For this assessment, I watched a video of my mentor, Lance Walker. Lance gave a one hour long speech at the NSCA state clinic about physical therapy. There were many things I noticed when I watched him give his speech. One of the most interesting things I gathered from his speech was his ability to hold the audiences attention. Through the use of writings, videos, humor, walking around, and asking questions he always managed to keep the audience completely engaged.
In his introduction, Lance explained how physical therapy is not a 9am-5pm job. Many physical therapists work 10 hour days purely because they love their work and want to be the best at what they do. He said it's not about the number of hours you work, but the quality of the work that matters. It is important to “squeeze more out of the hours you put in.” If you only put “seven hours of work in and you barely get anything out of it than that is just pathetic.” Through the use of humor he managed to make the audience laugh. Once the audience laughed their body language shifted to an upright position. I believe this is because once Lance made a joke they subconsciously wanted to learn more.
One of the exercises Lance used required the audience to write down a few goals. Once everyone had their goals written down he had the group discuss good and bad goals. He made sure each person was paying attention by moving around the room. I found his techniques very interesting and they are something I plan to incorporate in my upcoming speeches.
During his speech Lance also used many short videos. There were a few videos of Michael Johnson running. One of the videos was in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Lance asked the audience questions such as: Do you know who that is? How fast do you think he is going? How many gold medals did he win? He kept the audience engaged the whole time. Even though the video clip was approximately 15 seconds, he managed to expand on each clip for almost 5 minutes through his explanations and discussions. It has always been difficult for me to think of ideas in a long speech and I think adding videos will allow me to add quality to my speech.
I really enjoyed watching Lance's presentation. I learned so many tips about public speaking that I will use in my presentations.
