Scott EmpringhamAI Marketing Strategist | Helping CEOs Scale with AI

❌DON’T BE❌ ☠️INAPPROPRIATE☠️

2 Dec 2022 · 1 min

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Short YouTube interview (uploaded Dec 2, 2022 by Scott Empringham) in which speaking coach Pat Quinn names two pieces of bad advice for public speakers: (1) trying to control the audience instead of connecting with them, and (2) immediately sharing one’s deepest, most painful personal story in the first minutes of a talk. Quinn advises building rapport first (‘‘this is a first date’’ analogy) and leaving very intimate material for later in a presentation.

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What are the top two pieces of worst advice you could ever receive about speaking on stage? I caught up with Pat Quinn, speaking coach to legendary speakers like Grant Cardone, Daymond John and other greats. Here's what he said.
Two bad recommendations I can think of. One is that you want to control your audience. That if you are intense enough on stage, you can control your audience. I don't want to control my audience. I want to connect with my audience. I want my audience to recognize that I understand the struggle that they're in with the problem that I'm here to solve today. And I can't connect when I'm controlling them. The second thing I think people are telling people to do is to dig deep into their pain, share the most painful moment of their life in the first few minutes of their presentation. You just met these people and now you're sharing something deeply intimate. It's just inappropriate. It's uncomfortable in the room because, like in the first 30 seconds with a lot of speakers, you're sharing, like, an extremely painful moment for you, and it's just too much too soon. This is a first date. Talk about things we have in common. Talk about things that we connect on. We'll get to the really deep stuff later. But I wouldn't do that in the first few minutes of my presentation.