TO ALL MOTHERS WHO ARE READING THIS: HAPPY MOTHERS DAY!!! *HUGZ*
If you have not wish your mum a happy mothers’ day, please do so right now. No no, this entry can wait. Go on.. wish her. Make sure you give her a big hug and tell her how much you love her. In fact, you should do it everyday because they deserve it.
Clockwise from left: Eileen (my sister), Dad, really beautiful Mum and my girlfriend, Yiting.
Have you experienced the weird atmosphere which comes after a funny story you’ve cracked fell flat on the target audience?
Or, do you have the belief that you are, simply, not funny at all?
Even the most confident speakers may falter when it comes to the skill of injecting humour adequately in their speeches. Not to worry, though, as this entry aims to offer several tips which, I hope, will guide you in adding just the right dosage of humour in the right moment so as to make your stories or punchlines work.
After one week plus of dry spell, it is time to turn this blog up a few notches.
And I shall start off by sharing with you a video taken by my friend Bo from Massachusetts, USA. (I was interviewed by him on podcast last year for The FAQ Book on Public Speaking - scroll down to interview #11) Possibly one of the funniest table topic speech ever! For the newly initiated, table topic is a speech delivered by a speaker on the spot, so this trains you in your quick thinking skills and organizational ability. However, this table topic session was slightly different. The audience are told that the speaker will be given a particular topic while the speaker was given another. As you can see from the video, the mis-match causes the audience to break up in fits of laughter. This, by the way, is a comedy technique.
Inspired by Andrew Dlugan’s recent post “Stop Rehearsing! 3 Critical Things to Do Before Your Speech“, I will like to add to his list 7 more things you can do before your speech to take the nervousness out of you.
First, let’s do a quick recap of his three excellent pointers.
1. Study the venue logistics
2. Meet your audience (extra tip: build before rapport)
3. Watch, listen and participate in the event agenda
“Would you have quitted drinking?!”
Yes, I know it is the weekend and I am NOT suppose to be blogging. Or at least that was my promise to my mum who thinks I work too hard. In my defense, blogging isn’t work… it’s something I enjoy doing, especially since I know I have an audience. YOU! (grins)
Anyhow, I think you would love this entry! So read on.
Why is humor so important?
How do you attract positive attention and draw a sizeable crowd to you?
This is a question I ask myself when I did my first book talk in KL. Unfortunately, I could not find any credible or relevant information that answers this burning question of mine. In times like this, I improvise.
The good news is some work and I will like to share them with you.
Here are the workable ones that have been refined after three book talks.
1. A crowd attracts a bigger crowd… hire groupies if you need to
I just got wind from my publisher that The FAQ Book on Public Speaking has hit Kinokuniya’s bestseller! (DO THE CHICKEN DANCE!) And we are very close for MPH and Borders. Not sure how many books we sold thus far but hey, bestseller at one of the top bookstores in Singapore… that should mean something right? And here’s the best part, we haven’t been actively promoting the book. So I suspect it has got to do with YOU! So here’s a BIG hug from me and Andrew.
Pictures tell a thousand words but where do we get arresting images for our presentation slides? And for free?
One site I will strongly recommend is stock.xchng but recently I have been using pictures from flickr. Seth Godin wrote an entry on it last week.
If you need photos for a presentation or website or brochure, try Flickr.
Go to advanced search, choose Creative Commons Commercial license and search away. The breadth is extraordinary, but what will amaze you is the quality. And the license is a generous gift from the photographer to you.
… there are some HR companies that will shuffle all the resumes for the week and then throw the first 50 in the trash can because they do not want to hire unlucky people?
I shared this interesting quip with my students at Raffles Junior College the other day and that got their attention immediately.
As a speaker, you are going to face moments where your audience will be bored, distracted or exhausted. More often than not, this happens because there is no variety in your speech. Patricia Fripp, a well known speech coach in States, aptly pointed out that sameness is the greatest enemy to speakers. Put it simply, when you become predictable, your audience switch off.
This is a guest post written by a new online friend of mine, Perrine Oh. He found The Public Speaking Blog via The FAQ Book on Public Speaking and later initiated a really thoughtful email. To cut the long story short, I read 10 entries he wrote in one seating. My conclusion - this guy can write! And one of the articles that stood out is the one that you are going to reading right now. Perrine, take it away!
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