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The Best Speeches Contain The Stories That You Can Dig Up From Your Life

Congratulations – you’ve been asked to give a speech. Got one to give? Unless someone has asked you to deliver a speech that you’ve already given multiple times, you’re probably in the spot that most speakers find themselves all too often – standing in the middle of tracks while the train known as your speaking date comes racing towards you. What’s an accidental communicator to do?

What Makes A Speech Memorable

Let’s all agree on one thing first: if your speech is not memorable, then it’s really not worth giving. Starting from that point, you may start to feel some pressure – how the heck are you going to make your next speech memorable?

It turns out that there are a lot of ways to do this; however, the simplest way to do it is to work more of “you” into your speech. This means that you’ve got to find ways to share just exactly what makes you you with your audience. This boils down to one thing: you need to tell your audience some of your stories.

As I think back over all of the speeches that I’ve had an opportunity to listen to over my life, the handful that really stand out are the ones in which the speaker did a good job of sharing. You’ve got to remember that before they opened their mouth, I didn’t know anything about them. However, the personal stories that they told were so engrossing that they hooked me – I not only listened, but I’ve remembered their stories over the years since they spoke.

How To Go About Uncovering Your Stories

Fantastic you say, but I don’t have any stories to tell. Or at least no stories that anyone is going to want to hear. I hear you there – once upon a time I thought the same thing.

It turns out that your life story is a great story that, told well, everyone will want to hear. Now, you’ve been asked to give a speech and no, they haven’t really asked you to come and spend the time talking about yourself. However, adding your personal stories to the speech will make any speech have more impact.

One of the reasons that incorporating your personal stories into a speech can lend so much impact what you are saying is because you were there – you actually lived what you are talking about. This means that when you explain what happened, you will describe it using words that will build a vivid mental image for your audience.

Additionally, as you tell your story your body language will naturally synch with your words. This means that your audience will be getting a reinforcing message from your body even as you speak.

What All Of This Means To You

All too often when we get asked to deliver a speech we focus on doing the research needed to create a good speech but we neglect to do what it takes to make a great speech. A great speech is one that includes more of our personal content in it.

In order to personalize a story, we need to include more of our own stories. This means that we need to spend some time thinking about the things that have happened in our lives that would support the topic that we’ll be speaking on.
Speakers who can work their personal stories into a speech are the ones that will make a lasting impact. As long as you are going to go to the effort of giving a speech, doesn’t this seem like a good thing to do?

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

Question For You: Do you think that it might be possible to work too much of your personal story into a speech?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I think that it was Bruce Springsteen who in his song “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)” lamented that although he now had access to 500 channels, there really was nothing on that he wanted to watch. Well of course not, you weren’t on TV yet. However, in the very near future this may all change…

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Have you ever sat through a dry an boring speech? Of course you have, we all have. Did you spend any time trying to figure out why the speech was so dry? I’m going to bet that at least one of the reasons is that the speaker didn’t connect with the presenter – the speech content itself was impersonal. Did you know that it’s possible for a speaker to go too far in the other direction also?

A Speech That Nobody Wants To Hear

Once upon a time I had the misfortune to attend a speech that was being given by a presenter who had been married four times. Now the fact that he had been married so many times was no big deal, but the speech was on how to choose the correct investment plan for a 401k. During the speech, the speaker must have “revealed” aspects about his four different marriages at least 30 times. To this day I really couldn’t tell you anything about the different funds that one could use as part of their 401k plan, but I can vividly recall aspects of each of this guy’s marriages. This was a clear case of TMI: too-much-information. No the speech wasn’t boring, but the amount of personal information that was being shared overpowered the message. There’s got to be a balance.

So Where Do You Draw The Line?

All of us desperately want to avoid giving boring speeches. However, we also want to make sure that our speeches have an impact – and if we’re sharing too much personal information this isn’t going to happen. Here are some tips on how to draw the line between too much and too little personal information correctly:

• Match Your Speech Type: certain types of speeches naturally lend themselves more readily to having personal information included in them. Speeches in which you are trying to persuade or entertain your audience are great vehicles for more personal information. Speeches to inform are not.
• Match Your Audience: Who is in your audience (and why are they there)? If you have a business audience who are looking for ways to keep their business afloat during a severe economic downturn, then your childhood stories are not going to be appropriate. However, if your are speaking to a Garden Club filled with mothers, then perhaps a childhood story might be the perfect way to establish rapport.
• Stay On Topic: Sharing personal information just because it makes a great story (like my 401k presenter did) is a bad idea. You need to make sure that the story ties in with what your speech is all about. If it doesn’t, then skip it.
• Listen To Your Audience: In the end, it all comes down to what your audience wants to hear. If, while you are giving your speech, you start to detect that your audience is not staying with you, then cut back on the personal information and instead focus on your core content.

Final Thoughts

This is one of those tough areas where you are going to have to rely on your speaker’s judgement. Sometimes you’ll get it right and sometimes you might be off the mark and include either too little or too much personal information in one of your speeches. However, keep at it and refine each speech the next time you give it. In the end, you’ll know how much personal information to include in order to be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

Questions For You

When was the last time you sat through a boring speech? Why was it boring? Would it have been better if the speaker included more personal information? Have you ever attended a speech where too much personal information was shared? How did that make you feel? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking. Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If there is one thing that presenters dread more than forgetting their lines, it’s having someone add to their speech without an invitation. What should you do when someone in the audience starts to deliberately take away from your carefully rehearsed speech? Start crying and go home is always a possibility; however, I’ve got some better ways to deal with this situation for you…

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Stories Can Be A Powerful Part Of Any Business Presentation

One question that I keep getting asked over and over by speakers that I am working with is if storytelling is such a powerful communication tool, then why isn’t it used more in business settings? It’s a good question, but the answer is a little bit complicated.

Where Did All The Stories Go?

I can’t tell you how many business presentations I’ve sat though that at the end I couldn’t have told you what was talked about if my life depended on it. It’s not that the speaker was necessarily bad, it’s just that nothing that they said caught my imagination and so nothing stuck.

This is where stories come in – people remember stories long after you get done talking. We remember them because it’s a fundamental way that humans have exchanged information for as long as we’ve been around.

For some reason, people have decided that stories don’t have a place in the environment of business – perhaps they don’t think that they are “grown up” enough and that facts and figures should only be used. This is completely wrong.

What Is The Value Of A Business Story?

Dr. Caren Neile has been looking into the use of stories in the workplace and she reports that Makingstories.net president Terrence Gargiulo has identified 9 key values to using a story in a business presentation:

1. They empower the speaker.
2. They can be used to create a particular environment.
3. They can be used to bond individuals together.
4. They can help your audience to engage in active listening.
5. They can be used to resolve differences between both individuals and groups.
6. They can encode information.
7. They can act as tools to help with brainstorming.
8. They can be used as weapons.
9. They can be used to start or enhance a healing process.

The professional storytellers define the act of storytelling as being “… a face-to-face oral narrative that employs non-verbal communication and imagination“. One side effect of this definition is that when stories are told in a live business setting, they are much more powerful than when they are just written down.

What Kind Of Stories Work In Business Presentations?

Dr. Neile reports that Annette Simmons, who is the president of the company Group Process Consulting, believes that there are six types of stories that can be used in a business environment:

1. Who I Am: this type of story is used to gain an audience’s trust by having the speaker explain where they are coming from.
2. Why I Am Here: this story type is a way to communicate your agenda to your audience.
3. The Vision: this story paints a vision of the future that the audience can see and can then decide that they want to be a part of it.
4. Values-In-Action: this story shares the good things that can happen when the audience has shared values and the bad things that can happen when those values are violated.
5. I Know What You Are Thinking: this story shows how connected the speaker is to the audience and that he/she has their best interests in mind.

How Can We Use Stories During Business Presentations?

Stories that your audience can relate to are the best kind of stories to use. This means that you need to spend the time to uncover the true stories that already exist within the organization: the successes, the failures, and people behaving both badly and wonderfully.

The power of business stories is that they provide one of the most effective ways to achieve agreement about how to resolve issues and meet goals. It’s  no longer a question of IF they should be used, but rather a question of HOW MUCH they should be used.

Questions For You

Have you ever used a story in a business presentation in order to make a point? How was it received? Did you feel awkward using a story? Does your senior management use stories when they are discussing the company’s vision and goals? Does this make you buy in to what the company is trying to accomplish? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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         The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I just got back from spending the better part of a week up in Chicago at a big health care conference (HIMSS09). This was an amazing opportunity for me to sit back and watch somewhere in the neighborhood of about 100 different presenters get up and do their very best job at communicating. One of these presenters was Dennis Quaid – the actor…

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The Perfect Speech Needs To Contain The Perfect Stories

Last week I had the opportunity to give the perfect speech. Now, you might be offended by this statement and are probably wondering just how I could become so full of myself, so perhaps I should explain myself. I had spoken in this venue four times before, I had been invited to speak again because they liked what I had had to say before, and I knew that I was going to be speaking about a month before I actually got up on stage. These are all the elements of a perfect speech.

Since I already basically knew what I wanted to tell this audience, this time around I really worked on HOW I said it – I wanted to make an impact in their lives. Awhile ago I had read an article in which Patricia Fripp boiled down what makes a really memorable speech: tell a story, make your point, tell a story, make your point, etc.

So I did. I ended up working six stories into my speech and then following them up with the point that I wanted to make. In order to make sure that I would fit the 30 minutes that I had available, I did some quick math: 30 minutes x 150 words/minute = 4,500 words in speech. I then did something that I’ve almost never done before.

I wrote out my speech word for word. I did this because I had read somewhere else that in order for you to “tune” a speech, you need to know exactly what you are going to say. This came out to be about five single spaced pages of text.

How I memorized this speech so that I didn’t have to look at my notes even once during my speech is a story for another post…

Do you tell stories during your speeches? How many stories do you work into a typical speech? Do you write your speeches out? How do you ensure that when you give the speech it doesn’t seem like you are reading them off of the page? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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So why do we even bother communicating information to others? The answer is simple: we often need others to see things the way that we do. Study after study has shown that most people (myself included) believe that we’re so smart that we can not be sold. The great communicators know that the truth turns out to be that we can be persuaded to do something if, and only if, we don’t recognize that a “sales” technique is being used on us. Why should this matter to you? Simple – when you are presenting information and you take the time to incorporate a few persuasion techniques then you are taking advantage of what modern psychological research has revealed about how we can make the message that we’re delivering both more credible and believable. Let’s talk about how you can accomplish this…

Use a rifle, not a shotgun: If you want your audience to accept your ideas and make them their own, you need to aim at a narrow target. This means that you need to stop doing what we all instinctively do: back the truck up and dump everything that we know about a topic all over our audience. It turns out that this will just end up overwhelming them and not do much to bring them over to our side. Instead, what you should do is some field work before you present your information and find out what’s important to your audience. This will allow you to focus your persuasion on those and only those points.

Make It Story Time: Stories are a fantastic way for us to learn and they can be very effective way to persuade someone. However, if it sounds like you are giving a sales pitch, then you can be assured that telling a story won’t work. Instead, if you focus on a story that has real meaning, then your audience’s unconscious mind will automatically draw the necessary connections without any help from you and the result will be that they end up doing the persuasion for you. The key to telling an effective story is to once again pinpoint what matters to your audience and then tell a story about a similar idea or concept. This indirect approach is the secret to winning your audience over to your side and keeps them from feeling like you are selling to them.

How have you won an audience over in the past? Have you ever tried something that did not work out the way that you had intended? Has someone tried to persuade you to do something with a story but blown it by turning it into an obvious sell job? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: persuasion, communication skills, selling, stories

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Greetings from Las Vegas! I’m currently attending a very large trade show that is put on by the giant storage company EMC. This year it’s being held in Las Vegas and so far I’m only down about $100 or so; however, the conference goes for another two days so I can financially hurt myself still more!

The thing that I like best about attending this show is that if I move quickly, I can get a front row seat for the keynote addresses that are given by EMC upper level management team. I’m only vaguely interested in what they have to say, but I’m VERY interested in how they say it and if any of it sticks. Yesterday was the big kickoff: Joe Tucci who is the Chairman, Presidant, and CEO of this $15B firm. I had very high hopes: I mean, if anyone could buy their way to being an effective technical communicator, then Joe is the man.

So how did he do? Sadly, I believe that I’d have to give him a C. Maybe a C+, but that’s it. He did a fantastic job of delivering a speech from a technical point of view: clear diction, no filler words, very little pacing, and his slides / graphics were top notch (but of course — he’s in charge of a $15B company!). So why does he just get a grade of C? He didn’t connect with his audience. He talked for about an hour and must have hit on about 40 different points during his talk about EMC the company and all of it’s products and upcoming product. However, I’m betting that 30 minutes after he was done, you could pull aside anyone who had attended and they’d be unable to remember more than one or two things that Joe said. When it was over, it was over — the world had not be changed. What a waste!

I need to give Joe one little out here: he is in charge of the company. What he says can cause a change in the company’s stock price and so he always has to be careful about what he says. However, that doesn’t mean that he can get away with being boring.

Complaining is easy. Now how about if we talk about what Joe could have done differently to have been a more effective communicator. #1: know your audience, tailor your communication to your audience. Joe’s audience was VERY technical. These are the people who live, eat, breath storage systems for a living. Joe talked at a very high level for his whole speech and thus didn’t connect with anyone in the audience. He needed to at least once drop down into their world, show that he knows the types of challenges that they are facing, and then move on.

#2: Where’s the passion? Joe delivered his entire speech in a flat, non-emotional tone. Yawn! Come on, Joe’s from Boston the home of notorous hot heads. Oh, and he’s a sales guy to his core. Get some of that passion to come out — get people fired up! Tell the audience that HP and IBM make lousy products and that they made the right decision by selecting EMC products. Whatever — just show that you really care about this stuff.

#3: Tell a story. Nowhere in Joe’s speech did he include a story. Story’s are how we have always learned. If Joe had included a story, then this is what everyone would have remembered long after he was done.

So to answer the original question: no, CEO’s don’t necessarily do a better job of communicating than you or I do. Good communication always comes down to the three basics: know your audience, care about what you are taking about, and use stories to give your audience a way to remember what you have said.

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