Idea 84: Six principles of effective speaking

Speaking takes many different forms, ranging from the formal – addresses, discourses, orations, lectures, homilies, sermons, presentations – to the less formal. Briefing your team usually falls into the second category.

These six principles apply to all the public speaking situations you will encounter as a leader. You don't have to be a great orator. Apply these principles and you will become an effective speaker:

1. Be clear – make your communication unclouded or transparent. A clear sky is one free of clouds, mists and haze. With reference to speech it means freedom from any confusion and hence easy to understand. Being clear is not primarily a matter of sentences and words. The value of clarity is an inner one: it should act as a principle, purifying thought at its source, in the mind.
2. Be prepared – take active, conscious deliberation and effort before action. To be unprepared, by contrast, means that you have not thought or made any attempt at readying yourself for what you know you may or will have to face. You are like a football team that never trains or plans before its matches.
3. Be simple – so that your hearers are not put off by the unnecessarily complicated or intricate. But don't over-simplify or talk down to your audience, even if they are children.
4. Be vivid – make it come alive! This graphic or colourful quality springs from the interest and enthusiasm in the mind and heart of the communicator, but it has to become visible in your language.
5. Be natural – or, if you prefer, be yourself. What you say and how you say it should reflect your own personality.
6. Be concise – be economical with your words and other people's time. Less is more.