No One Has The Heart To Tell You You Are Not A Great Speaker

This week I was waiting in the wings to deliver a keynote, having the conversation with myself I had been having in the days before: “You aren’t ready, you didn’t rehearse enough” met with “you are going to be fine, you do this all the time, it will come to you when you are there”

At the end of the talk, I think it was fine… but I felt unsettled.

When I looked out at that audience mid-talk, I knew I was OK. All the work I’ve put in over the years carried me through. I was in my 3 Identity words: Fun, Wholehearted, Real.

But afterwards, deep down I knew - I hadn’t nailed the lines I wanted. I felt a bit sick in the uncertainty. I was more nervous than I needed to be. And I couldn’t honestly tell you it landed as well as it should have, and I know, it was because I didn’t know the content well enough to know either way.

Even when the praise came: “that was really inspiring”, “I loved that” - my head was saying “yeh that’s what they are supposed to say”.

So there I was. Right in the trap experience sets for good speakers - negotiating with myself about whether it was fine.  

The thing is - when you have done a lot of speaking, you get a kind of confidence that makes preparation feel optional. Quietly, without noticing, we start assuming we know how to land the point, then find ourselves missing a trick.

Watch enough senior people present and you’ll see the same pattern. Three things tend to be true when it happens:

• They jump straight in forgetting to set the scene or bring people on the journey with them
• They seem rushed, and flatten their tone, scraping through on past form (again), but scared to engage the audience properly.
• They talk in big jargony, strategic words, assuming everyone knows already (because they haven’t taken the time to break it down)

And it’s quietly costing them their leadership, because the room can tell they don’t have space for them. It’s just no one has the heart to say.

It's an easy trap to fall into when you do a lot of speaking - I’ve recorded roughly 3,000 episodes of a daily positivity podcast (Click here to listen). Three thousand days of showing up with something positive to say. After that many days you might think you need to move the message on, to be cleverer, and assume people must know what this all means by now. Driven by the fear they will be bored of me. But no, after this month's survey we are reminded again:  They want the simple stuff. Just remind them to be kind to themselves.

One of my favourite Producer Will moments in the last 6 months was when I sent a recording through with the line “and as you know about theta waves in the brain” - my phone rang immediately: “Kate! No one knows what theta waves are! What are you on about!?”

…I re-recorded that one! 

The Solution Is One You Aren’t Going To Want To Hear

Senior managers want to wing it, and I understand why. In fact I will rephrase that: Senior managers NEED to wing it!  There’s always something more urgent on the list.

While there is a difference between a keynote and a team briefing, the one thing that connects them is that if you fail to prepare you prepare to fail. I had done the prep, I had all the lines, I rehearsed and rehearsed, but… I had missed an important stage out of the process.

I should have said it out loud, with someone listening.

Now I can go into a big long diatribe about how all communication IS the rehearsal. It is. But when the stakes are high like, the board presentation, the strategic meeting, the big pitch - getting feedback is essential.

So, rehearse. Practise your key lines, your key stories, your key messages, out loud, until they sit in your memory bank instead of resting on your confidence.

Say it out loud. Then say it out loud again. Get bored of yourself.

This week’s practical step: pick one talk you’ve got coming up. Rehearse it out loud, properly, more than once. Say the key lines until you don’t have to think about them anymore. And most importantly - get feedback on the performance before you perform.

That’s what buys you the calm that experience only pretends to hand you for free, and then you know… you will hit every trick.

If you want somewhere to test your lines and stories before the room hears them, that’s exactly what we built the Sounding Board for. A new monthly communications practice session - where you can practice high stakes environments in low stakes moments. So if you are looking to be a better public speaker and build your leadership potential - sign up here.