Have you ever gone to hear someone speak and just been blown away by what they had to say? I mean their words just seemed to flow out of them and the stories that they told were right on the mark – a perfect complement to the point that they were trying to make? It turns out that you can deliver speeches like this too…
The Secret To Creating Great Speeches
If you want to be able to give a great speech, then you’ve got to be willing to invest the time to create a great speech. I’m not talking about shutting down for a couple of days and holing yourself up somewhere and banging out some fabulous bit of text – that never seems to happen when you need it to.
Nope, what I’m talking about is actually spending the time that it takes to really create a fantastic speech. How much time is that you ask? Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 hours. Oh, oh – now I’ve gone and done it. It looks like you don’t think that this is possible. Turns out that you’re wrong – spend the time keeping a journal and you’ll have all of the high quality content that you’ll need to quickly make a great speech.
How To Spend 100’s Of Hours Creating A Speech
I’ll grant that you are correct that the next time someone asks you to give a speech, the last thing that you want to have to tell them is “could you get back to me after I spend a 100 hours just whipping up a speech for you?” Maybe there’s another way to do the same thing.
Keeping a personal journal is something that all too few of us speakers do, and yet all of us probably should do more of it. Life comes at us fast and if we’re not careful, it will blow right by us and we won’t even remember what happened to us. That’s why a journal is so important.
If you take the time either once a day or perhaps for short times throughout the day to write down what you are doing, how you are feeling, what challenges you are facing, then you will be able to remember everything that has happened to you. This is the raw material that makes for a great speech.
Strong Words Make Strong Images
Anybody can jot a few words down on a piece of paper. It takes a truly skillful speaker to capture just exactly how you are feeling when you update your journal.
One of the keys is to record how you are feeling using all of your 5 senses. Yes, this means taking note of what you are smelling (perhaps your own fear?), tasting, hearing, seeing, and feeling. These are the small details that you will need to use when you use your journal entries to create a fantastic speech.
What All Of This Means For You
The truly great speakers are the ones who have taken the time to create a speech that will resonate with their audience. This means that they have crafted both the words and the stories that will not only allow them to get their points across, but that they have also found a way to get their message to stick with their audience.
You have the ability to create this kind of speech also. What you are going to have to do is to take the time that is needed to create such a speech: 100 hours or more. It turns out that you can do this by keeping a journal – the time that you spend working on the journal will pay rich dividends when it comes time to create your next speech.
By recording everything that you are experiencing at any given moment in your journal, you’ll be able to go back and relive those moments when you are in the process of creating your memorable speech. The secret is to not gloss over how you feel, but rather to record everything that is going on so that you can recapture it. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but it will be the best 100 hours that you’ve ever spent doing something…
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills
Question For You: How often do you think that a speaker should update their journal? Once a day or more often?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
PowerPoint is a double edged sword when it comes to giving a speech: it can be both a powerful way to add a multimedia impact to your speech or it can end up distracting your audience and taking their attention away from what you have to say. The experts know how to use this tool correctly and here are three of the ways they tame the PowerPoint beast…