Effective Speaking - 3 Rules You Must Never Break

Effective speaking means you have to consider- and this is not optional, this is mandatory - 3 critical considerations.

Do not take this lightly: you are NOT achieving anything even close to effective speaking unless you achieve all 3 of these critical considerations before you ever get up and speak or present your talk, presentation, seminar, workshop, boot camp, or whatever the context is in which you are speaking.

Study these closely!

Effective Speaking Rule #1: Know Your Audience

An old saying is show business is "know your audience" and this is also true in effective speaking.

Why is the "rule #1" of effective speaking?

Because you could spend hours preparing the best presentation in the history of mankind - and it wall totally fail if your group doesn't "get it".

There are 2 critical aspects to this:

1. Knowing who these people are, and how to "speak their language"

2. Knowing how to "push their hot buttons" and get them in rapt attention

Don't even think about preparing your talk until you complete this critical step first.

Effective Speaking Rule #2: Know Your Outcome

Don't try to achieve the goal of effective speaking until you consider what exactly your goal or outcomes are for this presentation, seminar, talk, speech, workshop, etc.

How do you know if you've hit the target if you don't even know what that is?

Effective speaking and reaching your goals depends on context:

Are you training people to learn some skill or educate them in some way?

Are you trying to sell your product or service?

Are you trying to get people to sign a petition or donate to your charity?

Only you know what the context is - you must be 100% clear about what you're trying to accomplish; are you?

Effective Speaking Rule #3: Measure Your Results

It's been said that if you can't quantify your results, then you have no results.

Effective speaking means you have monitored and quantified the key performance indicators of your talk.

The first thing you should quantify is how well you have achieved your goals from effective speaking rule #2.

What you measure after that is totally up to you; it could be units sold, dollars donated, test scores, info on feedback sheets, number of butts in seats, or number of signatures on a petition.

Effective speaking always follows those 3 rules, and sorry - there are no exceptions to those rules!