TJ Walker breaks down four rules for better speeches: don't read verbatim, don't turn your back to read slides, rehearse even for ten minutes, and skip the data dump. Narrow it to a few key points.
Chapters
So what are some public speaking rules you should never break? Well, for starters, never, ever, ever read a speech. Good morning. My name is TJ Walker. Do you see how you are already asleep? The hardest thing you could ever do is to read a speech in front of people unless your goal is to put them to sleep. It's a horrible, horrible thing to do. Another rule, never turn your back on the audience and start reading your PowerPoint bullet points. Horrific things to do. Audiences are made up of people. People don't like to be ignored. If you ignore them, they are going to respond in kind by ignoring you. So you're turning your back to look at your PowerPoint. Guess what they're gonna do? Let me check my email. You don't want to lose your audience. The next thing you don't ever want to do is say, this. Would have loved to have rehearsed, but there was no time. Baloney. There is always time to rehearse. If you're not willing to spend 10 minutes rehearsing and you're now speaking to 100 people, what you're really saying is, hey, the thousand minutes of your time is really a lot less important than 10 minutes of my time to rehearse. So you always want to rehearse. The next thing you never, ever want to do is do a gigantic data dump. Now, the number one problem most people have when they're giving a presentation is they say, hey, I don't know what to say. Let me cover my you know what, and dump out everything. So they dump fact after fact after fact, or they're looking at their PowerPoint and there's all this small print. Why is that? Because they didn't take the time to really sit back and contemplate. What does my audience truly have to know here? They didn't do their job editing. You never want to do that. You've got to narrow it down to your top handful of points. That will solve your problem of having the data dump you want to rehearse. That will solve the problem of you being awkward, awful, or boring. Avoid these big stumbling blocks and you'll give a great presentation.
