I’d like to be able to tell you that every time that you get asked to  give a speech, you’ll be told what the people running the show want you  to talk about. 

However, as is the case with all such things in real  life, it never seems to work out this way. Instead, somebody who is  hosting a show realizes that they need another speaker to fill their  slots and they come and find you because you understand the importance  of public speaking. Great, so you’ve been asked to give a speech, but you have no idea what you’ll be talking about. 

What’s a speaker to do?

When we are creating a speech, we’ve got a lot of work to do in order to  capture the importance of public speaking. 

There’s the opening, the  middle, and the ending. Each one of these parts is important. However, we might be able to say that the opening is just a little bit more important because of the impact that it can have on our audience. When we start a  speech, our audience is trying to make up their minds as to if they  should pay attention to us. 

How we begin a speech will determine if they  decide to give us their attention…

So why do we go to the effort of giving speeches? 

I think that it’s  pretty safe to say that the reason that we do this is because we want to use the importance of public speaking be remembered.  We want the words that we shared with our audience to remain in their  heads long after our speech is over and done with. This presents us with  quite a problem. All of us engage in lots of different conversations  every day and by the end of the day if you asked us to remember any of  them we would be hard pressed to remember them. 

What we need to do as  speakers is to find a way to add more flair to our next speech.

So here’s a quick question for you: have you ever head of an “elevator  pitch”? 

If you haven’t, then perhaps I should introduce to you what it  is and why it should be important to all of us. The thinking behind an elevator pitch is exactly what its title implies. The thinking is that if you found  yourself traveling on an elevator with a very important person who’s  attention you wanted to get, what would you tell them? An  elevator pitch is designed to allow you to use the importance of public  speaking to make an impression in less than 60 seconds. 

As  speakers who don’t always control how much time we have to give a  speech, it turns out that mastering the art of the elevator speech is a  critical skill for all of us.

Nobody ever said that giving a speech was going to be something that would be easy to do, but sometimes it  sure seems like it is a lot harder than it should be. 

What makes  creating a speech so hard to do is what we want the speech to do for us:  we want to be able to reach out, make a connection with our audience,  and then share with them the valuable information that we have for them  using the importance of public speaking. Getting a single speech to do all of these things can be quite a challenge. 

What is the best way to create a speech that will work for us?

Let’s face it. 

The world is filled with a lot of people who are not very  good speakers. We have a chance to hear these people speak all the  time. Since we have become at least comfortable with speaking if not  pretty good at it, what all of this means is that because of the  importance of public speaking we now have an obligation.  As accomplished speakers, it is our job to help those who have not yet  reached our level of speaking to improve. How can we go about doing  this? 

Simple – by mentoring.

What will the goal of your next speech be? 

If you are like most of us, you understand the importance of public  speaking and you’ll want to grab your audience’s attention at the start  of your speech and then find a way to hold on to it throughout the rest  of your speech. Although this sounds like a great thing to do, the  challenge that we all run into is that it’s really not all that easy to  do. All too often the speeches that we create have no real structure to them and they end up leaving our audiences confused about what the main  point of our speech really was. We need to fix this problem. 

We need to start to use the triangle.

This has pretty much happened to all of us at one time or another. 

We’ve  agreed to give a speech and eventually we sit down to write the speech  and then bang – nothing comes into our mind. We draw a  blank. We might know what we’ve been asked to talk about, we might know  our audience, we might know the importance of public speaking, we might  know everything, but still we just don’t seem to be able to find a way  to start our speech. 

What’s a speaker to do when this happens?

If you want to give a speech then you are going to have to write a  speech before you give it. 

If you are going to write a speech, then at  some point in time you are going to have to sit down and start to write  it. However, this is the point in time that some of us run into a brick wall. We just don’t seem to be able to get started writing. The fancy term for what’s going on here is called “writer’s block”. There seems to be something intimidating about staring at a blank sheet of paper. 

What’s a public speaker to do?

Not every speech that we will give will be the same. 

There will be times  when you are called on to speak in public where the people running the  show won’t actually want you to give a speech. Instead what they are going to want to you do is to act as the master of ceremonies (aka emcee) at their event.  What this means is that all of sudden your on stage performance has  just become a critical part of the success of their event. If you do a  poor job, then you can end up ruining the event. If you do a good job,  then you can create an experience that shows off the importance of  public speaking and is both engaging and appears to be seamless. 

The job  of the emcee is to make all of the speakers feel comfortable and to  allow the audience to feel included in the program.