Great Public Speaking Is About Building Bridges...

Metaphors have been with us since time immemorial. Comparing things and situations in ways that immediately conjure up vivid, emotive, personal-experience images and associations is almost always a great way to start a powerful speech or presentation. The way professional public-speaking coaches usually refer to it is: First, you must get them hooked! What follows is usually a story, a striking statistic, an anecdote or a promise of something useful, informative, impactful, entertaining or otherwise unpredictable.

If we were to identify one common denominator for public-speaking courses, online tutorials and on-site classes around the world, the realm of storytelling and metaphors has probably stayed on top of the list for centuries.

After all, it was good old Shakespeare who famously said All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players... ["As you like it"]. The same iconic playwright made an even more powerful reference to 'life as an onstage performance' metaphor, albeit in a much grimmer play, Macbeth:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Where there's a stage, there's an audience

Even after years of working with hundreds of people exposed to a variety of public-speaking roles, I really can't emphasize it enough how important it is to make a significant, conscious effort in trying to understand your audience! For a variety of reasons (many of them deeply rooted in psychological development, self-perception and various idiosyncratic qualities), people often forget what it actually means to focus on your audience and, instead, concentrate on all kinds of doubts, practical questions, stress, stage anxiety, auditorium characteristics or fonts and visuals on their slides. The larger your ego and the more you have achieved in life, the more likely it is your mind has grown impervious to the need of further, significant leaps of self-improvement.

This is, in fact, one of the reasons why, over the past few years, I've tailored my public-speaking workshops to focus on the needs of organizational leaders (mostly corporate) and corporate management boards. Why? Because these are the people have the highest (direct and indirect) impact on (the highest number of!) "subordinates", i.e. people who work with them (day in, day out) in their respective organizations.

Audience awareness at its extreme

If you want to learn from someone who really "gets his audience", study the likes of Donald Trump, one of the master populists of the 21st century! Don't believe me? See if you can imagine yourself using one and the same metaphor as many as 12 times in as little as 17 seconds? You've got to do what you've got to do, if you want your audience to associate specific ideas with you and you exclusively (particularly ideas like 'winning')! Besides, repetition is one of the most powerful tools of propaganda and social manipulation on a mass scale, as the darkest chapters of dominant 20th-century ideologies have proved, again and again.

The power of intuition, talent and data

Now, the reason why some politicians are so skilled at appealing to the most relevant public sentiments is partly talent (public-speaking skills, charisma, personality, the looks), partly hard work (preparation, structuring and perfecting ideas, rehearsing) and partly data analysis. The last category is perhaps the single most important area to focus on, at least if your really want to learn (or re-learn) critical thinking skills in public speaking.

Unlike ordinary mortals, politicians today have access to (a lot more sophisticated!) focus-group studies and high-tech analyses of public sentiments, needs and expectations, even if many of those needs have not been articulated (well or often enough!) in the so-called public domain.

Hence, compared to only twenty years ago, today's "Public Sentiment Shift Surveillance Technologies" [Don't Google it, I've just invented the term ;)] create absolutely unprecedented opportunities for politicians, especially those who are cynical enough to make effective use of them. This alone makes this particular "professional group" aware of its audience needs to a much larger degree than many a professional public speaker, debate moderator, teacher or academic lecturer. There would be no harm, I guess, if all of the three groups mentioned seriously considered learning something from politicians in that regard, ironically enough.