One Minute Pause No 6

The best speakers in the world not only think of their immediate audience, but of their audience’s audience.

Consider this:

When you have been in an ordinary presentation, you leave the room feeling that it has in no way affected your life.

When you have seen a good presentation, you are usually motivated to act, or respond in a certain way.

When you have seen a truly great presentation, you told other people about it.

So, you were the first audience, but then you tell a whole new audience.

Now, that’s a presentation.

The person who presented to you wanted you to spread the message and ensured that their presentation had maximum certainty of you telling others.

How did they do it? More importantly, how do you do the same?

How do you move from becoming a good presenter, to a great one? How do you give yourself the best chance of your message spreading?

Well, the secret lies in your approach.

When you present, you can do one of two things: you can tell, or you can teach.

The best presenters teach.

They know that the very finest path to creating understanding is to make their message so vivid, so impressionable, that their audience is able to leave the room and spread the word with great accuracy.

The fantastic result of getting a high level of understanding is that your audience, like loyal
foot-soldiers, will spread your message with immediate effect.

So, how do you move from teller, to teacher?

Well, you’re going to have to ask your favourite teacher that.

But here’s 3 pieces of advice that can really help:

1) Clarity
The clearer your presentation, the greater the chance of having your audience tell an audience of their own. As Tom said to Jack in ‘A Few Good Men’; “Tell it to me like I’m 4-year’s old.” This doesn’t mean you have to over-simplify. Just lose the jargon, and cut down the words.

2) Paint a picture
A simple path to understanding is to create a memorable image in the mind of the audience. Use examples, analogies and “imagine scenarios”. I have put one of my favourites heard recently during a workshop into today’s Pregnant Pause.

3) Involve your audience
The wonderful thing about involving your audience is that you can gauge their level of understanding as you move through the presentation. Encourage questions. Examples:
“Daphne, which part of this presentation did you get the most benefit from?” , or “Quentin, how do you see the new system applying to your job?”. In this way they are telling your message back to you, showing a higher level of understanding.

Too often we forget that our direct audience is not the only one we have to influence. There can be key colleagues, managers and decision makers who are the audience of your audience.

Presenting in a teaching fashion, using some steps like the ones above, will give you the maximum chance of having this wider impact.

More on creating audience understanding in future OMPs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005 at 1:34 pm and is filed under One Minute Pause. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.