Effective Speaking
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Last weekend was the Animal Rights Conference 2011. There were over 100 speakers from 60 different organizations. There were sessions on animal abuse, organizing, tactics, issues as well as eyewitness reports on key campaigns. This conference is designed to include diverse approaches to animal liberation and discussions by leaders of other social justice movements and it takes place every year alternating coasts from LA to DC.
I attended the conference and I’m sharing my notes here on Vegan Soapbox. These notes are from the session about Effective Speaking by Josephine Bellaccomo author of Move the Message.
There are two parts of every speach: the audience and the speech. It’s like a yin and yang.
When creating a speech use these templates in order to increase your efficacy: “As a result of this message my audience will do ___” and “As a result of this message my audience will feel or think ___.”
Engage people at their level of power. Don’t over-burden them and don’t underestimate them. Check out the chapter “Target It” in the book Move the Message.
There are two parts of our message: what we say and how we say it.
When in front of a large room, one trick to make sure we reach everyone is to make eye contact with the people in each corner of the room while giving our first few phrases.
Instead of using “nonwords” like “um” “ahh” just pause. There are other places to use a pause:
- after reciting a large statistic, to let it sink in
- when relaying something emotionally powerful, to let people have a chance to feel
Use vocal variety to make speech more dynamic. Change volume and speed of your voice. Incorporate other elements of variety too, like hand gestures.
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My notes from this year’s conference will be all at http://www.vegansoapbox.com/topics/ar2011/. In 2009, we took notes, too. You can see those notes at http://www.vegansoapbox.com/topics/ar-2009/.
I enjoyed the conference too but did not attend that many sessions this year.
Last year in DC at the AR conference I caught a session by Odette Wilkens about effective public speaking, where she passed around the microphone for audience members to speak about a question from another audience member for about 3 minutes. She then pointed out strengths and weaknesses in each speaker’s performance.
It was an amazing training tool for spontaneous reacting, engaging public speaking, and the skill to captivate an audience off the cuff without preparations. I loved that session!
This year again during the LA conference, I was impressed with the quality of speakers and their presentation skills. You can easily apply the learned tactics anywhere – in moving the animal rights message forward and beyond that.