We all know our emotions influence us, and they make a strong case on the moods of others. Nobody teaches us about how our feelings influence our actions or others. We do it instinctively.
You speak soothingly to help calm or encourage someone, inspire them into action, or fear them into your shadow. Now use this kind of emotion to help you craft a speech to never give up.
As a keynote speaker for years, I've been crafting speeches and asking, What is the feeling I want audiences to feel in my speech? I know if I get the feeling right, inspiring them to action is much more comfortable. If you're going to write a speech about hope, decide what emotional state you need the audience to feel along the way.
For instance, I'm a funny inspirational speaker; my job is to inspire. I do this with stories and humour. According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary definition inspiration is the act of drawing in and moving people through intellect and emotion. I've always felt an excellent motivational speech does both.
It would help if you appealed to emotion and logic. Use emotion to compel people and logic to build a case. Emotion moves you, and reason involves the research and steps to get there.
I like audiences to leave energized with a sense of mission. You can't do that without joining forces of emotion and logic.
We've all experienced presentations that have one but not the other. A strictly logical speech usually involves PowerPoint. It layers in a lot of information. If the information is well organized, and the statistics paint a compelling picture, it can still move people to action.
As a keynote speaker, I've watched hundreds of technical guest speakers. Most highly logical talks are intensely dull. They present the necessary information, but they leave you restless and wanting less not more. You lost me at hello.
Some talks are highly emotional. Usually involving a personal story, these talks can be very gripping. When someone talks about their hardships, it causes you to feel the way they feel or felt. You can be dragged through an emotional rollercoaster and hopefully lifted at the other side.
I remember speaking in Minneapolis for 2,000 insurance agents.
The plenary speaker before me took the stage and launched into a story about her son committing suicide. I was on the edge of my seat, feeling her agony. I could imagine the regret, the guilt and the internal pain she woke up with every day. It was heart-wrenching. I cried. I felt sad. At some points, I even felt angry.
I was transported from the formal convention ballroom into this world of sadness and pain. From time to time, I had to look at my phone to disengage my tears. It was too much for me.
My job was to get up and make the audience laugh after this. I could understand why the meeting planner stacked the agenda this way. However, fear and anger had split the audience up inside. It was a tall order. I was nervous.
I didn't have to be. The masterful keynote speaker magically transported the audience out of our sadness and into inspiration. With a nearly invisible touch, she pulled us from sorrow into hope. It wasn't an accident; she knew what she was doing.
She had mastered the art of engaging emotions: the happy and the sad ones.
Too often, we look for strategies that will shift people out of challenging emotional spaces. But we don't have to suffer in silence with painful emotions.
During difficult times we need to be there for one another. It means leaning into our emotions, not leaning away from them. Most people don't have a way to experience or express feelings, so when they see a keynote speaker do this, it permits them to feel.
If you are writing a speech on hope to never give up, remember to layer in emotion and logic.
Start with your logical points and build emotion around them. This usually includes personal stories. Let people know why this topic is essential. Use feeling to do it.
Instead of Defending your dignity be real with people. When you are vulnerable others will be too.
Here's how you write a speech to never give up:
Audiences are distracted. To get an audience's attention, you need to use stories to transport them from where they are to somewhere else. Being vulnerable and sharing your information permit audiences to feel their pain. A speech about never giving up requires personal stories to do that. Chose a story that means something to you. Recognize how sad feelings transform into hopeful ones. To move someone from defeated to hopeful you need to help them feel both states. Use your story to do that.
Some words have more emotion attached to them than others. Words like abandon, slash, attacked, cowardly vicious all paint a picture in your head. They evoke emotion along with that picture. String the right words along, and you create a powerful emotional feeling in an audience. These words make a speech about hope.
If a story is sad, you need to bring that emotional feeling into the telling. Otherwise, you risk seeming like a cardboard figure at the front of the room. If a story is real and personal, most of the time, your feeling of never giving up will come through quickly. However, nerves may get in the way. Transport yourself through emotion into the audience's hearts and minds.
First, be clear on what the audience might be giving up on. Hope? Is it their future? Are they giving up on their career? Are they giving up on their dreams? Or are you asking them to never give up on others? Be clear on where they have lost hope. Sprinkle your speech on hope with examples where you lost hope. Bring them down to your depths of despair so you can together climb back out.
A speech on hope must build hope. It sounds obvious, but for most people, it isn't. What does the audience have to be hopeful about? What steps do they need to take to find hope? Did you overcome an obstacle to give you hope? The speech needs to build on itself a feeling of hope.