Feb 13

Dealing with Difficult Audiences

Diane DiRestan from the “Business Presentations” blog wrote an article on dealing with hecklers and difficult audiences. I wanted to reference her blog as well as recount my own experiences on the same topic.

Diane outlines a 3-point strategy for dealing with this type of situatuation: depersonalize, detach, and defuse. Check out her blog for further details. I think she’s absolutely right with her assessment. However, it’s sometimes difficult not to go head-to-head with a heckler and, as a result, set up a competitive dynamic. Although, if it can be avoided, then it absolutely should!

But the very fact that an audience member has heckled immediately makes the situation confrontational and fills the room full of tension which, as a speaker, you have to deal with. As Diane rightly says, if that happens and you can diffuse it with humour then so much the better.

I personally think you need to be able to find a way to end the exchange before it gets out of hand. The best way forward initially is to try and ignore the heckle, especially if it’s in a large audience. People don’t always hear the comment and it may just be you. Therefore if you launch into a vitrolic attack, you may come across as the “baddie” as you have seemingly attacked an innocent party.

But that’s not always possible, as sometimes a section of the audience hears the heckle. Not everyone always hears the heckle, but even so a lot of times the rest of the audience knows that someone has said something. In this situation, I think that if the heckler’s dealt with in a firm, but humorous way and you re-gain the audience’s attention then you can move on.

I was speaking at a charity gig once and had a similar experience. A drunken audience member commented during my speech, I acknowledged what he said, he shut up and I moved on. I actually can’t remember if I got a laugh or not, but the very fact that I was on the ball and acknowledged the situation meant that I was capable of dealing with the situation even if it got out of hand. I asserted my authority.

Whereas the speaker who followed me wasn’t quite so lucky…

He just stayed there and slugged it out with the heckler and continued with his speech. Not only did the heckler get more instense with his vitriol, but other audience members joined in, initially to shout the heckler down.

Then the speaker’s suporters turned on the speaker when it became apparent that he couldn’t read an audience and his speech seemed overly complicated. I felt he should have cut his losses, realised the audience was beginning to turn against him and wound up his speech. Instead he carried on for 20 minutes after being heckled about 7 minutes in.

What to do in that sort of situation? I think that if a heckler “takes hold” and there’s nothing you can do to stop their torrent of abuse and disturbance of your speech then two things have to happen a) you cut your speech short and leave the platform b) the heckler gets ejected.

There are not always people mon hand to eject a heckler in this sort of situation.To my knowledge it’s still common practise in the Jongleurs comedy club chain. But speaking is an entriely different animal. Due to the gladitorial nature of stand-up you expect to be heckled. Not so with speaking.

I think in the above story, the speaker should have realised that his speech was going down like a lead balloon. He wasn’t attempting to entertain the audience; a fatal mistake. I think there has to be a certain amount of entertainment, especially if you’re speaking after dinner and people have drunk some alcohol.

Sometimes losing an audience’s attention is obvious. If people begin quietly chatting amongst themselves, generally it’s you that has made them lose interest. So you need to cut it short and go. Other times, it’s subtle; especially if the audience is sober.

I was in an audience recently at a Toastmasters club watching a 15-minute keynote speech and at a certain point at least 50% of the audience shifted in their seats at the same time! It was a weird experience, especially as I was one of the ones that moved. But when all those people moved together it was like it was rehearsed.

In that sort of a situation I think it becomes necessary to re-capture a restless audience’s attention. This is something that I have mentioned before. Those are the sorts of things that need to be kept an eye on when you’re speaking. Sometimes the audience getting restless or uncomfortable might not be because of the speaker. It could be the environment or something else beyond the speaker’s control.

The thing is to notice that type of situation and “head them off at the pass”, find a way to re-gain their attention before it gets worse and they turn into hecklers. Perhaps the above mentioned speaker could’ve employed The Hancock Manoeuvre?

Feb 06

Is Lots of Stage Time Really the Key to Being a Great Speaker? part 2

So as a sort of follow on from my last post I managed to get myself along to a different Toastmasters club tonight. London transport being what it is I probably would not have made it home if I’d have gone earlier in the week. But I found myself at Canary Wharf Communicators. It’s been on my to visit list for a while as it’s geographically quite close for me.

Not only that but the Vice President of Education , Rory Marriott, made a comment on this blog earlier in the week, so I thought it’d be nice to put a face to the post. It’s always good to be able to know the content of a Toastmasters evening, but have it conducted in slightly different ways in each club. So there’s a sense of familiarity and newness all at the same time.

As soon as I mentioned that I was an experienced Toastmasters I was immediately thrown in the deep end and asked to be a Table Topics Evaluator. Of course, I was more than happy to oblige. I was, however, unaware that I could have been evaluated myself tonight. I was under the impression (from what I’ve been told in the past) that in order to deliver a speech at a Toastmasters club, you have to be a member of that particular club.

his, as it turns out, is not strictly true. Which suddenly opens up a whole world of possibilities. That said, if you’re struggling to get a role at your club and someone from another club waltzes in and gets a speaking role without being a member, you’d be duly miffed.

So in order for it to fully work there would have to be some reciprocation. If you were able to get a speaking role at a different club, in my case if I spoke at Canary Wharf, then my home club, Grosvenor Square would have to offer a Toastmaster from Canary Wharf a role at it’s club. Fair’s fair.

Another interesting thing that Rory and I spoke about in the final part of the evening – the bar afterwards – was that it’s possible to become a mystery speaker at a club during the Evaluations Contests. This is something I’d hadn’t thought ab out befor either. By doing this you get to work on a speech and have 5 people giving you evaluations.

So if it’s a speech that you want to develop further, say it’s from the competent communicator manual, and you’d like to re-visit the subject for an Advanced Manual, then you would know that sort of things that worked in the speech as well as knowing what areas you need to work on as a speaker.

Rory actually wrote an article on that subject which got reprinted over at The London Speaker blog. This is certainly a valuable thing to bear in mind as it’s useful to help you develop your speeches. Not only that but of course it’s of great bebenfit to the club that you go and help out.

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Feb 03

Is Lots of Stage Time Really the Key to Being a Great Speaker?

I recently had a brief email exchange with Darren LaCroix, 2001 World Speaking Champion. He said that I should be speaking once a week at a minimum, even if it’s at Toastmasters. So I’ve decided to take him up on his challenge.

From tomorrow I’m going to visit as many of the London Toastmasters clubs as I can. I was originally a member of two, but had to leave one when I moved to a different part of London, otherwise I would’ve probably been traveling for more than an hour just to get there. So I need to find a secondary club. I know there are two near me as I currently reside in the East End. So I’ll probably pop along to those.

I’d also like to join Excalibur Speakers because they are predominantly a club for Advanced Speakers. But the only thing is they are only a monthly club (most clubs here in London meet twice a month), so that greatly reduces the frequency of stage time. But it would improve my game.

After all, that’s what it’s all ab out – the stage time. The more frequently I get up to speak in front of an audience in no matter what scenario the more my confidence will grow. I’m a pretty confident speaker anyway, my background as a professional actor and a comedian has provided me with the ability to be able to get up in front of a crowd.

But in order for anyone to grow as a speaker that must speak. Kind of makes sense really. If you’re only outlet is Toastmasters use it as the tool that it is. Whether you’re scheduled to do a manual speech, a leadership role, a table topics or you just get to stand up as a guest at the end of the evening and say how much you enjoyed being at the club that evening, stage time is stage time.

When Darren LaCroix was preparing for the World Championship not only did you frequent many different clubs honing his championship speech, but he also took it into comedy clubs too. That way he’d really get to see what bits were working and which bit weren’t.

For those of you who don’t know, LaCroix’s a humorous speaker with a background as a stand-up. So it made complete sense for him to get comedy club gigs and really hone his speech down. So not only did he work out the timing of the laughs, but he also got tonnes and tonnes of stage time.

You’ll find that there are similarities amongst the top speakers in the world. apart from earning large some of money and helping out business or educational establishments. One, is that they write on a daily basis, as Eric Feng pointed out recently over on The Public Speaking Blog. The other is that they speak – frequently. You can’t hope to develop as a stand-up or as a speaker with getting up on to a stage or platform and do the thing that you say you do.

I myself speak fairly frequently. But I think it’ll be nice for me to try and crank things up a notch or two. I’m going to try and track my progress here. But obviously, I might have to take the odd day off from my mission to see my friends and family. With any luck i’ll be able to meet some of the other London speakers that I’ve recently been in touch with via this blog.

Jan 24

Creating Killer Content Off the Cuff, part 2

I never really intended to write a follow up to my previous post Creating Killer Content Off the Cuff, but I have because both myself, and fellow speaker Eric Feng, blogged on the same subject. Eric spoke about the Borden method:

“Ho hum!” (or B-O-R-I-N-G!)
“Why bring that up?”
“For instance?”
“So what?”

and I spoke about how I used a Mind Map in order to quickly create a speech. And I became really intrigued to see how this would work!

With both techniques there isn’t really a lot of time to create a speech, so they are both good to do under pressure. I enclose a copy of my Mind Map.

mindmap-web20

If you know anything about Mind Maps you’ll see that this is not how they are normally done. What usually happens is that this stage where there are mostly circles is the first, idea-generating stage. You get the ideas down as quickly as possible and you try to find how they connect.

Then next stage you would then go on and do a Mind Map proper with the branches and capitalized text providing just a breif encapsulation of your ideas.

But as you can see it was literally just me throwing ideas down on the page because I was busy multi-tasking performing the role of time-keeper as well (and in case anyone’s wondering, I did do the job well).

The speech structure that I use was the traditional Toastmasters/basic speech structure:

– An opening.
– Three points each backed up with at least one example and then
– A conclusion.

In this case I used a technique called “re-open” which Paul Evans author of Instant Speaking Success discusses whereby you end with a mini challenge for your listeners to hopefully spur them into action.

I decided to go ahead and post the Mind Map because of some of the comment exchanges that I had with Eric Feng. I thought that it might be good to see if the Borden technqiue and Mind Mapping can be unified.

Then Eric suggested that I share my Mind Map to see how we can synergise.

(He also mentioned another technique called PREP: Point – Reason – Explanation – Point. This was something that I haven’t heard of and will look into).

But for now it’ll be interesting to see how we can synergise these techniques.

Jan 23

After Dinner Speaking, part 2

I spoke to the President and ex-President at my local Toastmasters club trying to find out how I can go about developing my After Dinner speech that I debuted at the Christmas Dinner at the end of last year. I was hoping that I might be able to use the method that winners of both the humorous speech contest and international speech contest do.

They go around different clubs and work on their speeches before the next round of the competition. But what was pointed out was the fact that the contest winners get special dispensation after winning a certain level. Seeing as I haven’t won the humorous speech contest (yet) then I probably won’t be able to go round to other clubs to develop it. Continue reading