7 ways to enchant your audience

How can you go beyond the usual efforts to create a successful presentation and enchant your audience? What are the secrets to creating magic with a speech?

Here are seven ways to take your speech beyond the ordinary. Some of them will be familiar, but hopefully at least one will be new to you, and help you connect with your audience better:

1. Tell a story. “Of course I tell stories,” you’re thinking. But do you make your whole speech a story? You probably just drop in the occasional anecdote.

Think about the standard Hollywood three-act structure. Do you raise the ante a third of the way through your talk, and then again two-thirds of the way through? Do you introduce conflict and suspense? Do you keep the audience on tenterhooks until the final curtain?

If you don’t, you’re not using storytelling the way you should to create forward momentum and suspense in a speech.