Speak with E’s. Be a speaker of influence, not control or guilt. With the privilege of the platform comes the awesome responsibility of motivating and influencing your audience to feel/think/act differently.
- Educate: Provide your audience with extensive information on your topic. This will empower attendees to feel competent and knowledgeable. Support your points with stories. Stories help us see through the eyes of other people. Adults delineate their thoughts visually.
- Entertain: Give them the facts laced with a good dose of humor. Adults learn better when they are lightening up! Here's the place for some magic tricks, handwriting analysis, or a song.
- Experience: Get the audience involved. When they interact, they get it better, and retain it longer. Group exercises, simple questions and answers, role-plays.
- Enthusiasm: Vary your tone of voice, smile often, and show passion for your subject matter. Make your body language reflect your comments.
- Example: Be the speaker/person who motivates the audience to admire and respect you. You have succeeded when people say, I want to be like him/her.
- Encourage: Be supportive to your audience, believe in them. Acknowledge them. Say, I did it and so can you.
- Excellence: Hold yourself accountable for excellence. And then help your audience be accountable and live up to its potential. Speakers need to give audiences what they need, not what they want.
- Expertise: Demonstrate that you know your stuff. Speak about what you know from your business background, personal experiences, and research. Be perceived as an expert on your topic.
- Eloquence: Deliver your speech with high energy, sincerity, inspiration, and a sense of humor. Are you one of a kind? What makes you different from your competitors?
- End result: You want to energize your audience to take some risks, some action, go to the edge, and execute. . .make their dreams come true, or get the job done. Your information should be useful and immediately applicable to their lives.
This is a guest blog post by Sandra Schrift, president/owner of CoachSchrift and Associates, a San Diego based consulting, training and coaching firm. Since 1996, Sandra has been coaching speakers who want to become highly paid professional speakers as well as executives and business professionals who want to develop persuasive presentations.
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