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The Microphone Is The Only Tool That You Need To Inspire Your Audience

What is the purpose of having you create a speech, practice it until you have got it “just right”, and then go through the mental and physical challenge of actually delivering the speech? Hmm, perhaps our purpose for going through all of this effort should always be the same – we want to change the world.

The trick, of course, is to figure out just how to go about making this happen. It turns out that there’s really only one way – you’ve got to find a way to inspire your audience. As you might well imagine, that’s easy to say, but hard to do. Maybe I should offer you some hints…

Enthusiasm Counts

How much energy can your audience detect coming off of you from the stage? What you say is actually less important than how you say it. If you are giving a lackluster performance or if you are just going through the motions in order to get this over with, then you’re audience will detect it and there’s no way that you’re going to inspire them.

Find your passion for the message that you are giving. After that, make sure that it shows when you are speaking: in your words and in your actions.

Tell Them Where To Go (In A Good Way)

If you want your audience to do something, then you’re going to have to tell them what to do. This means that you’ve got to use your speech to describe to them where they want to get to. You many not have all of the answers for them, but if you can describe what the future will look like for them, they will be more than willing to follow you.

What’s In It For Me?

If you want to get an audience behind you and your ideas, then you’re going to have to be able to answer the age-old question: what’s in it for me? As you are creating your speech you need to be asking yourself one simple question: “why should anyone care about what you are going to be saying?” If you can answer this question, in a convincing way, then you will have found the key to inspiring your audience.

It’s All About The Stories

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the most powerful tool that a speaker has is the stories that we tell. Our stories, unlike the rest of our speech, have the ability to connect with our audience at a deep emotional level. This is exactly the kind of connection that you want to make and stories are the tool that will allow you to make it.

Be Optimistic

No matter how bad things might either be currently or might become in the future, your speech needs to hold out the chance that there is a better tomorrow somewhere down the road. You don’t need to gloss over the obvious – everyone can see tough times or big challenges. Instead what you need to do is to show everyone how optimistic you are about their future. By doing this what will happen is that your optimism will spread and soon everyone will be sharing it.

What All Of This Means For You

When we think about changing the world, we always seem to think that it is something that “other” people do. Well guess what, there is absolutely no reason why you couldn’t be that person who makes a difference with your speech.

In order to cause a change to occur, any sort of change, you are going to need to find a way to inspire your audience. This isn’t nearly as scary or intimidating as it sounds – yes, you really can do it.

As long as you are going to go to the effort of preparing and delivering a speech, you may as well make sure that you are going to end up changing the world. Take the time to do this the right way, and your audience will leave your speech forever changed…

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

Question For You: How do you think that you could tell if you had been successful in inspiring your audience?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Have you ever had the misfortune to hear yourself talking? Can you remember what your facial expression was as you heard your voice come out of the recording device – pain, anguish, disbelief? Almost universally we all dislike the way our voices sound and we just can’t imagine that an audience would be willing to sit through one of our speeches. What’s up with all of this…?

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President Obama Sure Knows How To Give A Speech

Who do you think is the greatest communicator of all time? For most of us, we’d pick someone who has lived in the last 100 years because that’s pretty much all that we know. We’ve had some great ones in this time period: Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, etc. However, if I had to pick the best communicator out there right now, I believe that President Obama would win. Now the question for you, independent of your political beliefs, is how can you learn to speak more like him…?

Welcome To The World Of Politics

Linda McGurk spends a lot of time studying how politicians like Obama work their magic, and she’s come to some interesting conclusions. The first one is that if you want to have the impact with your speeches that Obama has with his, you are going to have to learn to be sincere.

One of the key take-aways from this guidance is that you really do need to believe in what you are talking about. Audiences get bombarded with so many different messages these days that they have reacted by developing sophisticated fraud detection capabilities. They can detect if you don’t believe the words that you are saying.

Keep in mind that it’s not just what you say when you are up in the front of the room or on the stage that counts. Everything that you’ve done up until that point may be known to the audience and it counts also. If you are known to be an avid hunter and you show up to give a speech on why people should be vegetarians, then you are not going to come across as being sincere.

Do You Care, I Mean REALLY Care?

How much passion do you have inside of you? Why are you keeping it all bottled up in there? If you want me to listen to you speak about something, you had better be passionate about the topic.

When you let your emotions out, when you let your audience know that you really do care about what you are talking about, that’s when you can connect with them. It is all too easy to do a great job of researching everything that you need for a speech and then simply delivering a lot of solid facts to your audience. That shows that you care, doesn’t it?

The answer is no. If you open up and explain to me why something is important to you, then I’ll listen. If I can understand how deeply you feel about something then I’ll at least listen to you. I may still not agree with you, but I will at least listen.

How Far Can You See: What’s Your Vision?

When you are giving a speech, you need to be painting a picture of the future for your audience. Once again, if you are just unloading a bunch of facts that you’ve picked up during your research for this speech, then you won’t be able to make a lasting impression.

One of the best examples of a fantastic vision expressed in a speech is John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address in which he told the country to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

This is exactly why people come to hear speeches — they are looking to hear a vision laid out for them. This is what makes the good politicians like Obama stand above so many other speakers — they’ve got the vision thing down cold.

It’s All In How You Do It

This all comes back to the basic point: what do you need to do in order to capture some of that politician speaking magic for yourself. There are three things that you can do immediately to make your speeches have more of that Obama impact:

• Have A Conversation: The more that you are able to work a conversational tone into your speeches, the deeper the connection that you’ll be able to make with your audience. Using fancy words or “talking over their heads” will only serve to increase the distance between you and them. Have a conversation with them and you’ll be able to make your point.
• Add Some Punctuation: Sure, we generally only think about punctuation when we are writing, but politicians show us that it plays a role in our speeches also. Adding periods, semicolons, and new paragraphs to the way that you deliver your speech will allow your audience to catch up and follow along with your thinking.
• Pause For Effect: Some of the worst speakers never seem to take a breath when they are speaking. Adding more pauses to your speech is a fantastic way to make it have more of an impact. Pausing allows your audience to laugh, consider a point, or just catch up and ponder what you’ve just said.

What All Of This Means For You

If you really want to learn how to speak like Obama, then run for the office of President. However, if you need to keep your day job, then perhaps simply incorporating these suggestions into your next speech will do the trick.

It turns out that it’s not all that hard to learn to speak like a politician. The overall goal is to connect with your audience using sincerity, passion, and vision. To do this in your next speech, all you have to do is have a conversation with your audience and add some punctuation and pauses.

I can’t guarantee that you’ll get elected to an office by incorporating these speaking techniques, but I can assure you that you’ll win the vote of your next audience.

Do you think that having a vision is all that important or can it be skipped?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So here’s a question for you to ponder: what is more important – the words that you say or how you say them? This is one of the classic questions that gets asked about public speaking. Could you pick up a fantastically written speech and deliver it in a way that would create the same (or better) reaction in the audience that the original presenter got?

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