Becoming an outstanding speaker: get feedback

How do you know if you are speaking effectively, whether to 1 or 1,000?

As with writing, this is theoretcially easy: you’ve been speaking effectively when your audience understands your message and is moved to act to support your goals.

But there is a long way from theory to practice. What specific steps can you take to see if you are being understood? Why, I’m glad you asked…

Direct indicators are rare

You may sometimes have a direct indicator—if your design approach is selected for your project, for example. But early on in your career you usually won’t be working on many of these types of conversations or presentations.

The solution is to ask for feedback. And good feedback, feedback you can use to improve your style and delivery, comes almost always in the form of bad news.

What do you mean “I’m boring?”

The arguments for asking for and acting upon feedback after verbal communications are mostly the same as the arguments we’ve already reviewed for documents; go ahead and read them. I’ll wait.

There is one new point that’s worth discussing when the feedback you are after is about your oral performance.

Think you’re doing ok? Ask anyway.

Unlike writing, which is something most of us do infrequently (relative to speaking, anyw”ay) and something we all do on purpose (that is, you sit down specifically to “write”), most of us speak all the time and usually without thinking about it or planning ahead of time. One risk we run with spoken communications is in assuming that we are already good at it.

After all, we talk all the time, right? It is our primary mode of communication, something most of us have been working on since the day we were born. What more is there to know?

Nearly all of us have a lot to learn

I can say, without fear of being wrong more than one time in ten thousand, that you were not born an effective speaker. Sure, you’ve been talking all your life, but you have no innate ability to give a presentation that doesn’t put everyone to sleep or to have a one-on-one with a key employee that she will walk out of remembering what was said and what she has to do next.

This means that effective spoken communication is something that most of us need to work hard on. Unfortunately many of us don’t realize our own shortcomings, or we turn a blind eye to them because of the emotional baggage we bring to public and private speaking.

Power through the pain

All this ignorance and avoidance can make getting useful feedback—in other words, bad news about our performance—a pretty painful process. Fight this reaction and the accompanying urge to become defensive and lash out at the person giving you the feedback.

Focus instead on the fact that what she is telling you is probably right, and that by addressing these comments you will become a more eVective communicator. Even if she is wrong, it is helpful to know how she reacted so as to try to prevent others from having a similar wrong reaction to your words in the future. Why did she misunderstand? Can you prevent such misunderstanding in your next talk?

Analyzing a failure it usually tough, and is at a bare minimum really tedious. Doing it is the only sure road to growth.