With his utterly deadpan comedy style, Jerry Seinfeld called out the ridiculousness of a recurring fact regarding public speaking: Americans are more afraid of death than they are of public speaking. While public speaking is stressful, especially for first-timers, a little bit of preparation and practice can go a long way to alleviate stress and lead to a successful speaking engagement.
I recently spoke at ShareASale’s Think Tank conference. It had been a while for me since a public speaking engagement and the topic for the speech was a very dry one, marketing attribution. While I was certainly nervous I fortunately had plenty of experience in performance work and public speaking courses to fall back on. I also had the fortune of co-speaking with an amazing colleague which was great in the context of a dry speaking topic as we could play off one another to keep audience interest and engagement high. As such, I wanted to put out a post here that covers my tips and tricks for public speaking.
Establish a one sentence takeaway that summarizes the main goal of the speech. The point is not necessarily directly addressed in the speech, but should be the final message or takeaway for the audience. For example, if you are an author speaking to a convention of readers, your goal to convey could be: “My book is interesting and you should buy it.” You aren’t actually going to say that verbatim to the audience, but the speaking event should lead the audience to that conclusion.
Keeping your one sentence takeaway in mind, write an outline that has a beginning, middle, and end which takes the audience to your one sentence takeaway. The outline should cover your major points and be no more than a one pager. Keep the outline high level. Do not include any specific phrases or text for your speech in the outline. The goal is to have a high level overview of your speech.
Use your outline to build to build out the PowerPoint slides for your presentation. Assume that each slide will equate to about a minute of your presentation as a rule of thumb. Keep the PowerPoint presentation visual, as some members in your audience will not read a wall of text. Do not rely on text and do not plan on reading from the PowerPoint as this will result in a dry presentation. Any text in the presentation should supplement or augment what you have to say or highlight a key statistic.
You will now compose your speech. The speech style I recommend is called extemporaneous speaking. Extemporaneous speaking does not involve a set word-for-word script, which can lead to fumbling speech and errors, but instead relies on a series of keywords and phrases to trigger your speaking. I recommend printing your PowerPoint presentation and going through each slide to compose what you want to say. Write a keyword of phrase that triggers what you want to say on that slide, keeping the time per slide to about a minute and avoiding a word-for-word transcription in your notes. This will force you to speak organically in a somewhat conversational way while keeping you focused and on task.
Practice, practice, practice! Run through the presentation several times, using your keywords to trigger your speech on each slide. It’s ok to stumble a take extra time your first read through. You will end up editing some of your keywords through a few readings. After a few times, certain phrases or moments within the speech will stay consistent but without a forced read-from-the-script feel. This will help you stay calm during your presentation, as you will practice having expertise in the topic rather than memorizing a speech. You can’t lose your place when speaking extemporaneously.
These are my general tips for public speaking. Follow these tips and practice with confidence and you will be calm, prepared, and poised!