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How to Change Minds With a Speech
What’s the best way to prepare people for change? This question is one that we speakers often ask ourselves, more or less directly, as we develop a new talk. We are in the change business, after all. Whether we’re motivational speakers or expert speakers or brand ambassadors, our speeches are either explicit or implicit calls for change. We bring attention to a topic, or an issue, or a cause and we want the audience to end up with new ways of thinking and behaving as a result of having heard us speak.
As I often say, the only reason to give a speech is to change the world.
So what’s the best preparation for that change? If you want your audience to remember what you’ve said, then tell them a story. New research has found that when you tell an audience a story, they remember more of what they hear. That’s true of both children and adults, by the way.
The statistics on memory, another recent study shows, are pretty depressing. We only remember about a quarter of what we hear, but what we do remember, we do so with reasonable accuracy. That’s consistent with long-term research results over many years showing that audiences recall 10–30 % of what they hear. And it puts the pressure on us as speakers to tell good stories in order to push that low percentage up as high as we can.
