Pity the poor speaker. 

All that he or she has to work with during their  speech is words. It is their challenge to find a way to draw their  audience into their speech and make them experience what they have  experienced only using words. In order to make this happen, we need to  find a way to paint a “verbal picture” with the words that we use. We  want our words to create a mental image in the mind of each member of  our audience. 

Just exactly how can we go about making this happen?

Honesty is soooo overrated. 

When we are asked to give a speech, we know  what we need to do in order to deliver a good speech. We need to make  sure that we know who will be in the audience, we have to sit down and  create a speech that will allow us use the importance of public speaking  to connect with our audience, and then we have to get up there and  deliver it in a way that will allow us to clearly communicate what we  are trying to say. How hard could all of that be to do? It turns out that it becomes a lot harder when we are telling ourselves things that just are not true.  

Our lies can have a negative impact on our speech and we really should stop saying things like this to ourselves.

I’m pretty sure that this has happened to all of us. 

We’re standing in  front of an audience giving a speech and we’ve just said something  clever or meaningful. We pause and get ready to go on to our next point  when all of sudden we realize that we have absolutely no idea what we want to say next. This is probably the worst possible feeling that a speaker can have. 

What can we do now to save the situation?

I’m pretty sure that we’ve all been there: we’re standing in front of an audience ready to use the importance of public speaking to give a  speech that we’ve practiced and then all of sudden, our mind goes blank.  

There’s nothing there. The speech that we’ve spent so much time  practicing has suddenly packed up and left. This has got to be the worst  feeling in the world. 

There has got to be a way to prevent this from  happening, or if not that, then dealing with it when it does happen.

What’s the worst thing that can happen to you as a speaker? 

Having the  audience get up and leave during your speech would certainly be a bad  thing, but since there is very little chance of that actually happening  perhaps we should focus on things that are more likely to happen to you.  Like completely forgetting your speech as you stand there on the stage. That can happen to anyone at any time. 

If it happens to you, what should you do?

As speakers we all know that the more humor that we can work into our  next speech, the better chance we have of connecting with our audience.

Everyone likes to laugh and if we can make our audience laugh, they’ll  remember what we had to say and we just might be able to make an impact  in their lives using the importance of public speaking. The challenge  that we face as speakers is that getting an audience to laugh is never  easy. One of the best ways to go about doing this is to add jokes to our speech. 

However, we are then faced with the challenge of just exactly how should a speaker go about writing a joke?

Every speaker wants to be able to use the importance of public speaking  to connect with their audience. 

We all know that there are lots of  different ways to make this happen. If  we can find a way to work humor into our next speech, then we have a  pretty good chance of being able to connect with our audience. The  challenge here is that humor can be very difficult to work into a  speech. 

The good news is that you can do it if you understand comedy  structure.

If there is one thing that every speaker wants from their next speech, it is for it to mean something so that our audience can realize the  importance of public speaking. 

The way that we determine if one of our  speeches means something is if our audience can remember it after we are done speaking.  In order to be able to claim some of that valuable mental real estate,  we’ve got to be able to create a speech that is original – our audience  has to be treated to something that is new and novel. 

If, as speakers,  we can discover a way to create a speech that will come across as being original to our audience then we’ll have a very good chance of being remembered long after we’ve stopped talking.

Who doesn’t like winning an award? We all do. 

When we receive an award,  it’s because we did something special or we have done something better  than anyone else has. These are great moments for us. When we get an award, we are often asked to stand up and say a few words. Oh, oh – this is where things can start to fall apart. If we don’t have  a plan for what we want to say, then we’re going to end up fumbling  over our words and we won’t do a good job of communicating. 

What is the best way to handle situations like this?

I can only speak for myself, but I can tell you that every word that I write when I’m putting together a speech is pure perfection. 

The words  just flow together and create a seamless whole. The very idea of going  back and editing one of my speeches after it has been written just seems  to be a travesty – who would want to mess with perfection? This is the  speech that I am going to use to show my audience the importance of  public speaking. Ok, so maybe my writing is not really all that good.  

However, the effort involved in editing one of my speeches is so great  that I often don’t want to do it. However, it turns out that if you want  to find a way to pack more of a punch into your next speech, you are going to need to be willing to do some serious editing of what you’ve written.