What is the goal of professional speaking?
The goals of professional speaking are to entertain, inform, inspire, and to get the audience to take action.
The truth is, in order for your presentation or speech to have its greatest effect you need to be able to entertain and wow your audience.
I'm going to give you eight ways that I use in my speeches to keep my audience on the edge of their seats until the end of my talk, starting with these two:
1) Say something right off the bat that connects to the audience.
Let me give you an example of how I open a talk, and you know I've given over 5,000 talks and seminars. I almost always open with the same words.
I say, "Congratulations for being here. This means that you are in the top ten percent of adults in our society today."
I say this in Russia, I say it in China, Finland, Canada, and I say it in Atlanta.
"You are among the top ten percent of adults in our society today."
"Why is that?"
"It's because you're here."
"You see, only the top ten percent of people in any society ever come to a seminar like this to learn how to be better in some way. The other 90 percent always have a reason for not being here."
Then I'll ask, "How many of you know people who could have been here, but had an excuse for not coming?"
Everybody in the audience nods and visualizes and thinks of the person who's not here, who is usually not a very successful person. Then, I tell them that the fact they are here means that they are in the top ten percent.
And by the way, how can you tell who a person really is? How can you tell what they believe in, what their goals are, and what their hopes, dreams and values are? Can you tell by what they say? Is it what they hope or wish?
No.
It's only what they do. The fact is that you are here. You've taken the actions to be here, and that means you're in the top ten percent.
