Episode 55 Catchy Ways To Keep Your Speech Interesting With Repetition to Reinforce and Remember

We're continuing the speech analysis from yesterday. Today we're focusing on the repetition that the speaker uses to reinforce his points and ensure that we remember his key ideas. The speech we're listening to is Simon Sinek's Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmyZMtPVodo&t=523sYou can find it on YouTube at the above link with English subtitles or head over to TED.com to find a version with a wide variety of subtitles. I hope you find this series of podcasts useful. It seems like giving presentations is such a huge part of most people's working life. I hope that taking the opportunity to really understand some strategies from a master can help you improve your own skills. Tomorrow we'll be looking at his use of stories and intonation.  Today we're looking at the way Simon Sinek has built this speech so that he uses repetition to help the listener hear his point. In fact, if you watch the speech a couple of times you will realise he doesn't have a lot of points to deliver really, just one or two. But he repeats them several times. He uses different stories and scenarios to deliver the points again and again so that you really get them. It's not only his points that he repeats. He uses similar vocabulary and sentence structure, even rhythm to help you catch his points and get attached to his ideas. Let's take a look at some of these: First of all let's look at one of the big repeated themes, that of trust, co-operation. At the beginning of the speech he gives us the idea: 'It's this deep sense of trust and cooperation. So trust and cooperation are really important here. The problem with concepts of trust and cooperation is that they're feelings, they're not instructions.' So the collocation he is using is 'trust and cooperation'. He's used it several times in this short phrase. Later in the speech he brings this idea back several more times in slightly different ways. 'When we felt safe amongst our own, the natural reaction was trust and cooperation.' And then again a little later. This time he ties it in with leadership. 'When the people feel safe and protected by the leadership in the organisation the natural reaction is to trust and cooperate.' The second common theme he has throughout the speech is about safety, protection and sacrifice. He talks about the choices leaders make to sacrifice themselves and the choices bad leaders make to sacrifice their people. Let's take a look: 'We know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could protect their own interests, or worse, they sacrificed their people to protect their own interests.' He quickly reiterates the same idea with a very repetitive sentence, just like the ones we saw above. And again, here uses a simple idea and makes it into a powerful idea. 'Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers. They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people.' This phrase is supported by the story of the company that gave everyone compulsory leave. 'It's better that we all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot.' The result is that we clearly understand that bad leaders sacrifice the people for the numbers and take no personal risk and good leaders sacrifice themselves for the people and take all the risk. Additional Vocabulary going by the wayside - idiom - when something is no longer our main focus or is passing by or is no longer importantperiod drama - we use this phrase to describe dramas that are set in the past pushes home the point also hammer home - idioms - both meaning to really reinforce something we want to say, I used both of these several times in this podcast series. tugs on the heartstrings - idiom - 'tug' means to pull. This idiom means something makes us feel something deeply. It's often used to imply that someone is making you feel something deeply on purpose or for their own reason.