How to Get a Standing Ovation

When I started public speaking in about 1986, I was deathly afraid of public speaking—for one thing, working for the division run by Steve Jobs was hugely intimidating: How could you possibly compete with Steve? It’s taken me twenty years to get comfortable at it. I hope that many of you are are called upon to give speeches—it’s the closest thing to being a professional athlete that many of us will achieve. The purpose of this blog entry is to help you give great speeches.

1. Have something interesting to say. This is 80% of the battle. If you have something interesting to say, then it’s much easier to give a great speech. If you have nothing to say, you should not speak. End of discussion. It’s better to decline the opportunity so that no one knows you don’t have anything to say than it is to make the speech and prove it.
2. Cut the sales pitch. The purpose of most keynotes is to entertain and inform the audience. It is seldom to provide you with an opportunity to pitch your product, service, or company. For example, if you’re invited to speak about the future of digital music, you shouldn’t talk about the latest MP3 player that your company is selling.
3. Focus on entertaining. Many speech coaches will disagree with this, but the goal of a speech is to entertain the audience. If people are entertained, you can slip in a few nuggets of information. But if your speech is deathly dull, no amount of information will make it a great speech. If I had to pick between entertaining and informing an audience, I would pick entertaining—knowing that informing will probably happen too.
4. Understand the audience. If you can prove to your audience in the first five minutes that you understand who they are, you’ve got them for the rest of the speech. All you need to understand is the trends, competition, and key issues that the audience faces. This simply requires consultation with the host organization and a willingness to customize your introductory remarks. This ain’t that hard.
5. Overdress. My father was a politician in Hawaii. He was a very good speaker. When I started speaking he gave me a piece of advice: Never dress beneath the level of the audience. That is, if they’re wearing suits, then you should wear a suit. To underdress is to communicate the following message: “I’m smarter/richer/more powerful than you. I can insult you and not take you serious, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” This is hardly the way to get an audience to like you.
6. Don’t denigrate the competition. If you truly do cut the sales pitch, then this won’t even come up. But just in case, never denigrate the competition because by doing so, you are taking undue advantage of the privilege of giving a speech. You’re not doing the audience a favor. The audience is doing you a favor, so do not stoop so low as to use this opportunity to slander your competition.
7. Tell stories. The best way to relax when giving a speech is to tell stories. Any stories. Stories about your youth. Stories about your kids. Stories about your customers. Stories about things that you read about. When you tell a story, you lose yourself in the storytelling. You’re not “making a speech” anymore. You’re simply having a conversation. Good speakers are good storytellers; great speakers tell stories that support their message.
8. Pre-circulate with the audience. True or false: the audience wants your speech to go well. The answer is True. Audiences don’t want to see you fail—for one thing, why would people want to waste their time listening to you fail? And here’s the way to heighten your audience’s concern for you: circulate with the audience before the speech. Meet people. Talk to them. Let them make contact with you. Especially the ones in the first few rows; then, when you’re on the podium, you’ll see these friendly faces. Your confidence will soar. You will relax. And you will be great.
9. Speak at the start of an event. If you have the choice, get in the beginning part of the agenda. The audience is fresher then. They’re more apt to listen to you, laugh at your jokes, and follow along with your stories. On the third day of a three-day conference, the audience is tired, and all they’re thinking about is going home. It’s hard enough to give a great speech—why increase the challenge by having to lift the audience out of the doldrums?
10. Ask for a small room. If you have a choice, get the smallest room possible for your speech. If it’s a large room, ask that it be set “classroom style”—ie, with tables and chairs—instead of theatre style. A packed room is a more emotional room. It is better to have 200 people in a 200 person room than 500 people in a 1,000 person room. You want people to remember, “It was standing room only.”
11. Practice and speak all the time. This is a “duhism,” but nonetheless relevant. My theory is that it takes giving a speech at least twenty times to get decent at it. You can give it nineteen times to your dog if you like, but it takes practice and repetition. There is no shortcut to Carnegie Hall. As Jascha Heifitz said, “If I don’t practice one day, I know it. If I don’t practice two days, my critics know it. If I don’t practice three days, everyone knows it.” Read this article to learn what Steve Jobs does.

It’s taken me twenty years to get to this point. I hope it takes you less. Part of the reason why it took me so long is that no one explained the art of giving a speech to me, and I was too dumb to do the research. And now, twenty years later, I love speaking. My goal, every time I get up to the podium, is to get a standing ovation. I don’t succeed very often, but sometimes I do. More importantly, I hope that I’m standing and clapping in the audience of your speech soon.

Comments

[Rimantas]

Hm, should you really speak to people who can be offended by the way you dress?

[Brian Ivanovick]

Another great post - I just have a couple points to add:

Make sure your the tone of your voice is conversational. Think about the last chat you had with your best friend and talk just like that. For some reason, I used to (and I've seen it in others) put on a formal, overly loud voice when public speaking. Imagine having a conversation with each member of the audience.

Extending point #8 - try to involve the audience : pose a question or ask for a volunteer. Break down the barrier between speaker and audience.

Finally it's better to be too short than too long. I'm not advocating a 1 minute speech - just make your points short and snappy. Nothing kills a good speech like rambling.

[Javier Cabrera (ClearYourMind)]

On your fifth point (Overdress), how this can be compared with what Steve Jobs does? The guy is dressed like if he went out for a pizza at the corner and in the way he stopped to give you a speech!

I like his style, but what you are saying here is that Steve Jobs must be dressed with suit because his public (some of them) are dressed with suit too.

Great article, I enjoyed every single word of it; if you keep writing like that, I will keep reading them every day.

[George]

#3 is dead on, no matter what kind of speech you're giving. I used to be a teacher. A junior high school teacher. And believe me, it doesn't matter how good your instructional materials are, and how many degrees you have. If you can't capture your students' attention, they're not going to learn anything.

One of the best techniques I found was to ask my audience (class) a question they were sure they could answer, and then tell them the real answer, which was the exact opposite of what they thought. That gives you their attention for a good ten minutes as you explain why the answer is not what they think--longer if you mix in stories related to the subject that entertain the audience as well as further illustrating your point.

If you master this technique, you won't leave anyone in your audience behind. After all, "Hey Joe! Pay attention!" isn't nearly as effective as "Hey Joe, do you think I can use this water to /start/ a fire?"

[Paul]

Great advice and much needed for most of the keynotes I sit through. The best piece of advice I have gotten about speaking is keep it simple. I was once told, "if you have more than one point, then you don't have a point." That's simple and stick to this as much as possible, except when I delineate into sub points.

[Daniel Jalkut]

Great advice. I love how all of these points fall outside the standard public speaking cirriculum. In other words, nothing about speech structure, note cards, faking extemporaneousness. Instead we have the practical matters of business speaking. Lots of stuff I wouldn't have thought about including the "dress to the level of the audience" and "earn trust of audience" points. Thanks, Guy!

[Mario bucolo]

about of "standing ovation" or, better, attract attention to biz proposals.
There is a myth, an urban legend...or real?
A young man looking for money ask money to one of the most important bankers in Wall St. This man tell to the young that he will don't give him any dollar but he can do it better. He take the young man under is arm and walk together in the NYSE hall. Other bankers see this young man walking so close whit the famous investor and note him. after this walk the young man was overwhelm of financial proposal to support his business...
Sorry for my English but I suppose the story is understandable.
So, Guy, a proposal to add a new BIZ showcase in this blog.
On the web there is
http://www.thealarmclock.com that create more people and investors aware of new initiative, but a showcase like this placed here will be more effective. What you think?

[Mario bucolo]

What about to delivery proceedings before or after the speech?
I prefer in every my speech to delivery slide copies or text proceedings only after the speech. When I see that people try to copy the slides contents I inform audience that at the end of the speech an hard copy of the slides will be available or, better, that the slide will be available for download from my web site.

[Craig Strachan]

Interesting comments. Regarding point 3, I personally believe that ANY speech is given for one of three reasons:
1 to inform
2 to persuade
3 to entertain

However, any keynote-type of speech would usually be given for a combination of the first and third reason (mostly third).

[Jon Sugai]

I totally agree with #5, especially in Hawaii where there is a tendency to be more "laid back," I always made an effort to dress up for my presentations in college.

Steve Jobs doesn't do this, but Steve is Steve. However, I do recall him wearing a suit and tie at a keynote he gave in Japan a few years ago (I think it was 2002...). Anyone know why he dressed up for that one?

[Raymond Hermans]

Great pointers there Guy... thanks for sharing them !

Mike... Guy did say "competition" :D

[Martin Oetting]

Guy, I have been reading your new blog for a few days now - I wonder how you'll keep up this amazing flow of brilliant content. Excellent bloggers will have stuff like this twice a year, if their readers are lucky. You have it in every post. That is awesome!

And about that "ech ben ein berlina" comment - I don't know, it never struck me as that, and I am German. If Mike is, too, we can maybe have an argument about that somewhere. ;-)

[mike]

I agree with everything except #1, and #6.
About #1, when JFK gave his speech in Berlin, he said, "ech ben ein berlina", which in German means "i am a doungut". ein berlina was a dougnut at the time, the correct way to say it is "ech ben berlina". But he said it very well, so i thinks its more like 20% of what you say, and 80% of how you say it.
And about #6, Jobs makes fun of microsoft all the time in his keynotes.