2. Begin writing your talk weeks in advance
It’s good to get ahead on your talk for so many reasons. But here’s one you may not have known.
Your brain actually has both long-term and short-term memory capacity.
If you write a talk shortly before you give it, the brain stores your talk in your short-term memory. This is why, sometimes, if you’re a preacher who wrote Sunday’s message on a Thursday (or worse, on Saturday night!), it can feel so unfamiliar to you on Sunday.
Contrast that with a talk you’ve worked on weeks ago and maybe delivered recently. For some reason, you probably feel like you know that talk much better than the others you write just before delivery. The reason is simple: Your brain stored that information in your long-term memory because it’s been around longer.
Ideas stored in long-term memory are just easier to recall.
I know it’s hard to get ahead, but try it. I’m working on a series I’m delivering two months from now. I’ve even got most of the bottom lines developed for the series and I’ll flesh out most of the messages in detail two to three weeks before I preach them. My guess is that by the time I deliver the first message, the series will already feel like an old friend.
Because I’m comfortable with it, the talk will immediately connect better with the audience. Your comfort with the subject may even appear to give you more authority on the subject, too, because your audience will assume you understand it well. They’ll realize you own it, because you do.
Speakers, this is also why conference talks you’ve repeated once or twice are so easy to recall: They’re stored in your long term memory.
By beginning every talk well in advance, you give every talk the opportunity to flourish into something better.
3. Include at least one self-deprecating story
If you want to build rapport with your audience, show them your weaknesses, not just your strengths.
I almost always try to find one mildly self-deprecating story in any talk I’m giving. (Fortunately, I seem to have an endless supply of self-deprecating moments from which to draw.)
This does two things. First, it put you on the same level as the audience, which is exactly where you want to be in a post-modern, post-Christian culture. Theologically, that’s a good thing, because you actually are on the same level as your audience. But in our post-modern, anti-authoritarian culture, the audience wants to know you’re one of them.
In a post-modern, post-Christian culture, your authority actually goes up, not down, when you display your vulnerability.
Second, the audience empathizes with you. They see themselves in you, and your honesty makes them quietly cheer for you.
Can you overshare? Yes. Can you undershare? Absolutely.
How do you know where the line is? If you’re not sure, I wrote this post on how to be an appropriately transparent leader without oversharing.
The bottom line, though, is this: People may admire your strengths, but they resonate with your weaknesses.
