Designing The Perfect Speech

Before you can give the perfect speech, you first have to design it
Before you can give the perfect speech, you first have to design it

Image Credit: David Salafia

Hmm, “the perfect speech”, so just exactly what would that be? First off, it would be a speech that we would feel confident in giving – we’d take the stage and because of the importance of public speaking we would confidently tell our speech without ever losing our way. Our audience would be hanging on our every word and at the end would stand up and clap for far too long because they were sad that we had to finish our speech. The perfect speech is a great concept, now just exactly how do we go about making this happen?

Getting Perfect Ideas

In all honesty, we are generally asked to talk about things that we know about. What this means for us is that a request to speak should not come as that much of a surprise to us. This is great news. We all have ideas pop into our heads from time to time about how we can explain things to other people. What you need to start doing is making sure that you always have some place to write these ideas down when they come into your head.

No, the ideas that you have may not be enough to create an entire speech from, but there is a good chance that they may contain an angle or an interesting point that can turn a so-so speech into one that is memorable. One of the things that makes any speech just a little bit more perfect is if we can include stories. These stories take time to really think out and by jotting down the ideas that you’ve had, you’ll be able to do a better job of weaving these ideas into stories that will captivate your audience.

Developing Your Perfect Ideas

I can only speak for myself, but I can tell you that more than often, my first idea is never my best idea. That’s why it’s such a shame that all too often when we are asked to give a speech we’ll sit down, knock out a speech and then that will be the speech that we deliver. The problem is that we never allow ourselves the time to develop our ideas.

If we want to make a perfect speech, then we are going to have to introduce a pause step in our speech creation process. What this means is that we need to take the time to create an outline for our speech and then pause. Take a day or so off and let our minds play around with the way that we are planning on organizing our speech. Undoubtedly what’s going to happen is that we’re going to come up with a better way of getting our ideas across and we’ll make changes to our initial outline.

Creating The Perfect Plan

The quality of the speech that you give is going to be based on the speech as a whole. What this means for you is that if you want to do this right, you are going to have to carefully plan out how all of the different parts are going to fit together. You are going to want your introduction to support the center part of your speech which will lead to a powerful conclusion.

When you are assembling your speech, you are going to want your introduction to make your audience become intrigued about what you’ll be talking about. In the body of the speech you’ll want to include all of the facts, figures, and novel ideas will be the place that you fulfill the premise that you had laid out in your introduction. Finally, this all leads up to your conclusion and it’s here that you are going to want to leave your audience with their lasting impressions of your speech.

What All Of This Means For You

We all dream of being able to give the perfect speech. If we were able to accomplish this then we’d be able to have our audience experience the benefits of public speaking and we would leave our audience clapping for us and wanting more from us. However, the perfect speech does not just happen. Instead. we need to find a way to build it first.

Building the perfect speech starts with coming up with the most innovative way to present our information. Ideas on how to get our message across can occur to us at any time. This is why it is so important that we keep a notebook or something that we write things down on with us at all time. Once we’ve got a basic outline for our speech, we need to give it a chance to rest. If we take the time to think about what we want to say and how we want to say it, then we’ll keep coming up with better and better ways to organize our speech. Finally, every speech is made up of multiple parts. We are going to need to take the time to make sure that each part of our speech flows into the next part of the speech.

Yeah, giving the perfect speech might seem like an unobtainable goal. However, think of every speech that you give as moving you one step closer to achieving this goal. Allow yourself the time to capture the best ideas, let them grow, and put them together in a way that will make your next speech the most perfect one yet.

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

Question For You: When you are letting your ideas rest, how long do you need to spend pondering them?

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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

When you are asked to give a speech, what is the first thing that you do when you sit down to create the speech? Do you spend time thinking about the overall body the speech that you want to give? Do you focus on how you’ll want to wrap things up? Does your mind go blank and you just end up staring at the wall in front of you thinking about the importance of public speaking? No matter what your approach is, I’m here to help you build your next speech from the ground up.