TJ Walker explains why politicians sound wooden at conventions: fear, teleprompter dependence, adrenaline. He shows how to stay conversational while reading a teleprompter by varying speed and volume, pausing, and moving your body so the prompter follows you instead of the reverse.
Chapters
So how do you give a speech at a major national political convention? For many politicians, this is the hardest speech of their career because the stakes are so much higher, there's so much more pressure, the audience is so much bigger. And one of the problems many politicians have who are experienced speakers. I mean, let's face it, the typical speaker at a Democratic or Republican National Convention has given thousands of speeches during the course of his or her lifetime and career. And yet you still see seasoned speakers get up there, and all of a sudden they sound like this. They are monotone and wooden and stiff and speaking at the same. Why is that? Well, for starters, it's because they're scared and they don't do the things they normally do, which is sound conversational. Part of it is parties like to have a sense of exactly what is going to happen. They want to eliminate surprises, so they ask all the speakers to give their speeches in advance in text, to be reviewed for edits, suggestions. And I mean, it's not technically censorship because it's not the government, but they do want some editorial control. All political parties do this. And what happens is people are now reading in front of a teleprompter, whereas their typical politician, often speaking without notes, or they're looking at a script that they glance down with occasionally, but they're able to focus on their audience. So this takes them out of their comfort zone. And the problem is, when you're in front of an audience that's so much bigger than any other audience you've spoken to, and you're seeing people in a coliseum or an auditorium or a convention hall, and some of them seem like they're seated a mile away, the first reaction is to think, I have to yell. So they hear me, and I show passionate. And unfortunately, when you yell the whole time, you rob your voice of its conversationality, and you can sound angry and shrill. This applies to men and to women. So that's the first big problem most people have is they just because of the adrenaline rush, the size of the crowd, they yell, and it destroys their voice of conversationality. The next thing they do is they start speaking at the same speed of the teleprompter because they're thinking, I don't want to lose the script. So they follow the teleprompter instead of letting the teleprompter operator follow them. Here are the keys. Some of you have heard me say this before, but the keys to reading a teleprompter successfully is sometimes you have to go a little faster, sometimes a little slower, sometimes louder, sometimes softer. Occasionally you have to pause and you have to move your hands and your face and your body. If you do that, you'll come across natural, likable, believable, conversational. If you don't do that, that's when you can sound stiff, scared, nervous, shrill, flat. So those are the keys of how to successfully deliver a convention speech.
