This is Part 5 of a series that I’m writing this week to help you be a better speaker.
What I’ve learned about every talk I’ve given is there is something essential that I have to forget about in order for the talk to go well.
Unfortunately, it’s something that almost every presenter only thinks about.
But it’s very important to know that your audience doesn’t think about this, and therefore you shouldn’t either.
Are you ready for the secret sauce of every single great presentation? Seriously, I am not fooling. If you have no idea what makes a presentation great, this will take you from novice to Jedi. Ironically, it’s not something you remember.
It’s something you forget.
Here goes:
Forget. Yourself.
Yes, that’s it. I’m not trying to be spiritual or transcendental. This is probably the most practical thing that I could share with you about public speaking.
If you can get to a place where the focus shifts completely from yourself, to the audience, you won.
The craziest thing is that most of us typically only think about ourselves when we are speaking. We worry how we are going to come across, cover all the notes, make the right impression, illicit laughs with our jokes – all of that.
And at the end of the day, we only focus on ourselves when we get up to do that presentation (whether it be an informal meeting or a keynote).
The key to effective communication is connection. When we spend our time during the presentation trying to connect only to ourselves, we have produced isolation and invited others to sit and watch us focus on ourselves. That’s it.
And we are all alone.
I’ve been there more times than I care to admit, and when I find myself going there, I feel it after. I know I didn’t make the connection, and I lost the point along the way.
Now, let me tell you another crazy aspect of this. The audience doesn’t care about you.
Period.
I know, if you’re a pastor you’re gong to say they love you. Sure they do. And yes, they might pray for you. But here is a cold fact: When they walk through the doors of the church, the board room, the auditorium, whatever, they’re not wondering how your prep time went. They aren’t contemplating on your physical health that day. They aren’t focusing on whether or not you’re going to be satisfied with those bold new glasses you’re sporting.
They simply don’t care.
When I started to recognize that fact, I was completely and totally liberated.
I felt that if these people weren’t coming to hear me based on how I feel, then maybe I don’t have to feel perfect giving a talk. Maybe, just maybe. . .I can forget myself all together and focus on. . .
Them.
Yep, just focus on them.
So from one presenter to another, you have to get out of your head. If you stay up there, thinking of you, and worrying about you, you’ll never enter the place you’re speaking. And when it comes to presentations, one is really the loneliest number.
So, of course, you ask, how do you do this.
I wish I knew. I don’t know you. I don’t know what motivates the people who are coming to hear you or meet with you. But here are some quick guidelines.
1) Realize that every single person you’re speaking to has something going on in their lives that has nothing to do with what you’re doing – and it most likely is overshadowing and competing for their attention. You either have to accept this, and learn how to utilize it, or you have to pretend that you are the center of the universe.
Think about them, and what they are about to experience. Is there something you’re going to say that’s going to encourage them, motivate them, heaven forbid, IMPROVE them? If not, maybe you’re thinking of yourself too much.
2) Understand that no mistake up there shatters the earth the way you think it does. Let me get real personal. I learned this the hard way. In 2016, I spoke publicly over 120 times to hundreds of people. Almost every single time I got up to speak, I had a massive panic attack (I will write about anxiety at some other point). The first time it happened, it happened behind the scenes with some of my staff and key leaders.
For a year, I thought that most people who knew I struggled with this were constantly thinking about it.
Nope. That wasn’t even close to true.
The majority of the people who witnessed the panic attack didn’t even think of it more that a couple times after the incident, and as for the other people who heard my talks, not one person recognized how tense I’d become during speaking.
Now, you can choose to frame this in a way that makes it feel as though nothing you do matters, but not me. This made me feel absolutely liberated from the fear of speaking. I realized that I was not everyone’s dinner conversation or a guinea pig standing on stage for scientific analysis.
I could be me. And I could forget myself, and focus on them.
3) The energy you invest on thinking of yourself could be better spent trying to connect to the audience. Thinking of yourself is draining. It really is. It requires effort. But if you take that effort, and focus on being entirely present, and being entirely for the people you’re speaking to, they’ll notice.
I promise you.
Getting out of your head and into that crowd will be the most beautiful and difficult journey you make, but when you invest that travel time into the people you’re serving by giving a talk, they feel it. And they’ll want more of you.
The most rewarding thing that happens when I give a talk, be it a sermon, or a presentation, is when someone comes to me and repeats something back that I said that connected with them. I’ll laugh because I truly don’t remember saying it. It’s at that point I realize it happened not because I’m senile and forget where I am and to wear pants sometimes. It happened because my chief aim was connection over anything. And if you have something important to say, it’s selfish to not attempt to connect those listening to you with that content.
So, do us all a favor as a communicator: forget yourself.