What Can I Give To Them?

 By Carol Fetzer

Keynote speaking is an opportunity to give something to others that is so much bigger than ourselves.

I had a big “aha” a few years ago, and it made a huge difference in where I put my focus prior to each of my own speaking engagements. I learned that when a speaker gets overly nervous or hyper before her talks, she is usually too focused on herself. Thoughts like, “Will they like me?”  “Will they think I’m a great/funny/dynamic speaker?” “Do I look good?” are totally about the speaker, and are often partial cause for delivering a less than winning presentation.

There is a saying that I’ve heard so many times it has started to become trite.  However, it’s so true, especially when it comes to contracted speakers, that it needs to be said again: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

How does an audience know that you care about them?  First of all, you have done your homework and you know who they are. You have a pretty good understanding about their world. You know something of their language, their issues, the kind of work they do.  Additionally, they can tell you are not delivering a canned talk. You have customized your presentation for them.

What does that “discovery” process look like? As a professional speaker, you should study the Client Profile that your speakers bureau provides you for each upcoming speaking engagement.  But there is a step that you should take even further, because you are the expert on your subject area, and you need to make that subject as relevant as possible to this client’s audience. Remember, the client already saw relevance, or they wouldn’t have selected you. Your bureau represented you as an expert in this subject area - as well as an excellent speaker.

You now have two clients: your bureau and the contracting client.  Make yourself available to meet by telephone with your bureau to discuss the client. Ask key questions that will help you in your preparation for this presentation - questions that are relevant to YOUR area of expertise and your speech topic. The Client Profile will include information such as: make up of audience; number in attendance; type of business; ratio of male/female; theme of conference; past speakers; other speakers at this conference; time allotted for presentation; etc.

Talk with the meeting planner. Additionally, you should have a conversation no less than a month out from your presentation with the meeting planner. This is a very important meeting as it will help you to build rapport as well as build confidence in you on the part of the meeting planner. Remember, the meeting planner is someone who can directly influence other future engagements for you with his clients, strategic partners, corporate alliances, and other meeting planners. When I was responsible for a large, annual international conference for a well-known corporation, I worked with many keynote speakers and bureaus. Whenever possible, I tried to have at least one conversation with the speaker we had selected. I talked with the speaker on-site prior to the presentation, as well. My personal experience with this speaker, as well as the feedback from my clients and the response of the audience during the presentation, had a tremendous influence on what I shared about this speaker with other meeting planners of other conferences in my own company, meeting planners I knew in other companies, and clients who asked me about the speaker.

Prepare. Prepare. Prepare your presentation for THIS client and their audience. I have known of some professional speakers who deliver the same canned presentation to every single audience they speak to. And the more they deliver it, the more canned it sounds. Though it seemed to work just fine for awhile, eventually something begins to happen.  We all have what is called “habituated behavior,” which helps us to compartmentalize our brains so that we can do more than one thing at a time. It works great for moms who need to do at least three or four things at once in the morning as they hustle about trying to get the children out the door to school. She can be fixing breakfast, buttoning a child’s shirt, answering a question her husband is asking her, and putting lunch boxes together – all at the same time. But habituated behavior, if not carefully and consciously monitored, can be detrimental to speakers. And that is usually what happens when talks become too canned.

I have seen and heard speakers who have everything in their presentations canned, including when and where they walk to different parts of the stage, when they share the same joke, and the exact words used for every key point. It becomes so habituated that they lose track of where they are in their talk, and they have to go back and repeat the same words, word for word, in order to figure out where they were. This doesn’t make a good impression, and most astute attendees recognize that the talk is “memorized.” You see, most memorized talks just don’t make a positive impression. So preparation of your talk for THIS audience, with careful consideration of THEIR interests, THEIR needs, and what THEY expect for giving of their time and money to hear your talk, is very important, and very smart.

An expert speaker knows the key points she wants to make, and has an excellent outline that she follows as she practices and prepares her talk for each engagement. Some phrases may even be memorized because there is a most effective way to explain a point. But be very careful that you don’t deliver the same talk, word for word, to every audience. It just doesn’t make audiences feel that you are tuned in to THEM.

What can I give to them?

I used to travel around the country speaking for The Walt Disney Company.  Although all of us who spoke had scripts that we had studied for these presentations, each of us learned that we needed to personalize these talks to our own style and experiences. We added our own stories; and we tailored our talks to each audience.

When I first started doing these presentations, I would get very nervous before each one. And I would worry about whether or not they would like me. I was so focused on myself that my talks were fairly mediocre. How do I know that? I saw my evaluations.

One day right before I went on stage to speak to an audience of about a thousand people, I changed my focus and began to think of THEM. I asked myself, “How can I contribute to their lives?” And I said a little prayer that I would know what they needed to hear, and that I would touch their lives in a positive way through the message I had been entrusted to deliver. That was the beginning of a huge turnaround for me in terms of how my presentations went. My evals went up; I got standing ovations; and I was surrounded at the end of my talks to answer additional questions. What had changed? I was the same person. The message was the same. But my focus was on my audience – not on myself. I felt truly blessed. And I have never been nervous before a speaking engagement again, because I now know that there is no need to be nervous if your heart and mind are in the right place, and your intent is to give something of value to them.