Face it. If you’re a boring speaker, you’ll make a room full of people hate you or something close to that.
Here are 10 things you SHOULD and SHOULD NOT do that will help you be a little less boring.
1) PAY ATTENTION TO THE BODY-LANGUAGE OF THE AUDIENCE. If they shift in their seats, you’re losing their interest and you’re failing as a speaker.
2) INFO-TAINMENT: Your job is to keep an audience informed, enlightened, and entertained. Remember this goal.
3) DON’T BE BORING: If you tell them something they already know, they will be bored. You’re the expert; tell them something they don’t already know!
4) DON’T SAY “WHAT I’D LIKE TO TALK ABOUT IS….” Don’t tell them what you’re going to say; JUST SAY IT! Don’t believe me that this will help you? Try it out on a crowd and just watch the whole room squirm. You’ve just said something boring.
5) DON’T TALK FOR 10 OR 15 MINUTES AND THEN SAY “TODAY I AM GOING TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT…” What the heck?! What were you just talking about for the first 10-15 minutes? Watch the room rustle, see people shift in their seats, and take their eyes off of you. At this point you will hear a slight rise in background noise; that’s the sound of people who have stopped paying attention to you. You’ve lost their attention because they’re so shocked that you basically just stole their minds & ears away for no reason before you started into your main speech.
6) DON’T SAY “JUST BEAR WITH ME”. That’s boring! Stop telling them how nervous you are, how much you’ve learned while preparing for your speech, how you’ve got a cold and your voice is messed up and to “bear with me”. Get down to business!
7) KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: Don’t be high-energy and irreverent at a solemn meeting. Don’t be formal with a bunch of managers that are there to relax and joke around. Don’t treat engineers like customer service reps. Don’t be inflammatory on touchy subjects unless it’s part of your “platform”. Just be ready to change your demeanor after testing the culture of the crowd, and then match them.
8) TELL STORIES: People hate textbook answers and information. People love stories. They’ve all heard the usual dry info-sessions before, but they’ve never heard your stories. Remember: People learn by stories. Your WHOLE presentation should be wrapped up in stories.
9) MAKE THE PEOPLE LAUGH AND THEY WILL LOVE YOU FOR IT. I once said that to a friend in high school that was running for class president. He took it to heart; he was darn funny and entertained the people. AND THEN HE WON. His main opponent wore a suit and made a dry politician-style speech. That guy lost.
10) MAKE THE PEOPLE CRY AND THEY WILL LOVE YOU FOR IT. Oh, boy…if you can make an audience cry, you will have a group of followers for life. If you can make an audience FEEL SOMETHING that’s out of ordinary from their usual drab, boring lives, you’ll gain a group of friends that will love you for what you’ve done for them.
Remember these points and then you might be interesting. If you forget them, you’ll probably be boring.
-Shawn
(the guy who runs this site, the FB page, the Twitter, etc)
