Episode 56 Catchy Ways To Keep Your Speech Interesting Using Stories and Tone of Voice

We're continuing the speech analysis from yesterday. Today we're focusing on using stories and tone of voice to deliver your point effectively and help people emotionally engage with what you're saying. 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=523s You 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've found 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.  If you listen to Simon Sinek's other speeches or read his books you'll quickly realise that one of his key strategies is to use stories to deliver and support his points. This speech is no different. Through the 12 minutes he is speaking he gives us five or six stories of various lengths to demonstrate the key points we discussed yesterday. Again, with these stories he is using repetition. The first and last stories are about the military. There are two stories about people almost being laid off and two different ways to deal with that scenario. He uses stories to tell us about a lack of trust and to explain how trust, cooperation and mutual sacrifice can lead to stronger teams and more successful companies. He starts and ends his speech with the military and also with a key point from people in the military about why they trust: 'Because they would have done it for me.' In this way he uses the personal story and even personal words from individuals to bookend his speech and make it more human. This is a sentiment and a sentence we can all relate to and appreciate. It sounds heroic, fitting for the people who said it. And ultimately, it makes us want to be a part of an organisation that is full of people who think like this. In addition to his story telling Simon Sinek is a master of using his voice. Listen closely to the speech. You will hear how his tone changes. There is one point in the speech where he actually whispers, 'we've got it the wrong way round!' And gets a laugh from the audience. He's delivering a painful point, one we all know, deep down, and something that affects our lives every day, yet by saying it in this way he makes his audience receive this truth and laugh at it, leaving them open to consider another way. Throughout the speech Sinek gets louder and quieter, faster and slower and uses stronger and weaker emphasis. All of these changes in intonation help our ear. Our ear never gets bored because the tone is always changing. And written down like this, it sounds like a lot! But because each change of tone is carefully matched with the content he is talking about we're not overwhelmed. Rather we hear his point more clearly, we enjoy his speech and we learn from it. As I said, he's a master speaker. Have another listen, see if you can catch all the intonation changes. How do they make you feel? How about you? When you're talking at work, in meetings or giving presentations, how is your tone? Have a listen next time and listen to others around you. Does their tone match their meaning? How can you use tone to help you deliver your point? Additional Vocabulary we get that - we understand that, we relate, we empathise bookend this speech - if we 'bookend' something we means we put something at the beginning and the end of it. corny - this is an informal (mostly American English) word to describe something that is sentimental I digress - another phrase I use often just like 'gone off piste' to mean I've gone off the subject. tap into - to connect with riling us up - if we feel 'riled up' then someone is making us angry and annoyed tactics - similar to strategies