How to present with purpose when public speaking
by Jaimie Abbott
When you’re public speaking it’s important to present with purpose.
If you are ever asked to do a presentation, or perhaps you put your hand up to be a guest speaker for something, it’s really important that you think about what your purpose is.
Don’t just do it for the sake of getting exposure. Think about who is going to be in the audience when you’re public speaking and think about what purpose are you going to serve for that audience. So really ask yourself the following questions:
What is the main objective of my talk?
What am I here to give?
What am I here to share?
How do you want people to feel?
What do you want people to do for themselves?
Am I raising awareness about something?
Am I reinforcing a perception?
Am I reassuring people of some sort of fear that’s out there?
What’s your call to action?
So it’s really important when public speaking to take a step back and think about what you want people to think, feel, or do after they see your presentation. When they walk out the door, what’s the call to action?
You need to be very honest and it may be something like you want people to call you up and get a quote because they’re really excited by this opportunity! Or, they’d like to know more.
So you’re stirring some sort of motivational feelings inside of them that want them to take action, you’re painting a picture for them to see. There’s a lot of different purposes that you can have with your presentations. But the bottom line is you should be really clear with yourself on what you’re hoping to achieve and what do you want people to do for themselves.
Keep it simple
The other thing is, when you’re working out what are you’re going to be talking about, it’s important to keep it simple. Three to five takeaways is all you need. The problem is so many of us have so much information in our heads. The challenge is to break it down into three simplified messages. Even if you are presenting to a particular audience who is in your area of expertise and they may know your acronyms, I still encourage you to simplify your presentation into three main themes. You might talk about 10 ten different points, but it’s important to prioritise the top one, but then another 2-3.
Have you ever gone to say a conference where there’s been speaker after speaker and it got to the end of the day and you’ve thought to yourself, ‘I can’t even remember what any of these people spoke about!’ So just put that into perspective. Don’t try and overwhelm your audience. Even if you are the only speaker of the day, people are half tuned in, they’ve got a lot on their plate, they may be thinking about their plans that evening or weekend. If you’ve given your audience members too many messages, they won’t remember any. So you don’t want to sound like a broken record, but you do just want to prioritise 3-5 key messages that you want your audience to remember.
Use storytelling
Stories are fabulous. To create, rich and powerful stories for your presentations, start to build up a little story bank, because people are more than 20 times more likely to remember a fact or figure if there is a story attached to it. So I encourage you to build up that story bank, start sharing some stories, gathering stories and think about what you can use to emphasize a particular statistic or a particular point that you’re trying to make.
Get rid of nervesTo present with purpose, you’ll need to try and put aside any nerves or fears you may have. Your audience wants you to win and the audience is on your side (some of the exceptions to this are political debates and I’ve had my fair share of those). The audience members don’t want you to stumble. In fact, think about a time when you’ve been in the audience, then the poor presenter has stumbled, they’ve apologised and said “sorry, I’m really nervous,”? Perhaps they’ve frozen, had a memory blank, stumbled over the words or lost their train of thought. How uncomfortable does that make you feel? Remember that the audience wants you to inspire them and to entertain them. They’ve come along to get something from you, to actually take a piece of what you have to share and apply it to their business, apply it to their life. So don’t forget that they’re on your side and you can then present with purpose.
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