When Speakers Are too Verbose
How many presenters, trainers, speakers (or wanna-be's...) talk too much? Are they too verbose? Do they speak beyond the optimal closing moment and maybe even lose the sale? This is evidence a speaker isn't keeping BOTH output AND input channels open while training or speaking.
In other words, while talking, a speaker shuts off their awareness of how their audience is responding. It's a form of temporary deafness or blindness.
If a speaker needs to "pause" their presentation, in order to reconnect with where their audience is at, that's a huge piece of evidence, that means they're not yet able to pay external attention while expressing their message. That's a major obstacle to their path to greatness as a speaker. Not being able to listen and watch while one talks and behaves is an enormous hindrance for most speakers, between just being "good," and reaching for deeper excellence as a platform communicator or coach or trainer. If this describes you, then you NEED to read this!!
You may be getting in your own way, ignoring your audiences, and blindly pushing your message instead of tuning it real-time.
If this describes you, then you may only be opening one communication channel at a time -- output VS input -- instead of both concurrently.
It IS trainable, and I know multiple ways to get you to open both channels at once. A couple of exercise drills, some repetition, and the closed channel opens up... you begin to flex the new muscles of concurrent awareness -- of external and internal awareness. The end result is far less verbosity, and much greater influence over every moment of your presentations.
Here's a place to start: When you communicate a lesson or story to a group of people, while you're communicating to your audience, plan to lead into a yes/no question about your content already delivered that could get mixed responses from the group. And I want you to do that without any extended pauses. If you can correctly predict the individual audience members' answers to the question you're about to ask, BEFORE finishing speaking, then chances are you've got both channels open. If you needed to stop and think about who would answer what, and could only do that after you stopped speaking, then... this hindrance is truly worth solving, as quickly and as thoroughly as you can.
If this is your obstacle, I invite you to grab this opportunity to finally solve this challenge, with me, at my next Speaking Ingeniously course. I have a 100% success rate at getting people to use BOTH channels concurrently!