Attention please!

Have you ever had to wrestle with the roar of an aeroplane's engines for the attention of your audience?  If you have ever spoken at an open air event in any of the neighbourhoods near the airport, you will understand exactly what I mean.  "And the winner is....the jet plane!"  No speaker can compete with that monstrous level of noise and win.  But silence can be an awesome adversary too.  At a recent awards event, my competition was a five-minute slideshow on replay.  After three minutes of standing in the middle of the stage and failing spectacularly to grab my guests' attention, I signaled the organizer to turn the slideshow off.  Immediately, attention was focused on the stage and our event burst into life.

How you begin is important.  Your audience must clearly hear you tell them what is happening, why it is important and who is involved.  If a plane has just taken off over your event venue, let it pass before you start.  If the audience is more interested in a slideshow, turn it off to make way for your opening remarks.

You can kick off with humour.  This may involve your observations of current affairs or things you may have seen or overheard at the event itself.  Be warned though - humour has its own challenges.  If you get a very enthusiastic response, the audience will expect your entire presentation to be liberally sprinkled with moments of laughter .  Get it wrong and you'll wish the ground could open wide to swallow you whole.  There is no embarrassment like what you feel when you are rewarded with blank stares after you said something you thought was hilarious.

Other ways to begin talking to your audience include telling a short story, asking a rhetorical question or simply getting your listeners to repeat a phrase after you.  Remember the goal is to get off to a strong start by grabbing people's attention.

Say What, Say What...

Picture this.  You're the MC at an awards event.  The show has been flowing nicely for an hour. Suddenly the event manager calls you backstage.  You need to fill ten minutes of time with 'something interesting'.  Why?  A scheduled item has been shifted further down the programme.  You need to get on the stage now.  Question is, Are you prepared?  Can you do it?

When things are progressing in an orderly way, the master of ceremonies can function as if he is a jet on autopilot.  It's when things start to unravel that he begins to really earn his fee.  The MC must go about his duties with poise, making sure he has the attention of the audience.  Nobody in the audience must suspect that something unscheduled is happening.  Is it easy to pull off?  No.  The key to success is one word: PREPARATION.

 Last week, I was hired to host an awards event for a major drinks company.  The guests were executives and managers from Europe and all over Africa.  In our pre-event meeting, one of the organizers asked me if I did comedy.  "Only at home and for my kids" was my reply.  But the question got me thinking.  What if I need to entertain the audience at some point during the event?  And that's exactly what happened.  Fortunately I was ready with some material about what makes us Ghanaians unique (everything from how we love answering questions with questions to our use of the word 'tea' to refer to all breakfast beverages...but that's a confession for another time).  Feedback?  I'd say it went well.  Just tell the comedian Funny Face to relax, I'm not coming for his job just yet!

Singing For Your Supper

Two weeks ago I attended a party hosted by a good friend I've known for 20 years now.  I was at the event as a guest and not working, which was a nice change.  The audience was made up of young professionals from Ghana and the African Diaspora.  There was a talented live band pumping out rhythmic grooves nonstop.  Also in the house was a very well-known singer renowned for a string of dance-floor hits from the late 80's.  An hour into the party, he came up to me and remarked with a twinkle in his eyes, "Any time I go out to chill, I'm asked to perform.  It's like having to sing for my supper chaley!"  Well, our reluctant star musician could only resist for so long.  In the end, he agreed to perform, on condition that I first introduce him onto the stage.  Which I promptly did.

What's the point of this story?  It's this - be professional, don't disappoint your clients and always be prepared.  As far as the public is concerned, there's no such thing as an off-duty performer.  My friend  had to get on the stage and do his thing, even if he didn't feel like it or just wanted to take a day off.  And by the way, his performance was top-notch as usual.  That's because he was prepared to pull it off even if he had been unwilling to do so only a few moments earlier.  And that, I noted, is the mark of a professional, not just in the music industry but in virtually any field.  That's what I was reminded of after the unscheduled singing session that our star gave us.  Because if you notice, both of us sang for our supper that night.

Who's perfect now?

Cast your mind back to one of your speeches which went horribly wrong.  Did you skip an entire paragraph of your address?  How about that simple word that you totally massacred when you pronounced it?  What did you do about these ‘mistakes’?  If you apologized profusely and  tried to right the wrongs on the spot, you made a bad move.  Why?  

Unless you shared your notes with the audience, absolutely nobody will ever know the structure of your speech.  If you left out a whole paragraph, who would know what just happened?  Nobody.

It's pointless fretting about a mis-pronunciation when you are in the middle of your address.  The best time is before the speech and the next best time is after when you are doing a post-mortem of your performance.  Most people pay attention at the beginning and the end of a speech.  Very few people will notice your mistakes especially if they are tucked away somewhere in the middle of your discourse.  

When you stumble verbally and then announce, "Sorry I'll take part again", you only draw unwanted attention to yourself.  My policy is "Make the mistakes and just move on."  You can always find another opportunity in your speech to pronounce the offending word correctly.  You can always create room for the point you missed and nobody will know that you were chopping and changing as you spoke. 

Are they there?

Ghanaian audiences are famous for showing lukewarm reactions to performers on the stage.  If you interviewed musicians and comedians about this and not just public speakers or MCs, you would get a confirmation of the fact.  Maybe there’s something in our collective psyche that prevents us from making our neighbour's head 'swollen' from our excessive praise or appreciation.  How do I tackle the issue of low audience reaction?  With humour.  

As soon as I step onto the stage and face an audience, I often ask, " Hello, how are you?"  If the response is half-hearted, I may say "Let's try again and this time, please invite your voices in from the car park."  Eight times out of ten, laughter breaks out, tension is lowered and all of a sudden, the audience is relaxed and all ears. 

Another way to improve audience reaction is to seat the participants closer together.  Don’t start speaking with your audience scattered all over the hall.  Ask them to sit up front and close together.  Proximity promotes communication.  People are more likely to ask questions and interact with a speaker when they see and hear others nearby doing exactly that.  It’s a question of group dynamics and a speaker can take advantage of it to get better feedback.

Serious Stage Fright

Up until now, everything has been fine.  You've made it to the stage in one piece.  You stand in front of the lectern.  You look out into the sea of expectant faces.  This is your audience.  You start to shake and your shiver.  Your heart skips a couple of beats.  Your legs are threatening to disown you with immediate effect.  You feel a cool bead of sweat form at the back of your neck.  You are scared.  You ask yourself, "Why am I here at all?  Do I really want to speak to these people?"  You feel like doing only one thing.  Running.  Away.  Fast.

Congratulations!  You've just experienced stage fright.  And the good thing is that you didn’t die.  You lived to tell the story and re-live it all over again.

Will it comfort you to know that all speakers have at some point in time had a problem with stage fright?  Some have even been known to pass out in anticipation of facing a room full of strangers and addressing them.  So you are not alone.  Ready for the next revelation?  Good. Here's how you can deal with stage fright:

Know the topic. It will make you confident and confidence drives away fear which is nothing but stage fright by another name.

 
Know the end. See yourself speaking effortlessly and ending with a huge round of applause

 
Know the venue. Arrive early and practice walking onto the stage. The next time you get on stage, it will be familiar territory.

Know the people.  This includes the audience and guests.  You can achieve this by arriving early and mixing with your audience, introducing yourself and getting to know them before you speak. When you mount the stage, you will have a few familiar faces you can look at during your speech.  And remember, most people come to an event expecting the speakers to do well.  Make their dreams come true.

Out of Time

 
When was the last time you made a speech and had to rush through it?  Did the MC have to slip you a piece of paper with WRAP UP scrawled on it?  Did you feel you still had much to say but had to end your address abruptly?

Time management is one of the major challenges at conferences and seminars.  You dive into your presentation, get stuck in and because you're having so much fun, you don't realize how fast time flies.  Left to your own devices, you could go on and on till you've squeezed the very last drop of juice out of your subject.  But that could delay the event, irritate subsequent speakers and even annoy your audience.  So how do you keep within time limits?  I'll show you a few ways.

The MC Way - You could work with the master of ceremonies to agree on an alert system for communicating how much time you have left.  He could sit right at the front and put up ten or five fingers to signify the number of minutes you have left.  Or the MC could have someone at the back of the room raising large signs with 2 MINUTES LEFT or END NOW! inscribed on them.  Just don't carried away with your speech and forget to look in the direction where your signals are supposed to be coming from!

The DK Way - DK Osseo-Asare is a Ghanaian architect.  When he strode onto the stage with his notes to speak at a recent conference in Cape Town, he also came equipped with a useful piece of technology.  A stopwatch.  The kind athletics coaches use. Perfect, I thought to myself.  He's in control of his time allocation and when he runs out, he'll end his speech. And so he did.  Of course for this method to work, you'll have to be clear on how much time you have to speak and then stick to it.

Showing off huh?

A few months ago, I got an email from Joe, a young university student who is also an occasional MC. He wanted to know how to conduct himself when "VIPs are in the audience". What a question, I thought to myself. It turned out that Joe bombed at the last event he hosted. He confessed that he had wanted so badly to impress the special guests with his performance but everything went haywire for him. He kept fumbling, mispronouncing names and cracking jokes which weren't funny. In the end, he says he was so embarrassed that he waited two clear hours after the event had ended just to be sure everyone had left before finding his way home.

Joe's experience is one common to speakers. It's not only MCs who are sometimes tempted to turn on the style just to show 'big' people in the audience how wonderful they are. Recently I came across a speaker who got so carried away by the presence of VIPs on the stage that he ended up delivering a six-minute opening prayer. I suspect the applause he received at the end of his address was more out of relief than appreciation. That's definitely not the way to go.

As the MC, you are not the star of the event. What you want to do is take the attention off yourself and direct it to your audience. Your responsibility is to make the experience of your listeners an enjoyable one. This means making brief comments and introductions whenever you have the microphone so that your event flows smoothly. This means concentrating on what is happening and being said so you can make relevant observations in your remarks. If you focus on these things, you will be too busy to worry about showing off your skills. And the strange thing is that your audience, including the VIPs, will end up being impressed. Try it and see.

A False Start

 
Imagine starting a speech with any of the following statements:

"I don't know how to begin."

"I'm a bit nervous about speaking to an audience like this."

"Sorry I'm late.  I got held up by traffic."

"I've never spoken to such a large group of people before."

"I'm feeling tense.  Please bear with me."

"I didn't really prepare for this talk but I'll see what I can do."

"This is my first time of doing this."

"I'm shy to be standing before such an august audience."

"Forgive me if I make mistakes."

"I hope I don't bore you."

"Where do I start from?"

"I was called at the last minute."

What kind of impression would you communicate with the above opening words?  Confidence?  Trust?  Excitement?  I don't think so.  These are 12 examples of how NOT to begin a speech.  And it doesn't matter how you really feel.  Do not start with an excuse, a confession or an apology.  You put yourself at an immediate disadvantage from which you may not be able to recover.  So what's the best way to take off?

You are better off launching on a strong note with a question, a statistic, a quote, a proverb or a story.  That will get your audience thinking about your talk and not wondering why you're still hanging around after giving them one excuse or the other.