Most successful disruptive speeches are romances between speakers and their ideas.

These speakers care very deeply about a subject, an ethic, a concept. They are excited by these ideas, inspired by them, and have used them to inform some very important decisions.

You too have these ideas and values that you care deeply about. You would not have succeeded as a leader if you did not.

Your goal as a speaker is to share some of this excitement with your audience, make them have the same realizations about the subject as you have. Be a matchmaker, if you will, between them and your idea.

How exactly do you do that? That’s where some of the fun comes in, and this is where the individuality of each speaker comes out.

There are lots of different ways to do this, but a good beginning would be to remember the circumstances under which you grew to love this idea. Then try to recreate it for your audience.

Maybe you started caring about ecological responsibility by watching forest wildlife as a child. You first cared about engineering by walking with one of your parents through a design facility. You first believed in the magic of math thanks to a brilliant, kind professor. Or witnessed the power of self-confidence watching your mother hold her own against a corporate board consisting all of men.

Remember that experience and try to find ways to share that with your audience. It could be something as simple as telling the story of that critical experience. Personal stories are always powerful. If you have reasons against going personal [there are valid reasons to go other directions], you can do powerful, detailed descriptions of objective experiences: what happens when a rocket is launched; when a whale jumps out of the water, when a prototype product is first tested in front of its nervous engineers.

You can make it funny: mock-lessons; mock-employee manuals and testimonials. You can pretend to be an accounting rule and describe what happens from their perspective [I once had a client do that.]

You can bring other people to help you. Some of the most effective, and most fun, presentations are group efforts.

And, of course, you provide some solid data including powerful well-thought arguments; important and accurate statistics. You are appealing to the rational, logical parts of your audiences as well.

But here are some important things to consider about data and powerful arguments. It is, without question, your responsibility to provide powerful, relevant and accurate data for your audience to process, but all this data is only part of your performance. Remember, you don’t have the time to comprehensively discuss the pros and cons of a subject. If you do, then you are conducting a lecture or seminar – a very worthwhile, but altogether different activity with different goals and strategic issues.

When you are doing a disruptive speech, you are trying to convince your audience that your favorite subject is worth further thought in the future. During that time of further reflection and research will be when the audience members will do the hard analysis, number-crunching and so on. For that matter, make sure you have excellent quality informational materials to hand out after the speech, as well as a formidable array of Internet resources, like glossaries, white-papers and other background materials. That way audience members can convince themselves of the merits of your argument long after the speech.

But again, the audience members will only look at all your excellent Internet resources if you succeeded at your first job in the speech: inspiring them about your favorite subject. Making them fall in love with your idea.