Ep 209 Is the Ego the Enemy in Public Speaking July 27, 2016

Is the ego the enemy of public speaking?

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 that was recently posed by Dr. Nick Morgan, one of the most reputable public speaking communications consultants in the world. Someone. I read all of his blog postings. You can read his full column on this topic at Public Words. Just search that in Google and you'll find his excellent bar. I think he's on to something. Ego is a huge, huge problem for public speakers at many, many levels. Let me just enumerate some of these. Part of it is just going on way too long. If I love the sound of my own voice and I'm told I have an hour to speak and next thing you know, 90 minutes have gone by and I'm having so much fun. Often that's about my ego. So no matter how brilliant you think you are, no matter how much you think your audience loves you, you need to really respect time limitations. Because no matter how much people love you, they may have planes to catch, trains to catch other appointments. There may be another speaker scheduled right after you. So by all means, be highly respectful of time limitations. The more insidious aspects of how ego destroys public speaking, I believe, is people worrying about feeling stupid, not looking smart, not looking like they know everything. So they overcompensate by trying to tell people every single thing they know. Here's the reality. No one else in the world has to know everything you know. If they did, they'd have your job. So when you're giving a speech, a presentation, or a talk, so much of what you should be doing as a good speaker is eliminating everything your audience doesn't absolutely have to know. That's so much of the job of a good speaker. Bad speakers typically put everything in. And that's the so called death by PowerPoint. When you see slide after slide after slide of data point after data point, that's about the person's ego. That's about the person saying, uh, oh, I'm scared. I'm afraid somebody's going to think I'm stupid. So if I just tell people everything I know, if I cover everything, I will have covered my you know what, and no one can criticize me. Here's the problem that creates more criticism. The biggest criticism of course, being that was a boring, deadly dull data dump. I remember nothing. And instead of what did I do? I checked email. Oh, here's an interesting email. Let me tune out from this speaker for the next hour and answer my Boss on email. That's the far and away the biggest problem most people have and why their ego gets into trouble. Let's talk about another area where ego really harms people, and that is the lack of willingness to practice on video. I hear this all the time from clients. Oh, I love to rehearse, but there's no time. That's a lie. There's always time for anything that's important. If there's no time to rehearse, then there should be no time to give the presentation. There should be no time to create slides. And yet somehow you found time to give the presentation. You found time to perhaps create slides. Ego gets into it because people say, oh, I don't want to look at myself. I hate my own voice. Guess what? Nobody else cares about your voice. As long as they can hear you and understand what you're talking about, nobody cares about your voice. That is the reality. The other thing is people say, oh, I hate looking at myself. Well, guess what? Your audience has to look at yourself. I could certainly look at a video of myself and say, oh, my God, T.J. what happened to you? You were good looking in 1979. Now your hair's falling out, you're getting jowls, your eyebrows are balding. Sure, I can do that. Anybody can do that. Well, maybe not the same specifics, but if you're any age, you can always look to a video of yourself and say, something's less than perfect. I don't care how beautiful or handsome you are. But again, here's the problem. Your audience doesn't care. They simply want you to come across as interesting, engaging, memorable. There's simply no other way to do this than to practice on video. Next. Big blunder people make is, is they spent way, way, way, way, way too much time at the beginning of their presentation establishing their credibility. Well, let me tell you about me and my history and the books I've written and all of my clients and my background. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Again, for the most part, nobody cares. They've either determined before they sat in front of you that you were credible. Perhaps you're their boss and they had to for fear of being fired. They perhaps they're at a conference. There were 20 other speakers. Now, they picked you because they liked your background. They read it in the program. I'm not saying you can never talk about yourself, but it should not be the first thing you do. You should always focus on something valuable for your audience. More on this in a moment.

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We've all seen speakers who at some point appeared to have some level of confidence. Maybe they had good eye contact. Maybe they walked around the room with confidence. Their slides went smoothly. The slides looked professional. But at some point, as an audience member, you've sized them up and you could tell this person is thinking, me, me, me. Let me tell you how great I am. Let me tell you about all the wonderful things I've done. Me, me. Hold all your questions. It's about me, me, me. And at some point, no matter how competent the person sees audiences tune out, audiences don't fall in love or in like with a speaker like that. On the other hand, we've all seen speakers who are maybe a little rough around the edges. Maybe they say, ah. And occasionally, maybe their shirttail is hanging out, maybe their jacket is wrinkled. But every single time they open their mouth when they are talking, you get the sense that they are 100% focused on you, the audience member. Helping you learn something, helping you get something, helping you improve. Audiences love those speakers because it's not all about the ego. It's not all about how great I am. The speaker is focused on helping you. Their ego is not a part of it. They're focused on you. That's what makes them a better speaker. That's what I believe is important to any great speaker. It's also, believe it or not, something any human being can do. You see your own child about to run in front of a moving truck or car on the street. All of a sudden, everybody's ego goes away. You're running, you're screaming. You don't care what kind of shoes you have on. You don't care if you're half dressed or not. You don't care if your voice is pretty. At that moment, you're just running out, screaming, yelling, trying to do anything, anything you can to help protect that child's life. Now, when you're giving a speech, you shouldn't necessarily be yelling and screaming and running like a mad person out in the street. But my point is the same. When you focus on helping that other person, you don't care about all the other stuff. Not to say you shouldn't care about your appearance or how you sound. But when you are speaking, your primary focus has got to be your audience, not about yourself. That leads me to the last point of where ego gets into trouble, how you handle questions from the audience. A speaker filled with ego is like, hold all questions until I'm through with my presentation. Awful, awful, awful. It's not your presentation, it's the audience's presentation. I believe most of the time. For most people, in most speaking situations, you're far better off letting anybody at any point ask a question and answer it right there. It's not applicable in every situation. If you're the keynote speaker at a convention of 5,000 people, you can't necessarily do that, although you can have a Q and A at the end. But for most people in business, in politics, in government, when you're speaking, quite often there are only 50 people or fewer in the room. You don't have a rigid, rigid time constraint. So by all means, let people ask questions that it's not about you, it's about your audience. Do that. Focus on your audience. They'll forgive your flaws, they'll listen to you more, they'll remember you more. And your ideas and your speech will be a much bigger success. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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