Creating, practicing, and delivering a speech is not an easy thing to do. However, as long as we are going to the effort of doing such a thing there has to be a reason. There has to be some sort of motivation greater than the importance of public speaking for us to make the effort, conquer our fears, and stand in front of that audience. It turns out that there is such a motivation. More often than not we are telling our audience about an idea that is very important to us. What we want them to do is to listen, understand, and then spread our idea. What can we do during our speech to boost the chances of this spreading occurring?
Set Your Monster Free
Inside of each of us there is a monster that wants to be set free. This monster is our idea, our passion, our desire to connect with our audience. It’s not always obvious what our monster looks like to us. When we are preparing to give a speech we need to take the time to look deep inside of ourselves in order to make sure that we understand the deep and meaningful connection that we have with our topic.
If we really care about what we are talking about, then our audience will be able to see it. Your passion for your topic will lead to your ability to master your presentation. There is no way that you’ll be able to inspire your audience if you are not first inspired yourself. The way that you’ll make a meaningful connection with your audience will be to express your ideas with passion and enthusiasm.
It’s All About The Story
When we give a speech, we need to have a goal. Often what we want to do is to be able to reach our audience’s hearts and minds. In order to do this, one of the best tools that we can use is a story. Really smart scientists have done brain scans of people who are listening to stories and what they have discovered is that when we are listening to stories, our brains are both stimulated and engaged.
The power of stories comes from the fact that our audience is taking in our words and really thinking about them as we tell them a story. What this means for us is that when you use stories, there is a much greater chance that your audience will agree with what you are saying. I don’t want to discount the importance of both facts and stats in a speech in which you are trying to convince your audience to take some action. However, before you can get them to mentally agree with you, you are first going to have to be able to reach their heart. This is what a story can do for you.
Teach Your Audience Something That They Don’t Know
If you want to get your ideas to spread, then you are going to have to make sure that your audience pays attention to what you are telling them. This means that you need to understand what the brains of the people in your audience are looking for. It turns out that everyone’s brain loves novelty. Any material that you can present that will be viewed as being unusual, unfamiliar, or even unexpected is going to cause your audience to wake up and take notice of what you are telling them. By sharing this information with your audience, you are providing them with a brand new way of looking at their world.
The information that you provide to your audience can come in a number of different formats. You want to share with them information that is either brand new to them, solves an existing problem in a different way, or information that you have taken the time to simply repackage in a different way. In order to get your ideas to spread, you are going to have to provide your audience with a new way of looking at the world that they live in.
What All Of This Means For You
When we give a speech, the reason that we do it is because we have an idea or a viewpoint that we want to share with our audience using the benefits of public speaking. We are hoping that if we do a good job with our speech then we’ll be able to connect with our audience and they will accept our ideas and then go out and spread them. The only trick is exactly how to make this happen.
We all have a bit of a monster living inside of us. Our monster is our idea, the thing that we want to communicate to our audience. We need to take the time to identify our monster so that we can fully understand what we’ll be trying to get across. One of our most powerful tools that we have to connect with our audience is the story. Studies have shown that our audience will be ready to listen to us when we tell them a story. If we really want to make sure that our audience pays close attention to what we are telling them, then we need to find new things to share with them.
The faster and further we can get our ideas to spread, the more effective we will have been as a speaker. It turns out that the trick to making this happen is to present our information in the right way. If we get this correct, then there is a very good chance that there is no limit on how far our ideas can be spread.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: If you use a story in a speech, how long do you think that the story should be?
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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
The reason that we give speeches is because we believe in the importance of public speaking and we have something that we want to share with our audience. It is our hope that because of the time, energy, and effort that we’ve put into creating, practicing, and delivering our speech our audience will understand what we are trying to tell them. In fact, we really want them to fall in love with our idea just as much as we love it. Love, however, is a powerful concept. How are we going to make this happen?