There are many ways to give a terrible speech. The chief executive who pulls out a sheaf of densely written text and robotically reads it aloud. The management consultant whose every word competes with a jargon-filled tangle of meaningless diagrams and bullet points. The best man who manages to embarrass the bride and outrage her mother with his scurrilous tales.
The strange thing is that we all know this. We’ve all sat in audiences watching speakers commit these familiar crimes against rhetoric. We all know that there are much better ways to give a talk. So why do we keep doing it so badly?
The answer is: we’re afraid. Jerry Seinfeld joked that people would rather be in the casket at a funeral than giving the eulogy, and while it’s a myth that people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of death, fear of public speaking is very common. It’s this ubiquitous anxiety about speaking in public that — ironically — leads so many people to speak so badly.
The chief executive is worried that an ad-libbed line will end their career. The management consultant is afraid of losing the thread or running out of things to say. The best man is terrified that people won’t laugh at his jokes. The unspoken question that frames the speech preparation isn’t “what do I want to say?” but “how do I get out of this in one piece?”. Being asked to give a 20-minute speech is viewed by many people as an ordeal to be survived, and the central task is to safely fill 20 minutes with words, neither running out of material nor forgetting your lines. If this is how people see the challenge, no wonder their instinct is to get the scriptwriter in, or to fire up the PowerPoint clip-art and start searching for inspirational quotations; or, in the case of the panicky best man, to think of the most inappropriate story they can.
The art of good public speaking is often to say less, giving each idea time to breathe, and time to be absorbed by the audience. But the anxiety of the speaker pushes in the other direction, more facts, more notes, more words, all in the service of ensuring they don’t dry up on stage. It’s true that speaking in public is difficult, even risky. But the best way to view it is as an opportunity to define yourself and your ideas. If you are being handed a microphone and placed at the centre of an audience’s attention for 20 minutes, you’re much more likely to flourish if you aim to seize that opportunity. Everyone is watching; you’re there for a reason. So . . . what is it that you really want to say?
If you’re the best man at a wedding, there shouldn’t be much doubt: “My friend can be a real idiot sometimes, but I love him and we all wish the couple every happiness together”.
For other talks, the point may be less obvious. But there has to be one. Many executive speeches are excruciating because the CEO is determined to avoid saying anything of interest, while management consultancy is cursed by the need to give presentations regardless of whether there are any ideas to present. No less an authority than Eminem put his finger on the problem, rapping “Nowadays, everybody wanna talk like they got something to say/ But nothing comes out when they move their lips/ Just a bunch of gibberish.”
People who talk when they’ve nothing to say are an annoyance, but then there are those who do have something important to say, yet duck their opportunity to say it. That is less of an annoyance than a tragedy.
I was recently leading a seminar about public speaking, when one woman asked me how she should deal with speaking to reluctant audiences. She worked in health and safety, she explained, and people only attended talks about health and safety because they were compulsory. She seemed self-effacing and glum.
“Do you think health and safety is important?” I asked her. Yes, she did. “Do you think that if people understood your ideas better, it might prevent an awful accident?” Yes. Well, I suggested, perhaps that might be a starting point.
She might build her talk around the message, “The simplest-seeming details could save your life.” But not necessarily. Another good talk about health and safety could emphasise that when you pay attention to safety, you raise your game more generally: “health and safety doesn’t just save lives, it saves money.”
Or maybe there’s a different angle altogether. I’m not a health and safety expert, after all. But most people, I would hope, have at least one interesting thing they might want to share with the world. If you have one, start there.
In his book TED Talks, Chris Anderson (the head of TED, the conference that has become synonymous with compelling public speaking) emphasises the “throughline” — the thread that should connect everything in the speech, every story, every joke, every slide and every rousing call to action.
The throughline is the most important idea in public speaking. A good speaker mixes things up, varying tone and pace and subject-matter — but the one thing they should never mix up is their audience. That means linking everything, from tear-jerking anecdotes to statistical analysis, to the throughline. More fundamentally, it means knowing what the throughline is.
It isn’t easy to speak compellingly in front of an audience, but our fear of the occasion does us more harm than good. It’s best not to prepare in a defensive crouch. Instead, start with having something to say. Then say it.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 25 October 2024.
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