Don't let visual aids get in the way of a good story

On the page about delivering your speech or presentation, I've written about how a man turned potential disaster, in the shape of technological gremlins, into triumph when he abandoned his 'aids' and gave us a riveting talk.

I was reminded of that again recently, when a client came to me with a PowerPoint presentation that had been supplied by his company. The marketing department had created a set of slides that basically just had to be read. The sales team were then supposed to go out and present this 'in their own style'.

Robin, my client, was really struggling to make this work and he decided he was no good at public speaking. Actually, when I took his laptop away and asked him to tell me a bit about the product he was selling, he talked fluently, knowledgeably and persuasively. He evidently believed in the product and, had I been one of his prospects, I would certainly have bought it.

But when he went back to the marketing department's presentation, he lost his passion and delivered it as if he was reading the news.

I see two morals to this. The first is that it's essential to speak naturally. If you're trying to deliver other people's words, your audience will know you're not speaking from the heart. Top politicians and businesspeople may have speechwriters but these writers are writing specifically for them and know their style. If you take a speech off the shelf or deliver the same presentation as everyone else in your team, it's very hard to do this well.

Robin went back to his company and negotiated that he could say what they wanted him to say but in his own words, in the order that suited him and without using all the prescriptive slides. When they saw the results, they realised that giving him the freedom to do this made all the difference.

The second moral is that public speaking is about communication. It's not about just imparting facts; you can do that with a pamphlet. What makes a speech interesting is the human, emotional content. Just because you're speaking in public, rather than to a small group of friends, it does not mean you have to adopt a detached monotone. On the contrary, the key to successful public speaking is enthusiasm.