Episode #128: How To Prepare With Your Coach For Your Big Speech

There is a major event looming on your schedule and as President, you will be expected to deliver the keynote address to a very important audience. This was the situation recently when I was coaching a major corporation’s President for his speech. I realised that the people around the President, don’t have a clear idea of what is needed to properly prepare for the big occasion. The time allotted is also never enough. It is made worse by the flunkies around the President, trying to cram other superfluous information into the briefing for the speech. Superfluous from my point of view anyway. The President’s time is at a premium and the key need is to focus on delivery practice with video review and massive coaching.

Here are some ideas to make the whole process more effective for the busy Presidents who are called upon to present in high stakes occasions.

Before getting to the session with the coach, go through the speech. I recommend not reading it to your audience, if possible. Having key points to hit in your own words is enough, especially when it is going to be interpreted into another language. All that crafty crafting of words and wrangling with semantics of expression in English gets lost the minute the interpreters get hold of it.

If it is a speech you need to read, there is a strong possibility a speech writer will have been employed to work on it together with the munchkins in your organisation. Don’t use this for the delivery practice sessions. Get hold of it before hand and start reworking it. What you are looking to do is add more of your authentic voice to the content. Get things expressed the way you would normally express them. This process will cause you to own the words and they will be much easier to recall and deliver as a result.

I was looking at the speech provided in this coaching occasion and it was average. The biggest weakness was the start. It was totally mundane and boring. Nothing to grab your attention. Nothing to smash through all the detritus of the day up until that point. We all have so many things on our mind today, the speaker really has to work hard to break into that mental flow and grab our attention as a member of the audience.

Craft a powerful statement or use a great quote to start the proceedings. Then you can introduce who you are and the name of your company. It is a simple thing, but the impact is entirely different. For example, I could introduce my speech like this, “Thank you for coming today, we are very happy you could join us, my name is Greg Story, I am the CEO of Dale Carnegie Training Japan”. Or I could start like this, “Corporate education is going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last fifty. Thank you for coming today, we are very happy you could join us, my name is Greg Story, I am the CEO of Dale Carnegie Training Japan”. In the second case, I have grabbed the attention of the listeners and they are wondering about what these miraculous changes are going to be. They are concentrating on what I am saying so that they don’t miss anything.

If you are using a teleprompter, with the see through glass type mounted on a stand on the podium in front of you, this presents a few challenges. This was the situation recently during the coaching session. One problem is that you don’t want to have your hands anywhere near the podium, as the vibration will make the teleprompter images shake and the words become harder to read. Also the position of the teleprompter to the left or right drags your gaze to that side of the audience the whole time. If you have had the opportunity to craft the speech you can divert from the script or remember parts of it, so that you can engage with other sections of the audience.

Ideally, you will have two of these teleprompters, one on the left and one on the right mounted on stands in front of the podium. That improves the audience engagement quite a bit, but the danger becomes you forget to talk to the people seated in the middle of the venue. Your head is constantly swiveling from left to right and back like a puppet.

Watching the playback on video does take time to do and as mentioned time is always at a premium in these situations. However, the video review and coaching from the instructor are very helpful here. You can see the way you were doing it before and then after the coaching you can see with your own eyes how big a difference it makes. This makes it easier to stop your old, bad habits and create new, better habits. Seeing is believing.

Give lots of vocal and gesture energy to key words or phrases in the speech. This becomes especially important if you are having your talk translated. The audience sees you deliver it and then hears the words in their own language. Your gestures and energy though need no interpretation, so in that sense, you can appeal directly to the audience, without any intervention from someone else. If the words refer to something with scale, then show big arm movements to match. If a target was achieved that was high, show “high” by pushing up one arm as high as possible, to make an imaginary measure. If it was a good result, then have a big smile and a lot of gesture strength to back that up.

The idea is to take this coaching and then project it further with additional practice. You can do this on your own, using video or have people there to give you good/better feedback. Running through the speech numerous times will be so beneficial and will create the momentum to make this speech a triumph. I saw one of those quotes you get in diaries attributed to a Japanese proverb, which said “More sweat in training, less blood in battle”. I have never been able to find the Japanese original of that saying, by the way, nevertheless the idea is perfect for speech preparation. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.