Knowing your point is a critical start, but still only part of your overall job. The next part—successfully conveying your point—relies on clearly understanding what your most important job is (and what it's not), and being able to start strong.
Know Your Job
When we consider the attributes of “great communicators,” these qualities—and others like them—traditionally come to mind:
Interesting
Informative
Funny
Engaging
Confident
Charismatic
Educational
Exciting
Some communicators focus heavily on creating these perceptions. Their internal voices say:
“I've got to start with a joke.”
“I need to share all this information.”
“The audience has to love me.”
But although these are nice-to-have qualities, they play a minuscule role in your ultimate success or failure. Effective communication hinges on one job and one job only:
Moving your point from your head to your audience's heads.
That's the ball game. If you deliver your point, you succeed. If you don't deliver your point, you fail—even if you're otherwise hilarious, friendly, attractive, relatable, admirable, knowledgeable, and likable.
If it helps, think of yourself as a bicycle messenger. Your only job is moving your package—your point—from Point A to Point B, from your head to your audience's heads. The only measure of success is whether or not the delivery is successful.
Because this act of delivery is so critical, the only way to know if you meet that goal is to ask someone in your audience, “Did you get my point?” For an even better test, see if that person can accurately express your point back to you.
Other “traditional” measures of success—like compliments, applause, laughter, and smiles—are fairly useless as indicators because they don't tell you if you've successfully delivered your point; they only reflect how much you engaged your audience. That's probably useful feedback for a game show host, but not for someone trying to make a point.
Knowing you have a single, specific job can relieve a lot of anxiety, especially if you're worried about things like your appearance, how nervous you seem, or even a foreign accent you may have. Successful point-making is not about your physical presence; it's about the successful transference of your point. Like the bike messenger, simply deliver the goods and avoid any obstacles in your way.
Start Strong
The first 15 seconds of making your point are critical. In that quarter-minute, your audience will decide if you're going to be interesting or boring. What you do during that short time can make or break that impression.
Friends and colleagues may be rooting for you. Competitors and detractors might be looking for holes in your argument. But they both have the same wish: “Don't put me to sleep.” In more actionable terms: “Make a relevant point.” Starting strong—and keeping people awake—relies on getting to that point quickly. Yet do you know the most common first word of most presentations?
Hello? No.
The? Nope.
SO.
Yes. So.
Why do we begin so often with “so”? Probably because it makes us feel like we're continuing a dialogue, which is comfortable, instead of starting a speech, which can be scary.
Here are a few examples of not getting to the point quickly, each leading with a big, fat “So. . . .” Do they sound familiar?
“So . . . how is everyone?”
“So . . . you may be wondering. . . .”
“So . . . we were talking yesterday about. . . .”
“So . . . let's talk a little about. . . .”
You can avoid this fate simply by knowing what your first word is—and committing to it being your first word.
For me, often it's “my”:
“My name is Joel Schwartzberg. . . .”
Or “good”:
“Good morning. My name is Joel Schwartzberg. . . .”
Or “today”:
“Today I want us to focus on a critical issue in our supply chain. . . .”
Whatever your first word is, don't say anything until you say that word, and then ideally continue with an opening that establishes three things:
1. Who you are (if you are new to your audience)
2. Your point
3. Why your point is relevant (if it's not already embedded in the phrasing of your point)
Because these opening 15 seconds are so critical, I often recommend memorizing them (which is the first and last time I'll recommend you memorize anything, by the way).
If you like, you can still begin your communication with a humanizing icebreaker—a joke, a funny moment from your morning, or a related news item—but they need to be planned, not winged. Also, recognize that these ice-breaking devices are not supporting your points; they're delaying them. So it's best to get in and out of a starting thought efficiently so you can quickly move on to your point.
I believe that the dance came from the people, and that it should always be delivered back to the people.
—Alvin Ailey