Image Credit: fliegender
Creating a speech is hard work. You take the time to understand who you will be talking to, what they want you to talk about, and how long you’ll have to talk. You then craft a fantastic opening line, outline a speech that will allow you to make whatever point you want to make, and then you start to practice it. You practice, practice, practice. Finally, the big day comes and you give your speech. Hopefully it went well because we all know about the importance of public speaking. Now just what the heck are you going to do with this speech that you’ve spent so much time creating?
File It
You do realize that you know more about this speech right now than you will ever know about it in the future, right? What this means is that if you don’t take steps to record how you delivered this speech, then this information is going to be lost forever.
If you are like me, then you probably didn’t write your speech out. Instead, you may have written out the important parts (the opening and the closing), and then you pretty much worked off of an outline for the rest of what you wanted to say. That outline that served you so well now is going to be your downfall going forward – you won’t be able to remember how you filled in the gaps later on.
Now is the time for you to sit down and, gasp!, write out your speech. The reason that you’re doing this is not so that you can read it to someone in the future, but rather so that you can remember what you said. By writing out each word in your speech you can now file it away and if you ever want to give it again in the future you can just get it out, read what you’ve written, and then you’ll be able to remember exactly what you wanted to say.
Deliver It Again
Once again, you are currently the best person in the world to give this speech. What this means is that now is the time for you to deliver it as many times as you possibly can. Just think about it – you really won’t have to practice!
In order to do this correctly, you are going to have to take a long hard look at what the topic of your speech was. The next audience that you’ll be giving it to will be different from your first audience. What this means is that you are going to have to be willing to make changes to your speech. Your goal needs to be to find an audience that is as similar to your original audience as possible in order to minimize the number of changes that you have to make.
Once again depending on the content of your speech, you may be able to change it so that it can work with a completely different audience. For example you might want to try to see if it would be an appropriate speech to give to at a storytelling event. Even business speeches can be transformed and turned into interesting stores with a moral that can keep a storytelling audience transfixed.
Make Yourself An Expert
You spent the time learning everything that you needed to know. What this means is that for a brief, glorious moment in time, you are probably the one person on this plant who knows the most about what you are talking about. Since you’ve gone to all of the effort to achieve this lofty goal, perhaps you should make the most of it?
A lot of us speakers get tapped on the shoulder every once in a while when someone that knows us needs someone to step in and give a speech. Since we generally know these people, more often than not we end up saying yes to them. It’s only after we say yes that we realize just how much effort creating a speech for their event is going to take – or how little time there is to get ready!
Now that you’ve mastered the speech that you just gave, perhaps it’s time for it to become your “back pocket speech”. This is the speech that you know so well that you can just whip it out and deliver it any time that someone needs you to give a speech? Do a bit of documentation and find some opportunities to practice it some more and you’ll be good to go.
Go Online
Welcome to the 21st Century! The day and age that we find ourselves living in presents us with new opportunities that were not available to us even just a few years ago. Once of these opportunities is, of course, the Internet. If you use this resource correctly, your speech can live forever.
What this means is that you’re going to have to do a bit of preplanning. You’ll need to make arrangements to have your speech taped when you give it. After that is done, some post processing will probably be required in order to get it ready for the world to see.
Having gotten all of this taken care of, you can now look for places to share it one the web. The obvious choice will be YouTube. However, once you’ve gotten that taken care of, you might want to do some more looking around. Based on the topic of your speech I’m sure that there are many other sites that would be interested in having new video to show their visitors.
What All Of This Means For You
Nobody ever told you that creating a speech was going to be something that was easy to do. However, this is something that we all know how to go about doing and so we do it. Once we’ve done all of the required work and we’ve delivered our speech, what can we do with the speech now to maximize the benefits of public speaking?
It turns out that the answer to that question is quite a lot. The first thing that we need to do is to take steps to record just exactly what we said for future reference. Next, we can deliver it in other settings and we can take the time to become an expert and create our very own back pocket speech. Finally, we can harness the power of the Internet and post a video of us giving our speech.
If you were to think of your next speech as being a sort of a living thing, then you can consider the actual delivery of the speech as being the birthing process. Once a speech is born, now you have to find different ways to raise it. The possibilities that we’ve discussed here are just the tip of the iceberg. You created the speech, now set it free!
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: Do you think that you’d need to ask permission to reuse one of your own speeches in a different setting?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
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
Pick up just about any book that you find at the store about how to become a better speaker and you’ll probably find a chapter (or two!) that talk about the dangers of using PowerPoint or Keynote slides as a part of your next speech. I agree that there are a lot of different things that you can do incorrectly when you use these tools; however, they are so valuable that because of the importance of public speaking we all end up using them in the end. Now the big question that you are going to have to find an answer to is just exactly how you can make your slides work for you and not against you during your next presentation?