Happens all the time, right? We craft our speech, get up in front of our fellow Toastmasters, and 'thar she blows. Sometimes it goes well, but other times we leave our listeners with a big question mark over their heads.
Last month I did exactly this: I performed a speech from the "Storytelling" manual loosely based on material from my work-in-progress novel.
It was the worst-received speech of my entire 8 year Toastmasters career. As you might imagine, I was pretty bummed out when I received my verbal and written evaluations. After all, I've poured my heart and soul into my manuscript for the past ten months. I went home that night downtrodden, and my husband, Derek, asked how my speech went. "They hated it!" I cried, "I don't get it; what did I do wrong?"
He asked me to perform the speech for him, and I did - a silly, dramatic scene in which two siblings quibbled over a game of chess. When I finished, I asked Derek what he thought, and he described the speech as "watching a five minute clip of 'Lord of the Rings' where the hobbits are stealing carrots from a farm and you have no concept of anything else going on in the movie."
Ouch! It was tough to hear. Honest, critical feedback when your dearly cherished work flops is always hard to listen to. But Derek wasn't telling me this to be mean. He's a Toastmaster, too, and one of the most charming people I know. After many, many flowers were purchased, I thanked him for his feedback.
You see, he was right. Everyone who evaluated my speech was. In my fervor to craft a speech under a tight deadline and share my ideas with others, I had completely failed to consider my audience.
Audience is our life blood in the business of storytelling. And yet, it's so easily overlooked, such an underconsidered factor when we are preparing our speeches.
As a result of this experience, I developed a new speech two weeks later. Using the material from the Toastmasters "Better Speaker Series," I presented "Know Your Audience - Five Golden Rules."
It was very well-received.
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: FIVE GOLDEN RULES:
1. Consider Your Audience! Age, gender, education, career, interests, etc., are all very important. These factors act almost as a picture frame for you put around a panoramic. How do you frame your message?
2. Target Your Audience! Imagine you are giving a speech about how to take precautions against the coming down with the flu. Your audience is a classroom of 4th graders. Now, take that same subject and let's change your audience to a conference room of medical professionals. The message would be very different. We must learn to use different "voices," depending on who we are speaking to.
3. Don't Lose Your Audience! Make sure you understand your audience's level of knowledge on a topic before you step up to the lectern to ensure that it's neither too basic nor to complex. If you can, try to avoid distracting gestures, as these can become an unintended focal point of your speech. You don't want to be the guy they only remember because he jangled his keys in his pocket for half the speech.
4. Choose the Right Audience! Putting good work in front of the wrong audience won't give you quality feedback. Just as there is no one book, one movie, one TV series that every person in the world is a fan of, so, too, does this apply to a speech. Make sure you put the right work in front of the right people to achieve maximum impact. Sometimes who your audience is can be unpredictable, so don't fret if your speech doesn't go as well as you envisioned. We live to see another day!
5. Don't Lose Your Message! There is such a thing as catering too much to your audience and losing your purpose. You want to think about your audience, but be wary of overanalyzing. Stay true to yourself and your purpose while telling your story in a a way your audience can appreciate. That's the goal.
