Roland Millward

Archive for December, 2009

At the risk of repeating myself

Repeating oneself is often viewed as a sign of old age. However repeating oneself is not always a bad thing.

When you give a talk you must remember that people will remember relatively little of what you have said after just a few hours of leaving the venue. How can you help them remember at least the key points of your talk?

One way is to use repetition. By repetition I do not mean simply keep saying the same things over and over again like children who are learning their mathematical tables. Repetition is repeating key ideas, the theme, and phrases that will help your audience to remember. This is a skill that once learnt will be invaluable as your audience will not only remember your talk but will likely talk about it to others for longer.

This subject is covered in my one day intensive speaking course in much more detail and you will be encouraged to practice this skill throughout your speaking career. When you compose your talk note carefully the key ideas that you want your audience to take away with them. This will form the basis of where you will build your repetition into the talk. You will be able to use phrases such as “Did you notice”, “I am just going to say that again” and then repeat or rephrase that point. Other useful phrases to commence your repeating of a point could be “what have we learnt so far?”, “let’s just go over that again”, “I just want to go back to” and of course many more. I am sure though that you can see that making sure your audience understands the reason for your talk and remembers the key thoughts is vital and using repetition is a tool to achieve this.

The key to repetition is to make it a natural part of the talk and not look like an after thought as though you were thinking “they did not understand.” You must also not appear to talk down to your audience or treat them like 5 year old children at school. With careful planning and thought your use of repetition will come naturally. Observe your audience and if puzzled looks are on their faces you may have to repeat your point so that they can understand. It has to be said that if people do not understand what you have said, simply repeating the same words is unlikely to make things clearer. You will need to put things in a different way. Therefore to make sure you do not have to do this too often prepare well and choose your words and illustrations according to the audience that will be listening. If you are talking about a matter that will be well understood by your audience it will require different explanations than a subject that is ‘foreign’ to them.

So let me say that again…..

Repetition is vital and its proper use is a skill that must be developed to become a successful speaker.

A good speaker needs to engage with his audience.

Each member of the audience needs to feel that the speaker is talking to them personally. This can be achieved in a number of ways.

Perhaps the main way that would come into anyone’s mind would be that the speaker should look at the audience. Some nervous speakers will look at the floor, their notes or maybe the props they are using or anything else but the audience. Some speakers are a little cleverer as they have learned to look at the gaps in the audience. That way they appear to be looking at people to the casual observer and because they are not looking anyone in the eye they feel less nervous.

Now you may be thinking – ‘what a great idea!’ – Forget it! It is bad practice.

To have real audience contact you must have visual eye to eye contact with the audience. Try to look at an individual for a few seconds then move your gaze to another and so on. Please make sure that you look and not stare! There is a difference. You do not want to make someone feel uncomfortable as you look at them and so make sure that you do not spend too long looking at one person or more often at one than you do others. Try to equal out the people that you make eye contact with and if a certain individual will not give you eye contact then it may be prudent not to try getting contact again with that one.

It must be said though that good audience contact is not just done visually. It is also be the way you speak to your audience. For example you can use the term ‘we’ instead of ‘you’ so that you are an inclusive member of the talk and not lecturing your audience. Your style of delivery should be conversational rather than preachy and if you have a warm and friendly manner your audience will engage with you and with what you say. By applying these techniques you will achieve good audience contact.

This subject of audience contact is covered in out intensive speaking course.

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