Drop the Microphone!

Imagine standing on stage to address a room full of 150-200 business and government representatives in a hotel ballroom at a lunch event.  You are the Chairman of the Board of the hosting organization and you are pleased to present news of positive results for the previous year. 

Just a few minutes into your speech, the entire room fills with chit chat and nobody is listening to your speech at all.  The rude talkers prevent the others from hearing you, even if they wanted to.  You carry on delivering the impressive speech that you carefully prepared and rehearsed.

I witnessed this last week and asked myself and a few colleagues, How did it all go wrong? 

First of all, it is shocking but true that Dutch crowds actually do this.  In other cultures, the audience would simply tune you out and politely daydream!

How can you prevent this from happening to you?   Before you take the stage , I urge you to consider your audience!  Ask yourself 2 questions. What is in it for them? How can they benefit from hearing what you have to say?  If you stay focused on your audience as you prepare, you will cut out a lot of crap that is just not interesting to them.  As a result you have a better chance of building rapport with the audience.  Another side benefit is that your speech will instantly be shorter, which will also win you bonus points!!  At this event, we were all standing up, so you should also keep the logistics in mind!  Is your audience feeling captivated or captive?

So, next time you take the stage, be sure to catch the attention of the audience immediately, or they will be lost to you forever and be sure to point out what’s in it for them.  If you haven’t won over your audience from the beginning, they may as well be chit chatting, because your message won’t reach them.  In that case, you should drop the microphone and run! 

 

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Upstaged

Yesterday’s event at The Hague City Hall to celebrate the opening of an Expatriate Archive Center was well attended. Not surprisng as the Archive Center is a Shell initiative and Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell was speaking. Another big draw on the program was newly appointed Mayor of The Hague, Jozias van Aartsen, former Minister of Agriculture and Foreign Affairs. His term as mayor is only days old, so public interest in him is high, based on the number of photagraphers present.

The audience was receptive to both of these high profile speakers, but when a nervous, slim, casually dressed seventeen year old Anika Smit took the stage, the audience and the event were entirely hers. She spoke a truth you don’t hear from politicians or CEOs.

She stood with her knee trembling, telling about the book Taxi she wrote at thirteen. Anika has moved 13 times and lived in 18 different houses around the world. She shared the heartbreak of goodbyes and the difficulty of adjusting to life in China, where she wrote the book. It begins in a taxi on the way to dancing class and ends in Inner Mongolia, where she truly came to understand the good fortune of her lot in life and the deep sense of responsibility that goes along with it. She urged us to make the distinction between real problems and uncomfortable situations. Her wisdom, poise and grace left me feeling hopeful for the future.

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