Practicing Public Speaking: Testing Speeches

00:01 Testing. It's one of the most important concepts when it comes to public speaking, and yet you don't hear people talk about it much.

00:10 It's not mentioned in most public speaking books, but I believe testing is the key to really walking into any presentation with tremendous confidence.

00:20 Now, let me step back a minute.

00:22 A lot of people like to talk about public speaking as a soft skill.

00:26 They call it a soft skill, almost like it's a soft little puppy.

00:31 It's not hard and quantifiable, like accounting or physics or mathematics. That's the conventional wisdom.

00:38 I disagree completely.

00:41 I believe giving a presentation, giving a PowerPoint talk, giving a pitch is absolutely just as quantifiable as any aspect of accounting, mathematics, or anything else you can measure. Because you can in fact measure your presentations based on results, based on what people remember.

01:05 Here's all you have to do.

01:07 You've heard me talk about this before.

01:09 I'll say it again and again.

01:10 You're giving a presentation to 50 clients or prospects on Thursday. Get three colleagues from down the hall or maybe somebody from another office.

01:21 And you're saying building you give them a free sandwich, and then you give them your presentation when you are done.

01:29 Ask them every message point they remember.

01:33 Ask them every PowerPoint slide they remember.

01:35 If you're using PowerPoint and that's how you test any message that was really important to you that they can't throw back in your face.

01:46 Guess what? You now have 100% empirical evidence that you failed.

01:54 It's never the audience's fault.

01:55 If the audience doesn't remember your message, it's your fault.

02:00 It's your problem.

02:01 It's not their problem.

02:02 It's not their fault.

02:04 I have found audiences are remarkably consistent around the world when it comes to business and audiences, adult audiences, they'll listen.

02:12 They're not necessarily going to write anything down, but they'll listen as long as there's something interesting.

02:18 And if there is something interesting and memorable, it will stick.

02:22 If it's simply a boring abstract data dump, even on a subject they do find helpful or useful, it goes in one ear and out the other.

02:32 They instantly forget it.

02:35 Here's the thing about audiences, though.

02:36 They don't really have the ability to lie.

02:38 Now they can lie and say, Oh, TJ, great job.

02:41 You did a good job today, even if they think I'm awful.

02:45 But if I ask them what message is to their member, and they can't give me any messages, they're not going to be able to just lie and make up messages unless they're saying something that wasn't in the speech.

02:55 And then I will know they are lying.

02:58 Here's what happens to many people when they ask that question after a presentation.

03:03 People say, Well, you know, you did a good job.

03:04 Everything was great. Very professional.

03:06 Good job, TJ. Way to go.

03:08 You're a real pro. If somebody says that to me after a presentation and I asked what they remembered, I now know that I failed completely.

03:19 I was awful.

03:21 That was an abomination.

03:23 I didn't actually communicate anything.

03:25 Your goal when you give a presentation is not to have people just think you're confident and smooth and comfortable.

03:31 Your goal is actual communication, and unlike a lot of new products in business or even new software, this doesn't take assembling expensive focus groups in shopping malls to test your ideas.

03:47 All you have to do is speak.

03:49 You know, there are two people in the audience.

03:51 Ask them what they remember.

03:52 If they don't remember your stuff, you failed.

03:56 You need to take your speech, your messages that were important to you.

03:59 Tear them up, throw it away and start from scratch.

04:04 Any message that's really important to you to get across to your audience, you need to be able to test it in advance and find out if another similar audience actually remembers it.

04:17 The very same thing applies to your PowerPoint slides.

04:20 Now you've heard me talk about, or you will hear me talk about in the PowerPoint section how to test slides.

04:25 But the same testing principle applies.

04:29 Give your PowerPoint presentation when you're done.

04:33 Ask people what slides they remember, what was on the slides, what the message was on those slides. If they can't remember what was on the slides, guess what? The slide is completely worthless.

04:45 Throw it in the trash can, please.

04:46 Right now. Throw it in the trash can.

04:48 It doesn't work.

04:50 It flunked the test.

04:54 So many people go into presentations with this idea of, Wow, I just sort of hope things work, or I hope the room likes me.

05:03 I hope I'm on today.

05:05 If I have a positive thinking mentality, if I visualize success or all these things where there's no empirical evidence that those are relevant, but in this way if I came to you and said, I want to build a bridge across the East River and I want you to pay for it all, and I'm going to make it out of popsicles or some other material.

05:31 Are you just going to take my word for it? Are you going to want some empirical evidence? Are you going to want to know that I'm a civil engineer, that I have the proper materials, that I actually have a design for a bridge to make sure it doesn't fall down? Or are you just going to hope that T.J.

05:45 is having an on day when he builds that bridge? I don't think so. I think you're going to want hardcore evidence, proof.

05:54 If you run an oil refinery and I come to you and say, I've got this great way of transporting oil from Alaska to your refinery, and it's going to be 90% less than any other type of transportation.

06:07 Are you going to take my word for it? I don't think so.

06:11 You're going to want hardcore evidence testing measurement that I can actually deliver, that I can accomplish what I say I can accomplish.

06:21 Well, I want you to take the exact same mentality when it comes to your presentations.

06:28 You need to test to make sure it works, and it is in fact incredibly easy to do.

06:34 All you have to do is ask your audience, Now, here's what you're going to find.

06:39 Audiences, I don't care where they are, how smart they are, how educated they are, unless they are writing it all down because you told them you were going to test them in advance, and that's unfair.

06:51 Audiences are just never going to remember more than five messages and tell you that right now, your money back on this course.

06:58 If you can find an audience that isn't in an academic situation, they're not being tested, and they're not writing it all down.

07:05 If you can find an audience where even 2% of the people remember more than five ideas, because in my experience doing this for 30 years, audiences don't remember more than five ideas.

07:18 Often they don't remember more than two ideas, and very frequently they remember nothing because the speaker was so boring.

07:28 So this testing philosophy is critically important when it comes to you building your speech, because I would submit that most speeches suffer a fundamental design flaw in the same way, if I'm going to build that bridge across the East River using nothing but rubber bands or nothing but toothpicks, at some level, it almost doesn't matter what the blueprint is or how experienced the team is that I've hired to do it.

08:01 If the fundamental building blocks are just flawed, it's not going to matter.

08:05 That bridge is going to collapse the first time someone tries to drive over that bridge. Assuming we can even get it up, they're going to go crashing into the river and drown. And unfortunately, that is exactly what happens with most people's speeches.

08:20 Their design is, here's a message, here's a fact, here is a fact. Here's another fact.

08:27 There's simply no evidence, ladies and gentlemen, that that is how human beings like to listen to someone when trying to learn a new subject or when trying to sit in a meeting or be at a conference.

08:40 So the basic idea of fact, fact, fact, fact, message, message, message and just putting it up, you know, a big shovel and scooping it and throwing it down, there's simply no evidence that that works.

08:55 I test audiences all the time, and I can tell you they remember a couple of things.

09:02 They remember stories.

09:03 If the story is relevant to a message that affects them, their business or their personal life, they remember the stories as it relates to a message, and they remember your passion.

09:15 And guess how passion comes out? It comes out when you are telling stories.

09:21 Audiences do not remember a fact delivered once in a straightforward, articulate way to test this.

09:30 Let me ask you a question. How many exit doors are there on a 747? Now, this is a question I ask audiences all the time, all over the world, and one person will say eight, one person will say six, and one person will say 12.

09:44 My point is, everybody is saying something different.

09:47 And yet anyone who's traveled a lot has been told hundreds of times of how many exits doors there are.

09:55 But here's the key.

09:56 When people are told how many exit doors, they're told at the very same time, all potential passengers.

10:03 Fasten your seat belt.

10:04 Here's how the seat belt is bad.

10:05 Blah, blah, blah. It's all said in such a boring, perfunctory, straightforward way that people just tune out.

10:13 So you can tell somebody something 100 times if it's said in a straightforward, boring, linear fashion.

10:21 It doesn't really stick when you're speaking.

10:25 You need to focus your energies on what you want to stick in people's minds. What I want to stick with you right now is this idea of don't ever, and I mean, don't ever give a presentation unless you've tested it.

10:39 And that's not expensive.

10:41 It's not some big fancy methodology.

10:43 All I mean is you're giving a speech Thursday to 20 people.

10:46 Fine. Three people, give your speech Tuesday.

10:49 Ask them what they remember.

10:53 But then you've got to go back and tinker with it.

10:55 You've got to change it.

10:57 And maybe they remembered one of your key points, but to others that you really, really cared about.

11:03 Nobody remembered.

11:05 And it doesn't help to remember this or remember this slot, because you can't do that in real life to the speech, to the audience.

11:15 So don't give yourself any extra help in the testing process.

11:20 If your audience can't remember it, you've got to change the speech.

11:24 You've got to typically remove extra message points and add stories to flesh your point out.

11:32 That's really what most people have to do because most people get greedy, and you know what they say about pigs? Pigs get slaughtered when you get greedy.

11:41 Trying to put way too many facts, way too many messages in your presentation. What is your audience to? Are they really doing this, writing everything down? Oh, TJ, so brilliant.

11:55 Let me write it up now.

11:57 They're doing their grocery list is what they're doing or what they're doing, especially if they're not on the first row as they're taking their cell phone , and they're checking their email.

12:10 That's what they're doing.

12:12 So, folks, it's not a luxury.

12:15 It's not an extra.

12:16 It's not something fancy or high-tech.

12:19 It's simple testing.

12:21 You should do it before every single presentation you give.