Image Credit: TEDx AngliaRuskinUniversity
Every speech that we give is special for us, but is it special for our audience? Does the speech that we give change their lives? Do we allow them to see things differently? Will our speech use the importance of public speaking to have a lasting impact on them? If you are like me, you sure hope that your speech will do all of these things. What we need to understand is that powerful speeches can act as a defining moment in someone’s life. Now all we need to do is to find out how we can create a speech that will make this happen!
The Power Of Defining Moments For Your Audience
Ok, so we want our next speech to create defining moments for our audience. Don’t these just happen by accident? It turns out that the answer is generally not. Defining moments can be engineered by speakers and used to create more powerful speeches. Speakers need to understand that defining moments are very important for our audiences, but they don’t have to wait for them to magically happen. Speakers can make these moments happen. In order to do so, we are going to have to find ways to harness what is currently going on and use it to get our audience motivated to move in the direction that we want them to go.
What speakers who want to create defining moments for their audience need to understand is how these moments will be viewed by their audience. They won’t be similar to mental movies that can be played over and over again in your audience’s heads. Instead, they will be more like fragments of time that will stand out and be remembered. Most of what your audience hears will eventually be forgotten. However, defining moments will remain. What speakers need to realize is that the things about their speech that their audience will remember will be the highs, the lows, the best moments, and the worst moments.
When a speaker wants to incorporate lasting memories into a speech, they need to understand that their audience will probably forget the things that they cover in the middle of the speech. The audience may remember things that are covered as a part of a transition like a beginning or an end of a speech. What this means to us when we are creating a speech is that our openings, closings, and any personal revelations that we may choose to make during our speech may have more of an impact on our audience that we may have realized. What we don’t want to do is miss an opportunity in our speech to create a defining moment for our audience. It will take planning and creativity to add these moments to our next speech.
How To Create A Speech That Will Contain A Defining Moment
When a speaker wants to create a defining moment in their speech, one of the things that they can do is to find a way to create a moment that will rise above the everyday lives of your audience. The way that you can go about making this happen is to be aware of what your audience is currently feeling and then go about enhancing their sensory awareness. Your goal will be to raise the stakes for your audience. A great way to go about doing this is to add an element of surprise to your speech. What you want to happen is to create a moment during your speech where the unexpected happens and your audience reacts by saying “I was not expecting that!” This is an engineered moment that will stay with your audience forever.
As speakers, we can create a defining moment in our speech by finding a way to give our audience a deeper insight into their lives. The goal of the speaker in this situation is to find ways to allow our audience to fundamentally change their understanding of their world or even of themselves. By listening to your speech, you want your audience to have a deep realization about something important in their lives. These defining moments will happen because of what your audience is thinking; however, as the speaker it is your responsibility to help them reach it. Speakers need to understand that in order to create these defining moments for our audience, we may have to place ourselves into situations where we could possibly fail – it turns out that the risk is worth the reward.
Speakers need to understand the audience that they are talking to in order to be able to create defining moments. One important way that such moments can be created is by tapping into the pride that members of your audience feel. If during our speech we can recognize members of our audience for what they have been able to achieve, then we can use these moments of pride as springboards that build on each other in order to help our audience reach a bigger goal. Likewise, if we can create a sense of connection between the members of our audience then we can create defining moments during our speech. Defining moments can be strengthened when they are being shared with others in the audience. By doing this we can help our audience to start to strive towards a meaningful shared goal.
What All Of This Means For You
Every speech that we give should be remembered by everyone. We all know that that is impossible to make happen; however, it turns out that if we can create defining moments during our speeches than there is a very good chance that the audience will be changed by what we have shared with them and they will remember what we said. As speakers it is our responsibility to find ways to add defining moments to our speeches so that our words can be remembered and our audience can experience the benefits of public speaking.
Defining moments are how our audience can remember what we told them during our speech. Defining moments don’t have to happen by chance, they can be engineered to be part of a speech. Defining moments are fragments of time that stick in our audience’s minds. Audiences will forget the middle parts of speeches and will focus on highs, lows, and changes in the speech. In order to add a defining moment to a speech, a speaker can elevate part of the speech so that it will stand out in the audience’s mind. Understanding your audience allows a speaker to use insight to change how their audience sees either their world or themselves. Pride is a powerful tool that can be used to create defining moments for audience members. If the audience can share a moment with each other, then there is a better chance that they will remember that moment.
Our job as speakers is to have an impact on our audience. One powerful way to make this happen is to incorporate defining moments into our speeches that will change the lives of our audiences. These moments can happen all by themselves or, more importantly, they can be engineered by us to be a part of our speech. If we take the time to understand our audience, then we can create defining moments by elevating our speech, using insights, tapping into audience pride, and creating connections between members of our audience. We need to understand that a speech that creates defining moments for our audience is a speech that will be remembered forever!
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: How many defining moments do you think that you should try to include in a speech?
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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 all agree on one thing: giving a speech is not an easy thing to do! There is the planning, the writing, the practice and then the delivery. As long as we are going to be going to the effort to deliver a speech, the one thing that we all want to achieve is to be remembered. What we want to do is the share the importance of public speaking and for our speech to be “sticky” so that our audience to be able to remember what we told them days, and even weeks after our speech is over. What this means is that we are going to have to craft our speech in a way that will allow us to remain in our audience’s heads even after we are done talking. So just exactly how does one go about creating a “sticky speech”?