Episode #107: What Is the Right Length For Your Speech

This was a gala affair for a very worthy cause. A grand setting. Beautiful ladies in evening gowns, men resplendent in their tuxedos. The host of the charity event was duly introduced, to give an opening speech. The speech actually started quite well. He told a powerful story about a young person struggling in their life. The trials, tribulations and barriers described in the lead up to the point of the story were gripping. The punch line was delivered and it was a direct hit to the heart. The person he was describing to us was a very close relative. This had real impact with the audience, it made it personal. Taking an abstract idea and then driving it home with reference to your own reality, brings an audience to you. They are sympathetic, some will be empathetic, but all will be moved.

This was a high point of emotional engagement and then he continued. And continued and continued. You could feel the power of the speech, the grip on the audience, was slowly being eroded. The attention of this luminous gathering was being lost, reduced, dissipated. Sitting there, I wondered, at what point should he have stopped while he had everyone in the palm of his hand? When it is us up there, how do we know when is enough is enough?

Perhaps his attachment to the loved one was driving him to keep going, elaborating and expanding on his message. Maybe he felt there were many things which needed to be said to this audience. No doubt there were many worthy points to be conveyed that evening.

The problem is, this is what we want. But what does our audience want? If we want to reach them, we have to give the audience what they want, so we can keep them with us. Once we indulge ourselves and prioritse our own interests, no matter how admirable, we are in danger of disconnecting our audience from our key message. This is what happened on this occasion. He should have finished on a high, while he had everyone’s emotional support.

For most speeches we are asked to do, we will have a strict time limit set by the organisers. We don’t have a chance to waffle on and keep babbling beyond that time dispensation. When you are the organiser however, there are no limits on you and this is dangerous. We need to be sensitive to how long we can expect to absorb our audience in where we are taking them with our talk.

The issue goes back to design of the talk. Even if you don’t have someone foisting a time limit on you, you need to foist one on yourself. Once you get to the arc in the story, the countdown to disinterest starts immediately. We have hit them with a powerful point or a powerful story. We have got them emotionally or logically. This is when we must strike and deliver the key call to action. The linking of the emotional or logical grip on them and the action requirement we have for them, has to be made as proximate as possible. Once we start padding out the story or start adding additional things, we lose their focus.

So in revisiting this particular case, the plan would be to lead the audience along a path of our own design. They don’t know where we are going with the story, when suddenly we reveal the surprise which leaps out and grabs their emotions. Now we have their full attention. This is the time to deliver the key call to action. Then we wrap it up, so that the last thing they have ringing in their ear is the action item we want them to take. We do this while their hearts are still feeling warm, benevolent and predisposed to do what we are saying.

If the point of the talk is to hear our own voice and get no traction with the good cause we are promoting, then that is a different scenario. If however, we want people to get with our programme and part with their cash or whatever, then we need to bring the speech to a clear end. This speech I have used as a case study could have been a third of the length and had one thousand times more impact.

When working out how long to talk on a point, we have to be parsimonious with our scope. Better to leave an audience tonguing for more, than feeling sated or even worse, feeling overfed. The message we want to get across is our one point of focus. In our planning, we carefully arrange everything prior to that point so we can set it up during our delivery. We want no more and no less to get the buy in.

Take your speech in the design phase and keep chopping bits out, until you have laser beam clarity around what you want to achieve with your listeners. Is this hard to do? Absolutely, because we fall in love with our own prose or the sound of our voice or our opinion or all three. We have to be disciplined and need consistency of view – the audience view, rather than our own. Less is more is true when speaking, especially if you are in the philanthropy business.