What do you do at the end of your speech? When judging speech contests, it’s a recognized phenomenon that the first and last speakers are the ones that get the most brain space in the judge’s mind. It’s the same with our speeches. People remember the opening and the conclusion. We hope they will remember our call to action. This is why it is critical to put effort into the end of your speech. This is my worst skill. I struggle over conclusions. Despite my insistence on this podcast to write your ending first, I still fail to nail the landing more than I succeed. Today on the podcast, we’ll talk about the end of a speech: how to build to a great conclusion – as soon as you know what that is. INTRO Are you looking for a way to change the world? To make an impact on the people and situations around you? Then you need public speaking and leadership skills. That means you need Toastmasters. Every week, you can spend an hour learning the techniques and finding your voice and have fun while you do it. This is Toastmasters 101 and I’m your host, Kim Krajci. The End of My Speech: Crash and Burn? Last week, I gave a speech from the Visionary Communications path from Level 5: Develop Your Vision. The irony dripped from this speech. The purpose of that project is to develop a vision and long-term goals to achieve a specific change in your life or your business or organization. I have issues with this idea. Frankly, I think we spend a lot of time spinning our wheels talking about vision statements and mission statements and goal setting – and wear ourselves out, drowning whatever motivation we had in the swamp of building expectations and plans. Ok, so that’s my take. I know that I’m not in agreement with the rest of the world, but hey, I do me. If you have a problem with a speech project, it’s hard to do it. And this is why this project sat on my to-do list for so long. It’s been 5 months since I finished all the other projects for this path. Irony in My Speech And frankly, although I say I don’t like visions, missions, and goals, essentially, that was what the whole “create a storytelling path” was. As I said, lots of irony here. I created a presentation to go along with my speech – I had the perfect graphics, including pictures of the references I used to put this path together. But when I started the presentation – all of the graphics disappeared. They were there before and they’re back – but for the 10 minutes of this presentation, they were not to be seen. Which means I skipped to slide 4 where my text was visible. That noise you hear? That’s me banging my head on my desktop. I didn’t want to take time to reboot or reload, so I went with it. I had the notes under the black slides, so I did the best I could to remember what the images were supposed to prompt me to talk about. Then we got to the end of the speech. Another blank slide. The End of My Speech Slide Deck is Blank! I took a deep breath and completely forgot what it was that I wanted to say as a conclusion to this speech. I’m sure that it was something witty about the irony of giving a speech about how I fail to appreciate the power of developing visions and missions and goals when that was I had just spent the last year doing. Instead, I said something else about how we need to take the Toastmasters Pathways projects and make them work for us, regardless of the project’s goals. I’ve got 3 Distinguished Toastmasters awards, including one in Pathways. No other path interested me, but storytelling does, so creating a path that meets my needs and challenges me is a lot more important than filling the letter of the law. Then I remember we have a guest: Marta. Marta is brand-new to Toastmasters and is preparing her first ice breaker speech and here I am, telling her to ignore it if it doesn’t work for her. Oops. I thought I was droning on and I was a bit worried. But I wrapped it up, finally, and waited for Mo, my evaluator, to nail me on rambling on my conclusion. Evaluation at the end of the speech? Instead, I got compliments on it. My take-aways from this: I’m not sure if I’m supposed to take away that if I feel like I’m rambling at the end of the speech that I am doing better.I have learned my lesson that I need to check a third time to be sure my presentation is going to play properly before the meeting starts.The call to action needs to be specific, personal to the members of the audience (not general) and put some persuasion – logos, pathos, and ethos – into it.With all this in mind, let’s take a look at your conclusions. Your call to action must be crafted, not thrown on at the end of your speech. I have said many times that you need to know where you’re going in a speech to make sure you get there. That’s why you start at the end, and after you write the rest of the speech, you come back and refine it. Let’s get ...
