love your audience: a speaker's manifesto
90% of what I've learned about being a better presenter
° Getting laughs all the time wasn’t my only responsibility. My responsibility was to engage the audience’s mind for ninety minutes.
Get laughs, of course, dazzle them from time to time with form, craft, verbal fireworks, but above all engage their minds.
George Carlin | 1937 - 2008 | American comedy icon
When someone squanders the gift of an audience—knowingly—it’s not just a missed opportunity. It’s a theft of time. Rude.
If you’re given the privilege of attention—as a speaker, leader, educator, or preacher—treat your audience the way you’d like to be treated. Care for it. Revere it.
That’s love. That’s where you start.
Step aside and let the objective & message take the spotlight.
The following points are obvious but we all know how wonderful it would be if more people did the obvious. The meat will be less obvious. Any repetition is intended to improve the chances of a point showing up as action.
Here’s what’s been helpful to me—and I hope to my audiences.
Be clear, concise, honest, and entertaining.
Know your audience.
Know your goal(s).
Develop your talk/presentation in writing.
Remove the unnecessary.
Make clear the unclear.
Practice.
Deliver pleasantly and enthusiastically.
Evolve and grow.
You don’t have to be a public speaker to benefit from what follows. It’s for anyone who’s given the gift of an audience.
This is 90% of what I’ve learned from keynoting for over 20 years.1 Why only 90%? In the interest of quickly helping the most people possible, I think it’s best to avoid too many details—just like when presenting in front of an audience.
Here’s the meat—
You can find value in any talk/presentation if you allow yourself to do it.
If you’re a speaker/presenter yourself, it’s even easier because the things you enjoy and don’t can remind you what to do and not do.
I’ve seen hundreds—maybe thousands—of talks/presentations and delivered hundreds myself. I don’t know everything and I miss the mark sometimes. Here’s the bulk of what I’ve learned.
(1) Be clear, concise2, honest, and entertaining.
Everything is about them. Do not get in the way. That’s love. No ego.
(2) Know your audience.
I find it helpful to describe it in writing.
As a motivational speaker3 who keynotes corporate events and trade shows, I like to know—
Professional roles
General daily work activities
Age range
Gender mix
Tenure range (if the audience is with the same organization)
Perceived current culture and biggest challenge(s)
Sometimes talking through those points with the person hiring me leads to other helpful information but those are primary.
If you can’t learn about your audience in advance, what do you want to bet on? What’s its likely level of understanding around the material you’ll be presenting? Will most of your people know the words and acronyms you use? What might trip them up? Will they have the prerequisites for your material? Describe whatever you can or are willing to bet on—in writing.
If you have a regular audience (as a team or organizational leader, educator, or church leader), you’ll know it through your experiences with them—assuming you’re engaged and connecting with them regularly. If you’re not, why not?
(3) Know your goal(s).
Ask yourself what you hope your audience will think about, talk about, and do after spending a piece of their infinite finite life and attention with you.
In my world, I serve the goals of the person who works for the organization that pays me. I ask this very important person in my life what they want their group to think about, talk about, and do as a result of my time with them. This helps me focus and better prepare.
For me, the answer is usually some form of “We want people to walk away motivated and doing the things better—embracing the 212 concept and/or being better leaders.” I find this a helpful question for any meeting, conversation, or difficult discussion.
With my interest in doing what I want others to do for me, I once offered an author some unsolicited advice about his presentation I attended. A remote topic—the history of wheat.
I try to do things outside of my interest/comfort zone at least once every quarter or so. I find it helpful even if it initially feels like a bad use of time. Although, I’m still waiting for the value of seeing a local production of Lord of the Flies show up.
By email the next day, I recommended two thoughts the author.
The first—“Simplify. Consider the 1 – 5 things you hope the audience will think about and do as a result of hearing you. Structure around that. Limit details unless you feel they’re absolutely necessary for your goal and/or entertainment.”
The response—“Thanks for this. I hear you about the five points but I'm a big fan of the meandering narrative. I will give it a think.”
I don’t see it as a choice between the two. You can wind through stories in interesting ways and stay focused on the goal(s) of the talk. After a little time, I’m guessing he felt the same way. Interesting he saw the number 5 rather than the number 1 or something in between. (I wonder what I’d see.)
Loving your audience is making it all about them.
It’s not an opportunity to talk at length without interruption. Although that benefit is kinda nice. A big plus of writing too!
(4) Develop your talk/presentation/keynote in writing.
With your goal(s) and time allocation in mind, write the words of your entire presentation. You won’t be reading these words to your audience. The purpose is to work it out and find the truth. The truth is what you feel is useful/of value to the goal(s) of your presentation.
If you don’t know your natural speaking speed, start by using 140 words per minute to get to your approximate word count (1,400 words per 10 minutes).
You’ll be practicing, so you can clip or add content later. If you include jokes that make people laugh, that will add time. Larger audiences take more time to stop laughing than smaller ones. If your jokes don’t land, you’ll painfully learn to cut them.
Then consider what audio and/or visual elements would be helpful to your audience and goal(s). Images? Videos? Audio? Text? Nothing?
I enjoy talks/presentations with various reinforcing elements. They give me something to look at other than the speaker—visual relief. Curated and done well, they’re helpful—even wonderful. Done poorly, I treat them as case studies and ask how I’d improve them.
That’s how I stay sane during a difficult presentation. If I attend something with my wife or anyone close to me, they can feel my cortisol rise. I might feel a calming hand on my shoulder or knee. Isn’t that nice?
If you have slides, you won’t be reading them to the audience. They serve as a backdrop to strengthen your delivery and help the audience retain the information.
There are several sentences spoken out in front of this slide—
There’s much more here that I’d love to share. But, in the interest of trying to help more people with the bulk of this topic faster, I’ll move on.
(5) Remove the unnecessary.
With goal(s) in mind, look hard (attentively) for what can be removed and remove it. There is something to remove—maybe several things.
I once had the chance to keynote a trucking company’s corporate event. The presenter before I spoke talked with the audience—mostly tractor-trailer drivers—about several procedural things. At one point, he suggested they check their manifest and find the errors.
The bullet on the slide read, “Assume an error has been made. It is your job to find it.”
I understood. At my former company, we approached our book printing runs in the same way. We’d give deep attention to the proofs with high confidence there were errors to be found. Sounds a little nasty but when you look for mistakes with confidence they exist, they’re much easier to find.
Bear down on your presentation for your audience. That’s love.
(6) Make clear the unclear.
There’s something to revise, if not several things. Same confident approach to the existence of a needed improvement applies here. There is an improvement to make.
If you have slides, help your audience want to look at them over a text message from a friend or the inside of their eyelids.
Don’t stuff your slides with information. Air out any large chunks of content over several slides if it’s all necessary and make sure the colors work for the room/lighting4.
Give your audience visual relief.
Too many people commit this easily correctable sin. I badly would like to show you examples of it but that would be unkind. To me, the stuffed slide is similar to some of the ridiculous job post descriptions that are almost as long as this manifesto.
If you use images with your slides, make them as large as possible. Nothing is sadder than hearing a presenter say, “I know this is tough to see, but…” I understand. Many things that are much sadder. I’m being hyperbolic.
Earlier, I mentioned sharing two unsolicited recommendations with an author.
The second—“Improve image clarity. The maps were difficult to grasp quickly because they have only black and white lines. I’m not sure how to do this but if the bodies of water were blue, that might help.”
The response—“I'll noodle with the images and see if I can't just create my own maps rather than borrowing them from medieval historians. Again, thanks so much for the feedback.”
That’s a guy who was open to notes—pretty rare in my experience. More on this below.
Note: Revising maps of medieval historians is almost always a good idea.
(7) Practice.
Few adults would argue against practicing.
Sure, there might be one or two lucky people out of a hundred who are better without practice. I’m not one of them and I don’t know any of them personally.
Carlin again—
“It would need a lot of writing and polishing, stage time to get all the parts working together. Plus a major memorizing job, which doesn’t get any easier when you’ll never see sixty again.”
An expert talking about a new bit that was far from winged.
I’ve not yet been convinced of a generally accepted standard for the amount of practice one needs for each minute of content delivered to an audience. The variables here are too vast, and if you’re evolving things, it really never ends.
With earbuds, I’m no longer concerned about people wondering why I’m talking to myself when I go for a walk. Pure joy to burn calories, develop sentences, and hone delivery.
If you only present occasionally, it’s not the best use of your time and attention to work on it constantly. But I know from experience, as I’m sure you know from being in audiences and meetings, more practice by most people would be a beautiful thing.
(8) Deliver pleasantly and enthusiastically.
Be as you wish all presenters would be—unless you enjoy dull, tired, or ego-puffed speakers. If that’s the case be as your audience would like you to be.
Do not resign yourself to mediocrity or worse because you’re in IT, accounting, or HR. If you were given the mic, it’s because someone thinks you should be heard. Get excited about it, or do your audience a favor and decline.
If you’re a pastor, priest, or someone who gives eulogies or sermons on a regular basis, for the love of God and all of us in this life, practice your delivery with warmth and some enthusiasm. More than once, I’ve imagined standing up at a funeral and pushing the preacher asking the preacher to step aside. At least it would have been more exciting. Is there anyone who hopes their memorial service is a downer for the living?
This doesn’t mean you need to be an over-the-top rah-rah person asking the audience how they’re doing today only to follow by suggesting, “You can do better than that.” It just means be pleasant and have some life about you.
How funny it is to me that anyone is given an audience who doesn’t have some level of observable warmth and enthusiasm. And when I say funny, I’m not talking clown funny.
(9) Evolve and grow.
Observe your audience(s) as objectively as you can. Make your notes and invite notes from others. Make it easy to give you those notes.
Avoid defensiveness. You might disagree and you could be right. But be open to ideas or risk becoming an unchecked beast or bully of time.
You have your tics. One of mine is saying, “Right?” I’m guessing it’s some sort of subliminal effort to get audience validation of something I said. It’s my mother’s fault.5
Some people upspeak—say declarative sentences with a rising intonation, making statements sound like questions. Some people trail off in volume. Some people overuse their filler phrases. (No one enjoys fat talk.) Some have a singing intonation I find unpleasant.
I detest listening to and watching myself on video but I’ll do it every once in a while to check in. Even typing that has my chest squeezing.
Adjust. Clip. Refresh. Revise.
Love your audience.
While I don’t believe presentation perfection is possible, most of us can easily do a whole lot better.
Tough with our continually eroding attention spans, but try to create something so good your audience can’t look away—so good they never look at the agenda or their phone—so good they painfully hold their visit to the restroom.
I know—impossible given the diversity of humanity. But with a high goal in the background, you’ve got a better shot at creating something special—212 special.
If you like these ideas, spread some love and save some audiences by sharing them with the speakers/presenters/leaders you care about. If you need one-on-one or team help from an experienced outsider, let me know.
Got notes for me? Add them to the comments or email me.
A scrap—
There are plenty of ordinary and smaller venues I’ve spoken in too. Here’s a shot where I was in a breakout room at a trade show about 6 minutes before I was scheduled to start.
Room filled completely but until then, I was feeling a little unloved 🥹 And despite being an experienced adult, I was carrying a little childlike jealousy of the main stage.
“But, I’m Sam Parker. I’m very special.”
“Yes you are. You’ll be down that hall—4th door on the left. Hey, Alex—did you get that note from Jordan?” as she walks away.
Please email me with typos, thoughts, comments, or suggestions (or put them here in the comments). Please don’t be shy or worry about my feelings. Quick, blunt, and maybe interesting or helpful6 is always welcome.
Might be 95%. I intend on adding the last 5% before my term ends😉
Concise is a beautiful word with an ironically funny definition. Adjective: giving a lot of information clearly and in a few words; brief but comprehensive.
I don’t like the label of motivational speaker, but it helps people get to this piece of me faster.
I learned the hard way in the beginning to never use black on red. Boring but white on black or black on white is most often best. I prefer the former.
I know. I used a blue on black back there. It’s intended. With that slide, I want to keep the title subtle and the points loud.
That’s a joke.
(or is it?)
“Maybe interesting or helpful” is meant to free you of concern.
I’d rather you risk sharing something with me than being concerned it might not land well. If your thought implies I’m stupid or an asshole, you might be right. If so, I’d like to try to fix it.