In the rush to focus on the comparatively easy task of generating and circulating written content, we’ve forgotten that giving a live speech is much more powerful and memorable.
And also harder to create.
The written word is not very effective at persuading people to do something.
I first took up public speaking in 1994 when I attended a London Toastmasters club. I was in awe at how the other members were able to stand up and speak without notes.
After years of working as a professional speechwriter, I decided to read about the history of speechwriting since the ancient Greeks.
You have to ‘perform’ a speech, which involves words, voice and gesture. They all work together to have an emotional impact on the audience.
I can remember speeches that had an influence on the direction of my life, my attitude to political issues and my personal habits. I became a ‘changed’ person.
I discovered that we’ve forgotten a very important lesson about communication.
To achieve things in life, human beings have to act together to achieve a goal. In order to ‘act’ we need to have absorbed a message and then felt something. An emotion – fear or desire – forces us to take action.
You can’t create bonds between human beings through messaging software like Slack, you need to be present, to project a personality and look people in the eye.
For this reason I have created a workshop called, The Craft of Speechwriting.
Learn the five-step process to writing a speech that was worked out in Ancient Greece, which you can still apply today. Sure AI can generate words, but if you’re relying on it to create your ’emotional content’, you’re going to be disappointed.
Some of the workshop focuses on ways you can manipulate people. It’s important to learn those ways because then you’ll understand how you are manipulated all day long by phrases, rhymes and structures.
They say that learning science is important for a job these days, well, learning about speechwriting helps you with every social interaction in your personal and professional life.
When people send me the drafts of their speeches, I often lament.
Wedding speeches written like Mckinsey reports, city brokers who think that you just throw up a deck of unintelligible slides, business owners who write endless sentences and show boring clips.
And it’s so hard to get them to change things, because they created them without ever having any instruction on how to craft an emotional message.
When it comes to their big moment, everybody can tell within 10 seconds that the guy is not worth listening to. The embarrassment can be concealed by staring at a phone or looking out the window, but I always see it as a missed opportunity to get noticed and have an impact on the world.
Find out more details about the workshop here or download a brochure here.
Leave a reply