Fundamentals and Stories

Now it’s time for the number one tip when it comes to your success when speaking to foreign audiences.

And it’s also the number one tip when it comes to your success in speaking to any audience anywhere

in the world including in your company in your own hometown.

And that tip is you’ve got to have something interesting to say and to say in a memorable way.

Now that may sound obvious but I work with clients all over the world and most of them are in the US

but everywhere.

And what I see is a problem that is massive.

It’s an epidemic.

And that is the problem of people giving a speech is a boring data dump.

Here’s everything we did last quarter here’s everything our company does.

Here’s a whole bunch of bullet points and it’s boring it’s tedious it’s a data dump.

Now you may think that somehow speaking to a foreign audience is more difficult than speaking to a domestic

audience.

What you might not realize is you might not be any good speaking to that domestic audience if you actually

judge yourself based on what people remember.

Now I operate under the assumption that most business executives really aren’t very good.

Now they may look polished and their time may be straight or their dress is perfect their hair may be

perfect if they have any but if you test the audience if you actually go around the room after the speech

and say Tell me everything that speaker just said.

What were the speakers main points.

Tell me every slide you remember.

In most cases people would be like I don’t know but the speaker seemed very professional and seemed

smart and I’m sure we could do business with them.

That’s not communication that’s time wasting that’s taking up space.

And that’s kind of going with the flow and doing what everyone else does.

So keep in mind you don’t get credit for speaking the foreign language or saying hello in their language

although that’s a nice thing to do.

If you still get up and give a boring speech here the fundamentals of good speech making you’ve got

to narrow your speech down to a handful of points.

I’ve been testing audiences all over the world for 30 years and I can tell you I’ve never met an audience

member who really remembered more than five points most common day for people to remember is 0 or 1

occasionally to 3 every once in a while 4 points.

But if you can get your audience to remember five key points you are going to be wildly successful you

are going to be the best speaker that audience member has seen in the last year or possibly ever so

focused start up by focusing on a handful of points that are most important to you.

The next thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to tell a story a story involves a real conversation that

you had with a real person could be a client colleague customer a patient a family member but it’s got

to involve a real conversation with a real person about a real problem and where you were the setting.

Now I’ll give you in the bonus section more details about storytelling but it genuinely is the biggest

difference between great communicators and awful communicators great communicators consistently illustrate

every key point with a story awful speakers no matter what language or what country they’re in consistently

avoid stories because there’s no time because they get to cover all the data they’ve got to go through

all these slides and all these numbers and on people are falling asleep regardless of what culture they’re

in now.

Certain cultures they may look more attentive and nod but they’re not listening to you because you’ve

bored them.

So that’s my challenge to you when you’re coming up with your speech for foreign audiences.

Do the same thing you should be doing when you speaking to domestic audiences use better judgment discernment

narrowing your messages down to five and then coming up with a story to illustrate each point.

And the only real difference is frankly.

Make sure your stories don’t involve football games or a certain cultural things that people just wouldn’t

understand.

But if it’s a problem with a client problem with on occasion these things translate all cultures.