When to add the salt?
"You could always add salt after you have finished cooking, but that
salt will taste forced. If, on the other hand, you add salt while cooking, the
salt will merge with the meal, it will cook with it, and the whole thing will
taste much better"
This was what my mother told me, while she taught me the art of cooking. But I dare to say that this does not apply only to cooking, it also applies to public speaking!
Yes, ladies and gentlemen! The mistake that most of us make is that we write the speech, and after we finish it, we say: "Oh, I want to add a presentation to that" This results in a presentation that feels forced on the speech, a presentation that lurks behind you, just showing pictures of people smiling, of cute hearts, of money… You know what kind of presentation I am talking about. But, personally, I believe that this kind of presentation takes away from the speech instead of adding to it. Because it takes a part of the audience's attention without offering anything in return!
"What is he trying to say?" you ask, I am trying to say that planning the presentation should be a phase that is integrated with the whole speech. I am trying to say that while you are writing your speech, you should keep thinking: what is showing on the screen behind me? How am I interacting with it? How is it helping me? You should mix your presentation with your speech, not add it on top of it.
In my first few speeches in ToastMasters, I used to commit this very sin of writing the speech and then adding the slides to it. When I talked to people after those speeches, I would ask them about my slides and they would say: "yeah they were cute", and would then stare away awkwardly, trying to avoid conversation. In my last few speeches, however, people would come to me unsolicited and say: "I loved your slides!" The thing that has changed in the past few speeches could only be explained by showing you some examples:
1- In a speech that I gave about how movies incorrectly portray hackers, I started my speech by pounding quickly on the keyboard, with a screen behind me that showed texts blazing fast on an exotic screen, with a map dotted with bright green dots (check out www.geektyper.com). I then looked at the audience and said: "This is how movies portray hackers to you".
2- In the speech that won me the National Humorous Speech Contest of ToastMasters Lebanon, I was telling the audience about my tribe, the tribe of programmers. I then proceeded to show them some of the ancient texts of our people. These texts, to the audience’s surprise were written in code.
3- My last speech, "The Falling Man", talked about a man who woke up to find himself falling from a very high place, and then described his story of trying to find the truth of this fall. Behind me, was an animated stick figure show that followed along with the falling man as he progressed through his adventure.
Looking back at these examples, I ask the questions: "Could I have pulled off those presentations, if I treated them as an add-on to my speech? Would they have had the same impact? Would they have gotten people this excited about the speech?"
I believe that the answers to these questions are No, No and No. Because our speeches only reach their maximum when we think of them as an integrated unity composed of a mixture of elements, not as LEGO parts that we put on top of each other.
This was what my mother told me, while she taught me the art of cooking. But I dare to say that this does not apply only to cooking, it also applies to public speaking!
Yes, ladies and gentlemen! The mistake that most of us make is that we write the speech, and after we finish it, we say: "Oh, I want to add a presentation to that" This results in a presentation that feels forced on the speech, a presentation that lurks behind you, just showing pictures of people smiling, of cute hearts, of money… You know what kind of presentation I am talking about. But, personally, I believe that this kind of presentation takes away from the speech instead of adding to it. Because it takes a part of the audience's attention without offering anything in return!
"What is he trying to say?" you ask, I am trying to say that planning the presentation should be a phase that is integrated with the whole speech. I am trying to say that while you are writing your speech, you should keep thinking: what is showing on the screen behind me? How am I interacting with it? How is it helping me? You should mix your presentation with your speech, not add it on top of it.
In my first few speeches in ToastMasters, I used to commit this very sin of writing the speech and then adding the slides to it. When I talked to people after those speeches, I would ask them about my slides and they would say: "yeah they were cute", and would then stare away awkwardly, trying to avoid conversation. In my last few speeches, however, people would come to me unsolicited and say: "I loved your slides!" The thing that has changed in the past few speeches could only be explained by showing you some examples:
1- In a speech that I gave about how movies incorrectly portray hackers, I started my speech by pounding quickly on the keyboard, with a screen behind me that showed texts blazing fast on an exotic screen, with a map dotted with bright green dots (check out www.geektyper.com). I then looked at the audience and said: "This is how movies portray hackers to you".
2- In the speech that won me the National Humorous Speech Contest of ToastMasters Lebanon, I was telling the audience about my tribe, the tribe of programmers. I then proceeded to show them some of the ancient texts of our people. These texts, to the audience’s surprise were written in code.
3- My last speech, "The Falling Man", talked about a man who woke up to find himself falling from a very high place, and then described his story of trying to find the truth of this fall. Behind me, was an animated stick figure show that followed along with the falling man as he progressed through his adventure.
Looking back at these examples, I ask the questions: "Could I have pulled off those presentations, if I treated them as an add-on to my speech? Would they have had the same impact? Would they have gotten people this excited about the speech?"
I believe that the answers to these questions are No, No and No. Because our speeches only reach their maximum when we think of them as an integrated unity composed of a mixture of elements, not as LEGO parts that we put on top of each other.
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