If your goal is to become more effective in your presentation skills value your own opinion. Although we are amused with expressions such as “Make my day”, “Read my lips”, “Think outside of the box”, “I’ll be back” after a while they are so overused they go from “classic” to “cliché.”
As an executive speech coach, public speaking school leader, sales presentation skills trainer this is the advice I give my clients.
Hope you find it helpful.
Whether you’re writing an article, speaking at a conference, running a staff meeting or enteraining your friends at the dinner table clichés will weaken your message and cause your audience to tune out.
Here are THE Executive Speech Coach Patricia Fripp’s Four Foolproof Tips for making your point:
1. You MUST use original material.
2. Your audience will forgive you ANYTHING but being boring.
3. If someone else has already said it, say it in a completely different way.
4. If it’s a cliché, throw it out!
At a recent Patricia Fripp Speaking School, a handsome, well-spoken attendee gave an eloquent talk.
What a shame…it was all rehashes of material from motivational books he had read.
Everyone had heard the messages and examples before, over and over.
No one felt any connection to the presenter. Everyone looked bored and tuned him out.
What a shame…he had lived a fascinating life that his audience wanted to hear about.
I asked him to describe his life, starting at the beginning.
This is what I call the “once upon a time” technique.
As he spoke, he became excited, and his audience did too.
Within his reminiscences was fresh, stimulating original content that could become
the core of his message.
Have confidence in your own viewpoints.
Deliver your content, or tell your life story to friends at the dinner table.
Record it.
Listen.
Prune out any clichés that have crept in.
Replace them with invigorating new phrases that are your own.
Value your own point of view, opinion and experience.
Your message will be memorable and your audience riveted.
If you want to strengthen your message….Avoid Clichés Like the Plague.
To learn from Patricia Fripp’s learning materials https://fripp.com/publicspeakingresources/index.shtml
Thank you. This article was fascinating and really made me think. My first reaction was, “What? How can you get rid of cliches when they add so much color and metaphor to your communications?” (I was thinking of exciting phrases like “shoot for the moon” or “hot off the presses.”)
So true, listening to speakers rehash their teachers’ or others’ work comes across as dull, dull, dull. I appreciate your great advice to figure out what the point is in the story you like and make that point with an original story from your own life. Then you won’t be cliched.
I also know as a writer that overused turns of phrase don’t mean anything any more. Our minds go blank when we read or hear them, creating an empty pocket in your communication, never a good thing.
And then I was back to thinking cliches adding color, until I took a few minutes to look up lists of cliches online… and realized you are totally right. There is nothing a cliche says that you cannot say in a more colorful and original way. They just don’t add that much color. New fresh color would be much, much better.
THANK YOU! Doing a little editing…
Great article. As public speaker we can often slip into over doing it mode. But I’ve found the best speakers are the natural speakers, who speak from the heart without resorting to cliches.