FROM GOOD TO GREAT – SPEAKER STYLE

I made a decision this year to immerse myself in the world of speaking. To ensure I became a part of the same speaker community that many of my clients hold aspirations to join, and to open myself up, as an educator, to the experience of what the greatest speakers in the world bring to our stages.

And at a Global Speaker Summit in Auckland, across more than 25 incredible Keynote, Plenary and Breakout sessions I became aware of one single thing.

That no matter the topic, the style, the background, how the speaker on stage in front of me came to be there, they were able to create a rhythm. To wrap us up in a world of possibility, where the real world was momentarily forgotten, to transport us to another place, another way of thinking, to ignite within a desire to be better and to do more. And they did this every single time through story. Master story-tellers, craftsmen and artisans with the ability, in Cam Calkoen’s words, to remove assumption and bend perception, through the way they told the stories.

They built in our minds clear pictures of the world they were describing. Through emotion and rhythm, they dropped those stories into our heart, to bring together a thread that softly and gently wraps itself into the tapestry of our life.

Moving almost straight from the power of the Global Speakers Summit, to the SpeakableYOU Intensive room, working with people to build their content and their speaking skills, really brought home to me the true difference between the good and the great speakers – insight I was able to share with the people in the room to strengthen their ability to speak, impact and influence.

The key insights we worked through in that room included:

1. The most impactful stories were built from lived experience; humorous, serious, insightful, pensive, and often dramatic, but always from their own lived experience.

2. They spoke to the one core message of the presentation; the stories were told on purpose, on target, and on message and ‘made sense’ to us.

3. The Narrator was ditched, and they told the story in such a way that we were immersed completely into the moment, as if we were living it with them.

As Ilja Grzeskowitz taught us, the simplest of stories can be the most powerful conveyor of our message when the structure of the story is determined on purpose to align with our core messaging, the scenes powerfully set, and the characters completely fleshed out.

Where just like our favourite movies, we ignite the senses and create a vivid picture of the world that is possible, through the stories we shape.