Letting go of our own beliefs

My experience these past twenty years or so observing, working, and discussing with professional speakers around the world is that the vast majority of them are great at what they do. Not just good, but actually great. Masterful storytellers, with the uncanny ability to get their audience to eat out of the palm of their hands.

Over the years, these professionals have developed a world-class, much sought-after expertise. One that people are not only willing to pay for, but an expertise that fills up conference rooms, sells tickets, and changes lives.

They hone their skills, delivery, and message, to the point where it all becomes crystal clear, even to the neophyte. They develop a powerful, laser-focused message. Incredibly compelling stories. They share a vision of what could be that truly resonates with their intended audience. They lay out these aspirational paths. They become masters at making us want to follow them. In short, they become experts at creating the expected impact. They grow, in all senses of the term, to become true speaking professionals.

Unfortunately, even the most experienced speaking professionals covering topics like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) still fall short, when it comes to offering truly inclusive experiences in their live, in-person, or virtual events. This is because accommodating audience members who have disabilities has never been something that made it to their speaking radar. Somehow, disability continues to be ignored as a fundamental aspect of speaking, even for well-established DE&I experts.

What I will typically encounter in my practice are either speaking professionals who don’t know much about accessibility, or accessibility experts who don’t know much about public speaking. They, who happen to master both, are a rare breed indeed! You might be one of these people yourself, or you might be aspiring to become one such individual.

As usual, your mileage will vary, but these posts are here to help you through that particular journey.

Challenging our unconscious biases

The most experienced communication professionals among us are certainly past the early amateur stages, otherwise, would hardly qualify as “professional speakers”. That’s obviously good, and not just for them as individuals, should the shoe fit. It’s also good for the benefit of their audience. Dare I even say, for everyone’s sake, and the sake of those speakers’ businesses, too.

If you, yourself, haven’t quite reached that stage yet, or are not quite ready to self-identify as a speaking professional yet, rest assured, there’s still hope! There’s nothing wrong with not being there yet. An open mind and an acute awareness of potential gaps are what really matter to eventually get there.

No matter how far along you find yourself on this inclusive speaking journey, now’s a great time to take a stab at just how mindful you happen to be about the true well-being and the best interests of your entire audience, not just those that are without disabilities.

As we’ve been discussing so far throughout these posts, no matter how great and experienced you happen to be as a speaker, you’re still ultimately limited by your own preferences, your own biased views of the world, and how everyone fits in it – yourself included.

In other words, we are all primarily influenced by our own experiences, and we can’t possibly be expected to know what we don’t know! But to be truly inclusive, we need to, somehow. In the absence of a single source of truth to rely upon – such as here’s the recipe to engage 100% of our audience, 100% of the time – we end up creating our own set of strategies and approaches about what we think our audience expects, based on our most fundamental beliefs or influences.

And misled by the confidence that they’re doing the right thing, most speakers tend to stick to that one-size-fits-all vision and rarely question it.

Swinging from one vine to another

It takes a lot of courage and a certain dose of humility to let go of what we’ve always believed to be true, in order to explore other ways in which we can welcome the audience into our own little worlds. Much like monkeys making their way through the jungle at great speeds, by boldly letting go of one branch in order to swing towards the next one, we as speakers need to have the courage to jump into the unknown.

But instead of long-stemmed, woody vines, it is our biases that we need to let go of, in order to discover what it is that our audience truly needs in order to feel, be or do.

If you’ve been following these posts or our weekly interviews, you’ve grown to discover what the experience of attending a speaking session can be, from the perspective of audience members who have disabilities. These insights into their world may have helped you grow a better understanding of how different we all are, and how a one-sized approach really never truly fits everyone.

Let’s consider just a few more examples based on common speaking and training beliefs you may still hold to be true… and where they might fall short, for some people.

You might tell yourself, “my audience loves it when I share video content to support my stories or to illustrate a point I’m making.” And chances are, you’re right. The audience sure loves those videos! But chances also are that your own biases get in the way, in the sense that your captionless videos are not helping your audience members who may be struggling to hear properly. What if you stopped for a second, and wondered what that video experience might feel like for someone who is deaf?

Or, you might tell yourself, “my audience is hungry for data-driven research, so I like to use these complex, colourful charts and graphs to present my data”. And again, you’d be right! But it would never occur to you that colour-coded data sets and information might be lost on people who can’t perceive colours the way others do, or have a hard time seeing with enough clarity to really appreciate them. What if you stopped for a second, and wondered if it was even possible to distinguish between data points when you can’t tell colours apart?

Or, to give one last example, you might tell yourself, “my audience hates slides full of bullet points and text, so I’m going to rely on vivid imagery to drive my points across instead.” And again, of course, you’d be right. But it would never occur to you to orally describe these visuals, so that audience members who can’t see the screen properly can still understand the message you’re putting across. Has it ever occurred to you to think about what the experience of a very visual presentation might feel like, for someone with limited vision?

A certain dose of humility

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It’s amazing what you can discover about your delivery and the impact it has on your message when you start acknowledging audience members who are different from you, don’t look like you, don’t talk like you, don’t think like you, or have lived experiences that are different than yours.

The vast majority of speakers that I either meet, work with, or simply get to watch as a member of their audience myself, are more or less consciously stuck somewhere in that initial stage of inclusive speaking, where they actively work at appealing to different types of audience members based on popular psychology research and learning styles, but still come up short when it comes to the 40% of audience members out there who don’t quite fit the mold of the average audience member.

Acknowledging the concepts we’ve been exploring so far in these posts takes a certain mindset. It also requires a non-negligible dose of humility to recognize that there might be a problem. That we might have been wrong. That’s not something every speaking professional can or is even willing to do. But to become truly inclusive, they absolutely need to.

Realizing that after all these years, honing their skills from the platform, perfecting their message, developing their businesses, doing all the things they’ve been doing, and yet, all the while, having excluded so many people in their audience gig after gig, without ever realizing it… What the impact on their brand was… What the cost on their businesses has been… Well, I guess we’ll never really know.

It takes a big person to admit that they’re wrong about something. If you’re one of those speakers with a lightbulb going off in their heads and you’re ready to do this, then stick around because we’re only getting started.