How to Give a Speech: Easy-to-Learn Skills for Successful Presentations, Speeches, Pitches, Lectures and More!

Also by Gary Genard

Fearless Speaking: Beat Your Anxiety, Build Your Confidence, Change Your Life

Copyright © 2007, 2016 by Gary Genard, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher Cedar & Maitland Press, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

How to Give a Speech: Easy-to-Learn Skills for Successful Presentations, Speeches, Pitches, Lectures, and More! Second expanded edition.

To order this book, please call (617) 993-3410, or write to:

The Genard Method

93 Concord Avenue, Suite 3

Belmont, MA 02478

www.GenardMethod.com

[email protected]

Discounts are available for bulk purchases and academic courses.

Print ISBN: 978-0-9796314-6-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911338

To Janice and Lydia

Acknowledgments

For their suggestions, guidance, and generosity in the preparation of this book, I’d like to thank the following people: John Baldoni, Karma Kitaj, Gretel Hartman, Jodi Whalen, and Christian Koestler. I’d also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to colleagues, friends, and family who gave me advice on the second edition: Arny Bereson, Patty Crowley, Venkat Janapareddy, Avinash Kambadakone, Joe Kvedar, Barry Levin, Brian Morris, Jesus Paez-Cortez, Linda Patch, Carla Reeves, Kirsten Singleton, and my wife Janice and daughter Lydia. And special thanks to Mara Levin, who went beyond the call in providing some timely, and much appreciated advice.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Maximize Your Natural Talents!

CHAPTER ONE: Calming Your Nerves and Gaining Confidence

1 Got 5 Minutes? — Relax!

2 Body Over Mind: The Progressive Relaxation Exercise

3 Four Key Ingredients to Achieving Influence as a Speaker

4 How to Establish Rapport with Your Audience

5 What Should I Do with My Hands?

6 Create Your Own Command Performance

CHAPTER TWO: Breathing Techniques for Public Speaking

7 Diaphragmatic Breathing: A Key Public Speaking Technique

8 Are You Breathing Incorrectly? — 3 Ways to Tell

9 The Amazing Power of Exhalation

10 Inspiration for Conquering Fear of Public Speaking

CHAPTER THREE: Organizing Your Materials and Telling Your Story

11 The Step You Must Take Before Deciding on Your Topic

12 Know Your Purpose and How to Accomplish It

13 Four Classic Formats for Organizing a Presentation

14 Using an Outline Can Help You Think

15 Dynamic Presenters Tell Stories. Do You?

CHAPTER FOUR: Creating Dynamic Introductions and Conclusions

16 How to Grab an Audience

17 Don’t Be Afraid to Advertise Your Expertise

18 Getting Your Listeners to Retain Key Information

19 Bravo! Ending Dramatically and Memorably

CHAPTER FIVE: Delivering Your Messages Successfully

20 How to Inspire Your Listeners

21 Four Powerful Tools for Persuasive Speeches

22 Under the Gun: How to Prepare a Speech in 15 Minutes

23 Presentation Strategy: Decide On a Direct or Indirect Approach

24 Simplifying and Selling Complex Concepts

25 Is Your Approach Stupid Enough?

26 Silence Is Golden: How to Use Pauses Effectively

27 In Trouble? Send an SOS!

CHAPTER SIX: Using PowerPoint and Other Media

28 How to Energize Your PowerPoint Presentations

29 The Four Golden Rules for Using PowerPoint

30 The Best-Kept Secret of PowerPoint

31 Testing, Testing… Is This Thing On?

CHAPTER SEVEN: Twelve Easy Ways to Achieve Presence and Charisma

32 How to Look and Sound Confident

33 Tap Into Your Natural Talents

34 Show Audiences Your Goodwill

35 Reveal Your True Self

36 Have a Dialogue with Listeners

37 How to Get an Audience to Trust You

38 Do This to Make a Lasting Impression

39 What Is Your Body Saying? — Using Nonverbal Communication

40 Speaking with Credibility and Authority

41 Three Tools for Becoming a More Powerful Speaker

42 Five Ways to Captivate Any Audience and Speak with Charisma

43 Your Best Visual Aid Is… You!

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Power of Your Voice

44 The 5 Essential Vocal Tools

45 Developing a Warmer and More Pleasant Voice

46 Finding the Pitch That’s Right for You

47 Are You Singing Your Speech or Just Mouthing the Words?

48 Like, Eliminating Uh, Um, and Other Vocal Fillers

49 Is Your Voice Helping or Hurting Your Career?

50 The Two-Minute Speech Warm-Up

CHAPTER NINE: The Visual You: Body Language

51 Body Language Secrets: What Self-Image Are You Broadcasting?

52 The 6 Worst Body Language Mistakes of Public Speaking

53 Body Language and Leadership: 3 Ways to Command a Stage 104

54 Are You Exhibiting Nervous Body Language? — The Top 10 Signs

55 Move! — How to Use Body Language to Tell Your Story

56 Speaking with Power: Three Key Body Language Techniques

CHAPTER TEN: Acting and Public Speaking

57 The Actor’s Art: What Can It Teach You About Public Speaking?

58 Stage Presence: Mastering the Art of Performance

59 An Actor’s Secrets: How to Improve Your Vocal Skills

60 Great Speaking? — It’s About Performance Over Content!

61 Why Acting Matters in Your Business Presentations

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Engaging and Persuading Audiences

62 Persuasion in Public Speaking Means Shaping Your Message

63 Zombie Presentations: How Not to Speak like The Living Dead

64 How to Read an Audience and Think on Your Feet

65 More Thinking on Your Feet: One-Minute Impromptus

66 Ask Many Small Questions… Okay?

67 Why Audiences Want to See You Naked (and Why You Should Be Glad)

68 How to Move an Audience to Action

69 Curtain Up! Add Drama to Your Speeches

70 Speaking Visually in the Age of Television

CHAPTER TWELVE: Dealing with Skeptical Audiences and Resistance

71 Know Your Listeners’ Needs and Expectations

72 Understand the Culture You’re Dealing With

73 Seven Tips for Overcoming Audience Resistance

74 Be a S.A.N.E. Speaker

75 Defuse Your Opponents’ Arguments

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Phone Conversations and Conference Calls

76 Why Your Voice Matters in Phone Conversations

77 Six Strategies for Improving Your Vocal Presence on the Phone

78 Etiquette and Tactics for Conference Calls

79 How to Leave a Voice Message

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Handling Q & A Like a Pro

80 Q & A: The Forgotten Avenue to Audience Persuasion

81 What If Nobody’s Asking Questions?

82 Four Reasons You Should Love Q & A Sessions

83 The 7 Danger Zones of Q & A

84 How to Tackle a Question-Hog

85 Emerging From Q & A as a Winner

86 I Hope You Never Get Asked a Question like This One

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Nuts & Bolts: Practical Skills for Presenters

87 Food, Caffeine, and Energy

88 How to Speak from Notes or a Manuscript

89 Surviving an Encounter with a Wild Lectern

90 How Video Can Transform Your Public Speaking

91 Jokes, Humor, and Other Serious Stuff

92 When Your Audience Has Eaten a Bowling Ball for Lunch

93 Three Important Steps in Preparing and Practicing a Talk

94 A Checklist of Nonverbal Delivery Skills

95 Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

96 Seven Tips for a Successful Job Interview

97 Toasts, Awards, and Other Special Occasions

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Looking Ahead: The Future of Public Speaking

98 Are You Ready for the Future of Business Communication?

99 Presentation Technology… Are You Using it Effectively?

100 A Four-Stage Rocket for Launching a Successful Webinar

101 The Big Bang Theory of Public Speaking

Preface to the Second Edition

I hope you’ll find this book an easy-to-use, practical handbook for enjoyable and successful public speaking. You’ll be introduced in these pages to skills based in theatrical techniques in a way meant to be accessible to everyone. Nine years ago when How to Give a Speech was first published, the book consisted of 75 Quick Tips for more effective speeches and presentations. This format had a simple rationale. As an actor and speech coach, I believed that a hands-on approach inspired by theatrical performance was the best way to improve your ability to speak to audiences—any audiences.

In the years since then, I’ve added to and refined this method of performance-based public speaking training in my work through The Genard Method. This second expanded edition of How to Give a Speech draws upon the continuing lessons I’ve learned and those I’ve taught. I’m deeply grateful to my clients, friends, colleagues, and fellow speakers who have been a part of this exciting personal journey.

In this edition, you’ll find twenty-six added Quick Tips for a new total of 101 entries, in sixteen chapters rather than the original ten. The six new chapters expand upon information in areas I felt now needed more individual focus. These topics include breathing and relaxation, using PowerPoint and other presentation media, body language, acting techniques for public speaking, how to excel in phone conversations and conference calls, and a glance at what the future of public speaking looks like from this vantage point early in the twenty-first century.

Once again, you’ll be invited to ask yourself this basic question: What skills and practices in listener-centered speaking will help me perform at my best to positively influence audiences? I believe the answers—tested and tempered through centuries of theatrical performance—are in these pages.

Belmont, MA

July 2016

Maximize Your Natural Talents!

Be brisk, be splendid, and be public.

—SAMUEL JOHNSON

How to Give a Speech will improve your skills in any speaking situation.

It will increase your confidence and charisma. It will improve others’ opinions of your character and competence.

But it will do something even more valuable than these important things. It will dramatically increase your influence with everyone you talk to—about anything.

Any book that attempts such a task had better focus on your actions as a speaker. By that, I mean your physical behavior and vocal approach that together convey messages quite separate from the words you’re using. These are the critical nonverbal components of public speaking, and they are the focus of this book.

How to Give a Speech, then, is a self-improvement book. It aims to substantially improve your public speaking performance.

Why should you worry about performance? Well, the answer to that is clear. To change people’s lives in some positive way—to affect how they think, feel, or act as a result of your presentations—you must perform at the peak of your abilities.

Successful and influential speakers know all about reaching this pinnacle of achievement.

Think of the great orators whose names we honor, people like Pericles in ancient Greece, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Each of them was famous and everyone knew what they stood for. But it was their stirring addresses in public, their moments of peak performance, that secured their places in history.

They consciously used their attributes as speakers to the fullest extent possible. They performed at their very best.

This book will show you how to maximize your own natural speaking talents in powerful and specific ways. The type of speech or presentation you give doesn’t matter. In each case you have the same task: honest communication that reaches your listeners’ hearts and minds, while conveying a clear sense of who you are and what you stand for.

Here, then, is solid hands-on advice delivered in what I hope is a compact and reader-friendly package. You can keep this book on your bookshelf if you like. But I urge you to slip it into your briefcase, purse, or carry-on and take it with you whenever you’ll be speaking in public. It truly is a guidebook of dynamic public speaking, meant to be as practical as possible.

There are 101 entries in all, written as Quick Tips organized in sixteen chapters. You can read the book from cover to cover, or explore a topic that’s on your mind at the moment, or head straight to any tip that catches your eye.

How to Give a Speech is the result of four decades of my work as a professional actor, public speaking professor, and speech coach to clients around the world. So it’s filled with the practical matters these people have been engaged with as influential communicators.

I’d love to hear from you if you’d like to add to the contributions from this speaking community. Or feel free to simply give me feedback on the book. If there are topics that you’d like to see covered in future editions, I’d be delighted to hear about them.

Now a last word to you before your important speech or presentation. It’s the traditional, lovingly intended advice from the world of the theater: Break a leg!

—GARY GENARD

[email protected]

CHAPTER 1

Calming Your Nerves And Gaining Confidence

The mind is a wonderful thing. It starts working the minute you are born and never stops until you get up to speak in public.

—ROSCOE DRUMMOND

1: Got 5 Minutes? — Relax!

Easy does it.

Take it easy.

Easy as pie.

In America, we admire people who not only do things expertly, but who make them seem easy.

I believe one of the reasons we feel this way, is that when things are going smoothly—when we’re hitting on all cylinders—we’re functioning at peak efficiency. And that just feels right.

Some people call this level of performance being in flow, or nowadays, being in The Zone. Whatever name you attach to it, it’s a feeling of effortlessness—an intense pleasure that comes from focusing completely on the task rather than the obstacles in our way.

The first rule of successful presentations then is to bring us to such a state of natural relaxation. Once we do that we can place our focus where it needs to be: on our message and listeners, rather than on the things that make us self-conscious and anxious.

But given today’s hectic professional schedules, we also need a way to help us relax quickly. So here’s a wonderful way to achieve a productive level of relaxation (yes, there is such a thing!) if you only have 5 minutes to spare:

1. Find a quiet and solitary place. (In a pinch, a bathroom stall will do, or even your parked car outside your speaking venue.) Sit comfortably, with your feet flat on the floor.

2. Close your eyes.

3. Listen to your breath for the first minute. That is, pay attention to what happens when you breathe in slowly and calmly. Understand with your body, not your mind, how breathing nourishes and sustains you. Feel the breath flowing down your throat, filling your lungs, and then bringing life-giving oxygen to every cell in your body.

4. Now, focus your awareness on a visual image you see in your mind. Make it a neutral color and shape: a green circle, a yellow square, a blue triangle. Any object that doesn’t have emotional connotations for you is fine. (Avoid the color red, which is often associated with blood or anger.)

5. See that object in as close to crystal clarity as you can manage. This will take concentration and a bit of practice at first. As you do, adopt a passive attitude toward any other mental activity. Thoughts, imagery, and feelings will emerge in your consciousness. Simply notice them then let them go on their way. Keep a gentle yet firm focus on your image. Do nothing; just let your awareness be.

6. Your breathing will become slower and deeper. This is what you are aiming for. You’re now in a calmer and more relaxed state. When you’re ready, open your eyes and slowly stand. If you feel any lightheadedness, sit down again, for your body may not be used to taking in this level of oxygen. Once you have it, try to maintain this level of calmness and relaxed breathing as you go on with your daily tasks.

This exercise allows you to calm yourself and focus your attention—two essential attributes of a good speech or presentation. Practice it until you can do it easily at a moment’s notice, because that’s when you will need it most!

2: Body Over Mind: The Progressive Relaxation Exercise

Here’s another exercise concerned with relaxation. This time, you’ll learn how to release muscular tension throughout your body so you can practice effortless diaphragmatic breathing. (For more on breathing and public speaking, see Chapter Two.)

Do this exercise while lying on a yoga mat or carpet. The first time you practice