Episode #160: How To Give A Motivational Speech

I was attending a Convention in Phuket and the finale was the closing inspirational speech for the week of events. I had to deliver the same speech myself at the Ho Chi Minh Convention a few years ago. This is a daunting task. Actually, when your audience is chock full of presentation’s training experts from Dale Carnegie, it is simply terrifying. The length of the speech is usually around ten minutes, which though it seems shortish, can feel quite long and challenging to design. Being an inspirational speech, it adds that extra degree of difficulty. It comes up though. The organisers ask you to deliver the closing, rousing call to action to fire the troops up for another year. Are you ready to meet the challenge?

There are some key components we must assemble. There must be one clear and compelling message. In a speech like this, we can’t rattle off the twenty things everyone should be doing. They can never remember them all and the whole effort becomes too diffused. It is a single call to action, so what is the action or idea we want to propose. We might use slides or we may not, it will really depend on what we want to say. Often in these cases, we can use images very effectively without any words and we supply the narrative during our comments. Photos and images are powerful for capturing attention and people’s emotions.

A call to action is an emotional commitment that goes beyond logic. We need to hit the bulls eye of what grabs people’s hearts. This is delivered through stories. We take people on a journey of our construction. We plan it such that it leads them to feel what we want them to feel and to think what we want them to think. This planning creates a funnel effect where we keep pulling people back to our central message.

Storytelling technique is a terrific vehicle for the speaker to lead people’s hearts and minds. We populate the story with people who are familiar to the audience. Ideally they can see these people in their mind’s eye. They might be people they have actually met or have heard of. They may be historical events, figures, VIPS, celebrities or people of note who are familiar to our audience.

In Ho Chi Minh for my closing speech at Convention, the timing was such that we had previously suffered from the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan. I spoke with emotion about that event. About having a nuclear cloud pass over your head polluting all the drinking water. Of having massive aftershocks every day for weeks, of the relentless black churning oily water engulfing communities, of the chaos and destruction. I brought that experience alive to drive home my central point.

We flesh out the surroundings of the story to make it real. We are all used to watching visual storytelling on television or in movies, so we are easily transported to a scene of the author’s creation, if the words create pictures. We describe the room or location in some detail in order to transfer minds to that place.

We place the event into a time sequence with a peg for the audience to grab hold of, to make the story come alive. We might do this by nominating the date or we might specify the season or the time of day or night. This type of context is important because it takes the listener down more layers of the story to make it more relevant. They can draw on their memory of similar occasions to approximate this story.

The delivery is where all of this comes together. It is a call to action so the speaker needs to get into high gear to make that happen. There will be an element of theatrics involved for effect. This is not some dubious trick or variant on a parlour game to distract the punters. No, it is taking the key message and driving it hard through exaggeration. Our speaker in Phuket toward the end of his talk dropped down to the push up position and pumped out twenty rapid fire pushups on his fingertips. I don’t know if you have ever tried this fingertip version, but it was pretty impressive for a man of his age group and was totally congruent with his key point about stress equals strength. It was dramatic, it was daring, but it also added that X factor to his talk.

There must be vocal modulation too, from conspiratorial whispers to hitting key words or phrases with tremendous intensity. Gestures will be larger than normal and more dramatic. The speaker will be eyeing the audience with great intensity, with a fire burning in their pupils of complete certainty of the veracity of the key message. There will be a level of super engagement with the audience, to the point they are cheering and responding throughout the talk rather than consolidated clapping only at the end.

Crafting a key message, a powerful call to action for an end worth pursuing and then wrapping it up in storytelling, delivered with energy and flair, is the formula for success when delivering the closing inspirational speech at your conference. Make it memorable and don’t hesitate about going BIG.