The Simple Truth

I’m back from the 2010 Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking in Palm Desert, California, and it turns out that I didn’t need that extra bag I took to carry home my trophy. I gave the best speech I have ever given, the culmination of months of thought, preparation, practice and sweat, and it wasn’t good enough. I didn’t even finish in the top three of my semi-final contest.

While I’ve had more than a few moments of depression and self-doubt since, on the whole it was a remarkably positive experience. I know I’m a far better speaker and writer than I was six months ago when I began this process.

The sheer volume of practice that I went through has made me more comfortable, confident and deliberate on stage. As former World Champion of Public Speaking, Darren LaCroix, always says, there’s no substitute for stage time.

The formal, and informal, feedback that I received has been invaluable in helping me to see myself, my strengths and my weaknesses more clearly. Dozens of people, some the unlikeliest sources, have given me clues to how I could express what I needed to say and mitigate my faults of style, logic and meaning.

The continuous process of tearing apart and rebuilding the same speech has also taught me more about structure, rhythm and pacing. A speech is a delicate thing. A single line can tie two ideas together in a seamless whole, or snap the audience out of their trance altogether. As with any other creative act, there is no right way to do it. There is only what is more or less effective in the circumstance at hand.

I learned an incredibly valuable lesson from my competitors. In my semi-final contest, the outcome was in doubt up until the last of the nine speakers, Ian Humphries, strode onto the stage.

Ian is a very soft-spoken, unassuming man, and not who I would have pegged as the favorite, but thirty seconds into his speech I knew, and I think the other competitors did too, that we were all fighting for second place. There was a quiet authenticity to his voice and message, about putting his life together after a stint in prison as a young man, which made the rest of us look like tap dancing monkeys. In fact, the speeches I heard last week that had the most impact were not the one that were technically the best. They were the ones that told simple, deep, honest truths.

That was something I had forgotten in my preparations. My speech was about a very bad day I had on the river when I was a whitewater rafting guide. It was an experience that taught me a lot about fear; how to overcome it and how to use it to focus under pressure and perform better. In trying to make the speech dynamic and powerful, I used every technique I could think of with my voice, body and gestures. I wrote and rewrote the speech to make the story intriguing, exciting and dramatic. And I think I was successful.

But somewhere in that process, I forgot to tell the simple truth of how that day had really affected me and my life. I tried to make it more than it was and lost the thread of authenticity that I began with. That’s what separated me from the top speakers. There was something deeply personal and honest in their words. Of course, that’s easy to say, but hard to do. Our deepest feelings are often the hardest to find and the most difficult to share. But they are what make an inspirational speech unforgettable and make a speaker a champion.