Ep 33 Public Speaking Feedback Is Over-Rated

Is public speaking feedback overrated?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

A common question I receive from my own clients is, tj, what is the best way to get feedback from colleagues, friends, family, other people I choose to share a speech with or a speech rehearsal with? This is a tricky, tricky issue. I certainly don't want to sound like I'm dismissing all feedback, but I do want to give you some guidance on how to use feedback because a lot of feedback, frankly, is not helpful and will actually steer you in the wrong direction. Let's start right here.

Body language.

For starters, you're going to get a lot of bad feedback from well meaning friends, family members, others on body language. Because somewhere, a long time ago, someone read somewhere that, oh, a professional speaker isn't supposed to move his or her hands. Professional speaker is supposed to stand behind the lectern, feet planted, and not move around because that would be distracting. Folks, this is horrific, horrific advice. So I caution you, when sharing a video of yourself or practicing a speech in front of people, be careful of the advice you get. Now listen to all of it. And certainly if someone is giving you advice on your body language, saying, I don't know if you realized it, but you scratched your left cheek for 30 seconds every other minute of the whole speech. And it made me wonder if you just gotten eaten by a bunch of mosquitoes. Certainly, if that's the advice you get, yeah, I would listen to that. If someone says you're constantly jangling the change in your pocket and that's distracting, well, yeah, I would listen to that and I would take that seriously. But by and large, what I have found is that most well meaning people who give feedback to friends, family members, colleagues, associates, they give bad advice because they're telling you not to move your hands, not to move around as much. And there's simply no evidence that audiences will respond to you better if you're frozen, if you're stiff, in fact, they'll come away with the impression that you're much, much less comfortable. Other big problems with asking people for advice, they either just give you something. It's so general, oh, you were great, everything is wonderful, good job, and maybe you were awful. So that's one of the problems is that someone wants to build up your confidence and this tells you everything's great. Well, there's nothing meaningful there. The other thing is that the criticisms they give you are not particularly valid. I really think your logo should be on the top right hand side of your screen, not the lower left hand side of your PowerPoint slide. And the person may have all sorts of theories on that and may have a valid point or two, but it's almost completely irrelevant to whether that is going to make your speech any better. So much of the criticism people have, again, it's well meaning, but it's about things that do not fundamentally matter. I want to give you really the single biggest tip you need to know about getting criticism in just a moment. So please stay tuned.

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The single biggest way you can benefit from criticism and feedback from friends, family members, colleagues, associates is to ask a different sort of question. Don't ask them, what should I improve? What's wrong? Rip it apart, tell me what you think I did wrong. That's what people often ask. Not particularly helpful. Here is the question you need to ask people. What do you remember of the messages of my speech? Ask them that if you're using slides. Ask them what slides they remember and what messages they take away from that. Those are really the two most important questions you can ask someone who has volunteered or you've convinced them to give you feedback. Because ultimately, if someone is telling you, oh, I didn't like the way you walked around stage, but they remember all the messages that were important to you and they remembered your slides and they remembered the most important facts and the takeaway and what you wanted them to do, then you should be on cloud nine. You should be so happy. That is an a success rate that puts you, believe me, in the top 1% of speakers. If people can do that, if they can throw back in your face what your messages were, that means you communicated. That's actually a rare thing to happen. Now, here's what I find happens most of the time. You give your standard business presentation or government or UN presentation and you ask a colleague to give you feedback. Perhaps you're practicing, just the two of you, @ lunchtime in an empty conference room. You give them your whole presentation, you ask them for feedback, and let's say you asked them what I asked you to tell me. Bill, what do you remember about my presentation? Well, T.J. you know, you come across very comfortable, confident, you clearly know what you're talking about and I feel good about you. Now, if that's what Bill says about my speech, what do I think about that? At first glance, it's all complimentary. That's great, wonderful. That's certainly the impression I wanted to leave. But let's take a little deeper. If that's all he can tell me about my speech, that means my speech was a complete, utter failure. Means I didn't communicate anything. If Bill can't tell me exactly what my messages were and exactly what my feed, what, what I wanted to get back from him, specific facts, specific messages, numbers, data points, action items, if he can't tell me exactly what I was trying to get across, well, then I didn't communicate. Because here's the thing. People, friends, family members, colleagues who are giving us feedback on our speech could lie to us. They could tell us, oh, you were great, you were really comfortable. Even if they thought we were awful and boring, they could lie to us. Not out of some sense of trying to con us into anything, but they just want to spare our feelings. But they really can't lie to us when it comes to remembering something if we said it in a boring, unmemorable way. If they don't remember it, they can't lie and say they did remember it. If we ask them an open ended question of what do you remember from this speech? The best way to really leverage the comments, the feedback from friends, family members, colleagues, as you're preparing your speech, or even if you're giving it and the audience afterwards and asking them, is to find out, what did they remember? I place that as the highest value. They may say, well, I really disliked the way you raised your hands too high. I really don't care about that. That is such a minor, minor, irrelevant thing. I didn't think your suit was flattering today. I, I'll listen to all that. But let's not lose sight of the fundamental goal of giving a presentation. Your goal is to get ideas from inside your head, inside the head of your audience members so they understand the idea and they remember the idea so that they can in fact act upon the ideas and do what you want. Everything, and I mean everything, should be subservient to that. So if I'm giving a speech and someone remembers that, I'm telling them, if you're giving a speech, you've got to narrow your message down to a handful of ideas. You've got to illustrate each one with a story. You've got to practice on video till you love your speech. If they remember that, and maybe they think I'm rude or condescending, or they don't like my hair, I frankly don't care if they actually remember those ideas, there's a much better chance they can act on them. So I want to hear from you. That's really what comes up.

Next. Your.

Questions. I want to hear from you. Your questions about this. What other questions do you have about getting feedback from friends, family members, colleagues? And I have a question for you. What has been the most helpful feedback you've ever gotten from someone, either watching a rehearsal from you or watching your actual speech? I want to know exactly what it was. I also want to the second question I don't typically ask you a second what's some of the worst feedback you got? Was it something that said, oh, you know, you're looking a lot fatter these days? Is it something that just knocked you upside the head and just pulled all the confidence right out of you? I'd like to know what that is too, so please let me know. As always, you can send your questions and your thoughts and your responses to these directly to me. Infoediatrainingworldwide.com you can post them on Twitter. JWalker is my handle there. You can post it on Facebook, YouTube, any of the social media outlets where we are. I do want to know your response to that. Those two questions. What's the best feedback you ever got from someone? And also, what was the worst feedback I'd like to hear from you? Don't forget any other questions you have, please send those to me and we'll address these in future issues. This show is a little bit different from most of the other public speaking podcast video programs you see on YouTube for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's exclusively devoted to answering your questions about public speaking, media training, presentation training, crisis communications. Really, any time you have to speak to someone, how do you do that more effectively? So we answer every one of your questions. The second area where we're different is we're here for you every single day. Now, you don't have to listen or watch every single day, but I'm here for you. Which means we have the time to really go deep and to include you. So it's not like a once a week show where only two questions get answered and the chances of you ever getting a question answered are slim to nil. For right now, until I tell you otherwise, we'll answer every single question, unless it's a question we just dealt with in the last week. And I would say shame on you for not listening or paying attention. I don't expect you to listen or to watch every single show, but certainly if you subscribe and then every so often when you are there on your phone or your iPad and looking at your podcast, you could just sort of quickly scroll through all the topics of the last week and check on the ones that you think are of the greatest interest to you. So thanks again. By the way. This is coming to you for the most part commercial free. But here is an ad I'd like you to pay attention.

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Mediatrainingworldwide.Com. One other small technology item I should have mentioned to you as it relates to getting feedback and criticism from people is the best thing is probably going to be to just get them into the same room with you Conference room at lunchtime. Practice your speech. Practice what you want to say for your media interview. But don't forget good old fashioned technology of your these days it's old fashioned your cell phone. Just practice your speech on cell phone or on an iPad or a laptop. Record your practice speech, then send it to a friend, ask them to watch it. Don't tell them you want a full detailed critique because then they're going to want to say oh, you had three ums the entire time and that's awful and you need to ring a bell again. Stay away from that sort of nonsense. What I'd recommend just ask them to watch it once, call them and I would call rather than email or text. Sorry for you millennials who think I'm an idiot for actually calling someone, but the reason I want to call them is then ask them what do you remember? If you email or text somebody, what do you remember from that practice video and they don't remember anything. Then in an attempt to help you or be nice or build you up, they they might go back and watch the video again, take notes and put it in there. Well, that's an unfair advantage for you because your audience, your public speaking audience in real life isn't going to rewind the video and go back and take notes. So if someone who watched a practice video of your speech can't get it just after one viewing, that's helpful information. That's useful information because that means the actual real life audience isn't going to remember it. So please remember the video practice isn't just for you. It's also an excellent tool for getting more feedback from family, friends, colleagues. In a note about family, I should have mentioned this earlier. In general would use family as a last resort. Now some of you have family members, spouses that are close advisors to you and you truly value their response. But be careful because too often other issues get involved. A spouse could say, well, what'd you wear that tie for, T.J. that's ugly. And then I say, well, what do you mean you gave me that tie. I told you I never liked it. But it can be too personal. It can be too close. So I recommend a professional colleague, someone whose mindset is similar to the audience you're facing and there's at least a little bit of distance between you as opposed to a close family member. But if you have a close family member who you value their advice, by all means listen to them. But I want to caution you, great advice when it comes to speaking is not the person who can rip you apart the most and tell you you had seven ums and you licked your lips once. The best advice is going to come from people who tell you what was most memorable. That is our goal. First and foremost, please don't forget, I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge.

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