Why are some speeches and speakers great — some few — and so many are not?  Ultimately, great speaking is about passion, and something more:  self-forgetfulness.

Watch Martin Luther King, Jr giving his famous I Have a Dream speech.  After about 10 minutes of prepared text, you can see King shift his stance, and look up from the page.  He drops the somewhat labored metaphor of a ‘promissary note’ due African Americans (because full rights have not been extended to them).  Incredible as it may seem, he begins to ad-lib the famous lines, I have a dream.  It is a dream fully rooted in the American dream……

King wrote afterward that he had been thinking about the ‘dream’ metaphor for some time before the speech, and on the day it just crystallized in the moment. 

It was a moment of self-forgetfulness.  King was subsumed, and transformed, in the message he was delivering.  And so he was able to take his audience on a journey that few speakers have ever achieved. 

I don’t mean, of course, that he literally forgot where he was.  I do mean that he achieved the self-forgetfulness of a great conversation, the kind where you’re only thinking about the exchange between the two of you, and you’re hardly conscious of the minutes passing.  It’s what the creativity gurus call ‘flow’.  With King, he achieved flow in front of 300,000 people. 

That’s not easy to do, but then the stakes are not always as high as they were on that day.  Nonetheless you can prepare yourself for that happy moment when you’re in the flow in front of an audience by taking a couple of steps before you speak.

First, rehearse the speech so that you know it cold.  You can’t achieve self-forgetfulness if you don’t know where you’re going at the level of near-instinct.  Flow comes from preparation, not from winging it.

Second, find what you’re passionate about and stick to that.  Keep your speech on topic and make sure that it is something that you are really burning to say in front of an audience.   

Finally, when you are speaking, focus on the audience.  If you know the speech, and you’re passionate about the subject, then focus on your listeners and how they’re doing.  Are they with you?  Do you need to crank up the passion?  Vary the tempo?  Re-engage them?  Where are they?  You can’t know that if you’re not paying attention to them.  And that’s the last step to self-forgetfulness and a sublime speech.