The goal of any speech that we give is for us to find a way to connect with our audience. 

If we can do this, then we’ll be able to clearly  communicate our message to them. An interesting question for you is if  you were in your audience listening to yourself speak, would you rather  hear two people having a conversation or hear a summary of what they  said? I think that most of us would agree that hearing the conversation  would be more interesting. 

What that means for our speeches is that if  we can find a way to work conversations into them, then we’ll have a  better chance of connecting with our audience.

As a CIO you are facing a number of different, difficult challenges.  

They are all important; however, one may be more important than all of  the others: finding and keeping qualified technical people.  The problem is that right now in the U.S. there are roughly 500,000  open IT positions. Just to make things even worse, this number is  expected to grow at twice the rate as other jobs in the U.S. according  to Bureau of Labor Statistics growth projections. What CIOs need to  understand is that there is not enough supply to meet an increasing demand for technical talent. 

How can CIOs deal with this problem?

Let’s face it – fear is real. 

Most of us can easily  experience fear just by thinking about getting up in front of a group of  people and trying to give a speech. Our blood turns cold, we start to  sweat, and our knees may even start to knock. This is not something that  we enjoy doing. However, there is good news for us. There are things  that you can do that will allow you to face your fears. We can learn to overcome what holds us back. 

We just need to understand what we need to do and when we need to do it in order to be able to give successful speeches.

The goal of any speech that we give is for us to find a way to connect with our audience. 

There are a number of different ways that we can go  about doing this; however, one of the most powerful is to include humor  in our speech. Humor is a tricky thing for us to deal with – what is  funny to us may or may not be funny to our audience. We are always  looking for new ways that we can add more humor to our next speech. 

What  we need are ways that we can increase the humor content of our speech  so that we’ll have a better chance of connecting with our audience.

CIOs need to get ready for big changes that are coming their way: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is arriving. 

It was not all that long ago that AI was something that  only Data Scientists dealt with. However, now things have changed.  

Companies that deal with such diverse things as manufacturing, finance,  and even insurance are starting to take advantage of products that allow their workers to create AI tools for their business.

Speakers know that there is power in laughter. 

If we hear our audience  laughing (with us) then it will provide us with a sense of confidence.  Everyone likes to hear it when an audience starts to laugh after you  have gotten done delivering the punchline of your joke. This is exactly  what it takes to provide you with a shot of energy and it can launch you  into the main point of your speech. However, the challenge that many of  us have is using the importance of public speaking to  get our audience to laugh when we want them to. 

What we need are strategies that we can use to get our audience to laugh.

As speakers, we know that if we want to give a good speech we need to  take the time to prepare for it. 

This means that we need to create a  theme for our speech, we need to create a great opening, work in some  physical gestures, and include the proper amount of vocal variety.  However, even after doing all of that, we might not be successful. It  turns out that your audience will be forming an impression of you within  the first 12 seconds of seeing you. Even worse, they probably won’t  change their impression of you even after they know you for a bit. 

How  can a speaker make a good first impression?

The world that we live in continues to change all around us. 

As  speakers, what this means is that more and more often when we are asked  to deliver a speech there is a good chance that our audience may not be  sitting in front of us. Instead, they may be remotely located.  When we find ourselves in this kind of situation, because of the  importance of public speaking, we need to adjust how we deliver our  speech in order to make sure that we are able to keep our audience  engaged. 

How to make this happen is the secret that every presenter  needs to discover.

There are a lot of high profile CIO jobs out there. 

However, one of the  ones that has the most attention being directed towards it is being the  CIO at the gigantic retailer Walmart. Think about it – there is a  Walmart in just about every town and we all go to Walmart every so often  to get things. The IT side of Walmart has to operate smoothly or else  there will be trouble for everyone. 

What is it going to take to do this  job well?

If there is one thing that every speaker wants, it’s to be remembered in a good way.  

We’ve gone to the effort to create, practice and then deliver a speech  and we would like to use the importance of public speaking to ensure  that there will be a lasting impact for our effort. The good news is  that we are the ones who are in charge of making this happen. It turns  out that it’s how we go about delivering our speech that can have the  biggest impact on if our audience will be able to remember what we’ve  told them after we are done. 

What we need to do is to make sure that our delivery style is going to make an impact on our audience.