HOW TO DELIVER A POWERFUL SPEECH
It is agonising to see educated, experienced and knowledgeable leaders struggling to get attention of the audience. Often, their messages are delivered in a factual, boring and uninspiring manner, making it painful for the audience to stay awake. But this need not be the case, if only they understand the essentials of delivering a speech that get their audience riveted to the message.
Over the years in coaching and training leaders to speak with power and impact, KL Strategic Change Consulting (KLSCC) has employed the 6 “E”s Model of a sizzling speech. diners watched him in disgust, while his son stayed calm. After he finished eating, his son, who was not embarrassed, quietly took the father to the wash room, wiped the food particles, removed the stains, combed his hair and fitted his spectacles firmly. When they came out, the entire restaurant was watching them in dead silence, not able to grasp how someone could embarrass themselves publicly like that.
The son settled the bill and started walking out with his father. At that time, an old man among the diners called out to the son and asked him, “Don’t you think you have left something behind?”.
The son replied, “No sir, I haven’t”. The old man said, “Yes, you have! You left a lesson for every son and hope for every father“. digital age has reduced further from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2017. That is less than the nine-second attention span of the average goldfish. The implication of these studies is that a speaker has only eight seconds to captivate the attention of the audience and needs to impart his knowledge in less than 20 minutes. A good speaker must find ways to enliven up the audience using various approaches. Here are some of them.
• If your speech or presentation is very long, break them down into chunks of 20minutes.
• Do something interesting, mindblowing or share some “jawdropping” information in eight seconds or less to capture the audience’s attention.
• Provide different stimulus such as simple audience participation, provoking questions, humour, statistics, inspiring quotes, etc.