A Batch of Bona-Fide Blarney!
My title has nothing to do with my blog other than to illustrate that an interesting, alliterative title can intrigue an audience and cause them to pay greater attention; at least in the beginning. Just make sure your title doesn’t over-promise what you then under-deliver!
Good speeches have 3 vital ingredients. They are, in order of importance: Strong content, engaging vocal dynamics, and effective body movement and gestures. I’ve listed these in order of importance through personal experience as a listener.
As an example, we were tearing it up in a multi-level marketing company. We were on the top 100 list of sales when we went to a regional meeting up in Northern California where we watched and listened as a motivational speaker encouraged us to overcome our circumstances and be all we could be.
His script was fabulous, his words and the way he spoke drew us into the stories he told. But his body movement was the worst I’d ever seen. Recently I watched as Anthony Robbins did exactly the same thing. They paced back and forth, back and forth, only occasionally glancing at the audience. It was the first time I’d seen Anthony Robbins and I found myself thinking, “how the hell did this guy ever get off the ground?”
I realized you can have 2 out of the 3 vital ingredients— Strong content and engaging vocal dynamics—or even 1 out of 3, if your content is strong enough, and still be considered great!
All good speeches start with great writing. You can deliver a speech with all the gusto, proper vocal presence and body language and be told you performed well. But only when your content is great is it truly memorable.
There are 4 important steps to writing a good speech: 1) getting all of your thoughts down, everything you want to say; 2) organizing it in a proper order; 3) paring it down to its most critical elements; and 4) refining and re-writing.
Getting all of your thoughts and information down.
The biggest mistake we make as beginning speech writers is making the first draft the final draft. All truly good speeches go through a process of writing, re-writing, adjusting, re-organizing, and re-drafting until all the “fat” is gone and only the lean, good material survives.
When you begin, don’t edit, just write. Get it all out in a stream-of-consciousness approach. Get it all out without worrying if it even makes sense. Writing is exploring our thoughts and reacting to our emotions. So just get them all out. When you’re done, take a break.
Organize what you’ve written.
When you come back, you can add, subtract, multiply and divide what you’ve written into proper order, defining and refining essential elements.
When that’s done, read both silently and out loud to make sure the sentence structure and words roll comfortably off your tongue. Make adjustments as needed, then walk away again.
Practice
Practice it just enough that it becomes a part of you without losing the power of your emotions. There is such a thing as too much practice. Over practicing can remove the emotion from your presentation and cause it to lose its impact.
Write in a stream of consciousness with all the emotion that drove you to the topic to begin with. Then go back and pare it down to its most crucial elements, then practice it just enough that it is a part of you while still allowing it to remain dynamic and “in the moment”.
When you’re done, hopefully the audience won’t believe you brought a bona-fide batch of blarney, but an exceptional elocution of elegance!
