Mastering the Brag/Bash Balance

I'll never forget how hard my Mom laughed when I got the term wrong. I mentioned that I preferred it when speakers were 'self-defecating.' She coughed onion soup through her nose, sent me to a dictionary, and I never made that mistake again.

'Self-deprecating.' It's a quality we admire and a technique that we advocate in good speeches and presentations. But doing it well is a tricky balancing act. Too much, and we lose the underlying 'follow me' effect; that psychological pull that inspires audiences to emulate our behaviours. Too little, and you position yourself as an abrasive braggart, earning audience reactions like, "I can't believe they paid him to come here and preen."

I have to walk this line in my own presentations. I have some humorous stories about embarrassing moments in my life, including:

- The time I fell off a treadmill at gym and landed up in a pile against the back wall, ankles around my ears - The time the IT guy accidentally loaded porn onto the screen behind me while I was speaking to an audience, and - (One that I'm still working on with my therapist).

... but I also need to refer to some victories, in order to illustrate certain key points; incidents like:

- Winning the Toastmasters Championships for public speaking in my country five times - Landing my first job on radio, and - Publishing my first book.

If your speeches are structured in such a way that you need to refer to personal incidents to make your points, are there any useful guidelines you could follow?

Absolutely! Let's explore them by looking at each end of the scale in turn:

1. 'Bragging':

The rule of thumb is this: All self-promoting illustrations must have intrinsic value. They must contribute to the audience's understanding of your message. They have to make a point. If they don't, they shouldn't be there.

Of course you want the audience to know about your credentials, but if they don't add to the speech, they should be relegated to your introduction, if they appear at all. Be secure enough to accept that not every audience needs to know everything you've accomplished.

Our job is to focus on making them greater people, not to illustrate our own greatness.

And so, the question to ask is this: Am I telling this story because I want them to know about my accomplishment, or will this genuinely inspire them? Intrinsic value is always the key.

2. Self-deprecation:

Self-deprecation does not necessarily have to have as much intrinsic value as its counterpart. To a large extent, we use it for the emotional impact it will have on our audiences. Therefore, the criterion becomes:

- It should move them (to laughter or tears) - It should help them to relate to you as an accessible human being - It should create an enjoyable, entertaining effect.

What it should not do is take you so far away from your actual point that you dilute the effect of your message. Nor should it make your audience feel uncomfortable. The usefulness of self-deprecation ends where self-pity or self-indulgence begins. Ask yourself: Am I telling them this because it will create emotional impact, or do I simply want pity?

Another useful purpose for self-deprecating stories is to create emotional tension before a triumph, for greater contrast in your speech delivery. You can sell an idea more effectively if you talk about your pain before you applied the idea. In this instance, your 'down' moment exists to throw greater light on the 'up' moment to follow.

A talk about personal finances, for example, can be brought to life with a self-deprecating story about how poor your own financial scenario was prior to your application of the forthcoming ideas. The further down you were, the greater the impact of the subsequent triumph. Without that subsequent triumph, you are merely using your audience as a therapist... And that's not what you get paid for.

Then there's the delivery:

When you must tell one of your success stories, don't try to play it down. It actually comes across as a reverse form of bragging, which is equally annoying. If you won the World Championships in one or other field, don't try to diminish its effect by saying, "I won a contest." Say, "I won the World Championships." Belittling a legitimate achievement doesn't make you look humble. You're just over-doing your attempt to avoid bragging, and it shows. If it is truth, state it. Don't play it down. But always begin by asking: Is there intrinsic value to the audience?

Some of the most ticklingly fantastic humour we'll ever create is born in our most embarrassing moments. Some of our most powerful points find their genesis in our own accomplishments. Present them with the right balance, and your audiences will come to love the human being bearing all before them!

Public Speaking: Create A Compelling Conclusion!

Concluding a speech is like landing a plane filled with passengers. How skillfully it's done makes a world of difference to all concerned!

More Than Just An End

Your conclusion is much more that simply an end to your speech. It is a critical part of your speech, perhaps the most important part of it. Why? For your speech to have a lasting effect on others, they have to remember it afterwards. What is stated last is often remembered longest.

Therefore, you should craft your conclusion carefully to create a lasting impact on your audience. It should drive home the overall point of your entire discussion.

What Is The Point?

This forces you to examine your objective, or the purpose of your discussion. While developing your presentation, no doubt you had an objective in mind, and that objective helped you to decide what material to use and what to omit. It guided you in your selection of your main points. Don't change horses in mid-stream, stick to that objective.

So, the paramount question is still: What do you want to accomplish by means of this speech? If your objective is to move the audience to take action, your conclusion should strongly urge them to take that action, in no uncertain terms. It should answer the question beginning to take shape in the minds of your listeners: "Based on what you've said thus far, what should I do?"

A Compelling Conclusion

A compelling conclusion uses both reason and emotional appeal. Its appeal to reason is found in the fact that the main points in the body of your discussion point directly to what you offer or urge in the conclusion. The conclusion is therefore the culmination of a logical progression of thoughts. It summarizes the main points and presents them again to your audience, for maximum impact.

However, logical reasoning does not always move people to action. For that, an emotional component is needed. This could be supplied by highlighting the benefits of acting as you suggest and coupling this with an earnest appeal to the audience to act in their own best interests. The conviction and earnestness you express here is essential.

To Compel, Convince!

This means, of course, that you have to sincerely believe what you advocate. That sincerity will help you to be enthusiastic, and to transfer your enthusiasm to the audience. Enthusiasm is both contagious and convincing.

Using a conclusion which employs convincing reasoning, and which skillfully appeals to your audience's desire to act in their own best interests, will be very compelling. Your objective will have been achieved and your speech will be a success!

The Surprising Genetic Link to the Fear of Public Speaking

So when I recently discovered that there's an evolutionary component to being in the spotlight, it made a lot of sense to me.

Did you know that the fear of public speaking is linked to prehistoric man?

Predators seek the easy prey: those who are alone, vulnerable, in a flat, open area. More than two million years ago, early man learned that his chances for survival plummeted when he was standing alone in open territory (no place to hide), unarmed, in front of a pack of animals that were staring at him, licking their chops.

The odds were high that he'd soon be attacked. So our ancestors developed a fear response to this type of life-threatening situation.

Over millennia, this fear became programmed into our genes. And although your audience today isn't a pack of hungry wolves, the vulnerable feeling persists.

Though it's a bit of a stretch, your genes are programmed to look for threats. It's called adaptation, and we're geniuses at it.

The modern twist on this genetically programmed anxiety is to fear humiliation, embarrassment and rejection. Granted, these are big fears. Not life-threatening, but they are some of the biggest fears of modern life.

It's natural for you to want to avoid embarrassment like the plague because you don't like it when your self-confidence takes a big hit. Ditto when you're humiliated; you temporarily lose your sense of identity.

From asking a hottie out on a date to speaking in front of a hundred people, performance anxiety touches your life in a wide variety of situations. The key to mastering your biology is to understand it, then find ways to plug the holes in your self-confidence.

When you recognize that public speaking triggers a lot of nervous energy, you can learn to focus that energy in a beneficial way. Nervous becomes excited. Motivated. Passionate. Engaging. Likable.

When you're nervous, your energy is scattered. Your thoughts are dominated by self-doubt and worry-neither of which help you deliver a strong presentation. Others will pick up on your nervousness and will be turned off by it.

But when you speak from your passion, you are your most persuasive. Passion is both attractive and contagious. People want to be around you; they're more open to hearing and agreeing with you when you speak from your heart.

Writing a Speech Is Like Planting a Garden

Now that the nice weather is here I have been thinking about gardening and speeches, and I have realized that they have many things in common... and not just that they are both hard work...

Do you garden? If so, you probably look forward to receiving the seed catalogue, poring over them and deciding what to put in where in your garden - flowers or vegetables, what kinds, how many. You may read books about perennial planting, or container gardening. You talk to other gardeners to get advice about the best flowers or vegetables to plant for your soil, and maybe get pictures of their garden so that you know what you are looking for. You might want to attract hummingbirds or other birds to your backyard and so you look up information on what types of shrubs to plant. Then you have to decide where your garden will be, how big, will you have a pathway, what will your focus be. You need to make sure that you have different colours and plants throughout the garden and not just bunch them up in one place. You might want to put in a path so that people can leisurely stroll through your garden. Perhaps you will have a bench where they can sit and pause as they view your garden, perhaps close to your piece de resistance - the most beautiful flower or amazing vegetable plants.

If you are a speaker who is a member of Toastmasters International, each month you receive a Toastmasters magazine with many articles and suggestions for speeches. You also read through your manuals deciding on what type of speech you will give (you do, don't you???) and if you belong to more than one club, to which club you will give it. You may keep a file folder of funny stories that you have found, or those from your personal experience. You talk to other Toastmasters and ask for advice about how to craft your speech, what to put into it and what to leave out. Then you decide on a plan. What will you use to attract the attention of the audience? What colourful words or alliterations can be used to draw people in? Then you think about the body of your speech. You will need to have it move at a gentle pace so that everyone will be able to understand what you are saying. You will need to add pauses for particular points (your best flowers) so that people can appreciate what you said.

You will want to fill out the body of the speech, just as you would the garden - a few points here, a few more over there, leading the audience gently down the garden path of your speech to the conclusion where you give them your best parting tip.

I am sure you can now clearly see how crafting a speech is like planting a garden. If you follow this "speech gardening plan", you will be sure to create excellent speeches. Just remember the following:

Just as a garden needs a variety of colour - a speech needs colourful words to draw pictures in the minds of the audience.

A garden contains many different types of flowers and/or vegetables. A speech needs many points of interest or stories.

A garden needs a path to guide the viewer. A speech needs to be linked with words and phrases to lead the audience from opening to conclusion.

People often want to "stop and smell the roses." The audience needs time to pause and ponder a particularly powerful statement. The speech needs to be nicely paced and not rushed.

In a garden it is important not to bunch everything together, but to spread it out so that people can enjoy it. In a speech it's important not to rush or to put all the information in the first paragraph or the last paragraph.

Oh yes, one more thing. A gardener has to work on his or her garden and pull the weeds on a regular basis in order to keep the garden beautiful and a speaker needs to read through and weed his speech in order to take out extraneous words to make it fit the required time frame.