After my speech-cum-presentation at Netcore’s India conference, a younger colleague walked up to me and asked, “How can I learn to speak like you?” In reply, I summarised what I had written previously. I said, “Prepare. Practice. Post-mortem” and gave her an idea to get started on her journey to become a better public speaker.
Preparation is about planning the speech. It took me a week. I wanted the speech to motivate and inspire, and also provide enough talking points to the customer-facing teams about Netcore’s strengths in a competitive marketplace. I then set about making the deck – pulling in some images as needed which could help amplify the points I needed to hit home.
Practice is about running through the talk a few times in private (or to a smaller audience). It helps one work through the transitions in the slides without breaking the flow and the story. Even on the day of the talk I made a few edits to incorporate a few ideas other speakers before me had made.
Then comes the actual “show” because it is exactly that. For the time I was on stage, I was a performer. I had to engage with the audience, add in that humour and topicality, connect with their thoughts, and make them forget about their mobiles! I had to surprise them – so they never took their eyes off me. I promised to send the deck to all of them so they didn’t have to worry about making detailed notes and could focus on the experience of listening. I too was in a “flow” as I spoke – the audience interaction propelling me forward. I had a powerful ending and that got me a standing ovation.
And then I did the post-mortem. There were a few places I had missed a few points. I realised I should have either added a word or two on the slide as a prompt or kept a sheet in front of me to make sure I covered those. (The laptop was not in front of me so I did not have access to the slide notes.) In a couple places, the jokes fell flat – a lesson to do better next time. A few times, I was repetitive – in my eagerness to emphasise a point, I went a bit overboard. So, some useful learnings for my next big talk.
In this case, I had the benefit of a friendly audience and unlimited time. In the talk that I had done at SaaS Open in March in New York, I was speaking to SaaS founders and had a 20-minute hard stop. Despite my preparation and planning, I overdid a couple stories which led to me being crunched for time towards the end, leading to a weaker closing than I would have liked. The lesson for me: stick to the script.
I then gave my colleague a suggestion: create a small group at work where she and 4-5 others can meet once every week to speak on a topic for 8-10 minutes. It is how I had learnt at the Indo-American Society course I had done in 1981. Half the battle is won when one can stand up and speak confidently in front of others.
Public speaking is not something we are taught in school or college, and yet it is an important skill to have. To be able to stand up and speak in front of others, persuade them, change their minds, and win their hearts – that is a key step in one’s own leadership journey.
Excellent suggestion of the method by Shri Rajesh Jain.
While I was on the faculty at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia, I suggested that we (in the Mechanical Engineering department) should help the students the ability to make good presentations. The Chairman gave me the task. I had two seminar courses to teach/conduct. One was on general topics and the other was on technical topics. Students prepared talks on topics of their choice. Other students volunteered to be lead discussers on each topic. The students also scored the presentations. I did score the presenters and scorers too. When a person makes a presentation, they should have a good knowledge of the subject they are presenting (usually the general topic), they should have command of the language in which they were presenting, they should make the topic interesting to the audience, and they should realize that they are not experts on the topic. At the end of the semester, the students felt that they gained a lot of confidence in speaking.