This is a guest post from Kwesi Millington.
Kwesi is a public speaking, storytelling & confidence coach, teaching you to speak, share, serve and live with greater confidence. Check out his website at www.CommunicateToCreate.com and do watch his periscopes. He shares some very practical tips on speaking and story.
KISS it!
Try to learn one new word per week. Grow your vocabulary. Explore the richness of the English language…
Just leave the complex words out of your speeches.
Author John Maxwell says it this way…
“As leaders and communicators, our job is to bring clarity to a subject, not complexity. The measure of a great teacher isn’t what he or she knows, it’s what the students know.”
Speaking is not about YOU. That is the most important piece of information you can ever learn about this art.
It is about your listener. Think about their comprehension level. Many speakers try to impress the audience with what they know.
It’s NOT what you know, it is what you DID NOT know and have learned that will impress them. It is in your vulnerability that you will find your victory.
In writing, blogger James Altucher talks about the Flesch-Kincaid score (He wrote about it for Quora). This respected scoring system is applied to writing to determine what grade level you are writing for. For example, a Flesch-Kincaid (FK) score of 10 means that you are writing at a Grade 10 level.
Altucher provided studies of some recent top ranked articles, then he went back and got scores for the classic Hemingway book “The Old Man and the Sea” as well as “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad, and “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky.
The F-K scores for ALL of these were between 4 and 8. Yes, that means that all of the above, including a Nobel Prize winning author’s work, were written at a Grade 4th to 8th level!!
When you speak, SPEAK the same way.
KISS it my friends (Keep It Simple when Speaking).
Martin Luther King said “I have a Dream”.
JFK said “It’s not what your country can do for you, it’s what you can do for your country.”
Grade schoolers can understand those quotes, and Adults have been moved by them.
Remember this…
Big words touch the Brain, Small words touch the Heart.
In public speaking, there are times when the best way to support the points you are making is by using data or quotations. Well-chosen quotations are certainly powerful, adding backup to our own opinions. Data comes in many forms – dates, figures and statistics, as well as visuals using graphs, diagrams, tables and more, and it can also be a powerful support for the ideas or opinions you want to sell.
Most of the time, these quotations and data are not our own. Often we are quoting other people’s work – or using other people’s work.
Imagine what would happen if we did use other people’s work – not crediting the source of our quotations and data?
We might very well get away with it, just as we might get away with all sorts of indiscretions, on-stage and off. But sooner or later it will be obvious to someone if not the entire audience that you are not crediting your sources. Your credibility will drop to zero, or maybe even into the negative.
It’s plain good manners to quote the source. Not doing so, really, amounts to theft. And audiences know that, they feel that.
Always quote your sources.
Your originality should be evident in the propositions you put;
and the power of your speech or presentation comes from that originality, that uniqueness.
There is no weakness in quoting the sources of your facts and figures or of your quotations. In fact you gain even further credibility, because it is obvious you are familiar with the information out there on your subject. You are knowledgeable or you have researched or both.
The process is easy, really – to be able to quote sources.
When you are researching, you need to start at the beginning of every book, webpage, or report. Before you start to take notes or store the content, note the details of the resource and its author. Then take the notes you need, and when the time comes to use them, if you are using them, you will have the details of the source ready at hand to quote…
and another reason to keep your audience engaged.
Words hurt, heal, motivate, and aggravate. They are powerful. They control emotions and can even control a person physically.
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