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Effective Public Speaking for Doctors:How to give a talk that rocks!
Disclaimer: This article represents the author’s natural style of public speaking. As such it has been written in an informal fashion with a touch of humour. The objective is to provide doctors with simple and actionable strategies to become a good public speaker.
A doctor’s tryst with Public Speaking..
It was November 14th, 2012 - World Diabetes Day. It was also the 2 month anniversary of my Clinic Vishwas that I had set up in a small suburb of Mumbai.I was just finding my hold in my community and I couldn’t have found a better occasion to organise an outreach event! With great enthusiasm, I had announced a workshop on diabetes a week ago. The workshop was titled as ‘Diabetes - complications and newer treatment modalities’. I was expecting a huge turnout!
At 5:00 pm as I set up my projector and loaded my presentation, I could feel the butterflies in my stomach. It was going to be my first talk to my patient community! Slowly the nervous anxiety faded and was replaced by exasperation. By 5:15 pm only 3 patients had showed up. All in all just 5 people attended the talk (2 of whom happened to be my neighbours). Not a very high conversion rate considering the fact that I had printed and distributed close to 2000 pamphlets. Something had gone drastically wrong!
After a couple of similar failed experiments, I was quick to learn my lesson - ‘What doctor’s think patients want is not the same as what patients really want!’ This realization led me to immerse myself in the study of patient psychology, social marketing, branding and the art of communication. In the past 7 years, I have conducted close to 50+ workshops/talks which were fairly successful, designed a leadership program for doctors and trained health professionals in the art of communication and public speaking!
Public speaking is an art that one can master only by practising and no article on public speaking can do full justice to the nuances that are involved in it. Nevertheless I have attempted to share some fundamental principles that will come in handy for doctors looking to master this skill.
To simplify it for you, I would like to share a 6 fundamental TENETS that we need to follow while preparing and delivering a talk:
1) Identify your Target audience: Even before you start preparing your talk, you need to ask these questions - Who are you preparing the talk for? What are the unique characteristics of your target audience - their age, gender, socio-economic status, social and cultural norms, and most importantly key pain points? What are their aspirations, desires, limitations, barriers? If you are giving a talk to your own community, talking to a few members of the community or conducting a focus group discussion will give you valuable insights. If you have been invited to give a talk, a good first step would be to send out a survey form to the organisers and seek as many details as possible about the audience. Once you have an accurate picture of your audience, you will be better placed to craft a message that would be relevant to them.
2) Define the OBJECTIVE of your talk:Why are you giving the talk? What is the end objective that you would like to achieve? The objectives could be one or many. More often than not the objective of the talk is to educate, inform, entertain, inspire or to elicit a call to action. Your style of delivery and the structure of the presentation will vary depending on your objective. For e.g. if the objective is to elicit a call to action, it would be necessary to engage and enthuse your audience through story-telling and persuasion. If the objective is to simply educate/inform then a factual presentation would suffice.
3) Focus on just ONE CORE message or theme: No matter how short or long your talk may be, the talk should be structured around one core message. Trying to cram in too many messages in one talk may dilute the impact of the talk. The audience may be overwhelmed and may fail to absorb all the information, defeating the purpose of the talk. Instead, focus on only one core message. For example, if you are giving a talk on diabetes, rather than trying to cover all aspects of diabetes such as causes, symptoms, complications, treatment, etc (similar to what I had tried to do in my first talk), you may want to focus on only one major theme - e.g How to enjoy a normal life with diabetes? Another example would be - How to reduce the need for insulin?Once you have crafted your persuasive message you can use it as a hook to attract clients to your talk.
4) Give your audience what they DESIRE:Often your patients will not tell you what they want. You will have to discover it through empathetic interviews and by meticulous observation. To share a relevant example - for years I thought that the most important pain-point for diabetic patients was to keep their sugar levels under control. However that was not the case. After conducting empathetic interviews I figured that the most important concern for diabetic patients (especially the newly diagnosed ones) was that they won’t be able to enjoy sweets and all the foods they love eating! So I organised a talk for them with the title ‘How to eat what you love - even if you have diabetes’. This talk attracted a record number of patients! No wonder … we had hit their sweet spot (pun intended)!
5) Tell a STORY: A story is nothing but facts interlaced with emotions. From our understanding of the human brain we know that facts appeal to the rational (frontal) brain, while emotions are processed in the limbic system. Despite knowing this we doctors tend to have a propensity to share predominantly facts. This is a result of our conditioning as medical students and residents where we spend much of our time collecting and presenting facts in a logical and systematic manner. Also when we give scientific presentations we are expected to keep them factual, to the point and devoid of any emotion. However we should remember that patients are not doctors. They are lay people whose minds are not accustomed to digest factual scientific information. The knowledge dished out to them has to be simplified, dumbed down and presented in a palatable fashion. If you were paying attention, did you notice that in this very article I have used elements of storytelling to keep you engaged? I started with a personal story. Did it keep you hooked?
6) Structure your talk: : Aristotle, the great philosopher most eloquently highlighted the approach to great public speaking through this quote - "Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them." To elaborate, any good talk has 3 core components - the beginning, where one prepares the audience and sets up the stage for what is to come next; the middle, where one builds and presents the main arguments, logic and the core message; and finally the end, where one effectively summarises the core message.
To summarise, to be a good public speaker you need to incorporate these 4 H’s in your talk -
Head - make your audience think
Heart - connect with your audience
Humour - entertain your audience, make them laugh
Hard-hitting - lesson (just one is enough!)
Now while these 6 TENETS may have given you some insights on how to prepare and deliver your talk, public speaking is a skill that can only be mastered with practice. So I am sharing a few practical suggestions to hone your skills:
A great talk with a shoddy presentation can ruin the experience for the audience, while a fine presentation can save the day even for an average speaker. So lastly, I would like to share a few tips for creating catchy powerpoint presentations:
10 Tips for creating powerful Power-point presentations:
1. Choosing the right theme/template - there used to be a time when colourful artistic templates used to be in fashion. The newer trend is that of minimalism - plain white slide with just one image and little text. For inspiration you may want to check out Apple Product launch presentations by Steve Jobs. Traditionally, the most popular colour themes that doctors use in scientific presentations are blue and black with white text, however these are now going out of fashion and are being replaced by minimalistic themes.
2. Consistency - Whatever theme you choose for your slides, it is important that you stay consistent with it throughout the presentation. For e.g. the location of headers, font style, color of fonts, style of animation, layout of text, etc. should follow the same/similar pattern on all slides.
3. Font size and colour - The ideal font size for presentations would be - 28 to 40 for Headings, and 18 to 28 for Bullets points. Anything larger or smaller would not be visually pleasing. Also make sure there is adequate spacing between two bullet points. For formal presentations you can use ‘Serif’ fonts (where letters have a base) and for informal presentations you may use ‘Sans serif’ fonts (where letters don’t have a base).
4. Text and matter - It is ideal to keep the text minimal. A powerpoint is not a substitute for a word document. Too much text would distract the audience from your talk. In case you have long sentences as bullet points, you may highlight the important text with a different colour. If you have a lot of bullet points under one heading, you can spread them across multiple slides.
5. Use of Images - Given the fact that free images are readily available on the web there is always a temptation to add a lot of images to your slides. However the best practice is to have only one, at most two images on each slide. Avoid copyrighted or watermarked images. It is also best to not mix clipart and real human images in the same presentation. Whether you choose to use clipart or real images depends on your target audience.
6. Layout - Since people read from left to right, it is common practice to have the text to the left and images to the right. If there is more text, you may add a small image in the lower right hand corner to break the monotony.
7. Use of animation - If you have a lot of bullet points on one slide and if you plan to talk about each bullet point, it is a good idea to animate the text so that the bullet points show up one at a time on clicking. While adding animations, use simple effects like ‘appear’ or ‘dissolve in’ rather than funky effects like ‘slide in’, ‘rotate’, ‘swirl’, etc, which can be distracting to the viewer. While using slide transitions (moving from one slide to the next) it is best to not use any animation as that can be distracting for the user.
8. Google slides vs Powerpoint - For those not familiar with Power-point, google slides is a much easier tool to learn. Also the advantage of using Google slides is that your presentation is stored online on google drive and can be accessed from any computer
9. Use powerpoint as an aid - Do remember, your presentation is to be used as a tool to supplement your talk and not to replace it. The focus of the audience should be on you and your core message. The presentation is merely an enabler.
10. Tell a story - A presentation is a powerful tool to tell a story and engage with your audience. With colours, images and animations you can evoke the desired emotions and leave a powerful impact. Use it creatively and wisely!
Warren Buffet, the billionaire, once rightly pointed out - “If you can’t communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you’re giving up your potential.”
We as doctors, have not just the potential but the moral obligation to share our knowledge, educate the masses and bring about social change! Effective Public Speaking is an indispensable tool that can help us achieve this goal!
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