disaster look like to a speaker?
I think that we can all agree that disaster can take on many forms when it comes to delivering a speech in public. However, I think that if you are on a stage and you lose your train of thought and can’t remember what you wanted to say next, then that can count as a speaking disaster. This is something that can happen to any of us at any time.
We need to be ready to deal with it the next time that it happens.
As speakers we can become comfortable standing in front of an audience giving a speech because we know about the importance of public speaking.
However, if we are asked to be the moderator of a panel everything changes. It’s almost like we will be giving a speech, but we can’t practice this one beforehand. Additionally, there are a lot of things that we are going to have to do in order to get the most out of our panel members.
We are going to have to use all of our speaking skills in order to make moderating a panel a success.
The ability to stand in front of an audience and use the importance of public speaking is a powerful skill to have.
It turns out that we can take this skill one step further if we are willing to teach ourselves how to use our speaking abilities to sell a product. The good news for speakers is that we are already doing most of the work that is required when we create, practice and deliver a speech.
However, when we want to use our speech to sell something, there are a few extra steps that we’ll need to take.
Back in the old days, when we came up with a new idea that we wanted to use in a speech, we really didn’t have a lot of choices when it came to trying out our new idea.
Oh sure, there were family and friends, but you know as well as I do that because of the importance of public speaking they would never tell you if one of your ideas was really bad. What we were desperately missing was a test audience – one that could give us honest feedback on our speech idea.
Well, fast forward to today and it turns out that now we all have what we’ve been looking for – a social media audience.
Speakers want to be remembered.
We’ve put a lot of effort in to creating, practicing, and then delivering our speech. We want this effort to mean something because we understand the importance of public speaking. We want to be remembered. The challenge that we are facing is that we are talking to a diverse audience. Everyone who is listening to us is different and they all remember things differently.
We need to understand how they remember and then find ways to make them remember us.
When we give a speech, we do it for a purpose. Perhaps we are sharing information or perhaps we are trying use the importance of public speaking to motivate an audience to take action.
It’s those cases in which we are trying to get our audience to take action that we need to be able to deliver a persuasive speech. These kinds of speeches can connect with our audience, make them believe the same things that we do, and then take action.
Now the big question is just exactly how can a speaker go about creating a persuasive speech?
So why are you willing to go to the effort of giving a speech?
If you are like most of us, you have a goal in mind. What you want to do is to use the, importance of public speaking to influence your audience to either change the way that they think or to take an action. If you can do this, then you will have become a powerful speaker.
We may all think that having the ability to influence an audience is hard to do; however, it may turn out that doing this is easier than any of us may know.
So the interesting thing about a speech is that they don’t all look the same. In fact, sometimes a speech may look completely different from what you might think that they should look like.
When you find yourself in a situation where you want to sell an idea to an audience, sometimes it might make sense to use the importance of public speaking and engage yourself in a debate. This allows your audience to see both sides of an argument and with a little luck they will agree with the arguments that you present.
What we need to know is just exactly how to go about speaking during a debate.
All speakers want to become better speakers.
The challenge that we face is that we just don’t know how to go about doing this. We can hire coaches, we can attend classes, there is no shortage of things that we can do. However, it turns out that if we truly want to become better, there one thing that we can do. Take the time to video record ourselves.
The camera never lies.
So why do you give speeches? Is it just to hear yourself speak?
Is it because you understand the importance of public speaking? I suspect that the answer to this question is “no”. We give speeches because we have information that we want to share with an audience. Our goal for sharing this information is to persuade and influence them in order to get them to take some sort of action that we want to have accomplished. In order to make that happen, your audience is going to have to understand your message, accept it, and then act upon it. What you need to do is to learn how to speak persuasively.
It turns out that there are a number of things that you can do while you are speaking that will make this happen.
I’d like to be able to tell you that every audience that you will address will be excited to hear you talk and are open to your message because they understand the importance of public speaking. However, as we all know this is not the case. There will be times that as you stand on that stage you will be able to feel the hostility coming from your audience. When you find yourself in a situation like this, you need to know how to deliver your speech in a way that will prevent your audience from tuning you out and may allow you to build bridges to them.
Would you like to have a big audience show up for your next speech?
I mean, would you like to have the room filled to overflowing? It turns out that this is actually fairly easy to do: just agree to give a speech about a controversial topic, you know what I’m talking about: sex, religion, or politics. The reason that so many people are going to show up is because a lot of them are going to disagree with what you have to say.
Just exactly how is a speaker supposed to go about giving a speech like this?
Often when we are creating a speech, we spend our time thinking about how we can connect with our audience.
What it’s going to take in order to get them to believe what we are telling them. Since we understand the importance of public speaking, we also spend our time looking for ways to get our audience to take action after we are done talking to them. It turns out that all of these things are exactly the same things that sales people do when they are trying to close a sale. Speakers can play the role of a salesperson.
We just have to know how to build a speech that will help us to sell…
Congratulation, you now have the ability to stand in front of an audience and give a speech – you understand the importance of public speaking.
What comes next? Have you ever thought about branching out? Perhaps you can use your speaking skills in a different way in order to communicate with a group of people. One way to do this is to become a trainer. If you think about it, being a trainer is very similar to giving a speech.
Just exactly what does it take to make the switch from being a speaker to being a trainer?
As speakers, the one thing that we want to happen when we give a speech is to use the importance of public speaking and be remembered.
In order to make this happen, we will spend countless hours thinking about what we want to include in our next speech. We will often think about how other people have been able to reach out and connect with our audience and sometimes we’ll decide that we want to do the same thing that they did – we want to use their material in our speech. When we make a decision like this, we are starting to travel down a dangerous road.
If we use too much of someone else’s material then we may run the risk of violating their copyright.