Be a Proactive Speaker
Years ago, as our kids waited for the school bus, a car careened up onto the sidewalk forcing us to flee up the grass hill to safety. We often witnessed cars come to a pause at the stop sign, then continue into the intersection not knowing the vertical street was (is!) a straightaway. The intersection has an elementary school, a city school bus stop for grades pre-K through high school, and a city bus stop. Our then seven year-old daughter wrote to City Council requesting a 4-way stop. A traffic study found there were not enough accidents to call for the change (don’t get me started). So, we painted a mandala to slow down the traffic through the intersection. We were proactive.
Speakers, too, need to be proactive—we can’t assume event coordinators or venues will have all details covered. I worked with a leader who brought me a video to illustrate her public speaking skills. The video showed her on stage with a slide lighting up the top half of her head to just below the nose where the rest of her stood in darkness. It was hard to discern her skill as I was so distracted by the image before me. I watched as her lips bobbed in and out of the light, a high hand wave here and there emerging from the gloom like a dolphin’s fin.
When I asked about this technical glitch—”Why were you standing in the dark?—she said, “That’s where they put me.”
Clearly, this positioning was not good for anyone—the audience missed out terribly.
It’s easy to default to passivity and trust that someone else is taking care of things. It reminds me of the mistakes I made at parties when the children were small—I just assumed that with so many parents around someone was keeping an eye out! Nope!
When we enter a TV studio or banquet hall, we assume that someone else knows best and will catch all the details. Not true.
In my experience, organizers and event coordinators are thrilled to have a speaker ask for what they need.
The first thing I do when I work with a speaker is ask them to PROACTIVELY reach out to the event coordinator and get information about the tech, the audience, the space, the format, the whole event. Weeks or even months in advance is just fine! Often, the coordinators do not yet have answers, but our inquiries nudge them to front-load their own preparation and think about details they themselves might have left for the last moment.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at all the things we can do as speakers to be proactive. Why? First, being proactive creates a better process for everyone: things get done earlier, technical needs are identified and taken care of, processes are thought-through, fewer things are left to chance. Second, the more we know, the better we can prepare, and the better we prepare, the more confident, solid, and playful our talk will be. Third, our audience is the raison d’etre, so everything we are doing benefits them and takes away obstacles to our communication.
Remember, it is a gift to see and be seen!