The Best Man Speech That Nearly Went Off the Rails

So I'm standing in my best suit in a hallway with my friend George and he's looking at me with a really worried expression. We are just about to go out and give the most nerve wracking speech I think I've ever given. And it's not a chiropractic event, it's our friend's wedding. Our friend Dave has named both George and I joint best men. And we have just had the only live run through for this speech that we're going to have. And I completely flubbed one of the punchlines. Now, in a really bad stroke of luck, the, the only two weddings I had this year both landed on the same weekend. I had just come from my cousin's wedding in Manchester in the north of England on Friday. And I then drove down to Dorset, the other side of the country, that morning to arrive an hour before the wedding started for Dave, where I'm one of the two joint best men. So we've been planning this speech for a while. We'd had to do a lot of it on zoom. In fact, pretty much all of it because George and I don't live that close to each other. This was the only chance we had to do it in person and I completely messed it up. And there's no time to do it again because we are literally about to walk in there, the speeches are going to begin and we're going to give this best man speech. And it's particularly tough because Dave is one of our childhood friends. And both Dave and George's parents, who I grew up with, who knew me as a child and a teenager, are in the audience. Dave's two older sisters are there as well and we're supposed to roast Dave. Now, if you've ever given a best man speech, you'll know what I mean. It is the hardest speech to give on the wedding day. The father of the bride can basically just say some nice things and heartfelt stories about his daughter, the groom. You've just got to remember who to thank and you can have cue cards for that. You don't have to be funny. The best men, we're supposed to be funny and we're supposed to embarrass Dave, but in a way that isn't too embarrassing and too cringing. And if you're like me, you've seen a couple of best men go too far before, so. And not only that, by the way, we have. We didn't think this through because there's a couple of jokes that, you know, work really well. But the timing's got to be spot on. Multiple times I have nail the timing and jump in and interrupt George to land some punchline or to say something else. And if they work, big laugh. If they don't, it's going to make me in particular look like a massive idiot who doesn't know what he's doing. And like I say, our live run through completely messed it up. George is looking at me like, you're not going to do that, are you? It's like, I really hope not, but we just have to go out there and see. And we go out there and we give this speech and I've never been so nervous. I'm quite alright as a public speaker, but I'm kind of trying not to shake the entire time there. One of the times I jump in, I jump in a lot louder than I thought I'd really yell, which luckily gets a little bit of a laugh as well. But we give the speech, we both sit down. I don't remember any of the other speeches. It was just a real adrenaline rush and we're kind of a bit worried going, was that all right? After the speeches, multiple people came up to us and said, well done, guys. That was really good. That really landed, you know, we timed, you know, we landed it quite well. We got the right sort of, you know, I think balance between embarrassing Dave, but not too embarrassing there. The thing that multiple people said to us though was like, oh, that was great. You got some great stories in and it didn't go on forever. We'd really, really work to narrow this speech down because we had no shortage of what are commonly known to all our friends as Drunk Dave stories. Dave was infamous for getting too drunk and doing embarrassing or stupid stuff when he was younger and apparently a little bit afterwards as well, in his 20s. We had so much stuff that we could use there and we could have easily gone on for 20 or 30 minutes with it, but we really tightened it down to six minutes and that was the thing that we really wanted to do. Because the problem with a long best man speech is there's way more time to mess it up if we can just get it down to a tight six minutes and that's it. You actually. It's easier because there's less opportunities for you to mess up, like I had just done in the hallway in our only kind of live run through there. And that's something that I think is really important for us to know is chiropractors as well, because we don't necessarily give big speeches. A lot of the time. But we do have to give a report of findings. And that can feel a little bit like a speech. You know, we're planning to talk for, you know, several minutes at a time. And the stakes on I'm going to make a complete ass out of myself in front of 100 people. But they are, am I going to blow it? Is this patient going to come back or not? So we can feel a little bit of pressure there. And what most of us do in that situation is we think, well, I've got to make sure the patient leaves understanding me, so I've got to make sure that I give them all the information I can so they really understand it. And we throw out loads of information and we talk and we talk and we talk. And the problem is the longer you talk for that's a longer stretch of time that you have to be interesting, that you have to be captivating, you have to keep their engagement. Because if at any point during that mini speech, any point during that report of findings, you lose the patient, they will walk out not really understanding it. They will walk out not really getting it, and you can't really get them back at that point. It's really, really hard. And I've had this before. I've had patients where like a few minutes in, they start, literally one guy, remember, looking at his fingernails, and I'm thinking, I've blown it. I'm not getting this guy back. So it's really important to actually make it as short as possible. Now, the reason most chiropractors don't do this is A, like I said, we think we need to give them all the information. And B, if we're honest, we're kind of winging it. You know, you have an idea, you maybe have developed a framework, but I'm betting you haven't sat and rehearsed it and rehearsed it, and you haven't gone through the different ways you could say things you haven't tried on your own in front of a mirror, role playing with somebody, the different ways that you can say that, that's really, really key if it's going to go well. So although George and I couldn't do that in person for this speech, we practiced it and I practiced parts in front of my wife as well. And we did that to really nail it down. That's so important for your reporter findings because if you lose the patient anywhere, you're not going to get them back and it's not going to go that well. So the feedback I give to people far More often than not. And I've reviewed hundreds of report findings over the years and seen many different ways of doing it. Many different examples, many different frameworks. The most common bit of feedback I give, it's, that's too long. In fact, when I do a report of findings review for somebody, when they send me a recording of their reporter findings for my analysis, I say to them at the start, if you submit a video that's more than 15 minutes long, I'm not watching it because if it's more than 15 minutes long, I can tell you it's way too long. That's my first bit of feedback, really. You should be able to get it down to seven or eight minutes. Obviously I have some patients who talk and interrupt or things like that. Depends on your practice, your way of doing things. But that's the one bit of feedback I would give you is try to make it as short as possible. It takes more work up front. That's why most of us don't do it, because it's actually more preparation, advance. But when you do that and once you develop it and you really nail it down, it is so much less effort for the rest of your career. It just pays off and pays off and pays off. And then you get to the point where you can deliver one. I do this live in seminars. I say, right, give me an example, give me a case. Okay, bang. I'm going to go into it right there because I've practiced and practiced and practiced, practice that. I know how to dial that down to just the essential bits, just the bits that you need to know. And I'm not filling it with WAF or anything like that. I'm not worried about having to be more interesting for longer than possible. So hopefully the stakes aren't as high as they were for that best man speech. Best man at my brother's wedding a few years later, same thing, five, six minute speech. That was, it went down really, really well. So think about this for your report of findings. Think about how short can you make this while still covering what you need to cover, Making sure they end what they need to know, but in the fewest words possible. Brevity is the soul of wit, as the saying goes. So I want you to think about that for your next patient, next reporter findings, give it a try and let me know how you find them.