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By the time you read this I should be led on a sunny beach in the South of France. If all goes to plan, I should also be thinking about and writing a humorous speech for the Toastmaster’s UK humorous speech contest which begins in September. Apparently I have a natural humour with my public speaking but this doesn’t seem to make the speech writing process any easier. Humour is after all extremely subjective and the nature of humour has been written about extensively by much greater, more informed writers than myself.

It's 70 years to the day that Winston Churchill gave one of his most famous speeches to the House of Commons. His 'So Few' speech was given as an overview of why Britain was fighting, how the conflict was progressing and where he saw the conflict moving on to. A classic example of a well structured speech using the past, present, future method of organisation. It brings a smile to my face that a speech that was over 5000 words long is remembered 70 years later for one single line.

I recently worked with an individual that had a bad case of ‘hereiswhatIhavetosayImgoingtosayitandgetmymessageacrosstoyoureallyquicklyandthenIamgoingtositdownagain’. By this I mean he spoke to fast when delivering a speech. His audience could not understand him and as a result they disengaged and did not receive the message that he was trying to pass to them. At first I thought that this individual was nervous when speaking and this was why he spoke so quickly. However, I soon discovered that this speaker had been told in the past that he spoke too slowly.

What your audience knows about you before you start speaking can make or break your speech.

What if you embraced the silence and rather than seeing it as something to avoid, made it part of your arsenal for delivering a great speech?

Last weekend I spent the day with a group of young people between the ages of 17 and 23, who were all completing a 10 week Prince’s Trust challenge. These young people had all come from disadvantaged backgrounds and trouble homes, but have enrolled on the course to help them get their lives back on track and learn valuable skills that will help them to achieve their full potential.

Dave has a night out the day before the big presentation. He wakes up bleary eyed, hung over and goes and gives the presentation of his life. Dave’s lucky, a little cocky and gets away without the preparation and nerves that everyone else has about speaking. Lucky Dave. So what should the rest of us be doing the night before a big speech or presentation?