Ep 62 When is It OK to Read a Speech March 2 16

So when is it appropriate to read a speech?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

Question of the day comes from Brother Ted, one of our YouTube viewers and listeners. He says, TJ when is it appropriate to read a speech? Presidents do it, people giving testimony before Congress do it. And yet Ted has probably heard me tell people, don't read a speech, don't read a speech. Let me answer the question directly. It's appropriate, I believe, to read a speech when your speech is going to get so much scrutiny and be picked apart by so many people, by the media, often translated into other languages, that the impact you have from the speech can often be more of what the actual words were than how you said it and the impressions people in that audience gathered from you that day when you gave it that there's a lot there to what I said. There's a lot of context. Let me unpack that for us. So if you're the President of the United States and you make a State of the Union address, for example, your words are analyzed and scrutinized with tremendous detail. So if you talk about environmental policy, the Environmental Protection Agency and all the people there are going to look at that, it's going to be transcribed, they're going to read it, they're going to figure out how do they implement this. One wrong, comma, could change economic policy or how the IRS collects taxes, for example, if a president emphasizes something in the wrong way. So there is tremendous, tremendous scrutiny to the words of certain people in certain positions. Presidents of countries, prime ministers, the head of state, if you are the head of the Federal Reserve or the head of the monetary system of your country, if you say one thing wrong, you can often spook the markets, the stock markets, and create economic collapse. So that's why heads of Federal Reserves and heads of the bank of England and other similar situations around the world typically read their speech. Because if there's even one wrong word that could be interpreted the wrong way, really bad things can happen. If you're secretary of State, that's another example people are so tense about. If you get something wrong, you could start a war. That's why interesting to people. If you've ever seen Colin Powell give a keynote speech at a success rally or positive speaking rally, he's dynamic and interesting, engaging and telling stories and moving around and just the most compelling motivational speaker you've ever seen. Whereas when he was Secretary of State, you would see him reading in a calm, straightforward, rational, logical Linear way. That was kind of boring. The stakes were different. And if you're giving a motivational speech, if you just make people feel good and they remember a few ideas, you're wildly successful. If you're Secretary of State, you have a much higher standard. You cannot create more tensions. You don't want to create an international scandal. You certainly don't want to escalate things into a war. So all of those are reasons for reading a speech if you're doing something where you know it's going to be translated into history books and studied for years. Some of my clients have given a speech, a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance award, and they did have their eyes up a lot of the time, but it still was following a written speech. But folks, those are rare exceptions. That is so less than 0.1% of speeches given in a year. And it's not funny. Let's talk real world. Most of us are not presidents of countries. Most of us are not heads of state and heads of federal reserves. So when most of us give speeches, we had to look at the relative risk of what happens if things don't go right. For most of us, most of the time, there's a very low risk of people transcribing our speech, reading it, rereading it, translating it, and looking for some flaw or error that simply doesn't happen. The big risk for most people in the world 99.999% of the time is we give a speech and nobody remembers a darn thing we said five seconds later. That's the big risk most of us have. So I'm a big believer. Prepare for the risk you have. If you are. If you're going to the Arctic and your every inch of you is going to be covered up, maybe you don't need to bring your bathing suit. If you're going to the beach, maybe you should focus on sunscreen and not bringing thermal underwear to prevent frostbite. You've got to prepare for the risk at hand for whatever you're doing, whatever expedition or travel or challenge you have. For most of us most of the time, the big danger is not that we left something out of our speech. It's not that our brain froze and we panicked because we weren't reading. The big risk for most people most of the time is nobody remembers our speech. So I start off with that assumption and work backwards. How do we increase the odds of making our speech memorable? And one of the worst things you can do is to read a speech the second you're reading a speech Especially if you don't have a teleprompter, is you lose eye contact, your voice goes flat, your speed becomes consistent, your voice is robbed of its conversationality. More on this in a moment.

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And folks, I have seen people read a speech and it was pretty good. I have seen Dan Rather, the former news anchor from cbs, read a speech and he didn't have a teleprompter to a couple thousand public relations professionals at an event. But guess what? Dan Rather was used to reading scripts because he read them for hours a day for 40 years. So he's able to do it in a way where he still still sounds conversational. So the biggest reason, brother Ted, and that's. I don't know if that's his real name, but that's the name he gives on YouTube. The main reason I ask people not to read is for most people most of the time, unless they are professional news anchors and do this three hours a day for a living, is it's just really hard to do. It's so much harder to read a speech than it is to simply speak to people in a conversational way and occasionally glance down at notes. That's what I'm doing. I have notes here now. I think I'm a pretty good reader, but I guarantee you, if I transcribed everything I've said in the first seven minutes of this show, went back and read it, even if I rehearsed, just wouldn't sound as conversational, wouldn't sound as intimate, wouldn't sound as real. Because even though I have a lot of experience, I'm not a news anchor reading a script for three hours a day. So it's hard to do. People call Ronald Reagan the great communicator. Well, he had been using teleprompters for years and years and years and years making commercials and doing the intros to TV shows. So that's why he was able to do it. But he still practiced, he still rehearsed. So, brother, that's my biggest problem with reading his speeches. Just for most people, it instantly reduces their skill level. If they were up here at a 9 on a 1 to 10 scale speaking, if they're reading it, it's down to a four. You basically lose five points on a one to ten scale if you're going from just speaking and speaking from an outline to reading because it flattens your voice, flattens your tone, makes the volume consistent, the Speed consistent and the pauses consistent. Now, it is possible to read a speech and not do those things. It generally takes more time to practice if you're reading a speech, not less time. In my experience, people who want to read a speech often are the people who are the least likely to be willing to practice again and again and again to get that comfort level with the speech and the text so that they sound comfortable. So that's just reality. I deal with reality when it comes to speaking because people ask me this all the time or they'll start a training session with me where they're reading a speech. Now, I'm very good at convincing people not to read a speech. Here's all I have to do. They say they want to read a speech. I say, fine, no argument for me. I put the video camera on them. They read their speech, they watch it, I record it, they watch it. I ask them what do they think? And they say, my God, T.J. i'm incredibly good. Boring. What did you think? And I say, I think you're right. We take their written speech, we tear it up, we ball it up, we throw it in the trash can, we get a clean sheet of paper, and we start with a simple outline. Now, again, I wouldn't do this. If you're the President, United States, and you're giving a State of the Union address or your inaugural address, and it's going to be studied by historians for centuries, that's different. But for the rest of us in the real world, our work a Day presentations, our speeches, our PowerPoints, our quarterly reports to the board, don't read. Because it's, put it this way, it's such an advanced thing. It's like someone coming to me saying, well, T.J. i'm thinking, I've always been interested in finance stocks. I think I'm going to start my own mutual fund. Well, anyone who's in the mutual fund business, as a lot of my clients are, heard that, and they heard a 22 year old say, I think I want to get in the stock business, so I want to start a mutual fund, would laugh. They would just think that's the craziest thing in the world because it's massively complex. The, the regulatory hurdles you have to get over the millions of dollars of fees, legal fees and structures, and all the boxes you have to check. Not to mention the fact that who's going to give you their money to Invest if you're 23 years old for a mutual fund? They would say, okay, you want to learn about finance that's fine. Why don't you start by Investing, you know, $200 in an index fund? Or start by following some stocks, or start by being an intern at a stock brokerage company. There are a lot of ways of starting, but starting in the finance business by opening your own mutual fund is just too ambitious, and it's basically guaranteeing that you're going to fail. That's how I feel about people who try to read a speech, because I want to get it just right. I want to minimize error. That's the rationale for reading a speech. I don't want to leave anything out. If there's something that's really important to you that you want to make sure gets in the speech, and you talk about it, write it on a piece of paper, write it in big, bold letters, summarize it in three words or so. And now you won't forget because it's there on a sheet of paper. If you need more than a single sheet of paper and you're writing in a large font, what that really means is you haven't done your job yet. You haven't put things in priority and figured out what's most important. That's the other big problem with people who want to read their speeches. Again, there are exceptions. A State of the Union address can be long and people like it, and you have to cover the entire country. But for most of us in business, other government situations, public affairs, we should focus on just a handful of ideas. Therefore, your outline should easily fit on a single sheet of paper. Make the font large, and then you can, as I'm doing right now, occasionally glance down. Most of the time you're just talking in a conversational tone of voice to your audience. It's going to be a lot easier for your audience to listen to. It's also going to be a lot easier for you to deliver. So, Brother Ted, thanks for the question. If you have any other questions, please let me know. For the rest of you, if you have questions about public speaking, just send them to me. You can post them on Twitter. JWalker is my handle there. You can also stop by the website mediatrainingworldwide.com, click on the news section, you'll see the blog, you'll see all of these programs posted there, and just post your questions and we'll be answering them. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may your presentations in life be a complete success.

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