It’s not a new idea that audiences will often remember a story that you told in a speech long after the have forgotten what the rest of the speech was about. Many speakers have had that experience.
What often surprises me is how often people take away entirely the wrong message from a speech they have just heard. Several years ago, in a Toastmasters contest, I gave a speech entitled, “The Key”. It was about how I had simplified my life to the point that I needed to carry only a single key, my apartment key, with me on a daily basis.
The message of the speech was that it could be incredibly liberating to eliminate unnecessary clutter from your life. Yet in the months and years that followed, I spoke to several people that had taken the exact opposite message. They thought I was saying that my life had become more impoverished by the thinning of my personal possessions.
I was stunned. I didn’t think I could have been any more clear. I had explicitly stated that it was a liberating experience for me and that I recommended that everyone take a closer look at how much pointless clutter they had accumulated in their homes and in their lives. But that’s not what they had heard.
There’s a school of thought in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) that that an utterance has no meaning except that taken by the listener. If that’s true, then I guess I didn’t mean what I thought I said, whatever that means.
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