Acting Techniques for Speakers

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.”

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Capturing Your Audience: (Part II)

Previously, we discussed the components of speech preparation and delivery that will make your presentation shine when you are addressing your association audiences. However, the speech only becomes truly vibrant when you tie all of the pieces together and package them into a compelling presentation. Remember humor helps freshen content, movement keeps the audiences’ eyes on you, inflection and varied speech patterns offer interest and variety and pacing of pauses and energy emphasis all add professionalism to an otherwise ordinary speech.

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Capturing Your Audience: (Part I)

Today’s audiences have very short attention spans. They are stimulation junkies with limited interest levels. Their television habits have coined a new term–channel surfing. With the advent of remote control no one watches anything that stands still enough to bore. Click, switch, fast forward, record and mute give them power over the medium. Sub-standard content, boring material or inane commercials are no longer endured. Your audience will forgive you of almost anything except being boring. This is especially true for association executives.

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Presenting Your Talk – For Business and Professional Speakers

The big day has come. You’re ready to deliver your talk. But there are still a few final things to do before you face your audience.

Check in early. Arrive early so you can check out the logistics of the room in which you’ll be speaking. Where is the platform? Where will you be when you are introduced? How will you reach the lectern? Is the audience close enough to build intimacy? Is the light on you, not the banner and the lectern if you are not standing behind the lectern?

Microphone: Learn how to turn it off and on, and how to remove it from the stand. Practice talking into it and walking without tangling the cord around your feet. Audio/Visual Equipment: Whether it’s an overhead projector, slide projector, or a VCR, make sure the equipment is in working order, and you know how to use it. Inspect your slides, transparencies or videotapes. Are they in the right sequence? Are they in good shape? Easel or chalkboard: Do you have lots of appropriate writing materials? Appropriate markers and erasers for a chalkboard, extra paper and markers for an easel? Can you write some of your information before hand to save time during your presentation?

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Preparing Your Talk: Developing & Delivering Your Speech

One of the best ways to promote your product or service and expand your customer base is also one of the cheapest. Interested? It’s public speaking. I know this from first hand experience.

When I started out, I had no public speaking experience, but I studied what the professional speakers did. What I learned from watching them helped me develop and deliver my first talk. Here, short and sweet, are some of the best principles and techniques I’ve learned and developed in speaking for the last two decades, customized for all you shaking-in-your-boots, but-eager-to-enhance-your-business non-speakers.

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The Danger of Using the Web as a Resource for Your Humor

The web is a great resource for information. There are vast quantities of information on everything from aardvarks to zoology. You’d also think it would also be an excellent resource for humor. Let me caution you. You must be careful using the web as a source of humor. There are hundreds of thousands of amateurs hosting web pages, home pages, creating ezines, and sending and forwarding a ton of humor. But because most of them are amateurs, they are not aware that humor is intellectual property. They unknowing will post anything that they find funny. And that might be something they scanned from a copyrighted book, or material they transcribed from some comedian’s performance, or from some humorist’s presentation.

It might be quotes from a comedy tape, a presentation from Comedy Central, or just a few favorite lines they recall from the last comedy show they attended. I have received jokes from friends and colleagues and I have sometimes subscribed to humor ezines and I frequently recognized material that belongs to certain performers but were not credited to them.

You may have heard about the hoax that was perpetrated some months back. A university commencement address was posted and attributed to Kurt Vonnegut. At a meeting of my local NSA chapter I heard a featured speaker quoting from that talk as his own material. A buzz went up around the luncheon table as several other attendees recognized it. Whatever the source, humor is the property of the person who originated it and you cannot use it without their expressed permission. If you want legally safe sources for humor, buy joke books or humor books that are explicitly designed to provide you with material you can use without attribution. When using the web for humor, make sure you know the source of the humor AND that is okay to reproduce the humor.

By John Cantu © 1998, 1999
 

 

 

 

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If You Want More Humor in Your Presentation(s)

An article on public speaking and humor

I want to introduce you to one of Three Musketeers of Speech Writing… John Cantu is a San Francisco comedy legend, owner and producer of the legendary Holy City Zoo, who helps you laugh all the way to the bank. He’s written material for Joan Rivers, Phyllis Diller, and the Smothers Brothers, many professional speakers and corporate executives.

Enjoy,
Patricia Fripp

This article gives you some concrete suggestions on how you can evaluate your current presentation and discover how effective your presentation’s current humor really is. If you are not totally satisfied with the effectiveness of humor in your presentations right now, chances are that your material can be slotted into one of the following three situations:

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Avoid Clichés – Like the Plague

Whether you’re writing or speaking, clichés will weaken your message and cause your audience to tune out. Here are Fripp’s Four Foolproof Tips for making your point:

  • You MUST use original material.
  • The audience will forgive you ANYTHING but being boring.
  • If someone else has already said it, say it in a completely different way.
  • If it’s a cliché, throw it out!

Sol Stein’s advice in Dialogue for Writers is equally useful for speakers: “The majority of novels are turned down, even those written by well-educated people, because they are cliché-ridden. And so is a lot of popular fiction that does get published.”

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How to Present to a Board of Directors

Gail was the Association Executive when I was president of the National Speakers Association. We planned the board meetings ahead of time at a health spa in Palm Springs. We would exercise in the morning, plan in the afternoon. The tough job for an Association Exec is that they have a new president every year, and it is really their job to coach the president on how to make this a productive and fun experience for the year. Some, of course, don’t want to be coached, so you have to do it very subtly. Because we don’t want to cause competition, it is better to not say, “I worked very well last year with such and such because__.” Just say, “Each person who has been president has brought something to the table.”

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How to Get Great Evaluations Every Time… Ask!

Ask for great evaluations in advance! Whenever you deliver seminars or break-out sessions, greet the attendees at the door and shake their hands. Start your presentation by asking the audience what they want and expect from their time with you. What ingredients are needed before they can rate you excellent?

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