Public speaking is a powerful tool for getting your point across and making headway in your profession. The core secret is the ability to draw points out by telling a story. Now think of it this way: people are not likely to remember the boring details of your speech, no matter how captivating it is; but if you can attach the major parts of your message to a story that purges emotion then you are on your way to winning the attention you need.
On a visit Kenya one time I was talking to a colleague in an elevator going down to a dining room for breakfast. Another man who was in the lift with us got interested in our conversation and said he could guess where we were from by our accents. “You are West African” he said, “probably from Ghana or Nigeria”. He was right because I and my colleague were from Nigeria but we had spent considerable time in Ghana as well. We begun to introduce ourselves and explain our mission in Nairobi. By the time the elevator stopped at the basement where breakfast was being served, it dawned on me that I had just practiced what marketers call The Elevator Pitch: convincing the person I was speaking to of my abilities and mission in Nairobi that day and winning him over as a potential client in the shortest time possible.
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There is something called the stage effect. The unfair advantage you create for yourself by standing in front of an audience. The quality of the presentation you make plus the size of the audience creates the level of attraction you bring to yourself. Creating a lasting impression is powerful in face to face contact. When you have a large diverse audience the trick is to keep their attention with broad spectrum appeal. This means you make the topic so interesting that anyone in the room would want to listen to what you are saying.
Deliver with stories. Shock them with ideas .Stories are the operating system of the human mind. The human mind has too much material to process but it will hold on to the things that are emotional. No emotion, no memory. Too much emotion however can lead to ailments. Emotion is the glue that makes information stick. Hollywood would spend $200million on stories without making anything from them initially, because they know the central operating system of the human being is stories. Stories told to human beings with the use of pictures are a very powerful tool. Speeches that paint vivid pictures in the mind are the next powerful tool. There was a time several years ago that there was no internet, no television and no radio. What was used to communicate ideas to large audiences at the time? The story rooted succinctly in a speech. Imagine how it was. People would sit around a camp fire and a gifted story teller would begin selling ideas to them through story telling. The concepts are fixed in the mind of the listener though drama, suspense and adventure.
Adolf Hitler wrote in Mien kampf many years before World War II that the speech is more powerful than the pen or the gun. He gave over 8000 speeches in his life time and used them to sell rather unpalatable ideas that united Germany. The example may not be salutary, but the power behind the concept is. So, one basic strategy for you to improve your appeal among a large number of people is to practice public speaking. Understand how to put information across to an audience and it will boost whatever career you are involved in. In modern business, people who are ardent in public speaking make head way faster than those who are not. It helps you leverage, sell things, bid for you salary, convince people of your gifts. Get comfortable with speaking so that your appeal can be raised notches higher than it already has.
In Ghana many years ago at the opening of a Nigerian bank that had just set up in Accra, there was a gathering of very important people. Former President John Agyekum Kufour a minister from Nigeria and top officials of the Central Bank of Ghana were present. After the official opening, a top manager in the bank was called to give a vote of thanks. She stuttered and shook over her presentation. It was so bad that from where I sat, even though I could not see her, I knew she was ill prepared and nervous. She started the speech with apprehension instead of anticipation.
There are general guidelines to follow: Always have strategic objectives in mind: If you are speaking to an audience and you to want to make a good impression, make up your mind to enjoy yourself. If you can, make people laugh. Don’t get nervous. Pass your message along in as simple terms as possible. There is power in simplicity. In classes on strategic planning I use a story of the hare and tortoise to put the concept across to the participants. There are three stories of a race between the hare and the tortoise. Each story is short and to the point and the participants watch me present it via power point projection. At the end of each short story, we pause a moment and the audience is invited to share their idea of what the morale of the story is. They actually are able to understand the concepts quicker and easier though the stories. That’s how powerful this is. Take a hold of these concepts and your public speaking powers will improve immensely.
