How to use feedback to improve public speaking
I was thinking about bookshops the other day. The ones that are surviving have niched! They have focussed on a particular area – it might be “tertiary education” – and considered how could they best serve their market in that niche. No only have they reflected on that area, and considered how, they’ve gone on to implement and to test how well that plan has performed. It’s like that in speaking!
- Do you want to know what others think of your communication?
- Do you know what to do with that feedback when you get it?
- Do you want to get even more feedback that you can use to improve?
Reginald Evans bucked the system of education, after exploring how people learnt when he encouraged managers at the Coal Board in the UK to meet together, to share their experiences and ask each other questions about what they saw and heard. When they applied the learning, the improved productivity was clearly evident – much better than much of the teaching that was going on at the time. Action Learning was born.
As Evans put it,
- Learning = Programming + Questioning
= (Programmed Knowledge with Simulations) + (Insights on what people hear, see, feel)
Michael Marquardt added an important element
- Learning = Programming + Questioning + Reflection
Reflection is also at the cornerstone in the art of coaching, where great questions can bring light to the insights where some of the greatest changes can be made. We’ll talk more about that in another post soon.
So if we apply this in a powerful setting, where a small group looks to learn from each other, there really are…
3 Simple Steps to Success in Speaking through Feedback
- Capture the presentation to study (it might be yours, it might be someone elses that you’d like to learn from). Use Video to capture it!
- Question and Reflect on how the presentation affected the audience. What might you do differently?
- Apply the learnings!
… and make sure you’re starting at Step 1 again, to be ready to improve even more!
Those 3 Simple Steps help you capture some great examples of communication, get more feedback than you can ever deduce yourself, and apply what you learn to improve! Pretty powerful stuff!
We’ve just started a community, where we’ve brought some of this methodology from our client programmes out into the Social Media world. Go over and join in, at Critique My Speech.
Lets hope the good bookshops keep Acting, Questioning, Reflecting and Learning!
