How do you close a speech?  Think about whom you’re talking to:  an audience full of people who are paid to be active.  You’ve asked them to be passive for an hour or so.  The best way to close a speech, then, is to allow them to be active.  Give them something to do.

If you’re the typical speaker, two questions have immediately sprung to mind.  First, what do I get them to do?  And second, won’t I be starting something chaotic?  How do I keep control?

You get them to do something that would follow naturally from the point of your talk.  Think of it in the following way.  Supposing you have given a great speech, and the audience troops out, back to their workspaces.  But their lives have been changed – you have changed the world for them.  What do they do back at their desks?  What’s the first action they take? 

The action you get them to do at the end of the speech should be the first step toward that change, that different way of looking at the world, that new way of thinking.  Have you been telling them about new ways to organize their lives and get more done with less?  Then get them organizing, or making out a new to-do list, or deciding what they’re not going to do.  Have you been inspiring them to make new resolutions, set new goals, find new horizons to reach toward?  Then get them to commit to something new there in the room – perhaps to their neighbors.  Have you been helping them to lose bad habits and make new, better ones?  Then have them start a support group right there in the room.

You get the idea.  The point is to get them started in some small, simple way, on the larger journey you want them to go on.  If there is no larger journey, what were you talking about?  You were wasting their time and yours.

OK.  What about control?  Speakers experience that burst of energy when you set an audience to a task as a loss of control, but what it actually means is that the audience is getting back into their active groove, having been passive for an hour.  That’s a compliment to you, the speaker, that they want to be up and doing.  A far worse sign is lethargy at the end of the speech.  That means they’ve checked out and you haven’t changed the world or moved the audience to action.  That’s bad.

But energy is good.  Here’s how you deal with it.  Let it run for a few minutes, longer or shorter depending on how complex the task is you set them to.  Then, save a bit of your speech for the very end.  Signal with your body language that it’s time to gather back again.  (You’ve sat down, say, when you turned them loose.  Now get back up again.)  Ask them how it went.  They’ll want to report back.  Validate with the whole group what they’ve done individually or in small groups..  And wrap it up with some stirring words of action and encouragement. 

Then say ‘thank you’ and exit stage left.