Making your talks Powerful, Memorable, and Effective
Getting the balance of stodge and seasoning right to really connect with your audience
"It's not enough to be right, you have to be effective" - Cyril deGrasse Tyson
Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash
You may have connected, you might've felt that you communicated, but did you only entertain, or were you effective as well?
Can your audience remember your talk? Can they remember your points? Did you enrich their lives? These are the questions that will tell you if your talk was effective and they rely on two ingredients that need to be balanced.
One ingredient is the backbone of your talk, and the second is the spice that helps you highlight its parts. I call these ingredients the "stodge" and the "seasoning".
The Stodge
The "stodge" of your talk is what's actually nutritious to your audience's brains. Stodge is the important points you want to make, likely your core narrative. It's the memorable path that highlights exactly what you want your audience to take away. My approach to the stodge is not to hide them. Lead with the nutrition stuff, place your stodge front and centre as much as possible, starting with your title.
Key Stodge Ingredient: The Title
When I try to come up with the main title for any talk I try to do two things:
Capture the main point that I want the audience to take away
Hint that this talk will contain "secret knowledge" that you simply *must* have
When preparing your talk always remember that you are competing with, amongst other things: other talks on the bill, bad weather, good weather, rail strikes etc. You’re up against entire lives of other stuff that are as, if not perhaps more, important to be doing than listening to you.
Your audience's attention is a commodity that is in-demand, and so it requires requires to get everyone physically, and mentally, in the room. It requires marketing and this starts with your main title.
My titles don't just tell you what I'm going to talk about, they tell you why you absolutely must attend. You can do this with a degree of subtlety, but, like it or not, when you're in the game of vying for people's attention, you need to start early and come out punching hard.
When my title is my main point, it also has a fairer chance of being the point that's remembered and I get to automatically reinforce it. Reinforcing your points is how you get them across to your audience without boring them, and once again it starts as early as the title.
Secondary, Tertiary and Miscellaneous Stodge: Titles with Pause
For the rest of my key points, which should be around 2 to 4 in number, I place them carefully at the end of story arcs. Story arcs are so important they they get their very own post but, for now, you can think of a story arc as being a short story-within-a-story—an arc of emotions towards a point that you want to make.
When it comes to the stodge, I make sure those key points are at the end of an arc and that they are accompanied by a pause for breath in the overall narrative. I give the audience's brains a chance to catch up—to begin to process the point—before moving on to the next thing I want them to take away. The impact of closing out an arc, when done well, opens up an opportunity to drop a learning-bomb of something you really want them to take away. The pause is important because, after such a bomb, you need to give their brains time to deal with the impact.
Adding Seasoning
Now it's time to add the sugars, salts and spice to your narrative. Or, as I tend to think of them: the Good, the Bad and the ... Interesting. Think of these elements as the seasoning to your talk's stodge—the powerful extra elements you can use to grab your audience's attention.
However, these are not just optional extras or nice-to-haves that are superfluous to the story. Your seasoning is almost as important as the nutritional stodge itself. They may make all the difference when your topic’s core points are on the, how shall we say, bland side of things? I never said boring, not once ... You can't prove it. But...
The fact is that the core of your talk may be, in essence, dull. The points you want to make may lack zest, and there's times when you can do nothing about that. You do your best to make the narrative compelling, and even the arcs suitably attention-catching and reinforcing, but in the end the topics are what they are and there's a danger of the brain's crap filter getting distracted.
That's when you throw in your seasoning, which might include:
Popular references and jokes
Quotes
Book references
Killer stories and confessions
Each of these could be a tiny arc in and of themselves. The seasoning should be just right to grab your audience's attention, especially if your last point just couldn't be dressed up as terribly exciting. A carefully sprinkled quote or, even better, short confession will do the trick but, like with all seasoning, there are limits...
Seasoning elements should have a "Use too much and people will either a) wish to the door, or b) think you just an entertaining fraud" warning label. Adding a sprinkling of cayenne pepper to your dish may help to give it just the kick it needs, and so popular references and jokes *can* liven things up beautifully, but if you use too much you're more than likely to send your audience rushing to the exit like it's a necessary bathroom break.
Likewise, a well-placed quote or reference to a great book that the audience simply must add to their reading list adds depth of flavour but, like too much salt on your fish and chips, too much and you'll either be seen as a) being too much of a smart clever-clogs—Just look how much more I've read than you, bask in my intellectual magnificence wretches!— or b) you'll be adding nothing of your own.
Just enough seasoning can be used to grab your audience's attention when you really, really need it. Too much and you'll make your audience ill. You have been warned.
The Special Case of the Spice of Humour
"Humour is recognition" - Neil Gaiman
One thing that I personally think you can always bring to your talk, and that won't ruin the mix, is humour. Humour is a spice, but it's also powerful enough to be useful if it pervades your talk right to its core, stodgy narrative.
I don't mean staged jokes, I mean having a sense of the humour of the stories you're telling and how, at times, to accentuate it. If a moment in one of your story arcs reminds you of something funny, then try and crack a smile. If there's something sad, let that sadness affect you. Your body language will trigger mimicry to the betterment of your stories and your core points.
You mustn't overdo it, unless you are a burgeoning actor, but letting the humour of the situation come to the fore is a great way of helping your audience relate to the stories. When they see your reaction, they can't help reacting similarly. Shared humour and emotion can be a powerful, instant connection.
It takes practice, but eventually you'll be able to detect and adjust humour as you deliver your talk. You'll often catch me smiling at a point I'm making in one of my talks, or pausing because I've found something funny and maybe, just maybe, the audience might as well.
Building your Spice Cupboard
"I'm sorry Mrs. Miles, Russell just isn't much of a reader." At this, Mrs. Miles drops to her knees, raises her fists to the skies and, in true Hollywood Blockbuster style, screams, "NO!!!!!!!!!"
Zoom out; fade to black.
That's how I imagined it played out. Even if the real events had none of that celluloid drama to them, the fact remained: I wasn't much of a reader as a child. Not up until the age of 8 did I care for reading. Then a combination of my mum not giving up—and Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl introducing themselves—changed everything...
When sourcing spices for my cupboard, I don't just read, I read voraciously, passionately, filling notebooks with ideas both random and apt. I read wildly.
Reading Wildly!
These days I don't just eat books, I devour them! 3 a week, 3 at a time is not unheard of. If you saw my library and appetite for reading now you'd think I'd been flung from the womb with a paperback of "War and Peace" tucked under my arm, rather than being a 7 year old utterly uninterested in what "Spot" and "Jane" were doing with a "red ball"1.
From Cicero to Dickens, Wollstonecraft to de Beauvoir, "Sandman" to "The Last Man", everything is fair game when I'm building up the sources for my talk's sugars, salts and spices. When you read wildly, uncontrollably, passionately then something magical happens. All of a sudden I see connections in perspective between books that I would never think had anything in common. I'll see a story arc in a fantasy graphic novel and the struggles that Richard Feynman had with his wife's health and then boom, there's a beautiful synthesis of these perspectives.
I take it all down, the direct references and the syntheses. Everything gets added to my spice cupboard, ready to be pulled from for whatever talk I'm working on at a given time.
It's not just about reading...
You will find many, many sources for your own spice cupboard, and I recommend whatever your sources are, use them to your fullest. Whether they be videos, pop music, classical music, overheard conversations in the bar ... I recommend becoming a chronicler of everything you encounter, building up a healthy, sizeable spice cupboard for your talks.
Go gather together your very own sugars, salts and spices, the good the bad and the ... interesting, and pull it all together to create your own go-to source for new elements and ideas for your talks. That way you'll always have something to hand when you want to make a point as punchy, and memorable, as possible.
TL; DRs
Your talk is made up of "stodge" and "seasoning". The stodge is your key messages, the seasoning is what you add to make the whole thing even more memorable.
Each title should be a key point in your talk. This is the stodge.
Stories, humour etc are what you add, taking ingredients from your spice cupboard of possibilities, to make you talk your own and great.
To put together a spice cupboard I read wildly, often a few books at once.
Another great source is your own experiences. In retrospect most painful experiences can bring valuable, personal and even funny spice to your talks.
(There are) No Dumb Questions
What if I'm early in my career and don't feel I have any stories to tell yet?
Step 1: Go get some experience, fast. I'm not kidding. Start exploring the subject you are thinking of speaking about and note down how you feel, what occurs to you, what you find odd; all of this is good material for your immediate spice cupboard. A beginner's experience is always a rich harvest of spice. You can also speak to others to see what they have in their experience, but always prefer your own experiences if you can. You can gather those experiences very quickly, and as they're your own they add so much more to your talk than a third party's experiences.
Can I watch videos instead of all that reading?
Absolutely. I don't care what channel you prefer your ideas to come to you on, just immerse yourself in it. For me ideas come from reading very wildly and *never* being picky about sourcing material from other channels.
This was an excerpt from the Work in Progress book, “How to Speak: Tips for people who want to tell their story” by Russ Miles.
How did it all change? The key was I was utterly and completely bored by the story-less books that were driven into kids of my age to improve our vocabularies. This was in the early eighties after all. Things changed for me when my mum realised that I didn't hate reading, I hated boredom. Give me a narrative and a story and I'm in! In many ways this informs my entire perspective on good talks, good articles, good books, good movies... The key is always the story for me.