Let’s say you are served a delicious bowl of soup. A fly lands in it, struggles for a moment and then drowns.
Of course you’re done with the soup. Your otherwise perfect meal is ruined.
Your droning speaking style is the fly in the soup. Those eight couples who came to check you out begin mentally checking themselves out within minutes, or even seconds of the drone beginning.
You’ve heard it said, “Seniors have a short attention span.” Rubbish. If you believe that, you have a serious droning problem. I have personally attended many advisor seminars, some lasting as long as two hours, and I have seen these same “short attention span seniors” totally engaged, and then even hanging around after the seminar for spirited conversation and even more question asking.
Let me define professional-grade speaking skills:
You know your material cold and deliver it with passion and conviction.
You can measure the quality of your speaking with a statistic you gather from your post seminar report card. It’s the appointment request rate.
The question on your report card should read something like, “Yes! I would like an appointment to review my situation.”
Here’s what the results mean:
40% or more of request an appointment = professional grade presentation skills.
30%-40% = adequate speaking style, but improvement needed.
20%-30% = boring. No passion or conviction. Probably reading bullet point slides.
Less than 20% = paralyzing experience. Join Toastmasters or get a speaking coach.
First master your content. That means you go “noteless.” OK, for your first few seminars, you can have all the notes you can put on a 3×5 card.
I have developed a procedure to master content. I named it “The 25% Solution.” You can get a copy at my Seminar Success Zone website. Once you know your content cold, passion and conviction normally take care of themselves. It’s really quite magic: The key to presentation style is actually content mastery.