What is the best possible time to deliver a speech?  A study about when people are at their most cogent seems to be relevant here (Bu et al., 2024). Researchers studied 50,000 people during the pandemic and found that we are zippiest in the morning, and generally get grumpier and grumpier as the day wears on and we get tired.

Check.  Give a speech in the morning if possible.  We want our audience (and ourselves) to be at our best.

But there’s more.  The same study found that people are generally in a better frame of mind on Monday (surprising) and Friday (not surprising).

So give your speech on Monday or Friday morning.  Check.

Finally, the study found that people are cheerier in the summer rather than the rest of the year.  (Oddly, suicides peak in late spring and early summer, but there you are.  Humans are messy.)  Check.  Give your speech early on a Monday or Friday morning in summer.

What else makes for a successful speech?  What are the key criteria for a winning presentation?  It’s a complex mixture of art and science, intellect and emotion, performance and authenticity.  You work fiendishly hard to get both the content and the delivery right. Then you find that, despite your best efforts, the success or failure of a speech is not even up to you.  It’s in the hands of the audience.  Your speech can fall flat despite your best efforts.

I once watched a speaker open with a joke and knew it would fail.  Sure enough, it did, and the speaker panicked, thinking that his material was no good, and was uneven for the rest of the talk.  How did I know the joke wouldn’t work?  I had used it myself a few minutes before.

Another useful rule:  always listen to the immediately previous speaker.  I felt bad, but what could I do?  I had no idea the same bit of hilarity would strike the other speaker.  We hadn’t coordinated our talks in advance.  We didn’t even know each other.

There are many variables involved and you can’t possibly control them all.

But if you can’t control all the variables, what should you do?  Is there one thing you can focus on that’s more important than everything else, and that will help guarantee success?

Yes.  It’s presence.

What is presence?  It’s the quality of being so focused on the audience in front of you and on your message that you make those people feel that they’re participating in the most important thing in the known universe right there and then.  Nowhere, no one, nothing else matters as much as that message, and that audience in that moment.  It’s frankly tough to do when you’re giving the same speech over and over again as a keynote speaker.

So, you want to be successful as a speaker?  Focus on the audience.  Pay attention to its biorhythms, yes.  But more importantly, stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about being present for the people in front of you. One of the paradoxes of public speaking is that, if you can focus on the audience, you’ve got a chance to really begin to shine as a speaker.

Once you know your speech, and you know what you are doing on stage, then the next thing to work on is counter-intuitive:  self-forgetfulness.  Remember, the real success of a speech happens when an audience thinks or acts differently as a result of having heard the speech.

So forget about you, and make the audience the most important humans on the planet at the moment of speaking.