Expert Advice about Presentation Skills
from Patricia Fripp

Reducing Your Hour-Long Speech

You’ve got a great, major presentation, and suddenly you’re asked if you can get your message across in five minutes! Don’t panic. For today’s television generation, sound bites can be more powerful than lengthy dissertations. Here’s how to compress your speech without losing impact.

1. Come out punching!

Grab your audience’s attention. One way is to make a startling statement. For a recent speech to the National Speakers Association, I walked out and immediately started building a word picture: “Columbus, Ohio, December, zero degrees, 2,000 people trudging through the snow to hear four speakers…”

Don’t waste your audience’s time with trivialities. I heard a speaker addressing a San Francisco Sales and Marketing Executives audience, starting with how nice it was to be there, how great the weather was, and how he loves our restaurants. Who cares? I didn’t race across town to hear him talk about weather and restaurants. I was there to hear about sales and marketing ideas and he was supposed to be an expert.

How to “Speak Their Language” Even When It Isn’t English

Now I finally know why my friends are so interested in speaking abroad. It is a wonderful, rewarding, exhilarating, ego-building experience, even when the audience doesn’t speak your language.

Why forego local engagements to fly half-way around the world, suffer terrible jet lag, and put your reputation on the line when you don’t know how a non-English-speaking audience will accept your message? You’d have to be crazy.

That’s what I used to think, so I usually turned down overseas work. But in November of 1998, I spoke for three public seminars and four in-house meetings in Taiwan, a total of seven Chinese-speaking audiences. It was such a triumph that I can’t wait to go back. Here is what you can do to have a similar success.

This article was written by my pal Ed Brodow. It will be featured in Professional Speaker magazine, the publication of the National Speakers Assn. As Ed interviewed me for this, and I found it very interesting, I asked if I could offer it to my friends and visitors to my website. He granted his permission and I hope you enjoy it. His contact information is at the end if you would like to contact Ed directly or check his website, www.brodow.com.

Many successful speakers are using acting techniques to upgrade their platform skills. After all, the speaker’s job is the same as the actor’s-get the audience involved. Legendary Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE, attributes much of her success as a speaker to her acting training. Patricia recognizes that, “Actors have to do the same role for months and years. How do they stay fresh? That’s what we have to learn.”