Speaking Tips for Speaking to a younger Audience

There is no great difference between adults and children!
That was one of my most profound revelations in life;
most of the time adults are just more devious versions of children.
The same insecurities, the same ‘listen to me’, ‘admire me’, ‘understand me’, ‘entertain me’, and ‘was I good?’ still applies.
One advantage with children is that they tend not to overcomplicate and most of the time carry less baggage!
Teaching Public Speaking to a class of ten-year-olds taught me that Public Speaking is very simple – as we get older we just find ways of making it harder.

I remember going into the Primary school class:
‘Hello, Sir.  What are we doing today?’
‘Public Speaking!’
‘Ooh, that sounds like fun.  What do we have to do?’
‘Tell a story and make a point.’
‘OK!’
And they all did.
Part of it is childish naïveté because at the age of ten, you might still be convinced that what you have to say is worth listening to!
Later as I started to work with fifteen-year-olds I discovered within those five years, they had become much more self-conscious, their self-image had crashed through the floor and the desire to share had virtually disappeared.
And then of course, by the time I was working with adults, they had already had years of:
‘No one wants to listen to what I have to say.’
‘Public Speaking is hard.’
‘I am going to look and sound stupid.’

So how do we stop ten-year-olds picking up all the wrong thinking of adults and how do we help adults recapture the simplicity of ten-year-olds?
It is hard putting toothpaste back into the tube and it is hard to recapture something that has been lost.
I know there are many hugely talented and instinctive sportsmen and musicians who after years of unconsciously channelling their ‘genius’, wake up one morning and ask themselves:
‘How exactly have I been doing this?’ – and at that moment it is gone.
And the rest of their lives are spent forlornly trying to recapture what has been lost.
The simplest step forward is to keep reminding yourself:
it is not all about you, it is about what you want to say.

10 tips for what to consider when speaking to a younger audience

1. Keep it simple

This should be a recommendation for all types of presentations and not just for younger people.
However, experience with teenagers has been revealing.
I recently went to a wonderful presentation on ancient Egypt.
It was very much in the style of a lecture; that is, the relationship between speaker and audience was from the point of view of an expert educating the interested.
Some parts of the talk were quite complex.
Two things happened:
- firstly the complexity of the subject was sufficiently challenging for the speaker on occasions to have to concentrate very hard to keep on top of the order of events he was describing. 
This caused him to lose energy in his delivery, so the voice and the delivery lost a little bit of conviction;
- secondly and consequently I could sense the beginnings of fidgeting in the audience as not only were they losing the thread themselves, but the drop in dynamism of the presenter also allowed their concentration to drift.
If we imagine the presenter as being the centre of some centrifugal force, where his or her clarity and energy create a momentum that radiates out and magnetically holds the audience during the presentation, then, as soon as that central force slows or becomes dim, it breaks the binding hold on the audience and the outer edges can start to drift away.
The lecturer had the presence of mind in this case, having detailed all the comings and goings of Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians and Babylonians to conclude:
‘That was quite complex; it might have been better to simply say that after a certain amount of ebbing and flowing the Babylonians took over.’
And he was probably right – for an audience of amateur enthusiasts, it would probably have been more than enough for them to take the key point on board, without risking losing some of them.
So keep it simple – Yes… however….

2. Don’t patronise

Patronising  feels like ‘dumbing down’ and can therefore seem to the audience a little insulting,
whereas keeping it simple rather than ‘dumbing down’  is more like ‘summing up’.
The French philosopher Pascal said words to the effect of:
‘I am sorry wrote you such a long letter. 
I did not have time to write a short letter.’
Keeping the content simple is about boiling the content down to its essential parts.
Nothing is patronising about saying:
‘In the end, it comes down to this.’
It is very important therefore that the speaker has a very clear idea of what ‘this’ is.
So my Egyptian history lecturer was essentially correct in his approach.
He could choose to itemise the comings and goings of the regional powers, but as long as he understood that when it all became too complex for his audience that all they really needed to know was that eventually the Egyptians lost power and the Babylonians arrived.
He can now judge based on the attitude and make-up of his audience how deep he needs to go into the comings and goings or whether he should simply cut straight to ‘then the Babylonians arrived.’

3. Speak their language

Maybe avoid trying too hard to ‘get down with the kids’, because that might be ‘patronising’,
but if you are talking about Ramesses II, it might help to reference Darth Vada as a comparison.
And in the process maybe you could consider whether your motivation for using their language is more about helping them relate to and therefore understand your subject matter, or whether it is more about you looking clever.

4. Locks and Canals

There is a sales principle which says:
‘Meet people at their level.’
I had a job many years ago selling IT training to people who were considering changing career.
Some of my colleagues came from an IT background and would explain the training course with an enormous amount of industry knowledge and detail, after which the potential students simply ended up confused.
I with some of my other colleagues had a limited understanding of IT but understood enough to be able to explain the courses and were consequently able to reach most of our potential students.
The significance of the locks and canals imagery is that it is only when the water levels are equal inside and outside of the lock that it is possible to open the gates and allow the boats to move on.
It is the same with communication.
If I am talking down to you (patronising) there will be no flow of information back and forth
and if I am so far below you (I do not know my subject) – again there will be no flow of information back and forth.
The ‘water level’ may need to be different for different audiences, so it is our job to be able to find a way of explaining our subject in the simplest of terms and yet still be able to go into greater detail when desired.

5. Have a filter

This starts to tie all the elements of ‘keep it simple’, ‘don’t’ patronise’, ‘locks and canals’, and ‘speak their language’ together.
The most effective presentations have a theme, a thread, or a strand that runs through them.
It will literally and metaphorically hold it all together.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is a famously thick and impenetrable novel!
I heard a wonderful lecture on the book.
There is an enormous amount of complex material in its pages, but rather than overwhelming us with too much information he chose a theme and used it as the filter through which we could see the whole book.  It would not tell us everything, but it would get us started.
The filter he chose was about ‘being usurped’ and he explained we could see the lead character being usurped in conversation, usurped in his own home, how the Irish nation was usurped by the British, the Irish language usurped by English.
If you are talking to teenagers, could Star Wars be a good filter or pupil-teacher relationships?
If you are talking to Primary School children, maybe Charlie and Lola, or sibling fights?
And we can take that into the adult world as well as look for a theme or filter that would relate our subject to the world that our audience experiences day to day.
Therefore…

6. Have a Structure

A simple structure holds the presentation together. 
If your young audience is drifting, you can remind them of where we are in the journey.
People get bored when they get lost.
Imagine an elite marathon race, where the runner in second place is keeping up with the leader.
The second runner starts to struggle to keep up and drops behind.  It seems remarkable how within a couple of minutes the distance has opened up to hundreds of meters.
If your audience is struggling to keep up with you, very quickly they can drop off and within a few moments like the second marathon runner it becomes too late for them to catch up again.
Your structure is what helps keep a young audience engaged when they are flagging.

7. Sign-post

Have a structure.  Show your structure and refer to your structure.
If your audience is likely to switch off when it becomes overwhelmed or confused, one way of keeping them engaged is to remind them regularly where you are in the presentation: sum up, indicate the next steps, and remind them of the key points.  With younger people, this might mean referring them regularly back to Darth Vadar or to Charlie and Lola.

8. Stories

We all love stories, old or young and a story is the most natural means of communicating a message.
Facts, data, and statistics are easily forgotten, but a well-chosen story can be used to anchor the key message in a way that is easy to remember and refer back to

9. Visuals

My lecture on Egyptian history may have had its confusing moments with the back and forth between Egyptians, Persians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, but what has stayed with me is a lovely big colourful map of the extent of the Babylonian empire at its zenith.
Remembering to avoid being patronising, young people will particularly relate to clear graphics that  visually clarify what is being said (especially if we consider the generations that have been brought up with all the visual bells and whistles that are on our mobile phones)

10. Participation

I no longer work in schools, but I have still noticed that when training groups of young graduates in corporations, increasingly they expect to be actively engaged.  Just sitting passively and consuming information does not work with them, so I am much more inclined to regularly break the routine with questions, and exercises and have them consider concepts in pairs or small groups.

The great advantage of working with young audiences is that they will let you know very quickly, either directly or indirectly whether you are engaging them.  Therefore it pays to be as clear as possible, more interactive, more engaging, and get them more involved.