TJ Walker watched a Toastmasters speech he thought was clichéd get a standing ovation. He learned that you can't please everyone, you have to know your actual audience, and the best stories make you the dummy, not the hero.
Chapters
I was attending a regional Toastmasters convention in Westchester, New York. It's a suburb just north of New York City. I was conducting a training session with Toastmasters there, but now I was in a room with everyone. There was a competition going on. A speaker comes out, and his speech title was something like, Children and Puppies are Nice. I mean, it seemed that saccharine, that generic, and frankly, that boring to me. I thought, well, let me give him a chance. He starts to speak and sure enough, it's like, puppies are the most wonderful thing in the world. And I like children. And I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, this is embarrassing. It's hard to even look. I've never heard so many boring trites, cliches in a speech. This is going to be awful. I feel bad for the guy. He continues. And it's more about, you know, give everybody a hug and smell the flowers and the coffee and just every kind of trite cliche you can imagine. It's going on. It just seems like it's going on forever. I can barely look at this train wreck. I'm just imagining when it's done and the stone silence this speaker is going to receive, how awkward it's going to be for the speaker especially. But everyone. Finally he finishes, and I'm just cringing. I'm almost wincing. And then all of a sudden, there was the reaction. Laughter, cheers, lots and lots of applause, a standing ovation. The audience absolutely love this guy. So what are we to make from this? Well, one thing you need to take away is I'm not necessarily the best audience for this guy's speech, certainly, but your speech either. You can't appeal to everyone. You need to know your audience. You're not going to please everyone. That speaker didn't please me. I thought he was boring, trite, insipid, and a total waste of time. Everybody else loved him and that's what matters for him. So keep that in mind. You're not going to please everyone all the time. And as long as you are speaking to the audience that you care about, I wasn't really the intended audience. Also realize you may hate a speaker. You can't discount them just because you don't like them. You have to look at the audience to really get a sense of how it's playing. Okay, so why do I tell that story? Couple of reasons. One big problem a lot of speakers have is when they tell stories, they make themselves out to be the hero, the problem solver, the one who came up with a brilliant solution each time. So I do think there's a danger in that. So when you're telling stories quite often, at least half the time, you need to make yourself the dummy and do it in a real way. This actually happened this way. I was the one out of sync with the audience. I was the one who didn't read the room properly and didn't perceive him the way everyone else did. And another message from this story is just to realize you shouldn't strike off anyone just because you don't like their style or even their message. You need to really listen, figure out what you can from that person. It's not that you're going to copy them or do everything the way they did, but there's something about what they did that might have worked. That could work for you too, in the future.
