Six lessons in public speaking from Obama

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America has elected the greatest political speaker for a generation.

You may think that there’s nothing for you to learn from Barack Obama’s speechmaking skills – that speaking to 200,000 people at Grant Park, Chicago is too far removed from the presentation you might give to your staff, to your management team or to potential clients. Here are six lessons you can learn from Obama’s acceptance speech at Grant Park.

1. Know your audience

It would have been easy for Obama to fall into the trap of talking to the 200,000 people before him in Grant Park. He didn’t. He spoke to Americans in their living rooms, he spoke to those who voted for McCain, he spoke to people watching him across the world – leaders and the poorest of the  poor. He knew who his audience was. [Read more]

Conversational Presenting

It’s easier to listen to somebody when they’re speaking in a conversational manner. This is intuitive but also backed up by research by Richard Mayer and others (there’s a nice summary of the research at the Creating Passionate Users blog). Research by Mayer showed that people learnt more when a computer-based educational game was conversational in style (Mayer calls this personalized), as opposed to formal in style. When tested on the content, they scored significantly more:

[Read more]