SPEAKING OF COMMUNICATION
By: Susan Young
Your job as a great communicator is to forget yourself and focus on the audience. It may be in a casual conversation in a conference room or it may be at a workshop presentation with 50 people.
When you deliver your message, it’s essential that you shift the focus from yourself and what you want to get out of the meeting. It’s time to completely concentrate on giving all of yourself to your audience.
Organizing your thoughts and message will help you to reach this goal.
First, write an initial outline of the three or four key points and lessons you want people to walk away with. Then decide you will backfill your main points with pertinent details to bring the message home. Standing in front of a group of people and doing a brain dump won’t get them engaged or educated. It will probably bore them to tears. You and all your statistics, charts, and information will be long forgotten by the time they leave the parking lot. You will have missed an opportunity to have a meaningful impact on someone else’s life.
Get out of your own way and target your audience. The key to conveying a memorable value-based message to every single person in the room is to share a lesson or story that resonates with them. Bring your audience along for the ride. Too many times speakers and professionals have left the podium without having revealed anything about themselves as a human being that can influence their audience.
Tips on targeting your audience:
Do your homework. Find out in advance who will be in the room. Ask questions of the person who has requested your presentation. Are the participants entry-level, senior managers, retail or members of an all-women executive board of CEO’s?
Ask the organizer why they want you to speak and share your expertise? Find out their goals and objectives for the day. What do they want the audience to walk away with? Just as we hear about return on investment in business, in the speaking arena, the priority is return on objectives. In the end, did you give them what they asked for?
Uncover their biggest challenges. By probing and asking questions of the organizer, you will be able to determine what problems the group is facing and hopefully offer solutions to their pain. This adds value.
When you concentrate on your audience and not on yourself, you have the ability to truly affect people. Dump your own agenda and work with theirs. Make sure your message resonates with everyone in the room. Grab the audience, engage them, relate to them and help them.
Forget the canned presentations and goofy slides from corporate. Customize your speech for every single person in that room. That’s a valuable and winning presentation.
Susan Young is the president of Susan Young Media Relations Inc. and Get in Front Communications. The companies provide public relations, mass media and interpersonal communications services to businesses, nonprofits and professional associations. Susan is a member of the National Speakers Association and is a frequent presenter at professional meetings and conferences. Call (732) 613-4790 or visit www.sueyoungmedia.com.

