What You Can Learn From Speaking in Public
Communicating with an audience is tricky in a lot of ways: you rarely know exactly who’d going to be in the audience and you can not predict the state of mind they’re going to be in when you are handed the microphone.
Yet you’re not speaking into a vacuum, either. You’ve done your homework, researched the audience the best you can and discussed the speaking engagement with the organizer. So you know a lot about logistics; size of the room, approximately size of the audience, AV set-up, etc.
But any speech is still tricky because it’s typically only a one-way communication. Sure, a seminar is more give-and-take, but a typical presentation is usually one-to-many. Even if you have a Q&A at the end, you’re still only hearing from a small segment of the audience.
So one thing you learn is the you never know exactly how your message is being received by your whole audience.
Yes, there are usually a handful of folks who come and praise you – if you did even a merely adequate job.
Another thing you may learn is that you left something out. And the speech went just fine. Only you know that you left out that piece! It may have been a key piece, a good anecdote, an illustrative factoid; whatever it was, you learned that the speech survived just fine without it.
Often after speeches I’ll learn that it came out a lot better than any of my rehearsals. Unless you’re like a robot and can repeat the same speech over and over with the same inflection and same pauses and emotion, every speech you deliver will be different. Even if it’s the same speech.
Even if you could deliver an identical performance twice in a row, your audience would be different. And they’d probably react differently: responding with laughter at a joke your last audience didn’t get, perhaps a little spontaneous applause at one point that the other audience ignored.
Of course you can also learn a lot about yourself. For instance you can learn that with each speech you stretch your comfort zone a little more. You define your message a little more clearly. You have a better idea of who you really are with each speech. Knowing that helps you in your preparation for your next speech.
Getting up and speaking to an audience is one of the more challenging things we humans do. The more we do it – as in any pursuit – the better we get at it.
But we never get so good that we can rest on past accomplishments. Ask any performer, whether stand-up comic, actor, singer, musician: they know that with each performance the audience is hoping to see them at their best. Hoping, hell! They’re demanding it. They paid good money. Even if you’re giving a free speech, or if the audience didn’t personally pay, they’ve still invested in the time it takes to sit down and listen to your ideas.
So you’d better give it to them good. As good as you can. No matter if you’re feeling under the weather or you’re distracted by personal stuff.
As soon as you hit the stage you have to be the person the audience wants you to be. Now that person may be exactly who you are, or it may be a livelier version – your persona, so to speak.
With each speech you learn who that persona is, and how to present it to those faces, all watching you.
Probably the best thing you can learn from speaking in public is that you have no limits, except self-imposed ones.
As you plan and prepare for your next speech, look to take an objective view: see what you can learn this time. And incorporate that knowledge into the next one.
Your audience will thank you for it. But probably not as much as you’ll thank yourself.
photo credit: TheCreativePenn
photo credit: Robert Banh
