The Only Reason to Give A Speech in 2011
“The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.” An old friend of mine, a speechwriter, used to say that to me. He meant it as a challenge. It was his way of saying that, if you’re going to take all the trouble to prepare and deliver a speech, make it worthwhile. Change the world.
Otherwise, why bother? Preparing speeches, giving speeches, and listening to speeches—each of these activities is fraught with peril. The opportunities for failure are many, and for success correspondingly few. An oft-quoted study suggests that executives would rather die than speak. Of all their fears, public speaking is number one, and death comes much further down the list, just before nuclear war. That must explain why they often put off the task of preparing speeches to the last minute—or give the task to someone else.
If speechmaking is hard work for presenters, it’s also hard work for their audiences. Most business presentations are dreadful—boring, platitudinous, and delivered with a compelling lack of enthusiasm.
People don’t remember much of what they learn from speeches—something on the order of 10 to 30 percent. With some business talks I’ve attended, that failure rate must be close to 100 percent. How many presentations have you sat through where your mind started wandering a few minutes into the talk and never really came back? Where you surreptitiously picked up your smartphone and started planning your calendar for the next millennium or two? Where you ended up more familiar with the number of acoustic tiles in the ceiling than the number of points in the outline of the speech?
So why do we bother? We bother giving speeches because of the opportunities they offer presenters with passion and a cause. There is something profound about gathering a group of people together in a hall and giving them the full force of your ideas presented live and in person. There is something essential about the intellectual, emotional, and physical connections a good speaker can make with an audience, something that cannot happen on the printed page. There is something powerful about the chemistry that happens in the moment of contact that no other medium can reproduce.
It’s what I call the kinesthetic connection. It’s something I’ve observed in over 25 years of teaching and coaching public speaking. When it happens, it’s powerful. When it’s missing, everyone feels it—even the hapless speaker.
Why People Will Always Give Speeches
We still need speeches. We need them to move audiences to action. People may learn to believe in your expertise from the printed page. But they will only be moved to action if they come to trust you from hearing and seeing you offer a solution to a problem they have. That kind of trust is visceral as well as intellectual and emotional, and it only comes from presence.
From the audience’s point of view, we still need to validate our impulse to action by seeing our champions, to test the sense of their messages and the integrity of their beings. Partly, we’re reading their nonverbal messages, those gestures and habits that we learn to interpret unconsciously for the most part, the ones that tell us something about the credibility and courage of the presenter. Partly, we’re testing to see if they can structure and present their ideas coherently in real time, abilities that tell us about how articulate and organized they are. And partly, we’re watching to see if we can find some sense of common humanity in the speaker, in order to make common cause with that speaker’s passion.
When Roger Mudd asked Ted Kennedy, on 60 Minutes in 1980, why he wanted to be president, Senator Kennedy famously fumbled the answer. Millions of Americans watched Kennedy at close hand, thanks to the eye of the camera, and judged his incoherent, rambling answer to lack credibility. The campaign was over almost before it began. Kennedy had changed the world—not in the way he intended, perhaps, but inescapably and irretrievably nonetheless. Potential backers slunk away from the Kennedy camp. Potential workers joined other campaigns. Potential voters resolved to find another candidate. And all of that happened through the faux-familiarity of television. Imagine how much more devastating it would have been in person.
Does changing the world seem like a daunting challenge? There’s good news buried in the challenge. With a powerful, audience-centered presentation, you can change the world. And that goes whether you’re talking to a small group of employees or colleagues—or a keynote audience of thousands. The principles are the same.
And there’s more good news to come: Regardless of how good you are now, you can learn how to give a better speech, one that makes a kinesthetic connection with your listeners. One that creates a sense of trust in you and moves them to action.
You Need to Listen to Your Audience
At the heart of this connection lies a counterintuitive truth: the secret to forming a strong bond between you and the people in the audience is to listen to them—from the very beginning.
Wait a minute, you say. I’m the one that has to do the talking. How can I listen to them? And what do you mean by kinesthetic? You’ve already used that word twice.
The answers to these questions are related. Let’s take the easy one first. Kinesthetic means being aware of the position and movement of the body in space. And to listen to the audience, you need to listen (and to show you’re listening) with your whole body. To give a simple example, consider the nervous executive in front of the shareholders for an annual meeting. He has some less-than-spectacular numbers to report, and everyone knows it. He’s prepared for the worst. He begins his talk with a curt, “Good morning,” arms folded, staring tensely over the audience members’ heads, looking into the middle distance, trying not to acknowledge the anger he sees in front of him. He immediately launches into a defensive talk aimed at minimizing the damage and second-guessing what the audience might ask him.
Not a pretty picture. Contrast that with a different executive in a similar pickle. She knows the meeting is going to be tough, but she’s ready. She stands up in front of the shareholders, smiles, and asks, “How are you?” Her arms are comfortably open at her sides. And she waits for a couple of seconds, making eye contact with at least one of the audience members on the right hand side of the room. Then she asks, no longer smiling, raising her eyebrows to invite response, “Are you angry about last year’s numbers? [Pause. Looking at someone else, on the left, now.] You have every right to be. We’re as disappointed as you are. Let’s talk about them. What’s on your mind?”
Not many chief executives would have the guts, frankly, to take the second approach. But which company would you rather hold stock in?
The second executive is well on the way to giving an audience-centered speech. She’s going to find kinesthetic moments to connect with her audience, and she’s begun by actually listening to them—reading their entire range of responses, including the nonverbal—from the start.
Indeed, even in this simplified example, the key to success is in making those rhetorical questions real. When you ask, “How are you?” of an audience, wait to see how some members of that audience actually are. Don’t continue until you’ve learned the answer, either verbally or nonverbally. It’s a small but vital way to begin an audience-centered talk. Success in public speaking is made up of a myriad little moments of connection like that.
And one big thing: charisma. That’s the magic quality, isn’t it? The one that everyone craves. And yet charisma doesn’t come from doing something difficult or esoteric that it takes years to master (and lots of expensive advice from speech coaches like me). We know now, thanks to the communications research of the last thirty years, what charisma is. Quite simply, it’s focused expressiveness.
Expressiveness is the willingness to be open to your audience, both verbally and nonverbally. To show how you feel about your subject. To get past nervousness and self-consciousness and get to the stuff that you care about, and give that to the audience. That’s why they call it “giving a speech.” If you can unlock your own passion about the subject, and give that to the audience, in a focused way, you will be charismatic. The audience will not be able to take its eyes off you.
And so we’re back to audience-centered speaking, and kinesthetics. The only reason to give a speech is to change the world. You accomplish that by moving your audience to action. To do that, you have to be willing to listen to the audience, and to give it your passion. To get to that happy state, you need to find kinesthetic connections with the audience.
That’s audience-centered speaking in a paragraph. It’s a simple as that.
And lest you think that when I say “changing the world” I’m only talking about the big speeches (the ones that CEOs give to shareholders, for example) understand that I’m talking about every speech ever given. These principles apply to all public speaking, whether to five thousand people or five, for a grand public occasion or simply a regular meeting to report on 3Q numbers. After all, if you give a brilliant, inspiring, audience-centered presentation about those 3Q numbers, you will change the attitudes of your team in the room with you. And if you change their attitudes, you just might change their behavior. And if you change their behavior, you’ve changed the world in the only way that counts.
So that’s my wish for you in 2011: that you’ll start changing the world with every speech or presentation you give.
