Humor me, please!

How to gauge the speaker’s expertise!

In a recent discussion with friends, the topic of determining good and bad speakers was brought up. And I thought it is a good topic to discuss with my newsletter subscribers.

With the world moving past COVID, conferences are back with rage. With so many speakers out there, how do we gauge the expertise of the speakers? Most people will say that we can look at the background and experience of the speakers on social media platforms. While this is true, after spending so much time to listen to the speakers, how do we know whether to trust what the speaker shared? We have to know that in order for us to curate the content of the talk and determining which part of it is something we can use for ourselves, in our career and personal lives.

I thought about it and came up with two points to determine the expertise level of the speakers.

Using Analogy

I find that a good speaker with high level of expertise tend to explain things using analogy and metaphor. Their selection of analogy is pretty unique and good in explaining his/her point across. As an audience, you can grasp it pretty easily and from a talk perspective, the speaker is able to get a lot of audience understand the point being made.

However, there is a downside to it, in the sense that the speaker could have “copied” and adapted it from somewhere he/she come across while preparing the talk. While I do use it as a benchmark, but there is still some flaws on it.

Using Humor

Humor is a pretty interesting tool to use for speaking. It does provide engagement when used well and appropriately. And here lies its challenges as well. Firstly, the humor must be at a level that the audience can comprehend, else you get awkward silence(s). Plus it must be done at a level that is politically correct so as not to incur unnecessary ire. Using humor is sort of a “Goldilocks” tool, where it cannot be too difficult to understand, plus it should not offend any folks as much as possible.

Given this challenge, and in order to incorporate well into the talk materials, only speakers with high expertise level can do it imo. Of course some people will say, humor is part of speaking style, it will be unfair to speakers who does not adopt a humorous speaking style. I felt that this is not true. As a fellow speaker myself, I feel that good speakers understand that humor is important as it improves engagement, something good speakers want as they aim to make an impact. Good speakers will adopt it in some parts of their talk but not to an extent that it will cramp their speaking style.

Good speakers with a good level of expertise can sprinkle their talk with appropriate humor to increase engagement and bring their points across.

To conclude this issue, how I will determine a speakers expertise in the topic will be the analogy that is used and the humor that was deployed. And after determining the speakers expertise level, I can move on to determine how much I can trust and curate the content of the talk. :)

What are your thoughts on this? Will love to hear them so please put them in the comments below. :)

I hope this helps my readers to sieve the good speakers from the bad and from there learn something that is impactful to your work and career.

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