Ep 38 Are You Trying to Make Your Speech Perfect

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

Folks, there are few things in life that have a higher chance of complete, unmitigated failure than trying to be perfect when it comes to a speech. I see this with my clients all over the world, and they try to write and rewrite and rewrite their speech and redo their PowerPoint slides 50,000 times. Everyone review it, critique it. And what I have found is the more someone attempts to make a speech perfect, the higher the error ratio is in the final delivery. I'm going to go through all the reasons why I say this in just a moment, but let's start with some of the basics.

Body language.

For starters. The body language is destroyed if you're trying to get a speech just right and perfect. Often that means you are reading it. When you are reading it, your head goes down, your face goes blank. You lose all eye contact with the audience. You start to sound mechanical, flat, monotone. Those of you listening to me can hear that I don't sound very good right now. Those of you watching this on the television side of this program, all you're seeing is sort of my bald head. You think, wow, TJ's lost even more hair than the last time, and it's completely uninteresting. So that's the problem. That's one of the common things people do because they want to be perfect, is they try to read the speech. Let me tell you, folks, that is not for amateurs. The hardest thing you can ever do, in my view, is to read a speech and actually do well. Unless your goal is to put people to sleep. The second you read a speech, you may technically get the words right, but you destroy all body language. You destroy your ability to use your voice to its full potential. You destroy so much of your ability to engage the audience. You certainly destroy your ability of sounding conversational, interesting, and authoritative. You lose your ability to walk around and move. So you basically destroy so much of what your speech was set out to help you do. So I certainly do not recommend that you ever read a speech. Now, the next problem people have is with trying to be perfect, is they convince themselves that their speech isn't really a speech, it's a PowerPoint document. So they start to refer to their presentation, their debt, their slide deck, as their speech, as their pre. How's that presentation going? Oh, fine. We're on slide 23. We're going over the last revisions. The second you tell yourself that the slideshow is your presentation the game is over, folks. You have already lost. You are basically guaranteed to be a complete, total disaster as a presenter. The presentation, for those of you new to this program, is you actually speaking. It's not the slide deck. Now, it's not. Because I'm anti slide decks. I love slide decks. I use them all. Some of my best friends are slide decks. But if you want to actually come across as a compelling, interesting, authoritative speaker, you have to speak. You have to speak in a way that's understandable and interesting, that isn't dependent on slides. So how does this perfection thing snowball in a way that really ends up in a disaster? I've seen it. If I've seen it once, I've seen it a thousand times. People tell themselves, well, or me. They'll say, well, T.J. we're happy to rehearse the speech as soon as we finish the presentation. What they mean by that is they would love, absolutely love to rehearse the presentation on video, as I recommend, but they can't because they have to keep changing a comma here. They have to add a word here. They have to make some tiny adjustment with this slide. They have to add this color coding for a 14th line to talk about how sales have gone up over the last 14 quarters in stores in the southern states. So they want to add more and more complexity and more complexity to the slides, the deck. And maybe if they're writing out, they want to add that too. And so it becomes a never ending process. Because, folks, if you tell yourself that the words have to be perfect and more is better, what happens is you will be editing that speech, changing that speech, refining that speech until literally the second you're walking up. And I mean literally. Actually, literally, not figuratively. I've seen people do it. You're literally changing the speech until a second before they are walking up to give it. If you do that, guess what? Not only are you not going to be perfect, you're going to be awful. Because if you're fixating and focusing all of your time on the text on the slides, it means you're giving 0% of your attention to your performance skills, of how it actually sounds, of how it comes out. Now, I'm not one of these horrifically awful presentation coaches who misquotes the 1972 study from UCLA which purports to show that 93% of all communication is how you say it and your body language. That isn't true. But I can tell you if you focus 100% of your time on the words and every aspect of how you move, sound, talk, your voice is awful because you're reading or you're saying it for the first time, then you are going to be an awful speaker. There's absolutely no doubt about it. So I beg of you, I plead with you. At some point, if you want your speech to be perfect, then you need to give equal time to preparing the words versus delivering the words. And I don't even have to have equal time. But for goodness sakes, if you've spent a month or two weeks writing and rewriting a speech and you've now spent couple dozen hours on it, then yes, you need to allocate half of an afternoon or four hours in the evening before the speech where you literally speak out loud, capture it on video, watch it, figure out what you like, what you don't like, what works, what does, and do it again, and do it again, do it again, and keep doing it until you are profoundly happy with it. That way, at least you won't be perfect, but you'll be a lot closer.

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I admire at some level the desire to be perfect in anything. You know, you look at the world's greatest athletes, they're trying to perfect what it is they do. If you look at the world's greatest inventor, they're trying to create some device that is even better than any other device that's in their field. But when it comes to speaking, I think people have their priorities wrong. Because if you want to be the world's greatest athlete, if you want to be the world's greatest sprinter or 100 meter runner, you got a way of measuring it. You can practice, you can work with a coach, but every single day, you can sit there with a timer. And if your time is getting better, you know you're doing something right, your training is paying off. If you're creating a new consumer, a new phone. If you're with Apple 10 years ago and you create a phone and you go from basically zero sales to billions of sales, well, then you've got some metrics for saying, okay, I guess this iPhone thing worked, we could continue to improve, continue to refine it, continue to make it better, continue to perfect it. But we're actually hearing from the marketplace every day from people who buy it or they don't like it, if they're sending it back, how to improve it. In fact, when the very first iPhone did come out, I did buy it and I found it was impossible to type on. I threw it away and I disparaged Apple and I went back to a Palm Trio. This is a long time ago, folks. But then they got better. I went back to it. And now it's really, frankly, hard for me to imagine not having an iPhone. Point is, they learned, they refined, they got better. When people tell me they want their speech to be just right, I never see the refinement process of what the actual product is. Again, if I'm making a phone, the phone is not just diagrams of electrical circuits on a computer. The phone is not a theory, the phone is not a concept. The phone is something will actually end up in a consumer's hand and they talk to it, or they type on it, or they text on it. This is the final product. When it comes to you giving a speech or a presentation, the final product is you actually speaking. People in a room staring at you, and maybe they're looking at a slide deck behind you. Maybe not. Maybe you've emailed it, maybe you're giving handouts, but it's still your presentation. It's you speaking. So whatever you do, when it comes to holding yourself up to these higher standards, it doesn't work if you haven't really put your finger on what it is. The thing that is trying to be perfect. Why does anyone care if the slide deck is just right or it's been refined 10,000 times, if the way you said it is incredibly uninteresting and boring and unmemorable. So that's why I'm begging you, if you're going to have high standards, you've got to figure out what it is you're actually judging. I understand the legal department in your corporation or your government agency may think the slide deck is the most important. And I'm not suggesting you put things out that are willful misinformation or illegal or cause you legal problems. But folks, that's not the big problem people have with constantly futzing around with their PowerPoint slides. The problem is this faction of the organization wants to add this. This one wants to take it out. People want this included. That's fine for a document that you email to people or hand out, but that isn't literally your presentation. Now, what I recommend to all of my clients, and believe me, not all of them do it, is if you're going to use a PowerPoint, have two presentations, one that consists exclusively of images, pictures, a simple graph if it illustrates one point to show when you're Speaking. And then the traditional PowerPoint with lots and lots of facts, numbers, bullet points, charts, columns that you email to people in advance. You hand it out, you make it available on your website, but you don't literally project it and put it up on a big screen while you're talking. And then if people want to continue changing that, fine. But that's not going to stop you from practicing your speech from a simple paper outline. Practicing talking. Making sure you really put a spotlight on the ideas you care about the most. Making sure you have interesting ideas, memorable ideas, because you've illustrated them with stories and that you're comfortable bringing up images at the appropriate time to further cement in the minds of the audience what your ideas are, and then have all the other stuff you want to give to people. That's really the most effective way. A to use power of point B. To be closer to perfect than you might otherwise be. By the way, there's really no such thing as a perfect speech. Show me someone who gave a perfect speech. Give me the video. I guarantee you I can go through and pinpoint something where I think, okay, this could have been done a tiny little bit better this way, or some other critic can't point it out. Your goal, in my view, should not be to give a perfect speech. Your goal should be to put a spotlight on a handful of ideas that are really important to you and make it understandable and memorable to your audience. Using every tool you can. And then if you have a whole lot of other backup tools, materials, information, data, slides. Yeah, you want it to be accurate? Give that too. That's not your presentation, and it's certainly not a perfect presentation. I'm TJ Walker. May all of your presentations in life be not necessarily perfect, but successful.

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