Knowing how to speak is a powerful advantage for politicians, but also for leaders and marketers. While good speeches have the ability to create opportunities and open doors, bad ones can help them close permanently. As indicated recently by the marketing professor, Jonah Berger, to the Knowledge@Wharton, a university journal published by the prestigious Wharton School, Pennsylvania, “we worry so much about choosing the right words that we end up devaluing other factors like body language, volume or tone of voice while communicating.”
And that leads us, namely, to the essential question of trust. If we want to communicate and connect effectively with our audience, or even inspire them, we can’t do it without such… trust. Now, fortunately or unfortunately, this is not a permanent or congenital attribute, with which some of us are born with, but rather the result of much effort. It requires, from the start, a clear mastery of the subject in hand; but it requires, at the same time, to be able to sense our audience’s pulse, exciting and interacting with it in the right measure.
In conclusion, we would say that in order to be “heard” and perceived as credible, we must “waste time” (by the way, precious!) preparing and thinking about our speeches. Otherwise, the next-door neighbor or the mobile phone tends to be a much more interesting stage.