If you’ve ever wanted to get up on a stage and share your business acumen or tell your story of survival, but have been held back by immobilising fear, this book will serve as a catalyst to action as well as a road map.
For most of us, the idea of speaking to a large group, even online, makes our blood run cold. In this substantial paperback — 340 pages — executive coach and leadership consultant Dineshrie Pillay outlines the methods she has found to be successful over 11 years of teaching people to become expert public speakers.
Using a workbook format with tasks at the end of each chapter, she employs the handy and believable concept of learning to drive. If you follow the guidelines carefully, she says, you can go from being a newbie speaker to an advanced one and then become an expert. The more you do it, she adds, the easier it becomes.
Pillay honed her skills in Toastmasters, an organisation that teaches a range of skills on many different levels, helping to instil confidence in front of the mic.
To become an expert speaker, you have to first unlearn bad habits and develop good speaking discipline, she says. This includes everything from pitch and posture to how to package your content.
Creatively sprinkled with driving metaphors, the book is divided into three parts: catalytic combustion, active acceleration and full throttle. (Though maybe knowing when to apply the brakes is also a good idea.)
She dispels some well-worn myths, such as that your best bet for an error-free presentation is a canned speech; speaking in public is for extroverted people; you need to know it all before you present or, by contrast, you can just wing it; and the belief that no-one wants to hear what you have to say.
She shares her storytelling secrets, giving some novel ideas for what to include in your story, and how to create a teachable framework and deliver your material in an engaging way.
However, all may go awry during the Q&A, and though you can never prepare for it 100%, you can do some prep, such as bringing backup slides for potential questions; briefing the team if there is one; and researching your audience. Importantly, she shares how to tell a silly question from a stupid one, as well as how to handle the tough questions.
Being able to read your audience is vital, and she speaks from experience when she says that, when selecting a volunteer to come up on stage, you should go for the quiet type rather than the enthusiastic extrovert who may succeed in upstaging you.
It’ has become accepted that to succeed in your game you need to do ongoing self-care. In a section called “How to look after yourself as a speaker”, Pillay touches on preparation tips, from the best foods to consume (“Fuelling your system”) to how to deal with breakdowns. “It takes a lot of energy for you to deliver your presentation on the day of your talk,” she says. “You require physical energy to talk, walk and engage with your audience. You need mental energy to recall your lines, stay focused on the delivery of your talk, and to answer questions... As a speaker, your energy state must be higher than that of your audience.”
Stay away from uppers and downers such as alcohol, stimulant drugs, caffeine, energy drinks, high-sugar snacks and nicotine, she adds. As much as they seem like an indispensable crutch, you don’t want to be on a mood rollercoaster when the spotlight falls on you.
So much is presented online now and Pillay provides useful pointers on conducting a webinar or webcast presentation. Creating engagement may be more challenging for these media and she gives tips on using slides and videos to capture attention, as well as advice on what software to choose, how to do live-streaming and integrating your presentation with social media platforms.
The book is upbeat, authoritative and accessible, but it is illustrated with slightly OTT cartoons and is written entirely in US English.
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