One of the unintended consequences of our new, amazing, super-convenient virtual world, where everything (almost everything) is a few clicks away, is that it robs us of real closeness.  More than that:  by spending time online we lose out on intimacy.  Facebook, your favorite airline rewards program, and even Amazon take away that real closeness as fast as they offer us faux intimacy.  This world knows who our friends are!  It knows the kind of seat and meal we want!  It can recommend books to us that we might want to buy!

But even the thrilling sight of a new box from Amazon will never replace the crinkling around a true friend’s eyes when you tell them about your adventures on that last vacation – or that last trip into town. The friend who knows all the disasters that befell you on the one before that.

All those delightful likes, wows and loves on Facebook in the end simply make us hungry for more.  The virtual world is a never-ending banquet that never completely satisfies.  The loop is never closed.  The Internet doesn’t hug you back.

Or, to put it another way, our poor new U. S. President can never get enough re-tweets to fully satisfy him.

But I digress.

An enormous opportunity is being created in all these hungry denizens of the Internet.  The speaker that can supply real intimacy in her speeches, real human connection, and real conversation, will be a star on the keynote stage.

Here’s the catch:  to supply the need that’s being created, speakers will have to eschew the seductive allure of TED and its short, peppy, visually compelling speeches. Offering intellectual entertainment will not be enough to enable you to stand out amongst the legions of TEDsters, TEDxers, and TEDwannabe-ers.

Instead, the intimate speaker will have to dig deep into stories that offer the raw power of human emotion and struggle, and guide audiences on a journey into that real intimacy and connection.

What sort of a journey will you take your audience on?  Will you tell them a love story?  Will it be a quest for understanding, or growth, or mastery?  Will it be a journey of discovery in a strange new land?  Will it be a tale of hard-won success after much struggle?  You have the power of choice, but you can’t duck the responsibility of digging deeper than virtually any speech does today to find the unique, human story that only you can tell – and that will resonate with virtually everyone you touch.

I often get asked by clients whether or not the advice in their speeches – their takeaways, their immediately practical advice that audiences can put to work right away – are original enough.  I often respond that what’s original is not their advice to leaders to be authentic, but rather their own particular way of telling the story of how they learned that familiar piece of advice.

When the great theologian Karl Barth was speaking in the US to an audience of seminary students near the end of his life, in 1962, one student asked this profound religious thinker what his understanding of Christianity was.  He replied, after a pause, “Jesus loves me, this I know, because the Bible tells me so.”

Many in the audience wept.  Not because his insight was original, but because, coming from him in that time and in that place, his simplicity and faith in his God were extraordinary.  Only you can tell us about your journey.  And only you can create your unique intimacy with the audience in front of you.

Facebook will never give us anything like that.