Ep 145 Anonymous Feedback Can Make You a Better Public Speaker May 24, 2016

I walked off the stage and I knew I had just nailed it. One of my best speeches ever. Or was it.

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So in early 2016, I was asked to give a presentation to the Reagan Media Conference here in New York City. Group of professional PR professionals, professional communicators, a great audience for me, frankly, for what I do. Also a good target for the sorts of people who end up hiring me. So I'm always happy to speak at places like that. I gave the presentation and frankly, I thought it was as good as I could do. I won't say perfect, but it went exactly as I had hoped for. Plan, great engagement with the audience. They seemed receptive. Laughter, applause. Afterwards, people came up to me, said they liked it. And I practice what I preach. I always tell people, don't just say thank you. If someone tells you you gave a great presentation, they might be lying. They might be telling you what you want to hear. What I recommend and what I did that day is I say thanks. Tell me, what do you remember? What do you take away? And sure enough, people remember the specific stories and the messages behind them. Create your content on video, distribute video regularly. Very specific messages I had from this audience. And I was pleased that basically two thirds of the people came up to me afterwards, gave me a business card, said they wanted more information from me. And those who were willing to talk to me and had time really did throw back specific messages. So I was feeling great. So it wasn't just general praise, it was me testing. But there are other forms of testing as well. One source which can be incredibly helpful is anonymous feedback. Now fast forward five or six weeks and I get the research from the Reagan conference people where they anonymously ask people to fill out forms. They send it to me, and I'm thinking, wow, this is fantastic. I can't wait to read this. Can't wait to see all these glowing reviews about how wonderful I am. So I open it up and I have it here in front of me. I'll just share with you the reviews. So I'm looking at the reviews. TJ Walker content. 2.86% of respondents ranked me as poor, not average or below average, but poor. 22% rated me as average. Now, in my delivery, 2.86% said I was poor, poor delivery. 20% said that my delivery was average. Ho ho. Now, in fairness, it was a fairly small sample size, and that was one person who gave me the below average. The poor. 42% said I was excellent. 45% my content. 45% said the delivery was excellent. I would have certainly hoped for 95 or 100% excellent. Now here's some of the comments. TJ contradicted several things the other speaker said. He kind of threw the other speaker under the bus, which didn't sit with me. TJ walked around a lot and has an okay delivery but not very positive. And it made me reflect and think, what did I do that actually was perceived as throwing the other speaker under the bus? Cause I liked the other speaker. I thought he did a number of things well. I do remember disagreeing on one or two of the points, but not in any way that was particularly critical with the host. But part of what I stress and I try to practice myself is no one's perfect. Your own perceptions aren't necessarily as relevant as the perceptions of your audience. So I wrote to the other speaker. I said, bob, I see this comment from some of the audience that I threw you under the bus. If I did so, I'm sorry, do you know what it was you're talking about? Now he wrote back and whether he was just being nice to me or not, I don't know. But he said, no, you didn't throw me under the bus. I thought everything went extremely well for both of us. So I don't know that I learned something there to improve. But the process of sort of stepping back, thinking maybe I didn't do everything right, really listening to an audience member reflecting on it, doing a little more research to figure out, could you have done something better, I think is helpful. And I'm still going to sort through this Other comments that I received. Again, not all of them particularly positive. I didn't find TJ's presentation anything really new. In fact, I felt like the title was a bit misleading. Now that was one comment and certainly doesn't make me happy to hear that. By the way, there were a number of other comments that were positive but generic. You know, T.J. was great. Nothing I can really do with that. I thought the speakers were great. TJ was dynamic and engaging. I mean, it's nice to hear that, but you can't really build on that as far as getting specifics. So a couple of points I want to share with you from this whole exercise and how I think it can help you in the future. More on that in a moment.

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So, a couple of big points here. Number one, no one is loved by everyone in the audience. I don't care who you are, you could be Ronald Reagan in his prime, Bill Clinton. There's always going to be someone who might fall asleep. Not like you. Not like the tone of voice, how you look, your hairline. There's always someone in an audience who just doesn't like you. You can't lose a lot of sleep over one person or even two people really disliking you. So as much as I don't like the fact that this one person thought I was just poor, I had to look at this in perspective. 44% of the audience said I was excellent and I'm going to have to look at the bigger picture. So overall, I'm still pleased with the response, but there is room for improvement. And that's why I do take feedback seriously. I always read it and I would recommend to all of you, listen to criticism, listen to feedback. Don't be too quick to just write it off. I took this criticism seriously. I took the time to think about it more and to reflect. Now, let me tell you the particulars of the situation. The speaker before me had asked me to critique him as a part of what I do, knowing that that's what I'm all about. And so here's what I did. I started off the presentation and I said, I mentioned the other speaker's name. I said, that was a great speech. We heard from my colleague, right, round of applause. Everyone said, yes. And then I said, or was it? I'm not going to judge, but I want to put it to a test because I'm a big believer that testing is what makes any speech, any media message, any presentation more effective. And I just went around the room to a couple of people, I said, tell me every message you remember from the previous speaker. And then I went to the speaker and said, are you happy with what they got? If you are, then it was a great speech. If you're not, then it means there's sign of improvement. So that's the same thing I do in trainings where people are frankly paying me a lot of money in small groups is I test. So it's a very important concept to me. I didn't go into the presentation thinking I would do that. It was something that Came to me just a minute or two before we started. So I made a spontaneous decision. Sometimes those will work, sometimes they won't. Sometimes it'll work really well with most of the audience, but one or two people don't like it. These things can be judgment calls. My big advice to you though is don't eliminate something just because one or two people don't like it. If you go into every presentation just thinking about how do I avoid criticism? You're going to end up with something pretty bland, pretty boring, pretty mush filled, and that's not good at all. The other lesson is most of us have either too high an opinion of ourselves or too low an opinion of ourselves when we're speaking. You want to have an accurate opinion. You want to accurately perceive how you're coming across. I would have thought that a higher percentage than 45% thought I was excellent that day. And so my perceptions were a little bit out of whack. I was giving myself too much credit. But sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes people feel like, oh, I was awful, I was average, I was boring and the audience loved it. You want to get an accurate sense of how they're coming across. The other thing is try to, if you ever have the situation or the power to construct the questionnaire, ask people what they remember from the presentation. Now I give credit to the folks at Reagan. They didn't have the standard sort of evaluation like rate this speaker on a one to five scale with five being excellent. That I find not particularly meaningful because someone can just have a bunch of applause lines, tell people what they want to hear, have a smile and a good laugh, get fives, and frankly not be very good speakers in any meaningful way. And sometimes people can really deliver great content that's memorable but get low marks because of some particular quirk they have. So I would recommend ask your audience, what do they remember from the speakers? What will they do differently after having listened to the speaker? That's incredibly useful because other things like fair and good. Fair, a fair rating can mean great in someone's mind. It can mean almost failing in another person's mind. So try to ask more open ended questions when you are evaluating speakers. And I realize it's a little messier to read and collate, but ultimately it's going to be more helpful to you as a speaker to improve. It's also going to be more helpful to the organizers trying to figure out who to invite next year and what really worked and what didn't work. Hope that's helpful. Tips and I hope that you can get independent anonymous feedback on your presentations from time to time. And by the way, all of you are more than welcome to give me anonymous feedback on this show. Because if you go to itunes you can leave a review. And you don't have to leave your name. So if you haven't done so yet, please leave a review. I'd love to hear from you. And as much as I would love nothing but all nice reviews, sometimes it is the ones that have specific criticisms that can be most helpful. Because the most helpful criticism I've received so far on my itunes review of this show is someone pointed out correctly that I have a tendency to mispronounce presentation. For whatever reason I call it presentation and the word is presentation. That still sticks out to me as one of the most helpful useful reviews ever. So please leave a review here. Love to hear from you. Thanks again as always. May all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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