You already know this, but many customer experiences are just plain bad nowadays.
Most of us have learned to live with that—or at least, to navigate around it. But when it comes time for us to speak in public, do we actually treat our customers (a/k/a, our listeners, or audience members) the way we wish big companies were treating us?
Here are three things I believe we “owe” to our audiences—things that will make their audience experience good!
1. We owe them our best thinking
While a speechwriter or speaker coach can help you develop, organize, and refine your ideas, nobody but you can decide what you should be saying. So take ownership of your speech, and make sure that it says what YOU want to tell your audience.
Back in the day, I spent ten years as a corporate speechwriter, helping executives create presentations to give at internal (company only) conferences.
And it always astounded me how often top executives would often assign the job of working with a speechwriter (in this case, me) to some member of their team.
Yes, the job of telling me what the boss wanted to talk about would fall to a staff person who might not have a clue what the boss wanted to talk about!
As you can imagine, this never worked:
- At best, the boss revised their speech a few days before the conference.
- At worst, the boss and I were up all hours writing their speech from scratch the night before they gave it.
What’s the moral of this story?
You should be in charge of your content. That way, you’ll know that your audience is getting your best thinking.
2. We owe them our time
If you want your speech to flow well, make perfect sense, and be easy to deliver, that’s going to take more time than you probably hoped.
I totally understand that most people don’t have much time to devote to an upcoming speech, let alone to prep for a meeting or conversation. (I didn’t, either, when I was raising a four-year-old and working 80+ hours a week—and that was before we had the added distraction of cell phones! 😎)
But typically, a good speech has been through several re-drafts (not touch-ups, but serious rewrites of at least some sections).
So what’s a public speaker to do? I recommend that you:
- Consult with a speechwriter, coach, or trusted adviser as soon as possible to make sure your ideas are solid, and fit the event you’ll be speaking at.
- Sketch out the bare bones (or outline) of what you’re going to say, starting with your key message (the most important point you want to make to this audience) and three sections of content that will support it.
- Only create as much content as you need. If you write down everything you know, and it takes 30 minutes to talk through it, you just did three times more work than was necessary for a 10-minute speech.
These tips will help you create your speech more efficiently. But there’s no way around it: making something good takes time!
3. We owe them our focus
When we focus on our audience’s experience, a whole new world of information opens up to us. We can notice (and maybe even take in) the fact that people are nodding their heads…smiling…or leaning forward to hear better.
If you want to create a great audience experience, it’s best to focus on what your audience is experiencing as you’re delivering your speech. That’s because, when someone is making a speech, there are two different realities going on:
- Theirs (the speaker’s), and
- Their audience’s.
Whose experience is more important? Theirs!
Understanding this can save you from a world of hurt, because if you’re prioritizing (or just stuck thinking about) your own experience, you’re more likely to:
- Trust the relentlessly nasty little voice in your head;
- Judge yourself by impossible standards;
- Believe that your audience is fixated on every little “mistake” you make; and
- Include every fact that you think needs to be covered rather than what your audience needs to (and can) hear.
Our brains are the ultimate “bubble,” and when we’re locked inside them, our perspective can get skewed in unpleasant ways.
But if our audience is having a good experience, it doesn’t matter that we may be feeling uncomfortable, self-critical, distracted, or whatever. Because their attention lifts us up, and their positive reactions are payback for the effort we’ve made.
So, what do we owe our audience?
Exactly what we owe ourselves!
