There’s one key ingredient when it comes to producing competent and confident youth public speakers. What is it? Read on to find out.
What is the end result you are trying to achieve with your youth speakers? Well, I’m guessing you want your students to improve. You want them to speak clearly, be organized, look at the audience, stop fidgeting, move confidently on stage, stop reading from their notes…. You can have a ginormously long list of items that you want them to achieve. Don’t share this with them. Ever. Even a shorter list can seem overwhelming.
Put your list away and think about this: the only way your students will achieve lasting gains is if they WANT to get better. This is your Key Ingredient – the desire to improve. You can’t make them do anything on your list. Well, maybe you could, but that brings to mind a teacher walking around brandishing a ruler and whacking knuckles. Use these three simple steps and help your students find and maintain the desire to continually better themselves as public speakers.
#1 Find the good. Flattery will get you just about everywhere, as long as it’s genuine. And it can be something very small.
- “I loved the content of your speech.” Give a specific example(s) of interesting/fascinating/fun information that they shared with the audience.
- “You were organized and I could tell you practiced.” Acknowledge the time and effort they put into the speech.
- Use positive adjectives to describe their stage presence or delivery. These could describe their vocal quality or volume, posture, movement, or gestures. Or they could describe more subjective qualities. Maybe the speaker appeared enthusiastic, friendly, approachable, trustworthy, experienced, or just plain fun to be around. There is always a positive quality you can point out.
#2 Establish a small goal. Find ONLY one thing to start working on. This is that whole ‘a journey of a thousand steps begins with….’ thing. You want them to feel like this is something they can do.
- For the quiet speaker. “You have such good vocal quality. You’re one of those speakers who everyone enjoys listening to. What I want you to do next time is work on sending that great voice all the way to the back of the room.”
- For the speaker who reads from their notes. “You are so organized with your speech and have great information to share. Next time, look through your notes and mark the places where it makes sense to look up at your audience and really connect with them. Just try and do this two times.”
#3 Celebrate and move on. Or, just move on. They do their next speech and one of two things happens. They either magically incorporate your stellar advice or they fall short of their goal.
- If they succeed, make sure you recognize their effort and celebrate their success. Then assess whether it’s time to add another challenge. Maybe. But maybe not. They might need more time to really master a skill before adding any other challenges.
- If they don’t attain their goal, the first thing you both need to do is get over it. Just showing up and getting on stage is an accomplishment in itself. Maybe you should simply thank them for their speech and leave it at that. There’s always next time.
- If you are going to address things with the student, you need to mentally assess a few things before you speak:
- Do you think they tried? Why or why not?
- Is the goal worth trying again?
- Or, did you give them the wrong goal? Would they be better served with a different approach?
- Think about it. And you don’t have to do anything right away. You can always think things over and send an e-mail a day or so later.
The ‘End’ we want –
“Begin with the end in mind,” Stephen Covey told us in his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Ultimately, our ‘end’ is to inspire and maintain that Key Ingredient – the desire to improve – in our students. And we do it with three simple steps:
1. Find the good.
2. Establish a small goal.
3. Celebrate and move on. Or, just move on.
Keep repeating these three steps. That ginormous list of ways your students need to improve may loom large and overwhelming in your brain, but you may be surprised at how often they achieve multiple goals when working on just one.
Focus on the steps to help your students feel confident and successful. Above all, help them attain and maintain that Key Ingredient.
All the best, Sarah
p.s. The overwhelming majority of students will benefit from this 3 step approach. The overconfident student, however, requires different handling. We’ll talk about the best approach for these kids in our next blog.