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Public Speaking - Top 5 Ways to Make Sure Your Speech Is
Completely Ineffective and Has No Impact
By Felicia J.
Slattery PPublic speaking is a powerful tool for all people in
business and can be an especially effective marketing technique for the
entrepreneur. As a member of a weekly networking group, I get to see a lot
of small and home-based business owners speak about their businesses for
about 10 minutes each. When the most ineffective speakers in the group
present, the communication expert and public speaking coach in me wants to
scream, "Why are you wasting your time and ours!?" I resist the urge and
instead funnel my energy into creating an article just like this. When you
follow the five steps below, you run the risk of:
If your goal is to confuse people and waste your time, then
follow these five steps for making your next presentation completely
ineffective, boring and have zero (or negative) impact on your audience:
Step 1: Don't have any structure to your speech.
Just get up there and talk aimlessly. Wing it, in fact. Then your audience
will feel totally lost and confused during your entire speech, will have no
idea where you're going, or when you're finally coming to the conclusion.
Step 2: Share information not useful or relevant to your audience.
The surest way to turn your audience off is to talk about things they care
nothing about. In the speech that inspired this article, the speaker
referred to worker's compensation often-- to a room full of people who work
out of their homes with zero employees. The speaker didn't bother to tell us
if or how worker's comp could impact us and succeeded in ignoring everyone's
needs.
Step 3: Try to squeeze everything there is to know about a topic into 10
minutes.
This works well when you really want to confuse and overwhelm your
audience-- especially if you're talking about new or technical topics. If
there have been volumes written about your subject, try to fit it all in.
Speak super-quickly, looking down almost constantly at your 17 pages of
exhaustive notes, ignoring questions so you can get through it all.
Step 4: Ramble.
Similar to not having any structure, rambling can lose your audience
quickly, too. Continually go off on tangents completely unrelated to your
area of expertise and topic and just talk about whatever comes up for you in
the moment.
Step 5: Allow your audience to "hijack" your speech time.
This is how you'll know if you're succeeding at the first four steps. Your
audience will be lost and confused, but to be nice they will try to bring
you back on track. So people will ask questions that others in the audience
feel they can comment on to help you out, too. Before you know it, you don't
even have to talk anymore, your audience is doing all the talking for you.
Keep at it and with little effort, you too can make sure your presentations
are completely ineffective, you lose your credibility, and irritate your
audience the next time you market your business with public speaking.
Public speaking is one important way to increase your credibility as a small
or home-based business owner. I invite you to discover how to Increase
Business by Communicating Your Credibility now. You'll get this FREE
e-course designed to help you attract more business and get more cash flow.
Pick it up here:
http://www.communicationtransformation.com/creating-credibility-ecourse.html
If you'd like to learn more about using public speaking to market your
business-- the right way--, visit
http://www.CashInOnSpeaking.com - You'll
learn everything you need to know from how to choose a topic, how to best
organize your speech to get instant results, and where to go to get booked
to speak.
Copyright 2008. Felicia J. Slattery.
Felicia J. Slattery, M.A., M.Ad.Ed., is a Communication Consultant, Speaker and Coach
with more than a decade of experience teaching people effective and powerful
communication skills in order to achieve their happiest and most successful
lives. Felicia offers a free e-course for small business owners called
Increase Business by Communicating Your Credibility at her website:
http://www.CommunicationTransformation.com.
Sign up now!
 You're
welcome to reprint this article online or in print form, as long as it
remains complete and unaltered and as long as you include the author
information at the end. I'd appreciate if you would
email me a link to your reprint. Thanks!
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