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So what are some public speaking rules you should never break? Well for starters never
ever, ever read a speech. Good morning. My name is T.J. Walker. Do you see how you are
already asleep? The hardest thing you could ever do is to read a speech in front of people
unless your goal is to put them to sleep. It's a horrible, horrible thing to do.
Another rule. Never turn your back on the audience and start reading your power point
bullet points. Horrific thing to do. Audiences are made up of people. People don't like to
be ignored. If you ignore them, they're going to respond in kind by ignoring you. So you're
turning your back to look at your power point, guess what they're gonna do? Let me check
my email. You don't want to lose your audience.
The next thing you don't ever want to do is say this. Would've liked to have rehearsed
but there was no time. Bologna. There is always time to rehearse. If you're not willing to
spend 10 minutes rehearsing and you're now speaking to 100 people, what you're really
saying is hey, the 1,000 minutes of your time is really a lot less important than 10 minutes
of my time to rehearse. So you always want to rehearse.
The next thing you never ever want to do is do a gigantic data dump. Now the number one
problem most people have when they're giving a presentation is they say hey, I don't know
what to say. Let me cover my you know what and dump out everything. So they dump fact
after fact after fact where they're looking at their power point and there's all this
small print.
Why is that? Because they didn't take the time to really sit back and contemplate what
does my audience truly have to know here. They didn't do their job editing. You never
want to do that. You've got to narrow it down to your top handful of points. That will solve
your problem having the data dump. You want to rehearse. That will solve the problem of
you being awkward, awful or boring. Avoid these big stumbling blocks and you'll give
a great presentation.