Public speaking is a powerful tool for all people in business and can be an especially effective marketing technique for the entrepreneur. As a member of a weekly networking group, I get to see a lot of small and home-based business owners speak about their businesses for about 10 minutes each. When the most ineffective speakers in the group present, the communication expert and public speaking coach in me wants to scream, "Why are you wasting your time and ours!?" I resist the urge and instead funnel my energy into creating an article just like this. When you follow the five steps below, you run the risk of:
-- losing your audience
1 2 Impact
-- confusing your audience
-- losing or extremely diminishing your credibility
If your goal is to confuse people and waste your time, then follow these five steps for making your next presentation completely ineffective, boring and have zero (or negative) impact on your audience:
Step 1: Don't have any structure to your speech.
Just get up there and talk aimlessly. Wing it, in fact. Then your audience will feel totally lost and confused during your entire speech, will have no idea where you're going, or when you're finally coming to the conclusion.
Step 2: Share information not useful or relevant to your audience.
The surest way to turn your audience off is to talk about things they care nothing about. In the speech that inspired this article, the speaker referred to worker's compensation often-- to a room full of people who work out of their homes with zero employees. The speaker didn't bother to tell us if or how worker's comp could impact us and succeeded in ignoring everyone's needs.
Step 3: Try to squeeze everything there is to know about a topic into 10 minutes.
This works well when you really want to confuse and overwhelm your audience-- especially if you're talking about new or technical topics. If there have been volumes written about your subject, try to fit it all in. Speak super-quickly, looking down almost constantly at your 17 pages of exhaustive notes, ignoring questions so you can get through it all.
Step 4: Ramble.
Similar to not having any structure, rambling can lose your audience quickly, too. Continually go off on tangents completely unrelated to your area of expertise and topic and just talk about whatever comes up for you in the moment.
Step 5: Allow your audience to "hijack" your speech time.
This is how you'll know if you're succeeding at the first four steps. Your audience will be lost and confused, but to be nice they will try to bring you back on track. So people will ask questions that others in the audience feel they can comment on to help you out, too. Before you know it, you don't even have to talk anymore, your audience is doing all the talking for you.
Keep at it and with little effort, you too can make sure your presentations are completely ineffective, you lose your credibility, and irritate your audience the next time you market your business with public speaking.