I got hit with a fine of U$1,500 the other day for speeding to a mere 116 km/h on one of the motorways around Geneva. The police took my driver’s licence for three months and charged me another 200 bucks for the privilege of doing so.
The officer who pulled me over said my reckless driving could have resulted in someone’s death. A bit of an overkill, if you ask me, but I do see his point. Traffic regulations are there for good reason and there is no bending them.
Now, in public speaking there are no unbreakable rules. For one, the risk of someone dropping dead at the end of a presentation is negligible. No-one will kick the bucket because a speaker kept his hands in his pocket, broke eye contact with the audience or messed up his slides. No matter how boring he sounds, odds are he will get away with no fine and still get paid in the process — although not for very long if he keeps doing it.
Then again, most of those rules make sense. The trick to expertly sorting the wheat from the chaff boils down to context. Context will tell you what to wear, how formal or casual to be, the jokes you ought to avoid, which language to speak, the gestures you need to unlearn. It will tell you what to say and when to listen, when to pause and where to end. It is the only guidance you will ever need, once you’ve gathered enough intelligence on the venue, the client, the audience’s needs.
In public speaking what one would call rules are, rather, best practices based on what works in most common scenarios. Learning them will increase one’s repertoire of coping tactics. But blindly adhering to those precepts can make one indistinguishable from a thousand other presenters that have come before. It risks robbing a speaker of the one thing that could make him stand out from the crowd: authenticity.
Your originality is the reason people are drawn to you or your talks. They come because they believe that you will say and do something new. They hope you will offer them a fresh outlook on a common challenge. Those people definitely want you to sound and act like yourself, who, after all, is the person they’ve paid to see.
In my book, having watched and lent my voice to thousands of speakers of every stripe, from every conceivable industry, there is but three capital public speaking sins: failing to communicate, being too predictable and not putting the audience first.
You can always get away with the rest. As long as you’re not in Switzerland, it seems.
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