Advice on How to Find Your Voice, Speak Your Mind, Inspire Any Audience from a legendary Presidential Speech Writer
Advice on How to Find Your Voice, Speak Your Mind, Inspire Any Audience from a legendary Presidential Speech Writer
Issue 135: In his new book "SAY IT WELL", Terry Szuplat, a speechwriter for Barack Obama, shares lessons to becoming a more confident and compelling communicator and leader
From FDR’s famous line “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” to Reagan’s demand that “Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall” to John F. Kennedy urging Americans to “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”, there is a long history of soaring oratory from American presidents. More recently, President Barack Obama was widely praised as “one of the nation’s great orators”. In fact, he’s the greatest public speaker that we’re have ever seen.
But almost always behind every great presidential speech is a great speechwriter. Terry Szuplat, one of Barack Obama’s longest-serving speechwriters, helped shape some of Obama’s most memorable speeches. But he was once terrified of public speaking. Public speaking is often considered one of the most nerve-wracking experiences and is a common phobia even for people who have spent years behind the scenes crafting speeches for world leaders.
In his new book, Say It Well: Find Your Voice, Speak Your Mind, Inspire Any Audience, Terry combines his experience as a White House speechwriter with evidence from psychology and neuroscience to offer a roadmap for anyone looking to become a more confident and impactful communicator. In fact, Terry interviewed Jay about his research on the language of polarization. His book focuses on how we can use communication to bridge divides, appeal to shared identities, and inspire change. Through powerful anecdotes and practical tips, Szuplat explains how to tailor your message to resonate with any audience—whether you're giving a presentation at work, advocating for a cause, or simply raising a toast.
One of the lessons I share—and that I now realize President Obama was doing in so many of his speeches, both in the United States and around the world—is that we can connect with our audiences by appealing, explicitly and implicitly, to their social identity and to group dynamics.
Say It Well is out September 17th which also marks the start of Terry’s live book tour. The book is now available for preorder here and on Amazon.
What does your book teach us about social identity or group dynamics?
Well, I want to start by pointing out the obvious—I’m not a psychologist or a neuroscientist. I’m a speechwriter. For nearly 30 years, I’ve helped leaders, including a president, connect with their audiences, and as a trainer I help people in my workshops find their own voice and communicate better.
For most of my career, I felt that communicating effectively was purely an art. After leaving the White House, however, I stumbled upon research that upended my thinking. I reached out to scholars to learn more, and I learned from books like “The Power of Us.” I now realize that connecting effectively with an audience is both an art and a science. In “Say It Well,” I try to bring it all together – the art of communication that I learned as a White House speechwriter for President Obama along with the psychology and neuroscience that shows why these techniques work so well—so that anyone, anywhere can become a better speaker, communicator, and leader.
One of the lessons I share—and that I now realize President Obama was doing in so many of his speeches, both in the United States and around the world—is that we can connect with our audiences by appealing, explicitly and implicitly, to their social identity and to group dynamics. As his speechwriters, we were doing it too, without realizing the science behind it, and in “Say It Well,” I share how anyone can do too.
What is the most important idea readers will learn from your book?
I think one of the biggest mistakes that many of us make as speakers is that we mostly think about what we want to say. As a result, many of us—a bit like a politician —develop something of a “stump speech.” We tend to give the same few presentations, especially in a professional setting, regardless of the audience.
I get it. It’s easier to have a ready-to-made presentation that we can pull out at a moment’s notice. It takes more time and work to tailor our presentations to each audience. But that’s exactly what effective speakers do.
With that in mind, one of the most important ideas that I hope readers take away from “Say It Well” is that if we want to connect with, motivate, and inspire our audiences, we have to think deeply about our audience—who they are and what they want and need from us as a speaker. To help readers do this, I offer “10 Questions to Ask Before Any Speech,” including:
What’s the background of my audience? Young? Old? Liberal, conservative, moderate? Urban, suburban, rural? What’s their racial, religious, or ethnic makeup?
What are their lived experiences? What events have shaped their lives? Are there achievements that they’re proud of that I can celebrate? Do they carry any pain, trauma, or sense of injustice that I can acknowledge and address?
What is their worldview—their beliefs and values? And what are yours? Where they overlap—the core values you have in common—is where you have the best opportunity to connect with your audience and where your best presentation lives.
What is their mood? Are they optimistic or worried? Energized or dispirited?
What do they expect of you? Are they supportive or skeptical of your views? What do they want—or need—to hear from you?
Ask and answer questions like these before you prepare your presentation and you’ll increase your chances of connecting with your audience and getting them to listen to what you have to say.
Why did you write this book and how did writing it change you?
I wrote “Say It Well” because, like so many people, I often struggled with public speaking too. Even though I’ve been a professional speechwriter for nearly my entire adult life, for most of that time I’d been uncomfortable behind the podium myself. I was a speechwriter who couldn’t seem to hack it as a speech giver!
Over time, I found myself avoiding situations where I might be called upon to speak. Then, a few years after leaving the White House, I was invited to give a keynote address—to an audience of three hundred people. At first, I wanted to say no. I was too afraid. I didn’t want to embarrass myself. But then I thought, am I going to hide from public speaking all my life?
I decided to face my fears. I had months to prepare and I used all that time to try to remember the lessons I’d learned as a speechwriter, including for President Obama, and use them to develop and deliver a speech for myself. And it worked. For the first time in my life, I was able to stand up in front of an audience (of 300 people!) and deliver a major speech—and the audience loved it. “Say It Well” is the story of the lessons I learned and how anyone can apply them in their own lives.
Writing the book changed me as well. I had to think deeply about why I was so nervous about public speaking in the first place. I reached out to experts, including Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. “We’re all social animals,” she told me. “We all need to feel safety, love, and belonging.” Fears of being rejected by our group, she explained, may be rooted in our ancient survival instincts. “Rejection used to be fatal. If you were kicked out of your family or your tribe, you’d be cast to the wolves. You could literally die.” Today, “social rejection can feel like a fast track to death.”
Listening to Dr. Hendriksen, I started to understand my own anxieties around public speaking and why so many people feel the same way. Its’ why the first Chapter of “Say It Well,” is called “Love Your Sacred Story.” It’s about how the safety, love and belonging that we all need in life starts in our own hearts—the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. That our voice matters. That our story is worthy. That we deserve to be at that podium as much as anyone else.
What will readers find provocative or controversial about your book?
Some readers might take issue with how I suggest addressing people with whom we disagree or whose views we find abhorrent.
By all means, we should condemn bigotry like racism, sexism, and homophobia as the scourges they are. At the time, if we’re trying to persuade someone—a neighbor, a coworker, an employer, an elected official, or our crazy uncle at Thanksgiving—I wouldn’t recommend calling them a bigot to their face.
“Telling people they’re racist, sexist, and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere,” explains Alana Conner, of Stanford University’s Center for Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions. “It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.”
I realize this is not what many people may want to hear. It’s hard to resist calling people out when we feel their views are an affront to the fundamental values of equality and justice that are at the foundation of our diverse democracy. But we have to ask ourselves: are we trying to condemn them or persuade them? If we’re trying to persuade someone, the first step is not condemning them.
Do you have any practical advice for people who want to apply these ideas (e.g., three tips for the real world)?
In the book, I share many ways that, as speakers and communicators, we can connect more deeply with our audiences, whether we’re speaking to five people or five hundred. Here are three:
The Power of You – How we identify ourselves to our audience can have a profound effect on how they perceive us, whether they see us as part of their group and therefore whether they’re open to what we’re saying. When you speak, think about which of your many identities might allow you to best connect with your audience. “I’m speaking to you today as…” “a mother,” “a father,” “a person of faith,” “a veteran.”
The Power of ‘We’” – “The single most powerful word in our democracy is ‘We,’” President Obama said once. “’We the People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome…’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone.” It’s the central lesson of “The Power of Us”— appealing to the identities and groups that people cherish, without demonizing others outside the group, can be one of the most powerful ways to motivate an audience to do good.
The Power of What We Do – As Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, points out, we can also motivate our audiences by appealing to how they see themselves (with fewer verbs and more nouns). He points to a study where encouraging people to think of themselves as “a voter” made them more likely to vote than people we simply said they planned “to vote.” We can do it too. Are you trying to motivate your coworkers? Appeal to their pride as “problem solvers,” “creators,” and “innovators.”
All of which is to say, combining the art and science of communication not only helps us know what to say in our presentations and speeches, it helps us know how to say it well.
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Catch up on the last one…
Last week’s newsletter was one of our most popular columns ever! It is the first in a debunking popular psychology myths series, which will continue next week.
