Fear is the Key

Fear is the key! is the title of a book by Alistair Maclean, an author of wartime espionage books, very popular in the 70s. In my school days, it was a big favorite among my classmates and a dog-eared, food smeared copy circulated among us for months. Along with the usual dose of adventure and mayhem, it also had a good dose of sarcastic humor, a winning combination as far as teenage readers were concerned.

“What does this have to do with communication?” asks the alert reader.
In most professional communication situations like presentations or speeches, fear is the key!
To be more precise, conquering fear is the key!

When we go in front of an audience, most of us awaken dormant butterflies in the stomach. The butterflies in turn are equally excited about the speech we are about to make and seem to be doing complicated aerodynamic somersaults to get our attention.

Is this common? Do ALL speakers face this? Experts say yes. More experienced speakers do get butterflies but manage to control their impact. You can say that they can make the butterflies move in formation like the fighter jets in the Republic Day parade.

Here are some of the tips that work for them. Try them and see how it works for you.

Experts recognize the need for preparation. They strive for mastery over the material. It is obvious that if you feel shaky about the material, then you will be much less confident about sharing it with others, let alone in front of a formal audience. So prepare your material thoroughly.

Aim for quality not quantity. In the course of your preparation you may collect so much material that you won’t know what to keep and what to ignore. The trick here is to ask yourself the question: “If I had to write the 3 most important things about this topic, what would they be?” Those are the points you must make in your speech or presentation.

Connect with your audience. Pepper your talk with examples that your audience can relate to. If you are not sure about the profile of the audience, aim for some general points. Traffic, pollution, family relationships, school days, government, etc are good sources for general examples or stories.

Practice, practice, practice! There is no short cut to this. Practice each presentation or speech, completely and thoroughly. The alert reader once again would ask, “How many times should I practice?” Well the answer is, as many times as it takes for you to make your speech or presentation with ease. For some it might be 3 times, for others it would be 6 and for yet others it could be 10 times. The good news is that, you will need lesser and lesser practice, as you make more and more presentations.... which brings us to the next tip.

Seize every opportunity to make a speech or presentation. This is the key to conquering fear. Making speeches or presentation should be as familiar and comfortable as eating out in your favorite restaurant.

Spread some humour. Follow the lead set by Alistair Maclean. If audiences accept humor in wartime espionage, they would not penalize a talk on taxation sprinkled with funny quotes or examples. Even the tried and tested jokes work well in such situations.

Here is one to start off your collection of jokes : A business owner walks into an auditor’s office and tells him that he has got summons from the income tax department and needs to show up at their offices in a week with his audited books. The harassed auditor looked through the account books of the client and found many pitfalls. He calls the owner on the phone and says, “You better pray that the IT commissioner is a fan of Sherlock Holmes!” “Why?” asks the surprised entrepreneur. “The deductions you have made in the last 3 years are even more brilliantly creative than the ones made by Holmes in his entire career!” responds the auditor.

Au revoir!

See you every Monday on these pages.

Do send in your comments. Use the comment box below. I look forward to hearing your views and jokes!

Gayatri