This is a guest post from my good friend Douglas Kruger. Douglas is a professional speaker, trainer and 5-time winner of the South African Championships for Public Speaking. Not only does he excel at speaking, but he has an amazing voice that keeps you engaged. Hope you’ll pick up great tips from his sharing.
Be it 5 minutes or 50, whenever you open your mouth, you’ve got to make your words count. If no one remembers what you say after your presentation, you’ve missed a valuable opportunity.
When your presentation becomes memorable in your audience’s mind, you stand a higher chance of moving them to action and creating a lasting impact. Let’s look at how you can make your words hit a little harder, and live a little longer…
We’ll begin with three ‘thou shalt not’s:
1. Thou shalt not speak to slides. That’s for junior members of the sales team, who can’t remember the company’s name. Make a strong impression by knowing your content, connecting with the audience, and delivering your speech without visible notes.
2. Thou shalt not do data dumps. This is all about creating impressions of strength and leadership, not about reciting every possible dot and dash in your litany of facts. Your message matters more than the facts that support it.
3. Thou shalt not indulge in long, waffling ‘thank you’s.’ Lists and formalities dilute your impact. Leave them for the MC. Start strong.
And now, the ‘thou shalt’s:
For starters, memorable presentations make use of a strong point-of-view. Don’t try to be gentle, euphemistic or neutral. This is the forum for bold ideas, strong suggestions and a powerful sense of voice. Your brand will not benefit from an overly cautious presentation. I’m not suggesting you champion the death-penalty or dance through the abortion minefield, but you should pioneer passionate views about your industry.
Now let’s get practical. Here is your basic structure for a memorable presentation that creates a lasting impact. You should:
– Tell them how things used to be
– Tell them what things they should be paying attention to now and why
– Tell them what it means to them; including the pitfalls and opportunities
– Tell them what things will work going forward
– Tell them how things will turn out
– Leave them with the implied message: ‘Follow me’
Follow this structure and you will create a strong impression. It contains all the nuts and bolts of a solid memorable and impactful presentation, and plenty of room for your own personal interpretations.
Bear in mind, though, that this is merely an outline. Your task is to make it come alive, with humour, stories, word-pictures and memorable phrases.
To that end, here are some of the oratory devices that I strongly recommend you use:
1. Create a Metaphor
Metaphors make complex ideas easy to process. The best are visual in nature. In one of my presentations I speak about how we inherit ideas concerning work and wealth from previous generations. To make the concept easy for the audience to grasp (and ‘see’), I explain it using a metaphor that I call, ‘The Wheelbarrow Way.’ It goes like this:
‘My son, pick up your wheelbarrow and fill it with bricks. To earn a coin, you must push your wheelbarrow for a number of hours. If you want more coins, you must push your wheelbarrow for more hours. If you aren’t breaking even, you must get a second wheelbarrow, and push it in the evenings for more coins.”
I then explain that wealthy individuals have learned to raise the value of their labour and offerings, so that they can earn more coins while pushing the wheelbarrow for less hours. In other words, I explain, wealthy individuals learn to ‘dump the bricks and carry gold.’
Audiences love metaphors like this, which can even become a talking point after the presentation. They compare thoughts on the metaphor and retell it to other.
You can use metaphors to make your ideas come alive and creating on-going buzz. Use the incredible power of ‘It’s like…’
(See Douglas’s video on ‘The Wheelbarrow Way’)
(Read part II here)
Douglas Kruger is a professional speaker, trainer and 5-time winner of the South African Championships for Public Speaking. He specializes in motivational speeches at conferences, and presentation skills training for executives.
Learn more on Public Speaking from Douglas in his book, available at amazon.com: 50 Ways to Become a Better Speaker
Check out his website to view more motivational speeches and skills-development articles: http://douglaskruger.co.za
Douglas is very active on Twitter. Follow him for tips and interesting ideas: @Douglaskruger
