Give Your Speech, Change the World. Nick Morgan
world by piecing together stories. In fact, from the cradle on up, we deduce cause and effect by creating primitive stories about what we see around us. Sitting in a high chair, we push over the cup of milk and watch in delight and fascination as the white liquid runs over the tray and down to the floor. Then the adults around us make a lot of noise and rush around cleaning things up. What a story!
From there, we develop increasingly sophisticated stories to explain how the world around us works. And we learn the stories our society tells us as a way of further understanding the apparent chaos of modern life.
Good public speaking connects with each individual audience member’s need to understand what’s being said in terms of stories. Think of the journey you’re going to take your audience on (the one from why to how) as a kind of story. Your audience will understand it better if it has all the parts of a good story—a strong protagonist, a clear dilemma for him or her to work on, and a happy ending.
In Western society, we have some basic stories that all of us learn at a very early age and that are reinforced by virtually endless repetition throughout our lives. The most fundamental is the Quest, but there are four others that we also have woven into our deepest cultural understandings. If you can weave some of the elements of a good Quest story, or one of the other fundamental ones, into your presentation, your audience will “get” the idea you’re trying to get across much more quickly and much more powerfully. In addition, the likelihood that they’ll remember what you have to say will go up enormously. I’ll say more about these stories in chapter 6.
Give your speech to the members of the audience by allowing them to become active.
Audiences are filled by and large with people who like to be active. They think of themselves as decision makers. For a good deal of your presentation, you’re asking these active decision makers to be passive. A good speech therefore describes a journey not only from why to how, but also from passive to active.
This is especially true of smaller audiences and more casual occasions—the typical business fare of ten or twenty people listening to a leader bring them up to date or exhort them to sell more widgets. Larger audiences in more formal occasions probably expect to be entertained (well or badly) rather than moved to action.
Far too many speakers, in a misguided desire to maintain control of what often seems like a potentially chaotic situation, refuse to “give” the speech to the audience. Instead, they hold on to it, keeping it for themselves. The result is at best an informative lecture. It is not a speech that moves people to action; it cannot therefore be a persuasive speech, except in the very limited sense that it could persuade the audience that the speaker is a learned person.
If you want to move your audience, you must learn to “give” the speech to them. Allow them full participation. Let them act upon your ideas. Move them from passive to active.
The single most important thing you can do to prepare a speech is to rehearse.
First of all, let me say that no matter how much I preach the virtues of rehearsal, some of those reading this book will nonetheless not do it. Why? On the face of it, it seems inconceivable that an executive could approach something as potentially important as a public presentation—even an “everyday” one—without extensive rehearsal. And yet many do. In my seventeen years of preparing, teaching, and coaching presentations and public speeches ranging from client sales pitches to campaign kick-offs and State of the Union addresses, I have seen more speeches fail from lack of rehearsal than any other single problem.
Do you think an internal speech to your staff doesn’t “count”? Then you’ve just lost an opportunity to change the world in the way that is most important to you. You have the most effect on the world closest to home, after all.
I’ve heard all the excuses, from “it’s just a little throwaway” to “if I rehearse I lose my spontaneity.” If a presentation is worth giving, it’s worth rehearsing at least once. If it’s not, then why would you be giving it?
Fundamentally, people avoid rehearsal because speech making is fraught with anxiety, and executives, politicians, and educational leaders feel about anxiety the way just about everyone else does: They try to avoid it. So, believe it or not, they put off the anxiety, greatly compounding the risk that the actual performance will be less than optimal, rather than face the worst of it during rehearsal.
Don’t do it. Please. Rehearse. It’s the single most important step you can take to become a better speaker. If you rehearse, you’ll be able to give the speech to the audience. If you don’t, you’ll still be getting to know it yourself. The difference is enormous in terms of what the audience can get out of your presentation.
Second, let’s agree that you won’t rehearse in front of a mirror alone. That trick fails to mimic adequately what public speaking is actually like. But more than that, it actually can create a problem for some: greater self-consciousness.
Self-forgetfulness is the secret to great speech making.
Successful public speaking comes ultimately from focusing less on yourself and more on the audience. For now, take it as the big Zen insight of this book. If you can forget about yourself—and even your speech—in the moment of giving it and instead focus on what the audience is getting from you, your presentations will be transformed into joyous performances.
The point of rehearsal is to take the first steps toward that optimal state by working through all the self-conscious moments and potentially awkward transitions that otherwise will trip you up during the presentation itself.
Rehearsal, in the first instance, is where you find out what your story is, as you put the whole thing together for the first time orally. It’s not enough to do it in your head. Only in speaking aloud will you discover where the gaps are, the pieces that you thought connected but in fact do not.
Stage actors typically rehearse for up to six weeks before they begin to perform. They leave absolutely nothing to chance. And yet a CEO of a Fortune 500 company will stand up in front of his stockholders with literally billions at stake (not to mention his job) and “wing it.”
And you will too, despite having read these words. So let me urge you once again: Rehearse, even for those “little” presentations. You can either change the world a little bit at a time, or you can leave no trace that you were ever here.
The speaker’s focus should be on the audience; the audience’s should be on the content.
Let’s be optimistic and imagine that you have rehearsed your content, and you’ve found the kinesthetic moments that will allow you to connect powerfully with your audience during the performance itself. And now, suddenly, it’s time to present.
My fifth-grade math teacher loved multicolored chalk. He’d stand in front of us, holding the chalk in his hands, more or less at parade rest at his sides. As he stood there, a multicolored sheen would develop on the sides of his trousers.
Naturally, we, his students, made fun of this addition to his garments. But the real fun began when we asked him questions and he thought about the answers. Then, his hands would creep up to his face. It’s a common gesture connected with thinking or other kinds of preoccupation—you bring your hands to your chin, your cheeks, your hair. Anywhere around your face.
Thus, the multicolored sheen would begin to develop on his face. Well, that was pretty great. But if we asked him a question that really gave him pause, gradually, his hand would steal over to his nose, and he would stick the piece of chalk right up it.
We loved it! Our whole aim in math class became asking questions that would cause the teacher to stick chalk up his nose. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn much fifth-grade math as a result. But I did learn something very telling about public speaking.
Visual distractions (indeed, any kind of distraction) can easily prevent an audience from getting even the little they can get under optimal conditions from a speech.
Or to put it another, more positive, way: As you speak, you send out a host