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Ten commandments for the lazy speaker
or how to avoid turning your listeners homicidal

Lazy speakers can turn a benign audience into a homicidal mass intent on revenge.

To stay ahead of the mob you need to re-think your approach to writing for speaking to groups of people. You may be a bad speaker now; but you could be worse if you lie much longer in the bed of laziness.

For now, you want people to listen to what you have to say and you want them to do what you say and you want a positive result, at least from your point of view.

So, you tell them how you see it and how they should see it and how much better everyone will be if they would just do what you say.

That system will work right up to the point when the wheel falls off the chariot. Try this instead for a better result:

1. Place no strange ideas before your audience. Stick to the plan; make a plan, stick to it. Simple. Anything else is for another day.

2. If you're not going to talk about something in detail; don't mention it in the first place. Otherwise, people on the way home will wonder if they fell asleep at some point and missed it.

3. Make time for breaks to relieve the soreness of your listener's backside from sitting. Failing a functional break, ask them to stand up and shake hands for some reason. They will thank you.

4. Respect your audience and their touchstones. Stick to the plan, introduce no side issues that you cannot speak on with authority. Be controversial if you wish; but at least know why you are being contentious.

5. Do not kill the interest of your listeners with a boring presentation. They may be a captive audience for now; but they will escape and attack you in the future.

6. Nobody will thank you for adulterating your presentation with half-understood thoughts from elsewhere. Be pure in your message. Respect your commitment to your listeners who are surrendering a part of their lives to listen to you.

7. Regurgitating someone else's material as your own is not a good idea; especially when you can be unmasked quite easily by an internet search for the original.

8. Basing your assertions on attacking someone else will soon turn listeners against you. You will sound hollow to even the most ardent of your audience.

9. Other speakers may attract more attention for now; but once you roll out of bed and start to present to your audience powerful, provoking and promising presentations you will have admirers of your own.

10. It is human to want to be better than you are but plagiarising another's work is not allowed. Create your own plan. Stick to it.

You too can be a better speaker.

You can take any audience anywhere you want with a fine script delivered well.

You can make willing listeners do, feel or believe most things that make sense, are moral and legal, most of the time.

You just need not to be lazy.

© Brendan Nolan 2010
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