Your Speech Is Not About You

So it's lunch break.

I'm in the green room.

Another of the speakers from that morning walked in for lunch.

She asked me, Randy, can you help me? I need to understand how did you get that standing ovation, that love from the audience? And I just got polite applause.

And she was a wonderful young woman and she was an Olympic medalist with like five Olympic medals.

And she kind of like, I don't understand, you know, I'm telling my story of how I got the medals and, you know, I'm available afterward and I meet the people and I take pictures and I don't understand how do I not get a better connection with audience, reaction, response.

That question she asked me is the one I'm going to answer for you.

What makes the difference from you getting just polite applause to becoming an agent of transformation? And that's actually we're going to talk about the first principles for professional speakers being on the platform.

delivering presentations.

And I've actually got 11 of them.

And when we get to number nine, that's where you're going to learn the lesson that I shared with that amazing Olympic gymnast.

One of the things you should understand is Toastmasters will teach you how to deliver a speech.

That's one job.

The job I'm going to talk about today is how to create transformation.

And I don't say that to throw shade on Toastmasters.

I think they're an incredible organization that helps a lot of people.

I'm saying they do one job, which is teach you, here's the format.

Here's how to do a speech.

Here's how to give a presentation without saying, um, 217 times.

Great.

Once you're proficient in that, then you're ready for what we're going to talk about today, how you become that agent of transformation for the audience.

and i should also tell you this is a series i'm going to tell you at the end about some of the other episodes in the series about being a rock star presenter all right so what you're going to see is i'm going to divide these into categories category number one and i have three first principles in there is the category i call responsibility Here's number one.