Not long ago I went to one of those local economic development seminars in our area that specialized in helping consultants do their job better. It was obvious that the speaker was well versed in consulting activities and well aware of the new mentoring and coaching strategies that are out there. He was definitely speaking from experience, but his speech was flat, uneventful, and he got too attached to his slideshow. He wasn’t getting much out of it. Interestingly, I took my digital recorder with me so I could listen later, as a review.
In fact, this is my way of reviewing the material that was presented in case I missed something, this is an old habit I picked up a long time ago in college using those little microcassette recorders. This guy also had teleseminars that he could do in case someone couldn’t make it to one of his talks or speaking engagements. I thought he was nice, until I realized while listening to a replay of his presentation that his monotonous way of speaking and the way he delivered this information left a lot to be desired.
Now, I’m not going to mention his name because that’s really very unfair, and I’m not even going to say what city he was from because it might as well have been anyone in the country doing similar work. What I am trying to say here is that there is a bigger underlying problem and that has to do with how many people are conducting their business talks and speeches in the same way.
Lots of people do teleseminars, and I’m sure you’ve heard quite a few where the person rambles monotonously, puts everyone to sleep, and at the end of the talk no one really wants to ask questions, and the questions they ultimately ask aren’t answered very well by the so-called expert speaker. Interestingly, no matter how experienced one is in the field, if you can’t convey that information correctly to an audience, no matter how good you are, no one is listening.
Worse yet, for every great speaker there is, there are 10 more to go. Every single one of these monotonous speakers hurts everyone who does teleseminars. Trust me when I tell you that if you speak in a monotone you are ruining it for everyone else, you are causing fewer people to call in and participate. Please consider all this and think about it.