Working More Of You Into Your Next Speech

You can be so familiar to yourself that you become invisible
You can be so familiar to yourself that you become invisibleImage Credit: Teeejayy

As speakers we’d all like to be able to give speeches that captivate and interest our audiences – that’s what the importance of public speaking is all about. However, the challenge that we have every time that we sit down to write a speech is coming up with something to say that will be interesting. As hard as this may seem to be to do, it turns out that we all have the answer to this problem. It turns out that the most interesting thing that you have to talk about is yourself. What we need to find out how to do is to work more of our story into our next speech.

Turing Your Story Into A Message

So it turns out that you already know the parts of your life that you want to include in your next speech. These will be the lessons that you teach to your children, the stories that you tell to your family and to your friends. Your personal stories that you’ll want to work into your speech are the ones in which you show people how to conquer their fears, tell the truth when its hard to do, and how to live happier lives. You’ve lived a great life so far. Now it’s time to work it into your speeches.

Ultimately, what you want to work into your next speech are your stories which reflect all of the experiences that you have had so far. These include the things that you have done both personally and professionally and they are the things that have added real meaning to your life. Another way to think about these things is that they are the things that you’ll be remembered for long after you are dead. In other words, they are your legacy. You can view these things as being the things that you were associated with, that you stood up for, or perhaps were well know for doing. In your next speech, you are going to want to work in the message that you have lived. The challenge that we all run into is that we may not exactly know what this message is.

So what’s the problem here? The reason that we may not know the message that we have been living so far is simple: it is so very familiar to us that to us it is invisible – we can’t see it. When we give a speech we are generally not objective about what we are presenting to our audience. What this means is that we really can’t see our own impact. What we need to understand is that what has happened to us during our lives is exactly what our audience wants to learn about. If we can work this information into our stories, then this is what our audience is going to want to listen to and while they are doing it, they are going to want to know more about us.

It Turns Out That Your Message Really Does Matter

If you are going to work your personal message into your next speech, the first thing that you are going to have to do is to determine what that message is. How can you start going about doing this? One way is to sit down and write out all of the major personal moments that have happened in your life. You don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking or double thinking over these points – write them as they come to you and then move on. The next step is to mark each of major personal moments that were successes for you.

Once you’ve accomplished this, you are going to want to go back and for each success that you’ve marked, you are going to want to add another life reference where you were at your lowest. Where something truly bad had happened or had knocked you for a loop. Now you are going to want to go back to the list that you have created and create a path. Your path is going to show how you were able to make it from each of your low points to the next high point in your life. What you’ll be seeing is a sequence of lows followed by highs. At this point you will want to ask yourself a very important question: has this all been part of a much larger journey that you have been on? Has everything that has happened in your life been leading you in a specific direction?

Everyone likes a story where someone is at a low point but is then able to turn things around. What you are going to need to do is to take a look at your list of low points and pick one of them. Take some time and write out how while you were experiencing the low point you experienced a moment of realization of just exactly how you were going to turn things around. Share the story of how this event unfolded and what you were feeling when things happened in your life.

What All Of This Means For You

The next time that you give a speech you want to be able to grab onto your audience’s attention and hold onto it so that you can share with them the benefits of public speaking. When we sit down to write a speech, we find ourselves wracking our brain for things that we can add to our speech that will make what we are saying both interesting and memorable to our audience. The good news is that it turns out that all of us have the material that we need in order to accomplish this. Our lives have been full of stories that our audience would love to hear. This means that we need to take the time and determine what has happened during our lives that we can work into our next speech in order to make it a speech that everyone will want to hear.

You have all of the information that you need to create personal stories that can be added to your next speech. This information is contained in the stories that you tell to your children, your family, and your friends. You’ll want to share the personal and professional things that have happened to you that you will be remembered for. These stories can be hard for us to see because we are too close to them – they can appear invisible to us. In order to capture your personal message you are going to want to sit down and write out all of the major personal moments in your life, identify the major successes, and then match them with low points in your life. You’ll then want to connect the low points to the high points and identify what your life has been moving you towards. You should then pick one low point and write out how you pulled yourself out of it and how this experience changed your life.

On those occasions when we are able to truly connect with an audience, magical things can happen for both you and your audience. In order to make those experiences happen more often, you need to work more of your life’s story into your next speech. Your audience wants to hear about your challenges and your successes. By sharing these types of stories with your audience, you’ll be able to bring them closer to you and you will have shared something with them that they will remember long after your speech is over.

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

Question For You: Do you think that it is possible to include too many personal stories 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

I can only speak for myself, but I can tell you that every word that I write when I’m putting together a speech is pure perfection. The words just flow together and create a seamless whole. The very idea of going back and editing one of my speeches after it has been written just seems to be a travesty – who would want to mess with perfection? This is the speech that I am going to use to show my audience the importance of public speaking. Ok, so maybe my writing is not really all that good. However, the effort involved in editing one of my speeches is so great that I often don’t want to do it. However, it turns out that if you want to find a way to pack more of a punch into your next speech, you are going to need to be willing to do some serious editing of what you’ve written.