Jan 15

Creating Killer Content Off the Cuff

I was at my Toastmasters club Grosvenor Speakers, this past Monday night. I was in the role of Time-Keeper. For anybody reading this blog unfamiliar with any of the support roles at Toastmasters use the previous link.

I had taken on this role because I have yet to do the role and also I need to complete my Competent Leadership manual (I didn’t previously get myself evaluated when I took roles on in the past hence having to play catch up now).

The president of the club mentioned before the evening began a speaker had dropped out and asked anyone (i.e.: me) if they had a speech. I didn’t have one prepared. Lesson learnt: always have a speech ready to go to pull out of the bag at short notice!

I thought about it for a few minutes and came up with a subject that I was really interested in: Web 2.0. I’m still learning lots about this subject, but I already know a fair amount about blogs, Myspace and Facebook. I am in no way an expert on this subject, but I am certainly passionate about it and a keen student!

So on the back of my club’s programme of events I Mind Mapped a speech. I gave it an effective three-point Toastmasters structure, an opening and a closing. Each point I made, I backed it up with examples.

Every spare moment I had between timing the different parts of the evening (which wasn’t many) I looked over the Mind Map. When I was announced as the second speaker for the evening I took the Mind Map with me and went to the stage.

I glanced at my notes once, just before starting then I launched into my speech.

It flowed smoothly and never dropped a beat. I had a pretty good grasp of my subject, so the information flowed. I did my best not to overwhelm people with detail and bit too technical (believe you me, I’m no webmaster).

I made sure that I opened my speech by getting the audience to raise their hands showing me how many people in the room had heard of my subject. It was just under half. So I knew how I had to pitch it.

Around the 7 minute mark I delivered a memorable closer, which rhymed and got me my only laugh of the evening, and I left the stage.

I got some very nice feedback both from my fellow toastmasters as well as my evaluator. I was complimented on my energy and ability to think on my feet.

My main criticism was that I didn’t allow for any pause for thought. Not that I just rattled through my speech at break-neck speed, but that I could’ve taken the time to create more tension in my audience.

It was a fair comment. However, it’s not going to be something that I am overly concerned about as I was making it up as I went along.

I wanted to make sure that I got my message across and had a clear and definite structure, both of which I achieved. I wasn’t bothered about getting laughs. I wanted things to be as clean as possible.

I saw that over at “The Public Speaking Blog” fellow speaker Eric Feng talks about Crafting a Speech in 60 Seconds using a technique by Richard C. Borden. (Edited to note Eric Feng’s blog is no longer active as at 2019) Whilst I know the technique and agree that it is very useful, it’s something that I think is good to have in the toolbox, but not really necessary.

I think that if you know your subject well enough so your passion comes through, you find an angle on how it applies to your listeners (in my case I spoke about the importance of Web 2.0 in terms of public speaking and toastmasters) and you use a solid structure you can certainly create killer content off the cuff!!

Jan 10

After Dinner Speaking – part 1

A few weeks ago I was asked to do a speech at my local Toastmasters club’s Christmas Dinner. I had lots of humorous ideas and access to a plethora of street jokes, but I wasn’t quite clear on what an after dinner speech was.

I googled the term and found the seven golden rules as written by Gyles Brandreth the British author and M.P. who holds the record for the longest after dinner speech.

I already knew a lot of these tips so it was nice to have them re-established for me. The website Wise Geek defines an after dinner speaker as follows:

“After dinner speaking can be seen as an art in itself. The speaker must have the ability to entertain their audience in a captivating manner. Part comedian, part lecturer, the after dinner speaker should have a certain “wow” factor“.

That gave me a lot more to go on. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have a lot of time to create material from scratch and fully react to it like the Killer Stand-up System recommends.

So what I did was come up with a topic that I was interested in and that I thought I also might be able to promote to speaking agencies in the future.

Then I sourced some relevant street jokes and I came up with a structure that would allow them to flow together in a logical order.

From there I incorporated humorous lines that either I had written and used in my old stand-up act, or witty reactions that I’d made a note of from conversations that I’d had. That just meant I went through my ideas notebooks to find those lines and incorporate those too. You do write down your ideas in a notebook, don’t you?

After lots of rehearsal I delivered my speech to my fellow Toastmasters. I nearly “killed them”, but not quite. How do I know that I nearly killed them? Because I recorded my speech onto my dictaphone and then played it, whilst I ran it past the Comedy Evaluator Pro software from the Killer Stand-up System.

Okay, here’s the skinny on this great piece of software. When a performer, whether a speaker or comedian, is in front of an audience there are two things that could be happening:

1) the performer is speaking

2) the audience is responding. the audience response (laughter, cheering, applauding) is referred to as a Positive Audience Responce or PAR.

For comedians the following is often true: headliners are getting 4-6 laughs or more per minute. Therefore their PAR score is in the 30s, 40s or even 50s. An open mike comic often gets a PAR score under 5. So you get the idea.

On the other hand a speaker or presenter who uses comedy aims for a PAR score of 15. So I was very pleased when my speech came in at a respectable 11 PAR.

I’m estimating that it will take me another one or two performances of this speech to get it up to a 15 PAR. That said I do, however, want to reduce the amount of street jokes I use and replace them more and more with my own humorous reactions. So it may take a little longer.

Dec 29

Amazing Public Speaking Skill – The Hancock Manoeuvre

I re-read a great book on public speaking recently and I was reminded of a technique which was the first one I ever used! I’ll give you a brief background on the book and the technique itself before I tell you about my experience with it.

The book I had read was called “Just Say Few Words” and it was by the late British Comedian and After Dinner Speaker Bob Monkhouse. Bob was a great comedian whose style were one-line jokes similar in style to his hero, Bob Hope. According to the book, Monkhouse was at an after dinner event in the 1960s alongside fellow British comedian Tony Hancock.
Continue reading

Nov 20

Seminar Presentations

I came across a public speaking tip by Heidi Miller over at Talk It Up! blog. It works well as a sort of follow on from my last blog post. Heidi talks about seminar presentations. Here’s a quick extract from that article:

Public Speaking Tip #6

“Here’s the thing. For most seminar presentations at conference, you have an hour. You are not going to be able to change our lives in an hour. You are not going to be able to give us 10 things we are going to be able to absorb and implement in an hour. You are not going to be able to change our entire way of thinking about something in an hour…”

She’s absoutely right of course.  Of the speakers I’ve seen who don’t have any specific training other than being in a managerial position, most do exactly this.

They try to cram in a lot of infomation, without sparing a thought for us listeners who might not even know where to begin to implement any suggestions. Or even to understand the exact take away value from what they are telling us.

I certainly learnt something from Heidi’s article.

To read the full article click here.

Oct 28

Gaining an Audiences Attention

When you do public speaking, whether you are getting paid for it or not, you have to realise that an audience’s attention span is short.

I don’t mean to sound dull, but in this day-and-age with MTV-style editing on TV, thousands of channels, the internet people need to be able to flip from one piece of information to the next. I know, because I suffer from this myself.

I find it difficult to watch things on TV when I could be checking emails, blogging, reading a book and so on.

When I used to do stand-up I learned that you needed a string closing line and a strong opening. The rest would almost take care of itself. You need to “grab them by the lapels” to make sure they listen.

But what about during your speech?

I’ve talked elsewhere on this blog about watching dull speakers. Sometime you just need to find ways to wake ’em up!

Tom Antion talks about this very thing:

“After you have created your talk, go through it and make sure that every 2-4 minutes you use some kind of attention gaining device…”

Want to know some of the tips that he recommends? Sign up to his Membership site Amazing Public Speaking.