It's Not All About You

Thanks for reading my weekly newsletter. I wanted to let you know that I will be the keynote speaker at The Power Conference to ADVANCE Women this August.

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A couple of years ago I was a keynote speaker at a large gathering commemorating an important event.?I had prepared carefully for it.?I was eager to communicate with this August audience and looked forward to delivering my remarks.

The audience had been listening for quite a while to quite a few speakers.?And so rather than dive?into my remarks, I said: “We’ve all had a wonderful evening so far, but I also know you’re tired. I am reminded of the advice of my sixth grade teacher when we would ask him how many words an assignment should be: “long enough to cover the subject, short enough to be interesting.”

The collective sigh of relief was palpable.?Everyone settled back into their chairs and relaxed.?Now the audience was ready to listen one more time because they knew I would not drone on for too long.

Communication is always a two way street.?It doesn’t matter how brilliant your communications transmission is, unless your target audience receives it, you’ve failed.?And so in addition to?being thoughtfully and thoroughly prepared to transmit e?ectively, a good communicator also works hard to get to know and understand the audience, both by doing their homework ahead of time and by?being attuned to others in the moment.?An e?ective communicator is not simply substantive, relevant?and clear.?They are also empathetic.

Think about your audience:?what is going on for them??In the situation I described earlier, I was?excited to deliver remarks I had worked hard on.?What was going on for the audience was they were?tired and they had already heard a number of less-than- inspiring speeches.?Their context was:?“Not another one please!”?Understanding and acknowledging that was a necessary precondition to e?ective receipt of my transmission.

Think about your audience:?why should they listen to you??It’s easy to convince ourselves that people will listen to us just because we are who we are.?They’ll listen to me because I’ve been?asked to deliver the keynote.?They’ll listen to me because I’m the boss.?They’ll listen to me?because they asked my expert advice about this subject.?They’ll listen to me because they are in the audience and I am talking.

It doesn’t work this way.??An e?ective communicator is humble and realistic enough to understand?that there are a million distractions and lots of ways your audience can tune out, whether you’re talking with one person or hundreds.?And so an e?ective communicator thinks about the source of their own credibility with each particular audience.

So ask yourself, why should they listen to me??Some possible answers:?I’ve been where they are; I understand the problem they are experiencing; I share their passion and enthusiasm; I have deep knowledge or expertise about this particular subject; something I am going to communicate is going to make a real di?erence to them in their world.

Finally, ask yourself, how do I connect with this audience??If you want people really tuned in, they have to decide to plug in - to connect.?This is why people so often tell jokes a the?beginning of prepared remarks, because laughter can connect people.?The jokes don’t always work however and this technique has become so formulaic that people frequently still tune out.?You can connect by saying something unexpected.?When people are surprised they pay closer attention. You?can connect by revealing something personal you share with the audience.?You can connect by?talking about them before you talk about anything else.

Last week we talked about clarity of communication.?This week we’ve added the importance of context, credibility and connection.

Next week we’ll talk about how to know whether it’s all worked.