Yesterday I was looking at my blog on UgiDotNet, the Italian .NET User Group, and found this gem, my first post about public speaking.
I decided to translate it here:
This evening I should write a document, but I’m blocked, so I decided to write a blog post, waiting for inspiration…
A lot of friends asked me for info and tricks to improve their presentations, they ask for help on effective communication, especially when they need to do a public speech.
I’m thinking to start a blog series, related to my experience of Microsoft Certified Trainer, UgiDotNet member & speaker, and Microsoft MVP, always light-heartedly.
The first post is about the essence of communication. I don’t want to use “theorems or axioms”, but, unlike who says that you’re always communicating, also when you’re silent, or even worse, when you cannot be understood, I know that there are different ways to communicate, some better and some worse.
To succeed in communicating, you should first ask what’s the right tool.
Speaking with three people is entirely different than speaking in an office with twelve people, a room of forty people, or an auditorium with three hundred people, not talking about a keynote room with fourteen thousand people (in that case I was part of the audience, and I can tell you that to keep me there for all the time they were outstanding).
Voice, slides, props, dress code, microphone, projectors, face, eyes, hands, pauses, silences, laser pointer, a flying monkey (it’s a long story), these are part of the TOOLS that we use to communicate.
The tricky part is understanding how to use those in front of the audience to convey better the message we should transmit.
You should also think about how to speak in an informal context. Think about communicating in a very crowded restaurant (when this pandemic will end) with thirty people. It’s not easy, isn’t it?
To be continued… maybe… 😊
Now I’m scraping my blog in Italian to search for other gems that I can repost here, for a later memory, hope that you like those.
-Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash
