How You Can Become More Creative When You Create Speeches

When you are creating your next speech you'll want to be very creative
When you are creating your next speech you’ll want to be very creative
Image Credit: Chris Piascik

The next time that I create a speech, because I know about the importance of public speaking, I want it to be the best speech that I’ve ever made. In order for this to happen, I’m going to have to be creative. This is where a bit of a challenge comes in – I’m not all that confident that I can be creative when I need to be. What I need to do is to find a way to exercise my creativity so that when I need to call on it, it’s there for me. What’s the secret to becoming more creative so that we can create better speeches?

Making Connections

The good news about creativity is that its something that we’re all born with. What seems to happen to all of us is that as we grow up and become adults, we start to suppress our creativity and our imagination so that we can better conform to the world in which we live. What this means for you and me is that we now have to relearn how we are going to start to think creatively. We’re not going to be able to do this overnight – it’s going to take time. However, with effort we will become better.

One of the ways that we can boost our creativity is by taking the time to practice making connections. We already make connections because this is one of the fundamental ways that we learn new things. One of our struggles is that based on old connections we’ve made in the past, we have used these connections to form habits. These habits have become engrained and are now difficult to break out of. What we need to be spending our time doing is taking the time and considering how we might go about connecting random objects in our lives in ways that we’ve not thought of before. This will allow us to develop our creativity skills.

Looking At Things From Different Perspectives

One of the reasons that a lot of the speeches that we create can start to sound the same is because we are always writing them from the same perspective – ours. What this means is that you and I see the world in a very specific way. When we go to create a speech our thoughts are molded by the way that we see the world and the resulting speech can start to sound like all of the other speeches that we’ve written in the past.

In order to break out of this situation and get some more creativity back into your life, we need to find a way to get you to see things in a different way. It turns out that doing this is not all that hard to do. What you need to take the time to do is to sit down and think about a given situation. You’ll naturally “see” it through your eyes. Now what you have to do is to take on someone else’s identity. It could be your boss, a competitor, a famous ex-president, etc. It really doesn’t matter.

Now you have to take a look at the situation through their eyes – what do they see differently than you do? What action would seeing this scene cause them to take that would be different than your reaction to the situation? Different perspectives can allow you to be more creative in how you view a situation.

Making Use Of That Thing You Call Your Imagination

You would think that because we all have an imagination, it would be the easiest thing in the world to exercise. However, for some reason it turns out to be a fairly difficult thing to exercise when we decide that we want to. Our imagination is what both makes us human and what separates us from each other. My imagination is not the same as yours a likewise yours is not like mine.

It turns out that if you want to develop your imagination you need to find ways to exercise it. One of the simplest ways to go about doing this is to start to ask more questions. The most powerful questions that you can be asking will always be the ones that start out with “What if…?” These types of questions can cause you to stop for a moment and really think about what the answer should be. With a little luck you’ll be able to start to generate answers that show some real imagination.

This is not an activity that you can just sit down and do for an hour each day. Instead, this is something that you can work into your day at different points. You’ll never know when a creative answer to one of your questions will strike. In order to capture your ideas when they occur, you need to make sure that you always keep a notebook handy so that you can write your creative ideas down and make sure that they find their way into your next speech.

What All Of This Means For You

The next time that we need to create a speech, we’d like to be as creative as possible. The challenge that we all face is that in order to be creative, we need to have taken the time to develop our creativity and our imagination. Just exactly how to go about doing this is where most of us don’t have a clue.

Developing your creativity starts with spending some time building connections. Take the time to sit back and create connections between things that you wouldn’t normally connect just to see what comes of it. A lot of the reasons that our speeches can start to sound the same is because we have a tendency to always write our speeches from the same perspective – our own. What we need to learn to do is to see situations from other people’s perspectives. If we’re able to do this, then we’ll get a fresh take on what we want to speak about. Finally, our imagination needs to be exercised in order to grow. To do this we need to spend time during the day asking “What if…?” questions in order to generate creative ideas that we can write down and work into our next speech.

When we give a speech we want our audience to be interested in what we have to say so that they can experience the benefits of public speaking. We’d love to have them hanging on our every word. However, if every speech that we give is the same, then this is not going to happen. If we take the time to develop our creativity and our imagination then we can work it into our next speech. Once we start doing this, we’ll start to create the kinds of speeches that audiences really want to come and hear!

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: What do you think is the best way to get the quiet time that you’ll need each day in order to ask yourself “What if…?” questions?

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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Let’s face it – speaking in public is a risky undertaking. Sure, we practice and we prepare; however, that doesn’t mean that despite the importance of public speaking things can’t still happen while we are giving our speech. Since we don’t run the world (yet!), as speakers we need to realize that we live in a complicated world and we need to make sure that we are prepared for things to go terribly wrong while we are giving a speech…