SPEAKING.APP

What are the first words you should say in a speech, and what are the last words you should say in a speech? Because tomorrow, if you go to conferences, nineteen out of twenty speakers will start in one of two ways that instantly lose the room. They’ll either begin with, “My name is Conor Neill, I’m from Tango, and this talk is about the latest trend in monitoring strategies.” Or they’ll begin by fumbling with the lights and the microphone, asking how much time they’ve got, and whether it’s plugged in. Either way, you’re sending the same signal to the audience. This is not important yet. This is the moment to check your BlackBerry, make sure the office is okay, and start planning the weekend. And that’s sad, because for some of you, this is the first time the audience has seen you, and your kid at school presenting on giraffes does a better job. So here’s the goal. Your first words have to earn attention. They have to pull people forward instead of giving them permission to drift away. It’s the same as walking into a bar or a networking event. If I walk up to a group and say, “Hi, I’m Conor. I’m Irish. Thirty-eight years old. I like sailing. I like running,” they’ll be gone before I finish the sentence. But if I walk up and say, “We know someone in common,” it’s suddenly hard to walk away. People lean in because a real question just appeared in their mind. Who is it? How do we know them? That’s what your opening needs to do. There are three strong ways to start a speech. The first is to open with a question that matters to the audience. Take a problem they already have and phrase it as a question so they start answering you in their head. If it matters to them, you have them. The second is to start with a fact that shocks them into rethinking. There’s more people alive today than have ever died. There’s more people alive today than have ever died. Every two minutes, the energy reaching the Earth from the sun is equivalent to the whole annual usage of humanity. All the energy, all the cars, everything moving, all the lighting, all the air conditioning of the world in one year is equivalent to two minutes of sun. Does that change how you think about energy? Find a fact like that, and you instantly create curiosity. And Google has transformed your ability to get at these facts. Given two or three minutes, you can find out whether what you’re saying is true. You still need the audience to trust you, and right now you trust me because I look the part and I’m from Ese. Those are, in fact, two true facts. But the best way to start a speech, and the way I hope all of you use from now forward, is the way we start a story to a child. Érase una vez. Once upon a time. When you say “once upon a time,” my daughter leans forward. She’s ready. She’s engaged. We were trained as kids to know when a story is coming, and we also know when a teacher is about to deliver a forty-minute lecture that has no impact on our lives. In business, you don’t hear Jack Welch saying once upon a time. Steve Jobs doesn’t start his speeches with once upon a time. But there is a grown-up way of saying it. If you listen at a dinner table or at a networking event, the people who gather a group around them start differently. In October, the last time I was in this room, there were a hundred and twenty people here. I was having a conversation with one of the world experts on public speaking, and he said something to me. He said something to me that’s had me thinking ever since. He said something to me that changed what I think is important in speaking. I can pause for thirty seconds to three minutes right now, and you still want to know what he said. That’s the power of story. Here’s what that power is for. In speaking and in sales, we assume self-interest. So start by telling a story from your own life that connects you to why this topic matters to you. Why you first joined the company. When you first saw someone benefit and you saw how their life changed. Explore what quality of life means for you, and connect it to what you do. In your business, how do you affect quality of life for a customer? That’s where the stories come from that connect you to the audience. Because stories are about people. They’re not about objects. They’re not about things. They’re about the people behind the things. If you want to tell a good story about Tango, don’t talk about the software. Talk about the people who built it, what matters to them, and what they sacrifice. And when you finish your speech, remember the last words matter too. All the reasons and benefits are already written in the document and in the PowerPoint. But people act only when they trust you and they care about you. So start in a way that makes them lean forward, and end in a way that makes it easy for them to act.