How to Give an AWESOME Speech
We have all sat through someone's speech before that they clearly were not prepared. As painful as it is for the presenter to stumble through, it's painful for the audience, too. And in my opinion, nothing is worse than listening to someone speak who sounds like they're monotone and reading the entire time.
When you're publicly speaking you want your performance to seem as natural as possible and give the illusion that you're speaking organically. When you over rehearse or rely too heavily on our script, your performance can lose elements of its life such as inflection on certain points or worse, your personality altogether.
Oppositely, when you don't have a lot of time to rehearse, your moment in the spotlight can come crashing down quickly leaving you feeling defeated and ultimately jeopardizing your reputation and credibility. But don't worry, some of the most powerful speeches happen when most of your content is delivered passionately and straight from your heart.
When you're put on the spot and don't have a lot of time to rehearse, use these tips to make yourself as prepared as possible with limited time on the clock.
Memorize your facts.
If you try your best to memorize your speech word-for-word in a short period of time, it can be nearly impossible to pull off! Chances are if you're making a speech about a topic, you have been selected because you are considered to be an expert in your field. If you find yourself with not much time to prepare, focus your time on memorizing important and useful facts. Organize these facts into a logical flow and use it as an outline to lead you through your presentation. Once you get up onstage, you can transform these facts into sentences and deliver a credible speech jam packed full of information.
An example of this is if you were giving a speech about airplane flight patterns over your country, memorize interesting facts such as how many planes are in the air at a time, what the largest airports in the world are, or how much money the top 3 airlines make in a year.
Arrange your memorized facts into a logical chronology that makes sense to your audience. Don’t worry about memorizing the fact word-for-word, but be sure to memorize the correct information. If you forget a fact, skip it -- don't make something up on the spot.
Tell a story.
Storytelling is one of the best ways to remember content because simply, every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When presenting your speech, if you lose your place, knowing “your story” can help you find your place again and regain footing.
Try to turn your entire presentation into a story and deliver it full of life just like you would if you were excited to be telling friends.
If your speech is about something not-so-entertaining like cancer, perform your speech so that you follow a day in the life of someone with cancer or the story of when they were diagnosed, treated, and now live everyday cancer-free.