Ep 117 Should You Use Every Minute of Your Allotted Speaking Time April 26, 2016

Should you use every minute of your allotted time when you're giving a speech or presentation?

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So this is a question that came to me from one of my clients, one of my trainees in Budapest last week. TJ I've been given an hour to give a speech. Should I fill up every minute of that time, use the most of it, or if I'm given a half an hour, should I plan on having exactly a half an hour worth of material? Well, I'm sympathetic to someone's concern there about using their time and using all of it, but the question is, what is the most effective way to use your time when you're in front of a group of people and you have the opportunity to speak to present on a topic of your choice? In general, I like to allocate 25% of the time at the end for pure 100% question and answer. You want to be truly interactive. Everyone talks about engagement and interactivity with social media, TV shows, everything else. Well, it's critically important with speeches, people talk about it. But if you don't literally give someone time, how are they going to do it? So you certainly want to be well prepared. You want to plan for your speech, but you by no means want to plan out every minute of the speech for the whole amount of time for several reasons. It's not just a matter of the wanting to leave proper time for Q and A. It's that during your speech, you want to give time for someone to ask a question. If a couple of people in the audience look a little confused, you want to step back a minute and say, you know what, I might not be making this point clear. Here's another way of looking at this. Or here's another example. You need time when you're actually giving your presentation to figure out how you can tailor it to the existing audience. It takes more time. I'll tell you even more reasons why you need to give yourself extra time and not plan every second in just a moment.

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A common mistake I see people make is they're given a set amount of time, let's say 20 minutes, and they want to be thorough. They want to be hard working. They want to show people they prepared. So they put together a slide show and maybe it's, let's say 20 slides. Not that I'm advocating That and they're going through the slides. They perhaps have a stopwatch or an alarm function on their cell phone, and they're practicing. They may be saying it silently, they may be even saying it softly out loud. And they're timing it, and lo and behold, it's 20 minutes. Great. They feel like they're prepared. They get up and they give the same presentation the same way in front of people. Lo and behold, it's 19 and a half minutes that have gone by, and the person is only 12 slides in. Well, what happened? What happened to the time space continuum to change things so dramatically? Here's the thing. You can read if you're practicing by reading silently, you're going to read much faster than you talk. If you talk it out loud, you're probably not going to do it in a fully conversational way. You're not going to speak with the same volume because you're not speaking with your normal volume, kind of, okay, now I'm going through the slide too. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're able to speak much faster if you're just talking to yourself. So when you're speaking it out loud to a room, it's natural to pause more, it's natural to move more, even if nobody asks you a single question and it takes more time. One of the surest signs of an amateur speaker is someone who doesn't plan, has way too much content for the time allotted, gets halfway through, starts panicking, starts apologizing. Oh, I'm not going to have time to go through all this. So let me talk faster. Let me skip through these slides. That is a true, true sign of an amateur. The other problem when you have that much, is it's only natural to try to hope that people don't ask questions, even if you don't verbalize. Please hold your questions. We may be short of time. People can feel that vibe from you. They can get the sense that you're more interested in your own little agenda of your speech. Now, your speech may be focusing on helping them. It's not that it's purely selfish, but at some level, you're telling your audience, let me get through my stuff. My stuff is more important. We got to do this quickly, then we'll get to your stuff, your questions. That is not the attitude you want to have when presenting to clients, customers, colleagues, people in the public, investors. You want to give them the sense that, hey, I came to this really prepared to give you truly important ideas that are going to help you. But first and foremost, I care about you. I want to hear from you. If I'm not making anything, something clear, I want to hear from you. If you have additional questions, I want to hear from you. Now, the standard policy in all of my speeches or presentations, unless it's in front of a thousand people, but the standard rule I have with all my audience is ask a question at any time, interrupt my speech at any time. Because guess what? It's not my speech. It's your speech. It is the audience's speech. They need to know that when you go into a presentation with that attitude and your audience senses that they will like you, respect you, pay more attention to what you're saying, rate you more favorably. But more important than any of that, they'll actually take away more of your ideas and be able to remember them and use them. That is presumably the reason you did all this in the first place. More in a moment.

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Here is far and away the best way to prepare the timing of your speech. It is you need to come up with the material that you want to come across and then practice it out loud in front of people. Now, the more it can be in the same size room, the better. The more you can speak to someone who is further away from you the way some of your audience members the better. Because if you're practicing just in front of one person who's three feet in front of you, you're probably going to do that faster than if you're in a room with 50 people and some of the people in the room are 25ft away. So I would and I understand if you're giving a speech on Thursday to 50 people, you probably can't round up 50 friends to practice on Tuesday. What you can do is find one person practice in the room that you're going to be in and have that one person sit in the back where some of the people are likely to be. And that will give you a better sense of how long it takes your sound to get around the room. The pacing more, the pausing more. Rule of thumb I would go by is leave 25% of your time unused so you can really draw out questions. So if you've allotted an hour, have 45 minutes prepared or even 40 minutes, and make sure you have 20 minutes left so you can really respond to people's questions. It really is what makes and breaks many presentations, if not most. The other thing you want to do is perhaps Even practice a couple of questions. Sometimes people may love your speech, but no one wants to be the first one to ask a question. After you've announced that you'll be taking questions. If no one instantly puts their hand up, don't act panicked, don't act embarrassed, don't act flustered. Instead, just in a calm way, say, while you're preparing your questions, I do want to share with you what one of the most common questions I do get and how I respond. And then ask yourself the question. Respond. And quite often that's enough to warm people up, essentially prime the pump, get them ready to start asking you questions. And there's no embarrassing moment of, oh, I guess I wasn't interested. I guess nobody wants to ask a question. That's how it comes across to some people when no one asks a question right away. You don't want to send a message to your audience that you're flustered or you're bothered or that you're demanding that they ask you questions. You're not demanding anything. You're simply making your time available. Here's the other big thing. If you have an hour allotted for your presentation, and let's say you speak for 50 minutes, you have questions for 10 minutes, you've still got 10 minutes left. Guess what? Nobody in the world is offended if you just say, thank you very much. We are officially concluded. If any of you have additional questions, you can meet me at lunchtime, the hallway, wherever, actually finish early. It's extraordinarily rare for anyone, any meeting planner, to be upset by that. The only exception I can think of is if you are a very famous celebrity and you've been paid a tremendous amount of money to speak and they are expecting that full hour. But in that case, again, if you're a famous celebrity, people are going to have questions. So I can't really even imagine that happening, where you're going to end early because you have no further questions. So in general, for those of us who are non celebrities, and I'm not a celebrity, I'm guessing you are not a celebrity. Just end a little bit early. Your audience is not going to be disappointed. In fact, they're going to be pleased. And you know what? I'm going to do that. Right now, these podcasts are often 15, 20 minutes long, sometimes 22. Right now I'm at 12 minutes. I'm going to end a little early.

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