Fail Well

Failing might be a meme on the internet, but it's also important to being a success in life. Seth Godin points out that failure avoidance is actually working against yourself. If you plan to not fail you are planning to not succeed. For without failure and the subsequent lessons learned, we can't achieve any measure of success.

How can you plan to fail well in your public speaking? First, start by doing risky things. Speak a form that you aren't used to. Practice story telling or joke telling. Speak from a script if you typically use an outline. Use an outline or even no notes. Act out a dramatic scene or talk to the kids (they will let you know if you failed).

Try other things that are outside of your comfort zone. If you're a preacher then join a public speaking club like Toastmasters where you can't talk for half-an-hour about the bible. If you're like me it will challenge you and cause you to fail. Take up a hobby where you learn a new skill then perform that skill in public where there's the high risk of failure.

Learning to fail publicly gives us the confidence to keep trying new things. Experimentation is the only proven road to success, but it's filled with potholes. If you experiment, you will fail. But you stand the chance to learn valuable lessons about yourself and your craft through the process.

How have you failed well? What important lessons have you learned?

Stage Fright

It might seem like a professional public speaker would be over the fears commonly associated with getting up in front of a crowd, but it's not true. The blog of all things helpful, Lifehacker, posted about one way to overcome your fear of public speaking. Essentially you need to psyche yourself up to get ready for getting in front of people. Listen to an energizing song or do some exercise or anything that tends to increase your energy and lift your mood.

I've noticed in preaching that there is a consistent fear of public speaking that manifests in several different ways. One is the podium shield where the preacher stands behind the podium and grips it for dear life throughout the sermon. Another is the ramble-warm-up where there's an extended time of talking about meaningless things to get over the nerves and get to the point of the sermon. There's the scripted sermon that allows the preacher to never have to look at the audience, but instead to just read the words.

One of the casualties of stage fright and the preacher's fear of public speaking is the lack of the use of PowerPoint. I've heard myriad objections to the use of PowerPoint in preaching, but most of them boil down to the fear of the preacher. Learning a new skill and the accompanying risk of failure in a public forum causes the stage fright to kick in before the sermon is written. PowerPoint is avoided because it's different and might be difficult, and above all because it might not work.

What does your stage fright make you do? How do you overcome stage fright?

Photo Credit: Yamil Flores - Fotolia.com

April Theme - Speaking Visually

No matter how good your PowerPoint slides are, your presentation will only be as good as you are. Everything begins and ends with how you present. If you're a great public speaker, adding PowerPoint slides can connect more people with your message in more ways. But if you skimp on the speaking skills, the slides will do little to bolster a poor talk. So, for the month of April I want to focus on the theme of presentation skills.

Specifically, I want to look at speaking visually. It's important for us to create vivid images with our words so we can connect what we have to say with what's going on in the brains of our audience. Our brains function as primarily visual/spatial processors which means that if you aren't giving people queues to help them visualize what you're saying, then they likely will miss much of what you're attempting to communicate. It's as if our brains are vast art galleries with paintings on the walls and blank canvases stacked up in the corners. You can access a painting that people already have up and link what you have to say to what they already know. You essentially give them a mental post-it note attached to that painting. So now they associate what you said with their previous mental image. If you want to talk about teamwork, you can point to their memory of little league or to a famous team incident so you tag on to what they've already visualized.

Or, you can lead them in painting on a fresh canvas, but we can talk about that more tomorrow.

How do you help people visualize what you say?

Sweaty Palms and Fidgity Fingers

One thing that bothered me in all my education is that there was no training in public speaking. For all of the classes (the hours and hours of classes) that I took getting through undergrad and graduate degrees in Bible and Ministry - I had zero classes on public speaking.

Sure, I had several classes devoted to the preparation and delivery of sermons, but none of them looked at the art of public speaking. The one class that I had on how to prepare a speech was my Freshman year in high school. Yeah. That's it. I took matters into my own hands and joined Toastmasters.

I have heard a lot of preachers, and most of them are good at their craft. But too often I come across someone who doesn't know how to communicate to a group. They have learned well the art of study and they are experts at determining the meaning of a biblical text, but when it comes to sharing what they have learned, they fail. This is not for lack of ability or effort, but for lack of training and knowledge.

I came across a review for a book that I want to read called Confessions of a Public Speaker, by Scott Berkun. In this book he examines not only the mechanics of speaking but the emotions and art of communication. PowerPoint can be a boon to an excellent communicator by giving them another way to get their message across, but to a poor communicator, PowerPoint makes the problem worse.