The hardest decision in every speech

I was sitting there in agony. Paralysed with indecision.

“Can I make it work?” I asked myself over and over.

I yearned for time to consider, to explore all avenues and find the best path forward.

Not such luck.

It was 2016, the day of the terrorist attack at St. Etienne-du-Rouvray in France. I had three hours to write a speech for a public ceremony in solidarity with the French people.

And I had to start again.

It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make a speechwriter, because I’d started with a strong theme. A good structure.

Halfway through I was stuck. I could keep going down that path, and it would be solid – good, even. Maybe very good.

But a new direction had come to me. What had originally been one part of the speech blossomed into a new central theme. And with just over an hour left before I had to deliver the speech (and two hours before the event), I had to make a hard call.

Stick with what I had, or scrap it and rewrite in the new direction?

I didn’t have time to explore both. And if it turned out the new path wasn’t as good, I wouldn’t have time to do the original justice.

I had to choose.

In the end, I choose to risk it all for greatness. And (thank god) the new direction worked. The speech was a success, and the client was happy.

But making that decision was hard. And, while you may not have the same time pressures, you’ve probably had to make a similar choice at some point.

In my experience writing over a thousand speeches, the hardest decision is almost never what to say… it’s what not to say.

Every speech can be taken in multiple directions. Each direction has something good going for it. But you only get one.

And there’s always so much you can say, and so much you want to say, for every speech. But again, you can’t fit it all in.

So how do you choose?

You start with the end in mind.

What do you want to achieve? Once you know that, you’ll usually find that the majority of what you could say doesn’t quite work for what you’ve actually decided to achieve.

That doesn’t mean cutting is always easy.

Sometimes you’ll be sitting there unsure, like I was.

But at least you know how to choose.

Of course, sometimes it’s a lot easier to know if you’ve got an outside eye to look at it. Someone to help you make the decision. Sometimes it just helps to ‘phone a friend’, as they say on the gameshows.

So if you’d like that kind of reassurance that the path you’re on is the right one for your next speech, talk, or presentation, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk.

Talk soon,

Alexander