public speaking tips: how to interact with the audience
Topics: being a speakerHere are some ways I interact with the audience during a typical motivational speech. You can use them in any presentation, whether it’s a sales call, a boardroom presentation, or a family meeting:
- Hand surveys. ”By a show of hands, how many of you have ever raised your hand in response to a question like this?”
- Brief conversations with individual audience members. “Sir, I saw you raised both hands just now. Are you an aspiring football referee or are you just ambidextrous?”
- Shotgun answers. “Here’s a question for everyone. What are a few examples of onomatopoeia? Just call them out.”
- Fill-in-the-blank. “I certainly don’t want this speech to bore you. After all, an idle mind is the devil’s what?”
- Ask for volunteers. “I need to take this call. Could I get a volunteer to come up on stage and give the rest of my speech?”
“Single Shoes” song
Topics: amputees, my lifePlease always ask what I do with my extra shoes.
I’ve always just put them in a box.
Until now.
my MTV appearance!
Topics: amputees, my lifeHere’s my appearance with the Jabbawockeez on MTV’s “Randy Jackson Presents America’s Best Dance Crew.”
NPR interview
Topics: my lifeCheck out this piece about me from NPR’s Intern Edition.
recording my audiobook
Topics: my bookPulitzer Prize winning writer Susan Sheehan sat in the studio for several days while I recorded the audio version of Just Don’t Fall. This is an article she wrote about the experience. (You can listen to a sample of my audiobook on Audible.)
“In the Moment”
Recorded books have become the modern equivalent of the antique art of storytelling round the fire. On a Monday in November, Josh Sundquist, a handsome, Obama-slim, Roman-nosed young man with sky blue eyes and a punk haircut, starts to read in a soundproof cubicle at Recorded Books, Inc., the world’s largest independent producer of unabridged audio books. The book he will read aloud for between four to six hours a day through Thursday is “Just Don’t Fall,” his account of being told at nine he has cancer, losing his left leg at the hip socket at ten, and skiing in the Turin Paralympics at twenty-one — four years ago. Most of the six hundred books put out annually by Recorded Books are narrated by professional stage actors in its seven studios on the tenth floor of an office building at 12th and Broadway above the Strand, the city’s iconic used book store, but occasionally an author who passes an audition, as Sundquist has, is permitted to read his own memoir. He begins:
“The physical therapist glues two stickers to my back, to the lower part of my back right above my underwear. There are wires coming out of these stickers, wires that will give me an electric shock – not the kind that electrocutes and kills people, no, don’t worry, she says, this is a tiny shock I will barely feel.”
Greg Steinbruner, a professional actor and playwright, who now works as a producer at Recorded Books, is seated in a separate room with a window facing Josh’s windowed cubicle. In front of him are a Furman console, a computer keyboard and screen, and a microphone. Every time Sundquist makes a mistake Read More
