By Joe Dolce, CEO, Joe Dolce Communications
LinkedIn: Joe Dolce
Healthcare has a trust problem. One 2024 poll found that only about a third of Americans trusted the U.S. health system, a significant drop from previous years. Another study indicated that trust in physicians and hospitals fell from over 70% in April 2020 to just over 40% in January 2024. This is particularly alarming for healthcare marketers and PR folks who are trying to build trust and confidence with their messages. Lately, there’s a new problem plaguing the trust gap: poor communication, especially, AI scripted talks. Your audience wants and deserves Authentic Intelligence and communication, not something artificially scripted by the latest AI bot.
I’m not naive. I recognize that there’s a good chance that you’ve already turned to AI for a first draft. That’s fine, but unless you’ve trained your AI in your voice and fed it dozens of great personal stories, the artificial voice will be detectable and your own trustworthiness could easily take a hit.
Let me highlight some of the triggers and tropes of AI-scripted talk.
- AI content follows predictable patterns, using repetitive sentence structures and transitional phrases like “furthermore,” “moreover,” and “in conclusion.” Good speeches don’t sound like that. They sound like YOU, with all of your quirky grammatical ticks included.
- AI is tonedeaf. It tends to be stiff and formal or neutral. It lacks the conversational, varied rhythm of a human speaker. In order to personalize
it, you’ve got to add off-handed remarks, asides, comments, turns of phrase that sound indelibly like you. - Turn on your jargon-detector. AI can use advanced words, but it often falls back on a pool of elegant but common words. It can also overuse certain buzzwords like “delve,” “crucial,” or “resonate.” Every industry has its own jargon, but steer clear of it when you can. Jargon doesn’t stick in the minds of your audience. It goes in one ear and out the other, so eliminate it.
- AI output is typically free of the subtle grammatical errors, or conversational tangents that reflect your unique, human way of thinking. It doesn’t sound real. And it doesn’t sound like YOU.
- AI can summarize, but it struggles to generate original insights. It can’t draw from real emotions or real world experiences. Mine your own stories and share them. Veer off script when you can. It’s a good technique that lets your audience know you’re with them in the moment, not just reciting some canned presentation you’ve given 100 times before. It’s even more effective in the artificially scripted world.
- Be opinionated. Take a stance. AI likes to “fence-sit:” it tends to present both sides of an issue in a balanced, and usually, uninspired way. It is opinion-avoidant. Figure out your POV before you write and insert them into your speech.
- Break up long sentences. AI-generated text often leans formal, stringing complex clauses together into one long, breathless sentence. That’s not how we speak and it gets in the way of the audience easily grasping your meaning.
Even if you’re not using AI, here are other ways to find your own authentic voice.
- Know your purpose. What is the one key message you want your audience to take away? In our attention-starved world, a great presentation should focus on only two or three key ideas.
- Know your audience. Understand their needs, interests, and level of expertise. A presentation to your peers should be very different from one for people new to the topic.
- And to go the extra mile, surprise them! One often unheralded quality that all great presentations share: they give the audience what it needs but NOT what it expects.
- Create a narrative. Humans are wired for stories. Structure your presentation like a story with a beginning, a middle, and a strong ending. And don’t forget to include the failed ideas or things that didn’t work along the way. Drama = conflict and all good stories include drama.
- Keep your sentences short. Oral communication is not the same as written communication. If you are writing long sentences with lots of clauses (commas) , rewrite them into shorter riffs. I always begin with bullet points. This is an easy way to ensure your talk has a logical flow before you even touch the slides.
- Write a strong opening and closing – these are the most powerful places to grab people’s attention. Launch with a surprise statistic, a bold promise, a compelling question or a quick relatable story that encompasses your theme.
- Close with a clear call to action, a powerful quote or a strong summary that leaves the audience pondering your address for the rest of the day (or at least the next few minutes).
Engaging visuals
Your slides should support your presentation, not duplicate your script. And they shouldn’t be so complicated that they take the attention away from you. You’re the star here, not the slides. So….
- Use minimal text and avoid clutter. Popular guidelines like the “10/20/30 Rule” (10 slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font) or “6×6 Rule” (no more than six lines of text with six words each per slide) work to keep slides clean and quickly gettable. Less is definitely more.
- One idea per slide.
- Visualize data. Rather than endless numbers, use charts or infographics to make the information instantly gettable.
Delivery
AI can’t help your delivery…yet. Confidence, connection with your audience, and energy are what truly sell your presentation. So…
- Practice, practice, practice. The average Ted speaker undergoes 100 hours of practice, so rehearse your talk multiple times, preferably in front of a test audience, or an even tougher master, your phone. (You’ll hate what you see but you can always delete it!)
- Keep it conversational. Don’t read your notes word-for-word. My favorite tone is one that replicates a conversation with a friend. You never want to sound like the smartest person in the room (no one ever liked the smartest person in the room!)
- Use your body and your voice. Stand tall, use open and confident hand gestures. Move around the stage, but do so intentionally (when you’re changing topics, for example) rather than nervously pacing. Amplify your voice – 20-30 percent louder. Bonus: Raising your voice also raises your energy.
- Incorporate strategic pauses to give key points more weight.
- Make eye contact. Select three people (one on the left, in the center and on the right of the room) and continually scan to include them. This makes everyone in your audience feel personally connected.
- Engage the audience. Break the speaker-audience wall. Ask easy questions or incorporate interactive elements like a quick poll or quiz. This makes people active participants rather than passive listeners.
- Anticipate questions and be sure to know the answers ahead of time. You don’t want to be caught flat footed.
- Smile. One good smile generates another (see mirror neurons). It shows that you’re happy to be there spreading your knowledge – as you should be. You don’t get too many opportunities to air your great ideas, so get happy and show it!
- You’re nervous. Guess what? Everyone is. Speaking in public is highly unnatural, especially since we were never taught how to approach it in all those years of school. So before taking the stage, take a few deep breaths and focus on what you have to give to the audience rather than what they’re thinking about your shoes. They’re on your side, they want to hear you and if you’re coming from your own truth, it will be easier and you’ll have a lot more fun doing it.
