What do you do if you’re chairing a panel and one of your guests makes a sexist remark? Or during a Q and A? Or ON NATIONAL TELEVISION. Well that’s what Mark Haines does here to broadcaster Erin Burnett. What do you think? Do you think she handled this appropriately? What is the best strategy here?
Jeffrey Davis is the owner of Speak Clear Communications. He is an executive public speaking coach and accent reduction coach in New York City.
It’s graduation season, so I thought we should take a look at a wonderful commencement address. Check out Steven Colbert’s Knox College Commencement Address. He crafts a speech that fits the occasion brilliantly, it’s light and witty, and he finds a way to turn the whole improvisational nature of the speech into the theme of the speech itself. “Say yes” he says, and learn to turn your life into a thrilling improvisation.
Note: The speech is broken into three video files. See the next two posts for the remaining two vids.
Jeffrey Davis is the owner of Speak Clear Communications. He is an executive public speaking coach and accent reduction coach in New York City.
Many business professionals tend to simply rehash the obvious when presenting. Sales presentations become a litany of product information, investor updates become awash in figures and PowerPoint, and small group meetings get bogged down in repeated information. Suddenly a thirty minute meeting feels like two hours. No good.
You can beat boardroom boredom (fancy alliteration, no?) by utilizing metaphor. Giving an ad sales pitch about your companies ability to sort and sift data? How about utilizing diamond mining as a metaphor? Sprinkle your speech with words like “sift”, “mine”, “granular”. Start out with an attention getter: “Where do you find a diamond?”. Use the imagery of sifting through dirt to find the perfect stone to represent your companies ability to sift through users to find the perfect ad match. That’s right, abstract the speech a bit, not much, a bit, and use the power of imagery to make an impact on your audience.
At the end of the presentation, your audience will remember you first, the way you speak, smile, laugh, frown, and the images you create second. The content of your speech rates a distant third. So hook them first with human interest and creativity, and hit them with the hard facts later. In the end, we all want to be entertained, stimulated and engaged, so view your presentation as a small performance, and watch your speeches grow by leaps and bounds!
Jeffrey Davis is the owner of Speak Clear Communications. He is an executive public speaking coach and accent reduction coach in New York City.
Performance Artist Maria Abromovic talks about CONCENTRATION.
Jeffrey Davis is the owner of Speak Clear Communications. He is an executive public speaking coach and accent reduction coach in New York City.
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Great speech. No more tele-prompter. More eye-contact. Fantastic imagery. “”five miles in a mountain, the only light the lamp on their caps”.
Jeffrey Davis is the owner of Speak Clear Communications. He is an executive public speaking coach and accent reduction coach in New York City.
Jeffrey Davis is the owner of Speak Clear Communications. He is an executive public speaking coach and accent reduction coach in New York City.
A lot of clients ask me for examples of great speeches. Jimmy Valvano’s 1993 Espy speech is a brilliant example. Notice how loose he is… he works off a structure, yes, but no reading. He’s working moment by moment off of his audience. Notice the patterns he uses to shape the speech; first a time pattern, he talks of the past, the present and the future, then a topic pattern, he talks of what to do every day, laugh, feel and think. Notice the beautiful personal details he shares to make a connection with his audience. The speech has great, humorous stories in it’s discussion section, the lifeblood of good speech-making, and a knock-out call to action for a conclusion. This is public speaking at it’s finest.
Jeffrey Davis is the owner of Speak Clear Communications. He is an executive public speaking coach and accent reduction coach in New York City.
