Love your audience

If it's Thursday it must be semifinals. The 91 Districts of Toastmasters International each send a contestant to the World Championship of Public Speaking, and they battle it out in nine enormous semifinal contests to find the top nine who will compete in the final on Saturday.

We attended two semifinals and they were exhausting. Semifinal 1 featured the luminous Kingi Biddle of Rotorua and we turned up in support, of course. Semifinal 7 included the new District 93, South Korea, who I visited when they were still undistricted and have fond memories of. After the contest I spoke to some of the Korean club members and was very happy to see an old friend again.

As I listened to those 20 speakers give their 20 inspirational speeches, I was vividly reminded of that morning's educational session, "Anatomy of a keynote" by Robin Sieger. Robin had delivered a keynote during the opening ceremony and now we got to find out how he does it. His message was sorted into 12 points, but came down to a single core principle: love your audience.

I noted down my interpretation of the 12 points. Here they are.
1. It's not about you, it's about the audience.
2. Love the audience.
3. Speak from the heart, with sincerity, as to a close friend.
4. Be the same person off the platform as on the platform.
5. Stay in the moment.
6. Make direct eye contact with the audience 95% of the time.
7. Think GIVE, not GET.
8. Tell your story fresh every time.
9. When the speech finishes, the keynote is not over for the audience.
10. Never forget you are telling a story, not preaching.
11. Get out of your own way. Be the messenger not the message.
12. Don't compare yourself with others. Learn from other speakers but do not imitate them.

For me, this all means one thing: a powerful speaker *gives* the audience something and really cares about them getting it. This came back to me during the semifinals because it was so clear which speakers cared sincerely about the audience and which were still focused on themselves.

The semifinalists were all tremendous speakers. They had trained and studied every tool in the speakers' toolbox, and they used them with all the great skill that had taken them to their District contests and beyond. It's a huge honour to speak on the International stage. Every one of the contestants worked hard and poured themselves into their speech and were in every way worthy of that honour. I hope they're all proud of their achievement; they should be.

The speakers covered many diverse topics, and, as is often the case in inspirational speaking, some of the topics were... heavy. Serious. Upsetting. The speakers talked about domestic violence and armed robbery, war and cancer, HIV and genocide, bullying and isolation. They shared with us their deepest personal experiences. We were honoured by their sharing.

But as well as honoured, we were exhausted. It wasn't just the heavy subject matter - it was what the speakers did with it. Simply sharing a story is not enough and they knew it. They worked hard to find messages for us in their stories, and they all succeeded. We learned to say thank you to the people in our lives, to hold onto our dreams, to reach out to others, to make wishes, to put things in perspective. It was all good stuff.

The difference between the speakers lay in what they did with their messages, having found them. The very best came to us with their message as a gift and their tragedy as the packaging - just enough to make the message real and important and relevant. Others gave us their pain and suffering in its entirety and then, when we were hurting with them, attached the message. I can't fault them for it - the strength they showed in sharing their stories was phenomenal, and I understand that it's not always possible to make a pretty parcel out of your real pain (at least not on demand for a speech contest). As a phase in the healing process, that comes pretty darn late in the piece.

But that was the difference between advancing and not. The best speakers wanted the audience to get their message and built their whole speech around that desire. Others wanted to share their stories, almost regardless of the audience's needs, and that was what became the centre of their speech - the speaker's story, not the message for the audience.

And that difference is something you could call love. Those who were ready to show love to the audience via the gift of their heartfelt message will compete again on Saturday. Those who weren't - who were too deep in their story to hold their audience tuly at heart - won't.

I have never entered the International speech contest. Not even at club level, not once, ever in my 12 years as a Toastmaster - even though I've entered the other three contests many times and been District champion in one. I've just never felt ready to speak from the heart in the way that's needed in an International contest speech. My journey as a speaker has taken me through 50ish speeches and nearly to my DTM, but I know I still don't know how to sincerely put my audience first.

This week's semifinalists have helped me to understand how important it is to care about the audience. I'm humbled to be able to learn this lesson from the greatest. I look up with the greatest respect to everyone who has had the courage and skill to take the International stage this week. When I try in a few weeks to give my first real inspirational speech at my club, I will be indebted to those people for a large part of its preparation.