When I ask people what they do to prepare a speech or presentation, the most common answer is, ‘pull a slide deck together.”  That is mistaking the tools for the house; it’s thinking about the process the wrong way.  A more sophisticated answer talks about storytelling, or a theme, or a series of points that the speaker wants to make.

I had one client tell me, “Make me sound like John Wayne.”  Leaving aside the relative merits of the actor in question, that approach puts the delivery ahead of the content.  I’ve generally found it’s better to start with the story you want to tell, then focus on the delivery.  Most delivery issues, though not all, have to do with discomfort with the speech content.  Get the content right and you’re well on the way to having a strong delivery.

Another approach – a potentially more fruitful one – starts with the audience.  Think about what you are trying to accomplish with a presentation.  You are creating, in essence, a temporary group that you want to move to action, enlighten, persuade, or entertain.  Probably some admixture of all of those.  So how do you create a temporary group and lead it through the process?

Begin with an invitation.  You want to begin by drawing a line around the people in front of you and saying, in effect, “You are all part of a very special group that has never existed before and may never again.  We are going to go on a journey that will change you and thus the world.  Fasten your seat belts!”

Set the criteria for inclusion in the group.  The people within the sound of your voice now have the chance to respond favorably to your invitation.  Give them a moment to do so – we want eager volunteers, not forced conscription.  You can also, by implication and even by direct address, exclude people not present.  Think of Henry’s famous speech to his troops before the Battle of Agincourt, as imagined by Shakespeare:

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Henry is both including the soldiers in front of him and excluding everyone else.

Create a strong sense of shared purpose.  Now you need to dive into the reason for the temporary group – the shared purpose, based on some need that is larger than any one person there.  It might be political, social, environmental – the purpose can be one of many causes for humans to engage in.

Outline the path needed to achieve the purpose.  It must sound hard enough to be worth the effort.  The mistake most speakers make is to make the effort – and thus the stakes – seem small.  Go big.  Remember JFK’s speech launching the US’s effort to land on the moon — it was compelling because it was calling the country to attempt to accomplish something hard.

Conclude by pointing to an action.  The audience needs to have something to do in the moment, a modest action the audience can take to start on the path.  Then you can wrap up by turning the responsibility over to them to begin, reminding them of the select group to which they now have special claim.

Put the focus on the audience, and it offers a way to think about speaking which is more sophisticated than most speaker-centered approaches.  It worked for Shakespeare; it will work for you.