Spontaneous Speaking – Essential for Leaders, Managers and Front Line Staff
Silver tongues and fast feet
The ability to be spontaneous when speaking is essential for leaders, managers and front line staff who want to engage their audiences. Here Clive Lewis, MD of Illumine Training, reveals how you can begin to think on your feet.
Who wouldn’t want to have that ability to say the right thing at the right time…to speak off the cuff, to improvise, even to wing it? We admire greatly those people who have this ability to be spontaneous – and rightly so. If you want to become an engaging speaker, a dynamic leader or a silver tongued sales executive then you need to master the ability to think on your feet.
But what is this gift of the gab, and can anyone do it? One way of explaining this quality is that it allows you to go ‘off piste’ but stay in control when speaking in front of an audience. And it’s my contention that you don’t have to have kissed the blarney stone before you are successful at it.
But having defined this quality, let me also ask the question ‘is it important?’ I believe it is. You only have to think back to the last presentation you had from someone who was reading from a pre-prepared script, or speaking only from a series of powerpoint slides, to get a sense of how stilted communication can be when it is being driven by inflexible thinking.
But would you dare to wing it when negotiating with your boss, delivering a presentation or running your next meeting? Most people wouldn’t but it’s my bet that you might completely change your mind if:
- You felt confident about doing it.
- It gave you a much better chance of achieving the outcome that you wanted. In fact if you felt confident of success it would be hard to argue against such an approach.
Fear and excitement
However, before I explain how you can wing it let me first just deal with any fears you might have about improvising.
You don’t have to look far to find some clear examples of people who try to be spontaneous only to fall flat on their face. If you have ever seen the performance of those eager candidates in either Dragons’ Den or The Apprentice, you will be quite aware of the process. Regularly caught off guard by what appear to be very reasonable questions, many of these would-be entrepreneurs simply fail to cope when asked to be authentic and say what they really think. And as viewers we watch wide eyed as these young hopefuls veer wildly off track, start providing far too much detail, or simply lose their heads. Predictably they then get booted off the shows.
Now it may, of course, be mildly entertaining to see the howlers that people make when under pressure but what should they have done? The answer is this – they should have learned how to improvise whilst still knowing exactly where they were heading. Let me explain.
Your ability to speak persuasively and spontaneously needs to be underpinned by a better understanding of how your brain works. The relevant information here is that there are two sides to your brain – the logical left side and the intuitive right side. As someone who wants to be able to improvise, all you need to do is to learn how to use both sides together, in harmony. You can compare this skill to that of being a pilot. What you need is a computerised flight path which will get you flying in the right direction. That’s the left side of your brain. Meanwhile, at any time, you can over-ride the computer, make mid-course corrections and even go and talk to the passengers. And that’s the skill of the right hand side of your brain. Translate this into the area of communication and you have disciplined eloquence or even, perhaps, reliable excitement!
Of course some people are concerned that any structure will limit their spontaneity. But this isn’t true. The mind processes information extremely quickly and presenters, in giving themselves structure to improvise, are actually helping themselves and their listeners in two extremely important ways. Firstly, structure provides a clear focus for an audience. It imposes order on the mass of information that speakers or presenters have at their fingertips. Secondly, structure is liberating. Much like driving a car, when you know where you are going you can then make decisions about whether to listen to the radio, make conversation or engage in some creative thinking whilst knowing all the time that you are travelling on the right road.
There is one other point to note here and that is to remember that the most powerful speakers are always less interested in what they are saying and more interested in what their listeners are receiving. Communication is the response you get and anyone who is in the business of communicating, and who ignores this reality, will have a painfully hard path ahead of them. People who want to introduce spontaneity into their speaking must be especially aware of this. It may be exciting for you to talk from your expertise or your enthusiasm but in order to get your message across you will still need to be precise, unambiguous and clear.
Pithy and punchy
So let me now talk about the way you need to plan for any discussion, talk or presentation that you are giving. The three ‘must dos’ are as follows:
- Find the right theme for your audience.
- Structure your plan so that you can deliver on that theme persuasively.
- Adapt to listeners’ reactions as you speak.
In the case of the main theme around which you are talking, it is extremely helpful if you have a pithy and punchy headline which sums up your topic. This may sound obvious but even at this initial stage you should be engaging your creative right brain. What will add colour, imagination and excitement to your talk? Get creative and find a headline that stimulates your audience’s curiosity so that they arrive in an inquisitive frame of mind.
As to how to structure your speaking, this is even more critical for anyone who wants to be able to improvise. The reality is that when it comes to thinking on your feet, your plan will help your engagement by imposing order on your talk. And the three essential planks of your planning process are to define the central core of your topic, to separate ideas out distinctly from one another and to create momentum in your speaking so that you move your listeners smoothly from point A to B to C.
As to what precise structures to use when planning, here are three templates which have proven to be highly effective and which you can use for almost any talk or presentation you are giving.
The clock plan. This plan is one that divides your talk into chunks of time. If you are leading a project, for example, you might therefore structure your talk into the following phases:
- Where we are now.
- The next six months.
- And the situation in 12 month’s time.
The globe plan. This plan packages the key topics into chunks of space. So, for example, in this plan you might have as your main theme ‘Doing Business Across the World’. It may then be broken down into:
- Existing customers in the UK.
- Opportunities for expansion in mainland Europe.
- Untapped potential in South East Asia.
The triangle plan. This plan proposes that you are moving from one vantage point to another. So, for example, let us consider the main theme to be ‘The new IT system’. In this case the plan might look at the issues from the perspective of:
- What the end users need.
- What customers will get out of it.
- What the IT department can deliver.
These are three pretty straightforward plans which can help any speaker to marshall their ideas and there are many more. However, whatever structure you use, the point when it comes to improvisation is that it allows you to stay on track. Without structure any improvising can derail you and your audience. Billy Connolly might get away with wild digressions but only because he’s extremely entertaining. For most of us we need our structure to support our spontaneity. Then we can start to have fun, using our intuitive brain to bring images, stories, sensation and imagination into play.
Now this technique, where you use structure and imagination, is extremely effective and is ideal for any presenter who wants to improve their ability to improvise. However here is a handy hint for first time users. Try numbering your sections as you go through your presentation so that you can remember where you are. This really is as simple as
- The heading.
- The main chunks – a, b and c.
- The conclusion with its reminder of how it fits into the main theme. Numbering won’t only keep you on track it will also help your audience to see exactly where you are heading and where you have got to.
Of course it is also worth remembering that not all improvisation happens when you are ready for it. You may also want to be spontaneous when answering on-the-spo
t questions. Whatever the situation, however, just remember that thinking on your feet isn’t about having every single possible fact at your fingertips. Rather it’s about becoming more efficient by using your understanding of how the brain works to significantly improve your performance. Often it’s about less rather than more. So don’t try to cram everything into your sessions but rather keep your message simple and clear and use appropriate colour to make it memorable.
Relating gives you wings
The point to underline here is that structure is not enough. It will be a dead weight if it is all you rely on. You need to take managed risks. If you know your subject then you have to remember that you have all sorts of anecdotes, bits of research and associated ideas on which to call. More than that, what every audience really wants is interaction. So provoke them with your insights and give them a chance to ask you questions. Trust that your store of knowledge will be enough and build up an awareness that your audience wants you to do well and isn’t anticipating your failure. More than this, nobody expects you to know everything – so be playful and engaging and turn your talk into more of a relationship than a lecture. Then, when the time is right, bring it back to the subject in hand and move on.
So remember, improvisation is only another way of saying that you need to be flexible. Your challenge, if you want to be engaging, is to find a way to be authentic and to use structure to support you. Your confidence in knowing where you are going will transmit to the people you are speaking to and, the ability you have for interplay between you and your audience is critical. That is why people want to learn the skill of thinking on their feet. It builds intimacy and trust and creates intellectual and emotional bridges between a speaker and his or her audience. This form of ‘winging it’ is truly skilful and in comparison, reading from a speech, eyes glued to the text, is like flying blind.
Illumine Training offers a number of courses and workshops that can help you to engage your audience.
Professional Presentations
Our compact 1 day or comprehensive 2 day in-house course that focuses on presentation techniques that help you to know your audience, prepare effectively and deliver with IMPACT. It’s not a course that focuses on presenting with PowerPoint®.
Think On Your Feet®
THE verbal communications course. It will help you to structure ALL your verbal communication by combining effective thinking with proven communication tectniques. It’s a great course to help you get your point across and deal with those awkward questions and situations. Think On Your Feet® is available as an in-house course or 2 day public workshop (London and Manchester).
Tags: Nov/Dec 08 - Verbal Communications, Professional Presentations (Training), Speaking and Presenting, Think On Your Feet® (Training), Verbal Communication
