5 Unexpected Reasons Why Great Speakers Give Terrible Speeches

Jan 8

Description: This article explores five common mistakes great speakers make that lead to unengaging speeches, including prioritizing story over substance, solutions over understanding the status quo, entertainment over engagement, misordering ideas, and not focusing on audience needs. It offers practical insights for impactful public speaking.

Most speeches suck.

To be clear, most speakers are wonderful, lovely people who are passionate, they care deeply about a message, they have an audience that they want to serve selflessly.

But the speeches they give often fail to engage.

Last year I was invited to deliver the keynote speech at a conference of 200 CPAs and financial advisors from across the region.

There's someone speaking before me. He's a lovely guy representing an innovative tech company in the finance space.

He's cool as a cucumber.

I ask, "Do you do this a lot?"

He says, "Oh yeah. I give this speech a million times a year."

And I think to myself, Fantastic. At least a pro is going on before me.

He walks on stage and as soon as he introduces the topic, the entire audience puts down their phones, cease the side conversations, and lean in.

But within about three minutes all the phones are back out, people are doing email, and the side conversations in the back corners of the room have started up again. Even folks in the front row are daydreaming.

At the end of the presentation he shows a slide with a QR code, and anybody who scans it, their practice will get free access to this critical piece of software he's been talking about.

And only three people in the entire room scanned the code.

Here was a speaker who had been given a gift: a captive audience of leaders in the field he's dedicated his life to serving.

He was given a gift, and he wasted it.

You have a moral responsibility to be engaging

I truly believe this. If you have a message that's important, and it would deeply benefit the people that you have chosen to serve, I don't think you just have a professional obligation. I believe you have a moral responsibility to deliver that message in an engaging way.

That is what this article is about, how to avoid boring your audience to tears and wasting the gift of their attention.

So, here are 5 surprising ways that great speakers fail to engage their audiences.

1. "What Do I Want Them to Know?" vs. "What Does My Audience Need to Hear?"

Far too many speakers focus on what they want to say, rather than what their audience needs to hear. This speaker-centric approach often leads to messages that don’t resonate.

Your speech needs a premise that comes from the audience, which is typically one of four things: a belief, fear, want, or problem.

Belief: a deeply held, pre-existing assumption about how the world works that needs to be broken in order to take action.

Fear: a deep aversion to something that must be assuaged in order to take action.

Want: something the audience knows they desire to get, achieve, relieve, or become.

Problem: an obstacle in the way of getting the thing they want.

Shifting to an audience-centric mindset involves understanding and addressing their challenges, interests, and needs. Building up from this premise makes the speech not just informative but transformative for the audience.

2. All Story, No Substance

You know this speaker. They're the "storyteller" - someone who is just going to tell anecdote after vignette for an hour.

And maybe they're really good at it. They're funny, they're dramatic, and the audience is on the edge of their seat... for a while. Until eventually they realize that there's no message, no takeaway, nothing in it for them. So the audience tunes out.

Effective speakers balance narrative flair with a clear message and actionable takeaways. Stories are vehicles for delivering the core message, not merely entertainment.

As my colleague and storytelling expert Francisco Mahfuz often says, "a story is merely a real-life example that makes a point."

This approach ensures the audience leaves not only entertained but also enriched with practical knowledge or new perspectives.

3. Solution Over Status Quo

We all want to talk about our thing - our unique insight, paradigm shift, proprietary method. Except... nobody cares. Yet.

Great speakers frequently sacrifice the potential power of their speech by jumping straight to their revolutionary solutions without first addressing all the common ways attendees typically try to solve the problem, or have thought about trying.

This sounds weird, but hear me out. Until your audience fully appreciates the failures of existing approaches, they cannot appreciate your special new solution.

Imagine you're in the market for a new TV and the salesman instantly starts working you on how amazing this one TV is, except it's much more expensive than the models you've been looking at and a brand you haven't heard of.

If you don't know why the TV's you're already considering aren't a good fit for you, you have no reason to listen to his pitch about the expensive, off-brand TV.

It’s vital to first establish the status quo, illustrating its limitations. This approach makes your innovative solution appear evolution, directly answering the audience's unmet needs.

4. Entertainment Over Engagement

Hey magicians, comedians, hypnotists, jugglers... I'm talking to you.

Listen, I get it - as a former magician who takes advantage of using magic tricks in my speeches, it's so tempting to lean into the entertainment factor.

But much like the storyteller, it's so easy to lose the core message amidst the tricks and laughs. Yes, speakers should be entertaining. But there are so many ways to do that without burying the takeaways.

I'm reminded of Nigel Lithgow, creator of So You Think You Can Dance, a popular reality show for aspiring professional dancers. He once warned a young dancer, the audience favorite and expected winner, "Do not lose yourself in the adoration of an audience."

Nigel was gently telling the dancer, that was a sloppy performance technically, which he had sacrificed in favor of entertaining the audience with passion and enthusiasm, and it would not be good enough in the real world of professional dancing.

He ultimately came in second place.

True engagement is about making the speech feel like a dialogue, not just a monologue. And the best way to do that is to structure the speech in such a way that your next point answers the question they just asked in their head.

Which leads me to...

5. Right Ideas, Wrong Order

This is perhaps the most common speech design mistake, lots of good ideas in the wrong order, or no order in particular.

Imagine baking a cake but starting with the icing. You've got all the right ingredients: flour, eggs, sugar, and frosting. But if you start by decorating your mixing bowl with icing before even mixing the batter, you're in for a culinary disaster.

This is what happens when a speaker presents a powerful conclusion before laying out the argument, or revealing the solution before explaining the problem.

If you frost before you bake, you'll end up with a mess instead of a masterpiece.

On the other hand, many speakers offer a series of interesting points that aren't obviously connected to each other. If you served your guests a plate of raw flour, eggs, sugar, and frosting, they wouldn't know what to do with it or why it was in front of them. You need to bake the cake for them.

Even the best ideas lose their impact if they're not logically organized and presented.

Let's build your world class keynote speech

Avoiding these common speech design mistakes is crucial for any speaker aiming to create a lasting impact.

Of course, that's easier said than done. That's why I'm running a 2-day virtual workshop in February called Build Your World Class Keynote Speech.

Join me for two intensive days where you will:

Deepen your understanding of the psychology behind speech design.
Figure out which story to use as your main hook and how to tell it.
Design your complete keynote speech outlined in detail.

It's February 15-16 for 8 hours on Zoom, both days, and includes a 2-hour storytelling masterclass from renowned storytelling expert Francisco Mahfuz.

There's only 15 tickets and 8 are already gone as of publishing this article.

Click the button below to learn more, read the full itinerary, and grab your ticket.