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The 100 Hour Secret To Creating Speeches Everyone Will Want To Hear

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Image Credit Yes, I Do Have A Secret To Share With You

Yes, I Do Have A Secret To Share With You

Have you ever gone to hear someone speak and just been blown away by what they had to say? I mean their words just seemed to flow out of them and the stories that they told were right on the mark – a perfect complement to the point that they were trying to make? It turns out that you can deliver speeches like this too…

The Secret To Creating Great Speeches

If you want to be able to give a great speech, then you’ve got to be willing to invest the time to create a great speech. I’m not talking about shutting down for a couple of days and holing yourself up somewhere and banging out some fabulous bit of text – that never seems to happen when you need it to.
Nope, what I’m talking about is actually spending the time that it takes to really create a fantastic speech. How much time is that you ask? Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 hours. Oh, oh – now I’ve gone and done it. It looks like you don’t think that this is possible. Turns out that you’re wrong – spend the time keeping a journal and you’ll have all of the high quality content that you’ll need to quickly make a great speech.

How To Spend 100′s Of Hours Creating A Speech

I’ll grant that you are correct that the next time someone asks you to give a speech, the last thing that you want to have to tell them is “could you get back to me after I spend a 100 hours just whipping up a speech for you?” Maybe there’s another way to do the same thing.
Keeping a personal journal is something that all too few of us speakers do, and yet all of us probably should do more of it. Life comes at us fast and if we’re not careful, it will blow right by us and we won’t even remember what happened to us. That’s why a journal is so important.
If you take the time either once a day or perhaps for short times throughout the day to write down what you are doing, how you are feeling, what challenges you are facing, then you will be able to remember everything that has happened to you. This is the raw material that makes for a great speech.

Strong Words Make Strong Images

Anybody can jot a few words down on a piece of paper. It takes a truly skillful speaker to capture just exactly how you are feeling when you update your journal.
One of the keys is to record how you are feeling using all of your 5 senses. Yes, this means taking note of what you are smelling (perhaps your own fear?), tasting, hearing, seeing, and feeling. These are the small details that you will need to use when you use your journal entries to create a fantastic speech.

What All Of This Means For You

The truly great speakers are the ones who have taken the time to create a speech that will resonate with their audience. This means that they have crafted both the words and the stories that will not only allow them to get their points across, but that they have also found a way to get their message to stick with their audience.
You have the ability to create this kind of speech also. What you are going to have to do is to take the time that is needed to create such a speech: 100 hours or more. It turns out that you can do this by keeping a journal – the time that you spend working on the journal will pay rich dividends when it comes time to create your next speech.
By recording everything that you are experiencing at any given moment in your journal, you’ll be able to go back and relive those moments when you are in the process of creating your memorable speech. The secret is to not gloss over how you feel, but rather to record everything that is going on so that you can recapture it. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but it will be the best 100 hours that you’ve ever spent doing something…

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

Question For You: How often do you think that a speaker should update their journal? Once a day or more often?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

PowerPoint is a double edged sword when it comes to giving a speech: it can be both a powerful way to add a multimedia impact to your speech or it can end up distracting your audience and taking their attention away from what you have to say. The experts know how to use this tool correctly and here are three of the ways they tame the PowerPoint beast…

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Speech Writing Success: How To Make It Happen

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
Image Credit You Can Be A Winner, You Just Have To Know How To Get There…

You Can Be A Winner, You Just Have To Know How To Get There…

So there you are: you’ve agreed to give a speech and now your mind has gone completely blank when you’ve tried to start to figure out what you’ll say. Where did your energy go? Perhaps more importantly, how are you going to get it back and create a great speech?

It’s All About Your Goals

If you’ve ever read a book or attended a workshop on motivational techniques, then you already know about the power of goals. If for some reason you haven’t, then you’re going to learn now.

In a nutshell, if you want to accomplish something, like writing a great speech, then you need to first start by creating a goal and, this is the important part, writing it down! Yes, I know that it seems too easy, but trust me – this really works.

Setting Goals Is How You Start To Be Successful

Sure we throw the word “goal” around a lot, but do any of us really know what it means? It can mean many different things, but for our purposes here lets assume that when we talk about goals, we’re talking about something that you want to achieve.

You would think that when it comes to the goal of writing a great speech, all you have to do is to think to yourself “I’m going to write a great speech” and that would be that. Right? Well, actually there is a lot more to it than just that.

The experts say that thinking about the goal is really just the first step. The next (and some argue the most important) step is to write it down. For some reason this has the effect of making the goal seem to be more “real” to us. Finally, the last step in the process is actually taking action to make the goal a reality. There may be many steps that you need to take, but taking the first one is what will get you on your way…

Visualization: Can You See What I Can See?

If you were a professional sports figure, then in the past few years you would have found yourself getting caught up in the “visualization” craze that swept through the sports world awhile back. Simply put, this is where you take the time to imagine yourself being successful before it comes time for you to perform. Since the mind can’t tell the different between real and imagined actions, it thinks that you’ve done this before and you’ve just improved your odds of completing your goal.

When it comes to writing a great speech, visualization can be a big help. Speech writing can take quite some time and so having taken the time to visualize yourself successfully creating a great speech helps you to stay focused and on track while writing.

What sport figures go through is called process visualization. What you’ll go through when you are writing a speech is called outcome visualization. You can “see” what you want to produce and that will help you to get there.

Becoming A Speaker Of Action

In the end, all of the goals and visualization in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t get up out of your chair and take some action. It’s this final step of the goals process that separates the people who plan great things from those who achieve great things.

What All Of This Means For You

You can write a great speech. The key to doing this is to make sure that you have clear goals for what you want to achieve.

Knowing your goals is only the first part of a process. Next you need to take the time to visualize yourself creating that great speech and then, most importantly, you need to start to take the steps that will be necessary to get you to where you want to be.

There is no secret to writing a great speech. You have the ability to do it right now. Go set some goals and you’ll be half way to creating that great speech…!

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

Question For You: What kind of goals do you think would help you to create a great speech?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Can we all be honest here? PowerPoint is a part of everyone’s life no matter how you feel about it. We all seem to fall into one of three camps: we fear it, we love it too much, or we just don’t really know what to do with it. With a little help, I think that I can help you out here…

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Speechwriting Magic: 3 Ways To Cast A Spell Over Your Audience

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
Image CreditIt Turns Out That Your Speeches Can Be Magical

It Turns Out That Your Speeches Can Be Magical

When you deliver a speech you stand up straight, you speak clearly, and you have fantastic eye contact. What more could anyone ask for? How about a speech that is both memorable and magical…

Do Your Homework

If you want to create a speech that will do the two most difficult things that any speaker can attempt, inspire and motivate your audience, then you’re going to need to write a killer speech. That speech is only going to be as good as what you are able to put into it. This means that you’ve got some homework to do.
If you wait until when you are sitting down to create your next speech to start to collect the information that you are going to need to make a great speech, then it may already be too late. The really good speechwriters are always collecting information. They read everything that they can get their hands on and those items that catch their attention get filed away somewhere they can find it when they eventually need it.
Your ultimate goal needs to have more information that you’ve collected for your speech than you could possibly use. This will allow you to sort through it all and pick out only the best bits to use.

Magic Speeches Start One Word At A Time

What’s interesting about speech writing is that all too often we are our own worst enemies. We all know what a great speech sounds like and as we are creating a speech we quickly realize that our first draft basically sounds pretty lousy. If you aren’t careful, you can get caught in an almost endless loop of editing in which you try to get a sentence perfect before you write the next one.
Don’t do this. Instead just let the words flow out of you as you create your first pass of the speech. One way to make sure that your speech is able to grab your audience’s attention and holds it is to identify 6 or so main points that will grab attention and which have a good story associated with them.
As you practice your speech, what you are going to be listening for is the “rhythm” that your speech has: it has a lot to do with the pace of the speech and how it all links together.

It’s All About The Ears

I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent in the past working on getting my Power Point slides just perfect. It turns out that what I should have been doing. Your audience really isn’t going to remember what your slides looked like after your speech is over. Instead, it’s your words that will stay with them if you choose them correctly.
If you take the time to make sure that your words are used to draw a sequence of mental pictures in your audiences heads then you will have found a way to leave a lasting impression. An important note here is that we write differently than we speak – we use more slang and contractions when we are speaking. If you write your speech out and then read it as you wrote it, it’s not going to come across as a natural way of speaking.

What All Of This Means For You

Finding a way to cast a magical spell over your audience is what every speaker wants to find a way to do. Creating a great speech is one way to make this happen.
The way to make happen is to get into your audience’s head while you are writing your next speech. Once you do this you’ll understand that your audience doesn’t really want to find out just how smart you are (what can they do with that?), but rather what they really want is to know what they can do with the information that you share with them during your speech…

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

Question For You: What’s your secret to writing a great speech?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Humor, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Well, maybe not – simply because although I do like using humor in a speech; however, it’s a tricky beast and it can turn on you at any moment. Just how is a speaker supposed to determine when some form of humor is inappropriate for the audience that he / she is speaking to?

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What Could Chris Matthews Teach You About Speaking In Public?

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
Image Credit
Chris Matthews Is The TV Star Of The “Hardball With Chris Matthews” Show

Chris Matthews Is The TV Star Of The “Hardball With Chris Matthews” Show

If you’ve ever wished that there was a formula for giving the perfect speech, are you in luck! Chris Matthews is the host of a couple of TV shows including Hardball with Chris Matthews. He gets paid handsomely for the work that he does now, but he got his start as a humble political speechwriter. Based on all of that experience, he’s come up with a way to give the perfect speech…

It’s All In His Book

Chris has written a book called Life’s a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success. In this book he lays out his six-step program for creating the perfect speech.

  • Step #1: Break The Ice – When you first take the stage, nobody knows who you are. The first thing that you need to do is to put your audience at ease. One of the best ways to do this is to make a small joke that is based on current events: the room is too cold, it’s raining outside, the local sports team just won / lost. Whatever you say the purpose is to relax your audience and let them know that you are one of them.
  • Step #2: Show Some Skin – Everyone in the audience didn’t just show up there by accident. They are there for a reason – they want to hear what you are going to talk about. Give them a quick “tweet” about what you’ll be talking about just to capture their attention.
  • Step #3 – Share A Story: You need to be able to explain why YOU are up there on the stage. Tell the audience the story of how you were approached and asked to present. The purpose of telling this story is to get your audience to both settle down for your main speech while at the same time building excitement for what comes next.
  • Step #4 – Let Them Have It With Both Barrels – Now is the time to give your audience what they came for: your & message and your content. You may be delivering a lot of information so be sure to break it up into bite sized pieces.
  • Step #5 – Lighten Up: you’ve got to communicate to your audience that the real meat of your speech is now down. The best way to do this is to tell another story, but this time keep it light and make it fun.
  • Step #6 – Launch Them: At the very end of your speech you want to get your audience excited about what they’ve learned from you. Revisit the reason that you were asked to speak and make sure that you leave them with clear direction on how they can use the information that you’ve given them.

    • What All Of This Means For You

    Ok, so I wasn’t completely honest with you – there’s no magic formula that will work for every speech. However, Chris Matthews does have a pretty good approach.

    Taking the time to initially connect with your audience, telling stories, and then sharing the content that your audience desires is a powerful way to get your message across.

    Chris’ technique should give you a place to start the next time you have to create a speech. Use these six steps to giving a speech in order to truly connect with your audience.

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

    Question For You: Do you think that you should deliver your main content in the middle of your speech or does it belong at the beginning or the end?

    Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

    What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

    If you’ve ever gotten any training on how to give a speech, the instructor probably told you that if used correctly, hand gestures can be a powerful tool. However, as with all such things in life, do you think that it’s possible to use this tool just a bit too much? Where should a speaker draw the line?

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    You Are A Superhero Speaker: You’ve Got Word Power!

    Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
    Image Credit
    Words Have Power – Careful How You Choose To Use Them

    Words Have Power – Careful How You Choose To Use Them

    The Thing About Words

    As speakers we have a tendency to focus on the things that scare us the most – forgetting our words, nervous body tics, etc. and we can often overlook the things that really count: making an impression on our audience. We see these images of sharply dressed orators presenting fantastic multimedia presentations and we sigh to ourselves and say “I could never do that”. Well it turns out that you don’t have to. You can be a powerfully effective speaker who is sought after by many just by taking the time to carefully pick the words that you use.

    Why Do Words Have So Much Power

    I don’t know about you, but when I know that I have a speech to give, I hurry to get the speech written so that I can start to practice it. Hopefully I’ve got a reasonably clear idea in my head of what I want to say and I rush to get it down on paper (ok, so I type it into a computer) before I forget what point I want to make. If I’m nervous about the audience that I’ll be addressing, then I’ll take some time and worry about the “flow” of the speech, but in all honesty that’s pretty much it.

    Clearly I’m skipping the most important point: it’s all about the words that we use. Sure, the structure of the speech is important also just like the design of a house is important; however, it’s what you build the house out of that is just as (if not more) critical. Words have power.

    Just think about the most powerful speeches that we’ve all heard: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” and “I have a dream…”. I don’t think that these words were in the first draft of either of these speeches, rather the authors went back and spent the time to get their words right. The fact that all of these years later we can still recall them shows that they were successful.

    Words Are Like The Paints You Use To Make A Picture

    When we give a speech, the big question is what are we really trying to do? We want to have our audience share an experience with us. We want them to feel and see what we feel and see. They don’t have to agree with us, but we want them to understand how we see a given situation. If we’re sad, we want them to experience sadness. If we’re happy, then we want to feel our happiness.

    As a speaker, at the end of the day all that we have to work with to accomplish this goal of connecting with our audiences are words. What words allow us to do is to paint a picture in the minds of our audience. I like to think of choosing the right words as being the same thing as an artist choosing the right colors with which to create a painting.

    If I gave you just a three colors, red, green, and blue, could you create a painting? Yes, in fact you could combine these three colors to make many more colors and if you had some artistic ability you could probably create a very nice painting. However, something would be missing. If we stepped back once you were done and looked at your creation I think that we’d both agree that you’d captured the essence of whatever you were painting; however, something would be missing – depth.

    If instead of restricting you to just using three colors I let you use every color in the world, just imagine what you could create now! The final product would be much richer – you would have been able to capture both depth and subtlety that was not possible when you had just three colors to work with.

    All of the same things can be said about using words in a speech. If you keep it simple and only use plain, everyday words then your speech will be flat and lack depth. Sure you can do it this way, but who’s going to want to listen to that?

    If instead you take the time to carefully pick and hone your words so that you use just the right word in just the right spot, then you will have made a speech that allows you to connect with your audience. When you are done, your audience will have a mental image that they can take home and treasure forever.

    What All Of This Means For You

    The most powerful tool that a speaker has are the words that make up the speech that he / she is giving. Just racing to throw a speech together and not spending any time to craft the words that you will use means that you are missing out on one of your most powerful speaking tools.

    Words are how we connect with our audience. In order to make a lasting impression on an audience we need to use the right words that will allow us to create a vivid mental image in every member of our audience’s head.

    It doesn’t take that much of an extra effort to make our words work for us. Reviewing your next speech and asking yourself if the words that you are using will allow you to connect with your audience will tell you where you stand. If your words aren’t painting a powerful image for you, then get some more colors to paint with!

    Question For You: In the speeches that you’ve heard, who do you think has done the best job of making their words work for them?

    Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

    What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

    Let’s face it – anyone can give a speech. However, not anyone can give a good speech.  That means that you’re going to have to find a way to really connect with your audience. Guess what – it turns out that this is actually pretty easy to do. The trick is that you have to start to use more “people words” when you speak…

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