Ep 118 Top Ten Public Speaking Blunders to Avoid April 27, 2016

Get ready to learn the top 10 public speaking blunders to avoid at all costs.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in Life. Speaking with T.J. walker.

This is a question I get asked frequently when I'm giving speeches, doing presentation trainings all over the globe. You see articles on this subject all the time. Well, I'm going to give you the answer. Number one. The number one blunder to avoid is focusing on your blunders. Focus focusing on your mistakes. That's also the number two. Number three and all the way to 10. Now I'm being a little bit, I guess, sarcastic here. You could accuse this show title of being a bait and switch, but I don't know any other way of stressing this concept. And here is the concept. The way to be a better speaker is not to avoid negative things and to fixate on your flaws. And uh, oh, I said, um, that's going to ruin my speech. I better not say um anymore. That is not the way to be a better public speaker. The way to be a great speaker is to focus on a few interesting ideas that you can talk about in a natural, compelling way. Make those as interesting and as memorable as possible for your audience. So focus on your strengths, focus on the good ideas you have. That's the secret. It's not about eliminating, oh, you touched your nose for one second, you get points off there, you said, and three times in 30 minutes. So that's a blunder. That is completely the wrong way of looking at this more in just a moment.

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The first thing all of my clients ask me after they stood up and given a speech or presentation in our day long training workshops is okay tj, rip me apart, tear me apart, tell me everything I did wrong and my response is always the same. No. I simply don't have any evidence that fixating on your top 10 blunders, your top 10 mistakes will actually make you a better speaker, a better presenter. What I found does work is let's isolate all the good things you have in your speech, in your presentation and then let's do more of it. That is the approach. So when I'm in a one on one training with clients or a group training with clients and I recorded their first speech, I always tell them, be ready to critique yourself. Strengths and weaknesses. Don't just fixate on what you don't like. Focus on what you do like, we'll cover both. But then when I ask them to stand up and give their critique of themselves the first time I say, forgive me, this may seem rude, I apologize in advance, but I only want to hear what you liked about your speech and your presentation. I don't want to hear what you don't like. And an amazingly high percentage of the time people will tell me, ah, dj, I only have a list of things I don't like. It's a lot easier to talk about what I don't like. I have 25 things on my list of stuff that I don't like. But I stick to my guns and I say, sorry, don't want to hear it. And then I go around the room and I ask everyone else in the room to say what they liked about that individual's speech. And there's always half a dozen things or more that people like in someone else's speech. So part of learning how to be a great speaker is learning a little detachment so that you can look at yourself and figure out what is working. When I look at the top speakers in the world, the most successful TED Talk speakers, it's very easy to go in and have a checklist of a hundred different things you're supposed to have in speeches and things you're not supposed to have, things I even agree with and see where these wildly successful speakers made mistakes, made blunders, weren't perfect, and yet they may have tens of millions of people who watch their TED Talk or who watch their presentation in other avenues. Why? It's not because they avoided blunders, it's because they did a few things. Well, you've heard me say these before. Forgive me if it sounds redundant, but it's amazing how often people constantly want to ignore the most important things and fixate on tiny little irrelevant things. The big picture is have ideas that are genuinely interesting and useful to your audience. Tell stories to make those ideas memorable. Say it with some passion. If you do those things, it just doesn't matter how many common blunders you make. Amy Cuddy, someone I've criticized on this show for some of her philosophies and so called research about how to speak more effectively using a Wonder Woman pose. I actually want to compliment how well she speaks, but I do want to point out that she does something that most speaking experts would say is a mistake. She speaks a little too quickly in the first half of her speech. In her TED Talk, which has had a bazillion views and is the second most viewed TED Talk of all time. Obviously a huge success. It obviously resonated with a lot of people. People remember it. Why? She had one big idea. She revealed personal stories that were compelling, interesting and memorable. And she said it with emotion that trumps all the other flaws. You can point out. Other speakers who are captivating, memorable, but have uhs and ums. Oprah, Martha Stewart. They speak with uhs and ums sometimes. They're still successful communicators. So I want to challenge you, all of you who click on articles on the Huffington Post and Facebook top 10 speaking blunders to avoid. And I do want to apologize by using that same gimmick on the title of this show. But I do want you to realize being a great speaker is not about being perfect. With some hundred point checklist of did you move your hands 10 degrees between 10 and and 2? Did you have 0 ums? Did you have perfect eye contact at all times? It's not about speaking in a way that's devoid of blunders. This isn't a six sigma get rid of all mistakes type of situation when you're speaking. What it really is about is can you do just one or two things well, focus on your strengths and it just doesn't matter. I've seen speakers who were viewed as the best speakers of an entire convention. They had ums and uhs, forgot what they were going to say from time to time, and their shirt tail was hanging out. But you know what? They had interesting ideas. They cared about their audience. They looked at their audience. They didn't read to their audience a bunch of boring PowerPoint slides, and they illustrated their points with stories. And their audiences loved them. If you don't have interesting messages, if your messages are self serving, if you don't have stories, well, yeah, people will start counting your flaws. Oh, TJ said seven ums so far. Let's keep a running Cali. Oh, DJ almost tripped over his cord. He shouldn't have been walking. Yeah, I guess it's possible people will make a running tally of your official blunders sometimes. But that's not your problem. Your problem was you didn't have the good stuff to begin with. Think of it as a restaurant. If you give people food that is the absolute greatest food they've ever had in their whole life. They'll often put up with bad or surly waiters or waitresses. They might put up with the fact that your location isn't in a great place. They might put up with the fact that you're closed on certain nights when they want to go out to eat. If you have the absolute tastiest meals ever, you could still succeed as a restaurant. But if you have the most beautiful restaurant in the world, very attentive waiters, great lighting, great music, but you have no food and no drink, you're not going to last very long. Or if you're only serving frozen dinners that have not been thawed and cooked, it's not going to matter how many other things technically you did right. Oh, good signage, nice menu, good mood music, good light. None of that is going to matter if your food is actually horrible. And when it comes to public speaking, your food, that's your ideas, your passion. You bring to it the stories you have to make it memorable. So please stop focusing on avoiding blunders and start focusing on making your ideas come alive. Be interesting and memorable. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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