What to do: tour your way to public speaking success

Public speaking combines two things that I truly enjoy: the opportunity to teach, and a chance to connect with a lot of people at one time. And I love giving talks. But it wasn’t always this way. I used to hate talking to a group.

The beginning of my training

I was required to take speech as an engineering undergrad, and I took it in the summer to concentrate the pain and get it out of the way. I did both, and didn’t learn much in the process.

Then, early in my grad program I was asked to give a tour of the research center where I was working. The center was very large with a strong educational mission, and the director at the time (Joe Thompson, one of my earliest mentors and an extraordinarily gifted man) felt strongly that the best way to convey that mission was to have students give tours. I did an OK job, and was asked to repeat my performance several times over the rest of the semester.

After that, the situation stuck and I became one of the official tour guides—they even made me a badge (mostly as a joke). It was in this environment that I learned most of what I know now about dealing effectively with, and adapting to, large audiences.

Building the wall of dull

Early in my tours I was very nervous every time. To fix this, I figured that what I needed was to have a script (thinking like an engineer!). I walked around by myself and rehearsed until I had a pattern memorized.

After the first couple of tours, however, I started to notice that my audience was usually not paying attention to me. They seemed to be going through the motions of listening and walking around behind me, but they weren’t really “connecting” with the message.

One size fits none

This really should not have been surprising. I had memorized a script, and every time I gave a tour I was going through a set of memorized motions. Guess what? My audience responded by going through the motions too. I wasn’t really engaged, so how could I expect them to be?

Also, I made another fatal error: I created a one-size-fits-all script. The secret about one-size-fits-all presentations is that they rarely fit anyone. Every audience is different. Every time you present you are different. Every time you talk you need to respond to these differences into your presentation.

Tearing down the wall of dull

My first step in tearing down the wall of dull I had built was to research my tour groups ahead of time.

Who were they? Were they parents, a team of external reviewers from the National Science Foundation, potential sponsors, or secretaries from around the university?

Clearly parents of potential first-year students weren’t going to be interested in the nuances of the partial differential equations we were solving. I should save those equations for the NSF team, and focus instead on the camaraderie, the quality of the educational experiences, and the fantastic facilities we were so fortunate to have.

I also started to ask the director what message he wanted to convey to the tour groups, and to work that in. Sometimes the answer was “no message, just show them around.” This left me freedom to follow my interests and judge their reactions, and in doing this I found a range of topics that I could mix and match to create a semi-custom tour for just about any group.

Build frameworks, not scripts

This approach was essentially about creating a framework for my tours, rather than a script, and selecting elements from the framework that addressed the needs and interests of each individual tour.

It worked, but it required a lot more effort on my part. I needed to know a little bit about everything in the center, not just the things I was personally involved in. I spent a lot of time up front learning the basics of all the research activities in the center. This allowed me to leave my dependence on a memorized script and to be able to talk more naturally and comfortably about a range of topics, responding to the audience’s interests.

And, suddenly, they were interested.

I was more comfortable, more relaxed, more engaged, and more connected to the audience. If I sensed the audience getting bored or talking among themselves, I would change the topic or change my approach to talking about the topic. I was talking about the things that I knew ahead of time they were likely to be interested in, and I was doing it in a style that was conversational (even though I had spent way more hours preparing for this “conversation” than they would ever be aware of).