I was inspired by David Meerman Scott’s great post on public speaking  (http://tinyurl.com/dndzw7) to write about 3 steps to achieving public speaking nirvana – that zen-like stage where you’re in the zone and time is suspended and you and the audience are one, or very nearly so. 

First, you’ve got to know your material cold.  So many people tell me that they just ‘wing it’ when it comes to public speaking.  This method occasionally works but mostly leads to disaster.  It’s a favorite of CEOs, especially, for some reason.  I suspect it’s because after they’ve finished winging a speech, they come down off the stage and ask a nearby SVP, “No, really, Jim, how did I do?”  Jim loyally praises the CEO to the skies and the CEO thinks, “I’ll do that again.”  Those kind of speeches are never as good as the deluded CEO thinks they are.

Instead, practice the speech until you know it so well that you can pick it up at any point and deliver the rest of it.  Know the ‘spine’ of the speech – what you’d say if you only had 5 minutes to give it.  That’s the gist of the ideas, in order.  Know the stories that you tell, and be able to cut and paste on the fly if necessary.  Know the speech so that it fits like an old, familiar glove.  Know the opening and the closing as well as you knew your mother when you were a baby. 

Second, forget the speech and focus on the audience.  Once you know the speech completely, thoroughly, and utterly, you’re ready to be giving it with 75 percent of your brain while spending the other 25 percent watching the audience ‘get it’.  What that means is that you stop thinking about the speech as you talking and think about it as the audience learning the fabulous idea you’re there to impart.  Get to know how the audience reacts at every step along the way.  When do they lean forward?  When do they get lost?  (Fix that part.)  When do they laugh, and when do they cry?  When do the lights go on?  What are the highs and lows?  Soon you’ll know the audience’s speech as well as your own.  That’s when you’re ready to take it home.

Third, forget the speech and the audience and focus on the content.   This is the step where you find simplicity again beyond the complexities of speaking and listening at the same time. Reinhold Niebuhr, the great theologian, once gave a speech to a rapt crowd of students.  At the end of speech, he took questions.  One student asked him, “Professor Niebuhr, you have devoted a lifetime to studying religion, and good and evil.  You have witnessed great suffering as well as great joy.  What in your mind is the essence of Christianity and what does it have to say to the human condition?”  And Neibuhr replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know, because the Bible tells me so.”  That comment was profound for the assembled audience because it represented the simplicity beyond complexity.  Once you’ve mastered your speech, yourself, and all the audiences you will ever speak to, you’re ready to find that simplicity and come back to communication being just about content, because all the barriers to communication are gone and nothing gets between you, the audience, and the message.  That’s public speaking nirvana.  Enjoy!