Introducing the inclusive speaking model

Think back on any situation where you were attending a presentation, weren’t paying full attention to what was being said, and suddenly missed out on that funny speaker’s joke or pun. Remember how you felt, seeing everyone around you bursting out laughing, while you were wondering what was said that was so funny? How you may even have pretended to chuckle, just a little, in order not to appear out of the loop? It felt a little awkward, right? Frustrating maybe, even?

To a lot of people who attend speaker sessions, these feelings of awkwardness and frustration are not just one-offs. To them, FOMO (the fear of missing out, or maybe more accurately in their case, the frustration of missing out) is a constant. It’s the default experience. Not something they run into when stepping away from their Facebook or Instagram timelines for a few hours, but something that occurs to them regularly, in the real world.

“What if I don’t understand what they meant by that? What if I can’t hear what it is that they said? What if I can’t see what it is that they referred to? What if I can’t find the focus to concentrate on that text? What if I can’t distinguish the colours in that document? What if I”… That list goes on and on.

The rejection and sense of failure felt by those people while attending our sessions and consuming our content is very similar to that fear of missing out. Because they will miss out on that joke. They will miss out on that visual. On that skit. On that idea. That lightbulb will never get its chance to go off. That other thing you did or said, that made your presentation so great? They’ll miss out on that as well.

Picture yourself in front of a large audience, with the distinct goal of not only delivering your best performance to date but also to not let anyone fade out from the conversation. What do you need to do to make it work? What do you need to avoid? Keep in mind the myriad of ways in which disabilities, ageing, and other challenges could affect parts of your audience’s experience and ability to truly connect with you and your message. Are you beginning to feel your very own personal version of FOMO with regard to how many audience members you might be leaving behind?

Because at this point, you might start to realize that the larger your audience is, the more likely it is that the specter of exclusion will rear its ugly head one way or another. What if something slips? What if you forget something? What if you say the wrong thing? What if you say the right thing, but the wrong way? After all, the more these exclusion situations occur, the more you risk pushing people in your audience off to Fadeout Town…

Imagine the potential audience members out there, with all sorts of vision, hearing, motor, vestibular, or cognitive challenges. Think of how conscious you need to be of the various needs of those people. Think of all these considerations you’re supposed to keep in mind and pay attention to, just to accommodate all those particular needs and expectations. That can build up to a lot of pressure, wouldn’t you agree?

Maybe for speaking professionals who care about inclusion, FOMO also stands for “fear of massive omissions”, too. But thankfully, I have a solution to keep us on track. And keep us honest.

The 5 INs of inclusive speaking

The inclusive speaking puzzle is complex, and its many pieces add up to how much of a difference you can make in getting your audience to feel like they belong. You are, no doubt, already invested in creating a fantastic experience for your audience. If we’re going to deploy that kind of effort, let’s make sure that this experience is also positive, and welcomes as many people in as we possibly can!

How comfortable you feel with crushing this goal of inclusivity right now is a powerful indication of where you are on your own journey towards becoming a more inclusive speaker. Given everything that we’ve covered so far in these blog posts, you might feel pretty confident about your ability to account for various disability types or for extreme use cases as you deliver your content moving forward. If so, then awesome. But if your confidence level isn’t exactly very high just yet, that’s okay, too! After all, inclusive speaking is as much of a journey as it is a destination…

However confident you might feel about your ability to rise to this challenge right now, chances are that you’re nowhere near as ready, or as clueless, as you might think. The truth of the matter is that even the best among us will still drop the ball every now and then. Inclusive speaking is a multifaceted soft skill that needs constant improvement and nurturing to get right. And you are always only as successful as your last (or next) performance.

The stakes are very high indeed. Let your guard down just a little bit, get just a little too confident, a little too complacent, and off to Fadeout Town, a part of your audience might go.

When it comes to the intersection between speaking and diversity, equity, inclusion, AND access, I’ve discovered that as speaking professionals, we all sit somewhere on a spectrum for inclusion. Over the years, my research has led me to discuss with hundreds of people who had disabilities, with the goal of better understanding what their needs, expectations, and frustrations were.

It led me to analyze hundreds of speakers in the process, performing in live or pre-recorded in-person and virtual events. The things they were doing well, and others that weren’t so great. The many tips and tricks speaking coaches will recommend you do to be a professional speaker, and how many of those advices were actually counterproductive to inclusion. This, of course, led me to challenge some of the misconceptions about what “good speaking” is supposed to look, sound, and feel like.

Over time, I started categorizing approaches, communication strategies, and delivery mechanisms speaking professionals used, as well as the gaps, frustrations, and barriers caused to some audience members. What it was that speaking professionals were doing really well, where it was that they were utterly failing, etc. And then, by maintaining this constant feedback loop with audience members who had disabilities, slowly connecting the dots between the problems experienced, and the possible solutions to overcome these problems.

Through subsequent interviews, discussions, analyses, observations, and various other means, I’ve come to consider that there are in reality five broad categories of speakers when it comes to the inclusion spectrum. Or five main stages to go through if you will, on the path to inclusive professional speaking.

If you’d like to discover what those stages are, and maybe where you fit in this whole picture, then stick around for next week’s post, as it’s now time that we talk about them.