Plan Your Speech With an Emotional Mission Statement
It’s hard to stand out these days. We spend our lives in a state of information overload –from the moment we get up to the moment before bed, navigating our way through personal and business environments with significant side portions of dopamine drip from whatever social media channels we have chosen to plug into.
So what makes you think that the big speech you are about to deliver is going to make a difference? What makes you think that you are going to be any more memorable in the mind of your audience than the last doom scroll or the next cats-behaving-badly reel?
If I’m making you feel like throwing your hands up in the air and saying ‘what’s the point then?’, then that’s a great starting point for this conversation!
The truth is, it’s rare now for a speech to make a game-changing difference. This is in part because the digital century has provided us with the footage of thousands of great speeches, not to mention tutorials on how to make one.
High impact speeches, including behemoths such as “I have a dream” and “We will fight them on the beaches” carved the names of their speakers into 20th century folklore and stamped an indelible mark on popular culture. That effect will not be repeated because the media scape and popular culture has moved on.
However, we can take a crucial lesson from these which is still relevant to anyone making a presentation today. Forget asking AI to write your speech for you and tap into… you. That means real human emotion, coming from a place of grounding, experience and the confidence that you have something to impart.
If this is the source of your input, then I can guarantee you that your output – a speech being received by an audience – will be more impactful than most. And the best way of achieving this is by planning your speech with a mission statement in mind.
By this I don’t mean some pithy, corporate jargon filled missive about moving the needle to blue sky thinking in order to circle back and deep dive… I mean a mission statement on how you want your audience to receive you.
How do you want them to feel? Many people approach speeches from a very subjective point of view. It’s hard to think beyond the ego. For most people, the stress of preparation revolves around how an audience will regard them – their appearance, their delivery, their credibility.
Great speech givers think in a different way. They consider their audience first. If there is a needle to be moved, it’s about moving people from a state of apathy, indifference or mild interest into engagement, attention and motivation.
So how are you going to achieve that? Through preparation. Know your audience and know what motivates them. AI can write you a speech, but it doesn’t know live audiences or emotions. That’s where you have an edge over the speaker who just paints by numbers.
What is it you want them to believe in? Is it you, the business you represent, a product, a service, an ethos? Yes some themes will overlap, but plot out the key theme and weave the other around that.
Follow your gut instincts. If you have done your prep, you will know, or at least have a good estimate of, what kind of audience you are speaking to and your mission statement is an invaluable starting point for building a presentation. Start with the audience and plan backwards. You will be surprised about how much of a difference this will make when you finally stand up to make a speech or deliver your presentation
