Episode #94 How To Liven Up A Speech You Need To Read

Watching a friend of mine deliver his speech to my Rotary Club reminded me of the perils of reading speeches. In his case, he was giving the speech in Japanese and so he chose the route of linguistic perfection over audience engagement. We do this in our own language too when the speech content is complex or of high sensitivity. Politicians have learnt they usually get themselves into trouble when they are adlibbing, compared to when they are reading from a carefully prepared and fully vetted speech.

Do I recommend reading the speech? No, but sometimes the stakes are too high or the situation demands you read the whole thing. My Japanese is not perfect, but I prefer to engage my audience than lose them by having to look down to read the content. Depending on the formality of the situation though, I might choose to read it. How can we liven this process up though?

What could my friend do when he was reading his speech to make it more engaging for his audience. He could have departed from the text and just spoken directly to the audience, while maintaining full eye contact for some of the sentences. Looking down at our speech means we have to break eye contact and this creates a barrier between us and the audience. By having a few sections where we replace sentences in the text with bullet points, to which we can speak will give us that chance to make continuous eye contact with members of the audience. His Japanese ability was sufficient for him to do that. For most people, they will be operating in their native language anyway.

We can do a similar thing with slides. We might show a picture, a graph or some key words and just talk to them, rather than read from the notes. The visual aspect supports what we are saying, so we lessen the burden on our words to sell the message. If we are doing it in a foreign language like my friend, we can have the perfect grammatical clarity needed up on screen to describe what we want to say and then just deliver the same key message in our own more natural if imperfect language.

He could also have used stories more in his speech. Stories engage our audience and we can transport them to specific locations, seasons of the year or times of the day through telling our stories. They key thing with stories is to tell something about locations or people with which the audience will be familiar. I heard a great one the other day from the head of Japan Post Mr. Masatsugu Nagato. He was speaking to the Economist Conference Network in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and doing so in English. He told an amusing story about when previous Japanese Prime Minister Mori met US President Bill Clinton when Japan was hosting a G7 meeting in Okinawa. The point I want to make here is his audience were familiar with Mori, Bill and Okinawa. We should do the same. Try to get your audience seeing the scene in their mind’s eye.

Rhetorical questions are also great for getting engagement. When we ask a question of our audience, we are forcing them to concentrate on what we are saying and think of the answer. Depending on the occasion, sometimes it is hard to know if the speaker really expects an answer or not. That is the ideal situation. We want to create some tension in the room because that creates connectivity between the speaker and the listeners. By throwing out questions we get everyone on the same wave length, at the same time and that builds our connection with our audience. We don’t need twenty of these, just a few will do the trick. For example, in a twenty minute speech, probably one every five minutes or so would work well. Remember, we need to step it up in our speech about every five minutes to keep everyone attentive. This might be using questions, employing the slide deck or telling a story.

So we don’t have to become captives to the text and lose our engagement with our listeners. These have been some simple ideas we can use to keep the talk interesting and engaging. It doesn’t matter if you are speaking in a foreign language or your native tongue. These ideas will work a treat.