Some speakers have the X-factor. That thing that makes the audience just fall in love with them even before the speaker opens his mouth.

One of the most extreme examples of that that I have experienced was when I was speaking at the same conference as Matti Bergström.

Professor Bergström is a Finish brain scientist, who focuses on children’s creativity and play. He looks like Gandalf and sounds like your favourite grand-dad.

The audience just melt when he is on stage talking about the need to let children develop their ability to play.

I shared a taxi with him after the conference and asked if he was aware of himself having this unique likability ability.

He smiled and told me that he had once done a speech in Stockholm and after 20 (!) minutes of speaking someone in the audience had finally raised his hand and said “I am so sorry, professor Bergström, but you are giving your speech in Finnish…”

(For you who do not know, Swedish and Finnish are TOTALLY different languages!)

The audience has been so mesmerised by the professor that the audience would not let the fact that they did not understand a single world of what he had said interrupted their experience!

It’s hard to pin down what creates this “x-factor” but the speakers who possess it has been blessed with a gift.

But speakers who have this ability also risk developing content that is less powerful. (It falls into the same category as the beautiful girls in school who doesn’t have to try so hard because she gets whats she wants in life thanks to her beauty.)

Today I coached a speaker whom I personally think has the potential to become  one of the world’s biggest speakers.

His “likability factor” is through the roof and as soon as they see him on stage the audience connects with him as if their long-lost best friends just stepped into the room. After hearing him speech audiences will give him raving reviews. But when you do a print out of his content and go through his current content word by word it becomes apparent that it is actually quite weak. Most people do not notice, because they liked the speaker so much.

There are three kinds of speakers:

1) Weak speakers with Weak content.

2) Strong speakers with Strong content

3) Weak speakers with Strong content

and

4) Strong speakers with Weak content.

The person I coached today was obviously in the last category.

The good news is that can easily be fixed.

It is probably easier to fix “weak content” than “weak speaker” – and when Mr X with the X-factor whom i worked with today gets his new speech done and the content is as good as his delivery it will be one hell of a speech that will probably end up at TED.com and get millions of views.

Which brings us to you:

Which kind of speaker are you?

If 1) – then you have a lot of work to do. Get to it! 🙂

If 2) : then congratulations (I hope you were honest with yourself when you came to that conclusion…)

If 3) : Your biggest challenge is discovering your true speaking style – something that can be very difficult, but will be very rewarding if you take the time to do it

And

If 4) Ask yourself if you are really speaking on the subject that you should be speaking on. There is a big chance that the reason you do not have good enough content is that you are not passionate enough about the topic.

After a few hours of talking through his current speeches and discussing what he is really passionate about we, together, unlocked the theme he should be speaking on. I can not wait to hear that speech.

I think the speaker was happy too. He just messaged me: “Thank you Fredrik. I am brimming with ideas after seeing you.”

Lesson: Understand which is your weaker side: your speaking style or your speaking content. Then work on fixing it.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the difference between “good speakers” and “great speakers”.
Today I will reflect over the difference approach that I think “great speakers’ have towards their content vs “good speakers”.

My theory is this:

Good speakers are speakers who think they are great because they think they have these amazing ideas and concepts that they have come up all by themselves.

Great speakers are speakers who have a passion for a subject and who then go out and try to learn as much as possible about this subject from OTHERS.

See the difference?

Great speakers do not think that they are great – instead they think that the topic that they are speaking on is great, and therefor they want to learn as much as possible about this topic from others.

Less about “me, me, me” and more about “learn, learn, learn.”

People who constantly want to learn more are great teachers. (and speakers are, after all, teachers.)

If you are a speaker on Customer Service, do you interview your taxi driver about service?
If you are a speaker on Leadership, do you ask your child’s teacher if they have any examples of great leadership from children?
If you are a speaker on Focus, do you interview your dentist on what she does to stay focused on the task when her patiens are screaming?

Are you constantly trying to learn more about your subject?

I hate when speakers talk about themselves as “gurus” where it is supposed to give the feeling of an “all knowing expert”.
I love when I met a speaker (or any person) who feels that there is yet so much to learn.

Today I met two people like that.

Andreas Ehn and Lisa Enckell

Lisa is a consultant and speaker. Andreas is an investor (and former CTO of Spotify)

They have just embarked on project where they will live in 10 different parts of the world in the next five years. On their website (https://approach.world ), where you can follow them on this journey, they write:
“We want to understand the world better. So we decided to spend five years living for six months in each of the ten countries that we believe will have the biggest economic impact on the world in the next 20–30 years. We will divide our time between learning about places, working with startups and investors and making early-stage angel investments in the local markets.”

You have to love an approach like that!
Or at least I do that, as a speaker who speak on the need to have a global mindset.

So since they right now are in Singapore I jumped at the opportunity to have them over to learn more about why they doing this epic and hyper-inspirational project.

Meetings like this inspires me to want to learn even more about how to have a global – or should i say, “human’, approach to life and business. Something that I think, and hope, will be felt when I give my talks on this very subject.

Lesson: If you, as a speaker, get more out of teaching (i.e. speaking) than you do out of learning (i.e. interviewing others on the topic you are speaking on) then perhaps it is time to stop speaking.

(Split, Croatia)

As a global speaker I like to say that a speaker should try to create a speech that works for everyone – a human speech – not have different speeches for different “cultures”, but that doesn’t mean that there are not differences in how audiences behave in different parts of the world.

Take questions for example.

Today I spoke for a few hundred business people in Split, Croatia. The organisers had put in 10 minutes of Q&A at the end of my speech, but also told me before the speech: “If there are no questions we will ask you some questions.” and they also got some copies of my books to give away as “prices” to the people who would ask questions.

Sure enough. After my speech we only got 3 questions (and the first one was “Can you sign the book I get if I ask a question?”)

Have to admit that was a sneaky questions to get a book 😉

Compare that to India, for example, where audiences love to ask questions.

I once did a speech in India where the organisers had put a side 45 minutes for my speech and one hour (!) for Q&A.

When I pointed out to the organisers that the Q&A was longer than the speech, he smiles and said “do not worry, we will have plenty of questions”. (And they did, after 1 hour people were still raising their hands eager to ask more.)

So why do they not ask questions in Croatia?

My client had an interesting theory that it was part of the communist mentality of former Yugoslavia where people where not encouraged to ask too many questions.

So what does this mean for speakers?

Good question 🙂

My lesson for today was to embrace the fact that not all groups are bubbling over with questions, or even if they are, they might not want to ask them in public.

It is easy as a speaker to get uncomfortable at the end of a session if there is a Q&A but not Questions come. I have learnt to not let it get to me. I think it is important that the last message that you send from the stage is not one of being uncomfortable.

Instead, stand there and smile and be happy that you were able to give a speech that was so good that people do not feel a need to have things clarified. (and be prepared that they might just come up to you after the speech and ask that question that they had.)

 

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