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Finding The Right Words For An Eulogy Can Be Difficult

Giving a speech is hard. Delivering an eulogy can be downright impossible. However, if we are asked to give one by people who are grieving, then we need to step up and do a good job of it. Since you are being asked to give the eulogy because you knew the person who passed on, this can be one of the most difficult speeches that you’ll ever give. I can’t make it any easier, but I can show you how to do it well…

What An Eulogy Is All About

The first, and potentially the most important question, that you’re going to have to answer is what is the purpose of this eulogy? Look, the person being eulogized is gone, your words won’t reach them so there’s no purpose in talking to them.

Instead, you need to realize that your words will be heard by those who are still here. The one thing that unites everyone who is in the audience is that they had some connection to the person who passed on. Clearly, this person needs to be the focus of your eulogy.

The tone of your eulogy is something that you need to get right; however, it can be tricky to select the right one. Tones can run the range from the fun remembrance to the solemn. Take your cue from who will be in your audience. The age, the background, and how the person passed are all factors that need to be considered when you are making a decision on the tone that you’ll use in your eulogy.

How To Build A Great Eulogy

Once you’ve decided on the tone you want to use for your eulogy, the next step is to design the speech itself. First off, let’s make sure that you don’t make the classic mistake of trying to tell the person’s whole life from beginning to end. Nobody wants to hear that.

Instead, what you are going to want to focus your eulogy on is the impact that the person had. The fact that the person was born, lived, and passed on has to stand for something. How was the world changed by their time on this planet? The purpose of your eulogy should be to bring the deceased back to life for just a few moments while you are giving your speech.

One of the best ways to make this happen is to make the focus of your speech be the relationships that the person had when they were living. No matter if the relationships were with friends, colleagues, or family members, talking about these aspects of the departed is what your audience wants to hear about and to remember.

No, your eulogy is not going to make your audience feel better while you give it – in fact they may temporarily feel worse as they remember what they’ve lost. However, if done correctly you’ll be able to provide them with one final opportunity to remember the best parts of the person who has left them and ultimately that’s how the healing process starts.

What All Of This Means For You

Dealing with the loss of someone that we knew is very hard. Having to give a speech about that person to others who are feeling your sense of loss can be the ultimate challenge for a speaker.

When you are asked to give an eulogy, you need to start your planning process by understanding what your goal is. You won’t be speaking to the person who has passed on, instead you’ll be talking to those who have been left behind. The purpose of your speech needs to be find a way to give comfort to the friends and family in their time of grief.

Depending on the person, your eulogy can take on many different forms. You need to match the style, funny or formal, to the person and to the situation. The goal of your speech needs to be to bring that person back if only for a few moments so that everyone can share in one last joint remembrance of the person who was.

Nobody ever gets good at giving eulogies. Instead, we all try to become good-enough to provide the words that heal during a moment when everyone is only thinking about what they’ve loss. Do it right and you’ll be the one that helps everyone to move on.

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

Question For You: How long do you think a eulogy should be?

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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

As speakers we are always being urged to “connect with our audience”. Now this sounds all fine and good; however, as with everything else in life the devil is in the details. Just how is a speaker supposed to connect with a room full of people who are staring at him or her? It turns out that you already know the answer – you need to use your eyes. As simple as this seems, all too often we do it wrong…

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After the axe has fallen, what's a speaker to say?

A bad global economy means one thing for workers: loss of jobs. Just about every company has gone through this painful experience as firms have struggled to find ways to stay afloat during the most recent global recession. Into this environment, public speakers can find themselves asked to give a speech to a dispirited audience. How the heck are you going to give a good speech to an upset audience?

The Wrong Thing To Do

When you are asked to speak to a group of people who have just gone through a round of layoffs, there are a lot of things that you can do wrong. What happened to the employees who were let go was bad, what the employees who are left behind that you’ll be talking to may have been through could have been even worse.

What many speakers in this situation don’t realize is that when something bad happens to people around you, but not to you, it affects you also. There’s even a term for this “survivor’s guilt”.

When someone is going through this type of situation, they may find it hard to concentrate (even on your speech), may have low productivity, listlessness, and a deep desire to avoid risk. Basically, there’s a good chance that your audience is stuck in the past.

Although none of this is good news, the company that your audience works for is facing a much more serious problem in the future. Workers who are feeling the aftereffects of a downsizing will never be satisfied with their jobs. This means that when the opportunity comes along, they will be willing to jump ship to the next available job. In this situation, everyone loses. You’ve got a big task ahead of you if you want to fix things.

The Right Thing To Do: Starting At The Top

If you find yourself placed into this difficult situation as a speaker, you’ve truly got your work cut out for you. You’re not just going to be able to get up there deliver a speech and then go away hoping that you made an impact – because you won’t have.

In a single speech, you can’t change the world. However, the speech that you give to an audience that has gone through this set of experiences needs to help them at least start the healing process. At the very least, you don’t want to make things worse!

As a speaker, you are going to want to start at the top – you are going to need to have a long discussion with the person who has asked you to talk to this audience. Assuming that you’ve been brought in by the management that was in charge of the layoffs, you need to understand what they are going through. Contrary to popular opinion, a company’s managers are not cold-hearted bastards. Instead, they are real people also who probably are dealing with their own issues in regards to the layoffs.

You are going to have to take the time to explore what happened: the who, what, when, where and why of the whole event. What you want to do is to really dig down deep and find out what the organizer of your speech is feeling and why they are feeling that way. You are going to want to take that emotion and communicate it in your speech.

The Right Thing To Do: Helping Your Audience

One of the things that you’re going to have to discuss with your audience during your speech is that when it comes to layoffs, we all do the same thing. In order to shield ourselves from the hurt and loss of the upheaval, we enter into a state of denial.

The longer that your audience stays in that state of denial, the longer the damage will go on. What you need to use your speech to do is to show them a way out of this “closed box”. The only way that they are going to get better is if they open up and start to talk to others about the way that they are feeling.

Depending on the setting and what the event organizer wants, you can also use your speech as an opportunity to start the next phase of the healing process: venting. Carefully controlled venting will allow your audience to start to express how they feel and by doing so they will start the process of moving on.

What All Of This Means For You

One of the most difficult speeches that any of us can be called on to deliver is a speech to an audience that has just gone through a set of layoffs. This is an audience that is in no mood to listen to a speaker who can’t understand their pain or connect with them.

As a speaker you are going to have to work closely with the event organizer in order to determine what the tone of your speech needs to be. During your speech you are going to have to show your audience how to overcome their denial and start to talk about what has happened to them. Finally, if you can provide opportunities for them to start to vent their emotions, then the healing process can start.

There’s only so much that one speaker can accomplish in a single speech. However, once you know what you need to do, you can provide a hurting audience with the healing power of the right words…

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

Question For You: Do you think that acknowledging that layoffs have occurred is a good way to open your speech?