Understanding The Force

Forget about what to do with your hands, or how to control your voice. Forget about making nice slides. These things are important, but really just the fine details. There is something fundamentally much more important to work on. Once you have though, everything else is easy.

What is this thing? I like to call it The Force. The name is important because once you start using it an powerful spell is cast on your audience. Something will happen that quite possible has never happened to you before when addressing a crowd. You will feel a real and tangible connection, the interest from the audience will be obvious and genuine. They actually want to know more!

I discovered this by chance, and by mistake. I was before an important audience pitching my grand idea. This 3 minute pitch was a do or die, everything or nothing, occasion. I had reached the final of a startup competition and reached the final. I was three short minutes away from glory. Standing infront of my carefully prepared powerpoint deck I was ready to launch into a well rehearsed script where I outlined my idea, the opportunity, the competitors, the business model and investment needs. A little about the rock star team and the special sauce that made this unique. The usual stuff, in other words. But, as I pressed the next button on the remote expecting to see my first slide, I was horrified to see something totally different, the first slide from another project. My uploaded presentation that I had expected to consist of 10 slides, was just 1 slide, with the title of the project. Somehow I screwed up and sent in advance a single slide rather than my actual pitch. Faced with this I went into a mind fog, I couldn't think what to say, or remember where to begin. I stared at the clock ticking down the seconds, then at the judges in front me. This is a public speaking nightmare come true.

I didn't know it then, of course, but this was actually the best thing that could have happened to me. Instead of regurgitating the fact-based, cliched script that I was going to deliver, I reached for something else. That something was a personal story. A story about where this idea had come from, about being a boy and being inspired by my Grandfather.

A personal story is a fabulous tool because for many reasons. But perhaps it's best to think of it as a way of killing two birds with one stone. The two birds being emotion and credibility. With a few words through a personal story we can establish that we are an authority on this subject by demonstrating what it means to us, and at the same time create an emotional reaction in the audience. Forget logic, this is the superpower you need to use to make the biggest improvements in public speaking.