Jennifer Anderson has an excellent article on how to develop your listening skills.  As I showed in an earlier post, it is hard to listen with your mouth open.

Jennifer asks us to listen to someone without talking for 30 minutes.  Then there are 7 questions to ask yourself about your experience.

Do you think you could listen to your clients better?  If so, try this exercise.

You need to start your speech with a joke.

The logic being that you will relax both yourself and your audience.  This may well be true, but there are some significant downsides.

Is the joke related to your topic?  If not, it will likely confuse the audience and take away from your message.

Are you good at telling jokes?  More to the point, are you good at telling jokes when you are nervous?  If not, what if the joke flops?  Rather than put everyone at ease, you just raised the stakes!

What if the joke flops?  What if it offends some people in the audience?  The benefit of putting everyone at ease is far outweighed by the potential for failure.

Don’t start your speech with a joke – leave the joke telling to the comedians

Why should I have to say my phone number every time I order pizza?

Caller ID has been around for quite some time.  Why then was I surprised when the Sleep Country sales representative used it?  It saved me from having to tell him an account number or spell my name.  Using caller ID, the sales representative was able to cut through the logistics and concentrate on solving my problem.

Sure, automated systems have been using caller ID to route your requests for a long time.  It is the smaller businesses that I would like to see use this to streamline their interactions.

Think about your business.  How could you use caller ID to benefit your customer?

Do you find it difficult to give specific feedback to a single person when you are performing a table topics Evaluation?

Often table topics is the most feared aspect of a Toastmasters meeting.  The Table Topic Evaluator may feel like saying, “just answering the question at all was good enough”, when really they know a number of areas the speaker could improve.

One technique that is very useful in this situation is to use the another speaker as an example:

“I loved how you used gestures in your table topics.  They were both fluid and natural.  I didn’t see the other table topics speakers do that, so it stood out for me even more.  Your gestures today really made your topic come alive, especially when you were describing the hippopotamus!   Fellow Toastmasters, when you give a Table Topic speech, try to remember to use your gestures as you would in a regular speech.”

Because boring doesn’t work.

Boredom gets in the way of understanding. What enables and encourages understanding, on the other hand, is style. Style engages the audience. It delights them. It speaks to them on a human level.

- Presentation Coach

When you give an evaluation, are you boring? Do you stick purely to the facts and deliver informative but dull feedback? Consider adding some color. Tell a story, add some humor, lighten up!