Becoming One with Your Listener!
It was June 1999 and I was sitting in a room with a group of people I just met. It was the first day of Ty Boyd’s Excellence in Speaking Institute. I was attending his school because I wanted to become a better public speaker. Actually, I wanted to learn to present so well that people would say; “Look at him, he’s a wonderful speaker!” So it’s interesting to note the first lesson I learned that morning was “professional speaking isn’t about the speaker.” Professional speaking is about the message and the audience needing to hear that message. If you don’t have a message your audience needs to hear then you probably don’t have a right to be in front of them. Professional speaking is not about speaking. It’s about how to communicate. Our job as presenters isn’t so much to get the attention of our audience as it is to give attention to our audience.