Nowadays, everybody wanna talk like they got something to say
But nothing comes out when they move their lips
Just a bunch of gibberish.”
( Will the monkeys ever type Shakespeare? )
How to give a good speech - Before you begin, what is it that you really want to say?
There are many ways to give a terrible speech. The chief executive who pulls out a sheaf of densely written text and robotically reads it aloud. The management consultant whose every word competes with a jargon-filled tangle of meaningless diagrams and bullet points. The best man who manages to embarrass the bride and outrage her mother with his scurrilous tales.
The strange thing is that we all know this. We’ve all sat in audiences watching speakers commit these familiar crimes against rhetoric. We all know that there are much better ways to give a talk. So why do we keep doing it so badly?
The answer is we’re afraid. Jerry Seinfeld joked that people would rather be in the casket at a funeral than giving the eulogy, and while it’s a myth that people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of death, fear of public speaking is very common.
It’s this ubiquitous anxiety about speaking in public that — ironically — leads so many people to speak so badly. The chief executive is worried that an ad-libbed line will end their career. The management consultant is afraid of losing the thread or running out of things to say. The best man is terrified that people won’t laugh at his jokes. The unspoken question that frames the speech preparation isn’t “what do I want to say?” but “how do I get out of this in one piece?”.
Being asked to give a 20-minute speech is viewed by many people as an ordeal to be survived, and the central task is to safely fill 20 minutes with words, neither running out of material nor forgetting your lines. If this is how people see the challenge, no wonder their instinct is to get the scriptwriter in, or to fire up the PowerPoint clip-art and start searching for inspirational quotations; or, in the case of the panicky best man, to think of the most inappropriate story they can.
The art of good public speaking is often to say less, giving each idea time to breathe, and time to be absorbed by the audience. But the anxiety of the speaker pushes in the other direction, more facts, more notes, more words, all in the service of ensuring they don’t dry up on stage.
It’s true that speaking in public is difficult, even risky. But the best way to view it is as an opportunity to define yourself and your ideas. If you are being handed a microphone and placed at the centre of an audience’s attention for 20 minutes, you’re much more likely to flourish if you aim to seize that opportunity. Everyone is watching; you’re there for a reason. So . . . what is it that you really want to say?
FT
If you’re the best man at a wedding, there shouldn’t be much doubt: “My friend can be a real idiot sometimes, but I love him and we all wish the couple every happiness together”.
For other talks, the point may be less obvious. But there has to be one. Many executive speeches are excruciating because the CEO is determined to avoid saying anything of interest, while management consultancy is cursed by the need to give presentations regardless of whether there are any ideas to present. No less an authority than Eminem put his finger on the problem, rapping “Nowadays, everybody wanna talk like they got something to say/ But nothing comes out when they move their lips/ Just a bunch of gibberish.”
People who talk when they’ve nothing to say are an annoyance, but then there are those who do have something important to say, yet duck their opportunity to say it. That is less of an annoyance than a tragedy.
I was recently leading a seminar about public speaking, when one woman asked me how she should deal with speaking to reluctant audiences. She worked in health and safety, she explained, and people only attended talks about health and safety because they were compulsory. She seemed self-effacing and glum.
“Do you think health and safety is important?” I asked her. Yes, she did. “Do you think that if people understood your ideas better, it might prevent an awful accident?” Yes. Well, I suggested, perhaps that might be a starting point.
She might build her talk around the message, “The simplest-seeming details could save your life.” But not necessarily. Another good talk about health and safety could emphasise that when you pay attention to safety, you raise your game more generally: “health and safety doesn’t just save lives, it saves money.”
Or maybe there’s a different angle altogether. I’m not a health and safety expert, after all. But most people, I would hope, have at least one interesting thing they might want to share with the world. If you have one, start there.
In his book TED Talks, Chris Anderson (the head of TED, the conference that has become synonymous with compelling public speaking) emphasises the “throughline” — the thread that should connect everything in the speech, every story, every joke, every slide and every rousing call to action.
The throughline is the most important idea in public speaking. A good speaker mixes things up, varying tone and pace and subject-matter — but the one thing they should never mix up is their audience. That means linking everything, from tear-jerking anecdotes to statistical analysis, to the throughline. More fundamentally, it means knowing what the throughline is.
It isn’t easy to speak compellingly in front of an audience, but our fear of the occasion does us more harm than good. It’s best not to prepare in a defensive crouch. Instead, start with having something to say. Then say it.
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Last week, just an hour before I had to leave my apartment for the airport, I was still frantically packing. It was a short trip with a full schedule, but I spent about 10 minutes deciding which of the three books I was reading to take with me. I knew it was unlikely I’d have time to turn more than a few pages, but it never occurred to me to not take at least one book.
Reading has always been such an important part of my life that I can easily forget what a privilege it is, a luxury even, not only to be able to read but to have access to so many books across different genres and subject matter. When I stop to think about the value of reading, it strikes me that maybe it’s a luxury we can’t afford to not take advantage of, however busy our lives might be. I don’t think we can overestimate the role that reading plays in shaping our lives, especially when what we read invites us to reflect on unfamiliar stories and perspectives, those we have yet to make room for in our imagination, alongside the familiar.
I love François Boucher’s 1756 painting of Madame de Pompadour, which is housed in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Gold curtains are pulled back as though to reveal Pompadour, mistress of the French king Louis XV, lounging on her chaise, centre stage. Her dress is almost a character in its own right, and seems to take over the canvas, yet her figure is in no way diminished. Behind her is an ornate bookcase with full shelves. An obedient dog sits at her feet, beside strewn flowers on the floor. A side table is arranged in the foreground of the painting, with its drawer open to reveal an inkwell and quill, while on the shelf beneath, books pile up and spill over. Placed right at the centre of Madame de Pompadour’s body is an open book, which she holds in her hand.
We know that literacy grew significantly throughout 18th-century Europe, and that reading material became more widespread, available to people beyond the clergy and nobility. But books remained expensive, and reading, even for well-to-do women, was considered a luxurious pastime. Moreover, in France at this time, the state had tight control of reading materials.
Although I am more than aware that few of Pompadour’s contemporaries enjoyed the luxury of books, what I love about this painting is how it places reading on a par with fine jewels or clothes as something worth aspiring to. Pompadour’s head is held high, as though reflecting for a moment on the contents of the book, and I like to imagine that in the privacy of her room she has managed to get a hold of whatever it is she wants to read, regardless of royal censorship.
It’s easy to forget that the reason why reading was controlled in the past, and is still controlled under some regimes today, is because people understand that books reveal a multiplicity of worlds. They show us the many different ways that a life can be caged or free. They offer us powerful access to knowledge, which can in turn expand our sense of agency. And once people have a sense of agency, almost anything seems possible. Besides the sheer pleasure of it, I have always recognised my access to books as a form of power. I learn how to do new things or how to approach different seasons or experiences in life. Reading invites me to contemplate both more expansive and intentional ways of being in the world.
The 1886 painting “Marie-Madeleine au Desert”, by the 19th-century French painter Emmanuel Benner, is on view at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. It shows a naked young woman draped on a blue cloth, engrossed in reading a large folio manuscript. She is alone in cave-like surroundings, yet she appears unafraid. The woman is supposed to be Mary Magdalene, known through the New Testament Gospel narratives as a devout follower of Jesus of Nazareth. Some believe her to have been wealthy and a financial supporter of Jesus’s ministry. Others believe she was a woman of ill repute. Regardless of interpretation, I love the reframing of her here as a reflective, literate woman, seemingly undisturbed by the opinions and perspectives of the outside world.
Reading is such a significant part of my vocational life, and I think about the hours I can and often do spend on a weekend afternoon immersed in a book without thinking about anything else. The book can almost become a place of habitation. And this painting, in some beautiful way, suggests to me that reading can feel like returning home, and can offer a deep sense of nourishment. There is also the fact of Mary Magdalene’s nakedness, which I choose to see as symbolic of the exposure and vulnerability that any of us can bring to a text, a sense of openness to learning and to listening that can foster a dialogue with the author. Her posture implies that this exposure is not a threat, it’s not dangerous. Rather, that when we read with openness, we expose ourselves willingly to the possibility of being encountered ourselves.
I am regularly drawn to the work of contemporary Kenyan artist Wangari Mathenge. Her 2021 painting “The Ascendants XIX (Her Things Are Here)” gives an overview of a green table with cosmetic items, make-up bags and flowers arranged on its surface. We also see a pair of women’s hands with slim fingers. The right hand stirs a cup of coffee and the left cradles a book, the thumb serving as a place marker.
It seems such a simple, commonplace scene. But what I like so much about this work is its sense of perspective. As we look from above we are given an intimate view of a small slice of this woman’s life. Perhaps we’ve caught her getting ready in the morning, grabbing just a few minutes to read a couple of pages of the book she can’t keep away from. And we see the book’s cover clearly enough to know that she’s reading Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, a striking and unforgettable memoir by Alexandra Fuller, about her chaotic upbringing in Rhodesia during the country’s civil war. Its inclusion is an interesting choice for Mathenge, who lives and works between African and western countries, and perhaps points to the ongoing ways in which a woman negotiates her relationship with writing, identity and place.
I love that the artist lets us read the title of the book. It is almost an invitation for us to look for it ourselves in our own lives, and to spur our own thoughts, even if they may come into conflict with what we read. This, for me, highlights the value of reading as something that can open up ways to engage with stories vastly different from our own, and at the same time let others into the more intimate spaces of our lives, as with this painting. How many of us have been in a conversation in which we are either asked or we ask the other, “Are you reading anything you’d recommend?” or “What was the last book you read?” We love to hear about the books that other people read because they tell us something about who those people are, their interests and what excites them. There’s the hope that we might find something in common with one another. And the hope that we might find something new and interesting that might inspire our own lives.
