Presenting Advice: Tell Your Story

When you speak to a group, do you carefully recite your speaking notes, word for word?

Or do you actually tell your story, whatever you’re talking about? Are you so caught up in your story that you’re picturing it in your head and you’re naturally using words that pull your audience into your world?

When you recite your story, you might not stumble or need a moment to think, but you’ll also sound more like an automaton.

The audience will be able to tell that you’re just going through the motions. They’ll be able to tell that you’re disengaged from whatever you’re talking about.

But when you push yourself to tell your story — to really care what you’re talking about — you’ll have natural pauses and your natural enthusiasm will leap out to the audience, even through a screen.

I learned this lesson when I read the morning news for Vancouver Island on CBC.

I might read three different versions of the same news story over the course of a morning, so I would get pretty familiar with it. It would have been easy to read out that story without thinking. I could have used that extra brain space to think about when I could eat breakfast or the errands I needed to run after work — all while reciting that news story aloud on the air.

That’s when I realized that I had a choice. I could read those stories or I could tell them. It took all my focus and energy to put myself into those news stories, but that’s what I had to do.

Because if I wasn’t interested in that story, why would my listeners be?

Same thing goes for presenting and public speaking. You don’t need to be passionately enthusiastic about everything you say, but you do need to care and show your interest to your listener.

Tell your story; don’t just recite it.