Who has used innovative activities that they would share with me on how to improve people's verbal communication skills?
I am training a group of department leaders who have staff team members who give fun informative talks to the public on a daily basis.
The problem is that although they seem very happy and upbeat, because they do the same talk day in, day out, it has lost its' meaning for them and so their words flow into each other and cease to be meaningful!
How can we help them bring back the meaning?
9 Responses
This might help…
Hi there
Get them to transcribe what they say and print out eaqch one for all the group to see…
Give out 4 coloured highlight pens…
They then mark each part of the transcript as follows…
Red – Words that have high impact
Blue – Words that are somber
Green – Words or sentences that should be repeated
Yellow – Parts of the dialogue that need silence
Lots of variations on the above but have done this many times and it works.
Good luck
Steve
thank you!
Thank you Steve that sounds like a great ide, I shall work on exploring it further! Brilliant!
Speech to Text
Good luck…and if they don’t want to type out their speeches…never tried this but it look squite easy…
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/491578/how-do-i-convert-speech-to-text
Impactful Talks
Hi
So, you need to develop, via your managers, presenters who give meaningful messages that have credibility and interest to the public?
First steps might be to go back to the start and ask, ‘what are you looking to achieve in your communication?’ and ‘how do you want the public to feel at the end of your talk?’ With this information they could re-work their content, as it may even be that their customers (the public) may need a different approach or context than they did when they first created their content.
Next step could be to make sure the language they use is full of visual, auditory and feeling words in order to connect with everyone. Personal stories or metaphors help bring content to live and to resonate with people in a way that pure facts don’t. If they’re looking to help their audience change (their behaviour for example), showing the gap between what is and what could be is a powerful way to move people to the possibility of change, supported by the communicator offering support or resources to help them change.
Finally, the way the message is delivered has significantly more impact than the message itself, so they should be practicing delivery and getting feedback on how they can connect with the audience with their posture, voice and actions (gesture, movement, posture etc). In my experience, this often has the potential of a significantly better received message than simply re-editing the message (althought this also needs to be hitting the mark).
There’s a really interesting article here: http://www.influencetraining.co.uk/latest-updates/the-real-impact-of-a-powerful-posture/ on the impact of a powerful posture.
Regards,
Karen
Karen Stone UK Head of Learning & Development
simple, quick exercise
For greater understanding of the power of tone and emphasis of using words in a sentence, try this:
"I DIDN’T SAY YOU STOLE THAT"
Get different members of the audience to read this sentence out but each time emphasise/highlight a different word in the sentence. i.e) ‘I didn’t say you stole that’ could imply someone else implied this, whereas ‘i didn’t say you stole THAT’ implies you think they took something, just not that object. It works differently for each word.
quick, but quite powerful.
Matt
Fun informative talks
May I suggest that you search Youtube for ‘Yeoman Warders’. The ‘Beefeaters’ as they are more commonly known have the same or similar task – talking to the public giving in essence the same information day in, day out. Yet they all do so in slightly different ways adding a touch of their own personality to each presentation. A warning though, being ex-military, they are not the most politically correct people around! Please do view all of the posts, it won’t take long and they really are both educational and entertaining.
ahem!
"A warning though, being ex-military, they are not the most politically correct people around!"
Ouch!
is it politically correct to stereotype all EX-military personnel together?
😉
Yeoman
I really enjoyed watching the Yeoman…amazing he gets away with it with foreign visitors who probably have no idea he is being humorous rather than rude!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiW_bWZ2Is
Impressive
I support the above statement. The print edition of this internationally respected title was first published over 60 years ago and has become widely acclaimed as the premier source of information on the academic sphere world-wide. The Diet Solution Program Scam