Public Speaking Tips from Steve Jobs

I’ve never seen Steve Jobs speak.

But I hear he’s really good at it.

Here’s some­body look­ing at what he does well.

Now, there’s some peo­ple that would say that giv­ing a ser­mon is dif­fer­ent than giv­ing a Mac pre­sen­ta­tion. I’m not con­vinced, though, that’s true–we’re still talk­ing about pub­lic speaking.

And it seems to me that the things he lists are all things I try to do when I’m speaking:

• rehearse — I do this poorly; and in fact, it’s prob­a­bly my biggest weakness
• is him­self
• uses visu­als effec­tively — I think this is really impor­tant; nobody wants to read your ser­mon notes from pow­er­point. it’s good for images, chunks of scrip­tures, and maybe bul­let points (although, I’m not a fan of bul­let­ted sermons)
• focus on the prob­lem — this is really huge. I think cre­at­ing ten­sion, mak­ing the prob­lem clear is really really important
• rep­e­ti­tion — the key here is using the same words over and over. I like to cre­ate a mini-vocabulary within a ser­mon, where I latch onto a par­tic­u­lar word or phrase (usu­ally not a nor­mal Chris­t­ian jar­gon word, but not nec­es­sar­ily some­thing weird) and use it as a micro­cosm of every­thing I just talked about
• tell sto­ries — a per­sonal con­nec­tion is where it’s at
• dra­matic pauses — I like to take lots of pauses b/c I think it makes peo­ple feel uncom­fort­able. which means they’re pay­ing attention.
• com­par­i­son — ok, I don’t get this one, let’s pre­tend it’s not last and I’m not end­ing on a whimper

I think I’m going to check out a Jobs keynote on YouTube or something–I’m really curi­ous. Is he really THAT charis­matic? or is it just because he stole most of my ser­mon style?