This is a big question I address with clients and potential clients all the time: when should I call in the professionals and what on earth do I do with them?

Some of my colleagues and friends in the field will kill me for writing this, but sometimes you don’t need to get a professional.

If you are doing one or two speeches a year, and you have the time to devote to learning about yourself and applying what you learn to what you are writing, maybe you don’t need a speechwriter.

In fact, I encourage everyone to do at least one or two speeches on their own to understand all that it involves. Every executive should write their own speech at least once to become a better business communicator, of which we will always need more. Period.

However, if you are doing five or more speeches a year, at important venues, with varying messages and wording, then get thee to a professional.

When you are doing that many Big League performances, you need someone who has the skills and resources to bring out what is your unique best.

But then you have the issue of cost.

Now, this is an era of editorial price pressure. Companies are looking for ways to cut costs from their writers, their communication staff, their freelancers and other vendors.

It’s understandable. There are price-pressures everywhere, and costs tied to hiring a speechwriter will be one of those things to consider for cutting.

At the risk of being biased [alright, I am biased], let me try to explain the issues of cost, and price, from the perspective of a speechwriter.

Let’s say you need to do a really great 15-minute inspirational speech at a Conference, something that will introduce you and your vision to the world. … And you don’t have a lot of experience.

Say you try to write it yourself, or you assign one of your senior staffers to work on this speech.

That project, at bare minimum, is going to take you or your colleague a week to put together, because:

• Someone has to figure out what it is you really want to say.
• Someone has to gather all the materials, data, arguments to back what you want to say.
• Someone has to figure out the jokes, and any other fun or entertaining stuff.
• Someone has to figure out the best ways for you to say all of this, which means someone has to put in the effort to get to know you and understand how you speak.
• Someone has to struggle through a few drafts.
• Someone has to talk with you, or someone you trust, to get the input necessary to adjust what was drafted to a final copy you feel comfortable performing. That also involves figuring out what you are really trying to say when you give that input. [This last bit is harder than it sounds.]
• Someone has to watch and listen to you as you practice this speech and figure out how to improve this performance.
• Someone has to sit with you and let you vent and work out your stage-fright and frustration.

Conservatively speaking, this project, the first time, involves roughly 40-hours of work. Maybe more.

So, what is the hourly rate of your trusted, senior colleague, or of you yourself? Multiple that with 40-hours and you have roughly the cost of doing that speech.

Expect to pay something roughly in that range for a good speechwriter because they are going to be devoting roughly that many hours (maybe somewhat less because they have the experience) and they are going to be adding all the value of their years of personal experience.

Remember, that good speechwriter is devoting those hours to you, and not to some other person or some other source of revenue. It is the reality of all billable hour professional services.

Here is where you get the value from a speechwriter:

• They’ve been around the block a few times. They’ve seen what works. They know what people are doing.
• They have experience in making the process more efficient, and more successful.
• They, usually, know what to do when a problem comes up. They’re more likely to have an answer.
• Like a sports coach, they have an incentive to win with you. Every success is a key vehicle for generating new clients.
• They’re not going to take it personally when you flip out. They’ve seen it all.
• And if you are doing more than one speech, they know how to apply all the material from a single research interview to many speeches. They know how to adjust lengths, language, tone, etc. They can make your public speaking messages adaptable, and customizable.
• They have experience with None-Disclosure Agreements. They know discretion matters.

Now, after saying all of this, we speechwriters are still too expensive for some executives. That’s just a reality.

In response, some speechwriters, including myself, are looking for ways to develop new, more affordable lines of services.

My firm’s experimentation in this arena goes two ways:

1. Experimenting with technology like apps, websites, seminars. My firm’s focus is on apps and software that help executives brainstorm and learn basic skills to get started. We’re even experimenting with speechwriting games. However, there are many, many other firms and organizations that are further advanced in this area. For example, the Professional Speechwriters Association, led by the phenomenal David Murray, offers online seminars that set the standard in this profession.
2. Experimenting with a la carte services. Instead of doing a whole speech, we would provide one of the essential steps outlined earlier and charge a flat fee or by the hour. For example, instead of doing all the drafting, research, interviewing and brainstorming, the speechwriter just does the final draft after the client does all the rest. Or the speechwriter provides an hour or two-hour consultation to give advice on how to start, plan and execute this project. Or a day of consulting and advice on how to improve the speech’s performance. The key challenge with a la carte services is clear articulation, and management, of expectations. For example, if a speechwriter is just doing the final draft, they are only going to work with what has been given to them. They are not being paid to do the initial research and information-gathering, etc., so you need to make sure you have given that professional everything they need to work with.

Now, at Enchanted Loom, we’re still experimenting with ideas on both fronts and we expect to make announcements in this area by the summer. We think there is a large demand for self-empowerment in this area, as well as targeted services.

Now, some are ready to take the big plunge and are looking to hire a speechwriter either part- or full-time.

If you want to take this route, of course look for people whose style and talent you like. Ask around.

But after you find a handful of candidates who have the talent you are looking for, pay additional attention to these attributes:

• How focused are they on getting the best out of you? How good are they are at finding your best?
• How good are they at sizing up the other communication needs of your firm, as well as the needs of your other communications staffers? How good are they at enabling this?
• Are they willing, discreetly and privately, to talk tough with you or your trusted colleagues to push you to be your best? You don’t want someone to be mean with you, but you do want someone who is willing to be honest and push you out of your comfort zones.
• How well do you trust this person? Do you have the right chemistry?

A good speechwriter realizes that only by you succeeding, can they succeed.

Now, there are many wonderfully talented speechwriters out there, all with different methods, personalities and strategies for getting the best out of you.

That’s great news for you, because there is enough variety out there for you to find the person who is best for you.

Good luck and I look forward to seeing you on stage.

This is one of the hardest lessons my clients go through: the only way you are going to be good on stage is by devoting the time to learn what you are like on stage.

It is one thing to envision a speech and practice it repeatedly in your head. It’s another thing to perform this speech in a real-life setting in front of one or more human beings.

Certain phrases which read wonderfully on page, or sound amazing in your head, could be awkward, flat or just plain awful in a real-life setting. Jokes may not work. Arguments may not be clear.

You may not know how to use the best of your natural talents. Your voice may be too loud, or too soft, or not clear enough. You may not know where to stand or what to do during certain moments.

There are a thousand and more other possibly annoying things that you will never know about your speech until you actually get up on a stage and perform it.

Don’t get me wrong, there is no such thing as a fatal flaw in public speaking. There is no single characteristic of a speech, or a speaker that can’t be turned into an advantage. A powerful vehicle for one’s unique identity.

The key is having the time to learn about your characteristics and figure out what to do with them.

The worst time to learn about an interesting element of your public speaking is at the same time when your audience is learning about it. You never want to be as surprised as your audience.

And preparing for such possibilities is fairly easy: just devote some time each week to a little stage work.

You need not go crazy or comprehensive. You can do an open mike night; do Toastmasters (a great organization); call in a colleague or two and stand in front of them in your office; do a presentation in your living room in front of your dog. Fifteen minutes a week is good. Half-an-hour and you are on the road to be amazing.

It’s hard to underestimate all the benefits of this practice. You get used to the sound of your voice. You figure out how to breath [a lot of people lose their breath the first time on stage]. You learn how fast you should talk [the average person talks between 100 to 150 words per minute]. You figure out what to do with your body, your hands, where to look and how to move.

You also get a wealth of ideas on how to improve your speech that you would never get by just rehearsing it in your head. You can discover that one passage can be better said this way, in comparison to the way you originally wrote it.

Sometimes, you come up with entirely new things to say.

Stage-work is also the key strategy for dealing with the biggest ailment public speakers face: stage fright.

Some people would rather die that go in front of a group of people and speak. It’s a shame, because it can be a fun and rewarding experience and does wonders for the creation of ideas and new possibilities, etc. It’s one of the foundations of being a leader.

Spending time on stage, working, performing and goofing around is the most powerful tool for fighting stage-fright. You get used to the experience of being in front of an audience, and this familiarity breaks down the fear dramatically. You also get good at what you want to perform, and the competence gives you a powerful confidence, and even pride, that is infectious. It becomes its own kind of rush.

And, perhaps most importantly, you learn that when you make a mistake on stage, it’s not the end of the world. It can actually be an opportunity to do something new and interesting.

Ditto for the experience of a non-appreciative audience. So, the audience didn’t like your joke, or was rude, etc., it won’t kill you. It never does.

But you won’t get any of these benefits if you don’t do it.

Getting on a stage and practicing, frankly, is an exercise like any other.

You just have to do it and work your public-speaking muscles.

Looking at that blank page for the first time can be a killer.

Some people get blocked by it. What do I do? What am I going to say? This is too hard.

My advice for my clients, as well my college students [no better test for a public speaker than standing three-hours every week in front of a class room of independently-minded young adults], is to just remember all your normal day-to-day experiences and use them as building blocks for your performance.

All the things you do, and say, and think about during your day-to-day life is valuable. Most of your best ideas are imagined, honed, and communicated during normal life.

Since you are a leader, you are always talking with colleagues, explaining plans and thinking up strategies.

Whenever you have an interesting idea, or thought up an effective way to describe something, or heard an interesting question from a colleague – put it down.

Each week, you’ll find that these recorded bits have grown into a dozen or more lines of text. Without even trying, you’ll have enough material to work with in a month.

Of course, these bits will be rough. You’ll need to polish them, organize them, fill in the blanks, build on them and so on. But you will have a starting point.

You’ll never have to stare at a blank white page again. It will always, already, be full of great stuff to work with.

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.

Again, your audience is you. So, who are you?

You are a successful smart person who has their own hard-fought successes, decisions, strategies and ways of doing things. You are not going to upend years of experience and thinking just because someone, anyone, says something flashy over the course of 10 to 30 minutes. No speech is so good that you are immediately going to dump what you view as your common sense.

Also, you have loads of distractions. What is going on at home. What is going on at your business. All the incredibly distracting distractions on the news, the Internet and social media. You are never more than maybe ten seconds away from pulling out your phone or device and ignoring what is in front of you –should you decide to do so.

In short, you are a tough customer when it comes to new ideas, with lots of options.

So, just what will earn your attention, for a reasonable amount of time?

A powerful experience with a few surprises might do the trick. Maybe a few things interestingly said. Some laughter wouldn’t hurt. Maybe something different. Maybe a few powerfully argued points, and maybe some strong pointed stats – but not too many, you can always go to the Internet for the full drill down.

In short, you want your brain to be kickstarted a little bit, to be set up for a Eureka. You want a few new things to explore, to process, and maybe even have some fun playing around with.

This is what you would want as an audience member; this is what you should supply the audience as a speaker.

You’re a leader, and so you stand before an audience all the time: press conferences announcing new products; employee seminars; strategy meetings; sales pitches and so on.

Try to remember that each of these functions are different, they involve a different set of goals; a different relationship with the audience, and a different level of control.

When you are standing in front of an audience of primarily strangers for say 10 to 30 minutes, there are limitations to what you can do.

Odds are, you are not going to be able to hard-sell your product or company; make the audience rethink their business models or change decades-old beliefs or strategies. You don’t even have enough time to comprehensively educate or talk about the pros and cons of any subject.

But here is what you can do: you can convince an audience that a particular subject, which you care deeply about, is worth further thought sometime in the future.

If you can inspire a group of strangers to devote a half-hour of thought to your subject in the coming weeks or months, you’ve hit it out of the park.

At first blush, this may not seem like very much at all, but that changes when you consider to whom you are speaking.

Your intended audience, whether you know them or not, consists – more or less – of people like you: smart; driven; with their own information resources and their own formidable abilities for getting things done.

Imagine what happens when you devote a half-hour, or more, to a subject. You research on the Internet; pick the brains of colleagues and friends; analyze the merits of integrating this subject into the ways you do business, and then you start concrete foundations for making things happen – if you decide this idea is worth working with.

During this process, you might spread interest in the idea to those you brainstormed with, and then they would spread interest talking with others, and so on and so on.

If one speech can get 10 people like you to think about and discuss an idea, you’re setting the seeds for some serious possibilities. Imagine what you can do if you inspired 50 people in your audience, or a hundred, and so on.

A successful disruptive speech is a force multiplier of leadership energy, creativity and mental processing power. It is very much worth the effort and resources.

But to do it right, you need to remember that such speeches are not hard sells, product announcements or mandatory employee seminars.

A good disruptive speech is viral: you are infecting your audience with a brilliant idea and hoping that it will flourish in their own minds.

You have a vision, a unique business model, and a powerful code of values, all hard-fought, time-tested, and now thriving.

You want to present this vision to the world, enter the global conversation of ideas and opportunities. That is excellent. The world needs your ideas.

You are ready to do what we at Enchanted Loom call a “disruptive speech,” a speech that introduces a new idea or a new perspective that could potentially change the world.

To help you get started, here are some tips:

Understand Your Goal

Understand Your Audience

Focus on Setting Up a Eureka

Use Your Day-to-Day Experiences for Material

Get to Know Yourself on Stage

Know When, and How, to Use a Professional (Sometimes It’s Not Necessary) 

You can click on each of the above to drill down further into the tips, or look for them in the “Words Are Like Taffy” blog.

I hope these prove useful.

Nowadays, as a business leader, you feel like you have to engage the public constantly – without stop.

So why do you feel like you can’t connect with anybody?

Maybe, just maybe, all you need is some practice sharing experiences with other people.

In this hyper-connected world, there is this constant pressure to message. But at the same time, constant exposure starts to feel like constant peril. Litigation. Haters. The Competition. You need to succeed, but you also really can’t afford to fail. So, you risk-mitigate. Hyper-analyze your audience until they no longer feel like people. And you power-strategize with a 25-page communications plan (I’ve made them) that makes all your content read like it was generated by a computer. Or maybe you just do a selfie and an emoji because everybody else is doing it.

How do you get your wonder back?

I had my recent epiphany on the subject when helping two good friends, the married team of Jim Christy and Mary Phillipuk, generate support for their independent film project. The project is titled “Love and Communication,” and it will be based on the award-winning play that Jim wrote on the experiences he and Mary have had raising their 14-year-old son Jimmy, who has autism.

The play is beautiful. More than that, it is thrilling – a rare experience for a kitchen-sink drama. And it achieves this thrill by asking this most basic question: how do you communicate your love to someone who doesn’t experience the world by your rules?

I won’t ruin any surprises, but I will note that both Jim and Mary have devoted their lives to becoming students of how Jimmy lives and experiences. It is a never-ending education. And one important way they do this – you guessed it – is by simply sharing experiences with him.

It sounds painfully simple, because it is both simple, and painful. It’s not easy just sharing an experience with someone: without narrating it; without strategizing it; without judging it by the rules you’ve developed from other previous experiences. Without your mind wandering to today’s grocery shopping or your client meeting at 3 p.m.

Just do the thing. Be it a walk or planting a shrub or mixing bread dough, yada. Share it. Be there.

If you want, over-communicate the goobers out of the experience after the fact. But not then. Just share.

So why I am pushing you to try this zen-like mishegas? Simple. Because it forces you to recognize a connection with someone without all the blah blah blah.

Sometimes you have to reboot something by going beyond the words. And when it comes to connecting, we used to do it so easily when we were young. As kids, we just played with other kids, without trying to outflank each other for promotions or obsessing over our 401(k)s. (Of course I’m idealizing. Go find cynicism about childhood elsewhere.)

This is important because we connect in ways that go beyond whatever words we are in the habit of using. Beyond our risk-mitigation, strategic optimization and audience analyses. And when you forget how that feels, nothing you do will connect.

But when you do remember, it can be thrilling. It’s like rediscovering the fact that every person you talk to has their own mysteries and you haven’t discovered them all. That the connection you are looking for is ever so-slightly out of your complete control. It’s humbling. It’s exciting. It brings back your wonder. Like riding a bike.

Now, will this crazy little exercise solve all of your leadership communication problems. Um,…No. But it should solve a few – like remind you why you talk to people in the first place.

And that’s always worth remembering.

[If you MUST be academic about the subject of non-verbal communication, look into the work of such researchers as Prof. Albert Mehrabian at UCLA, Prof. Carrie Keating at Colgate University and Prof. Robin Akert at Wellesley College. But don’t forget about the point of this simple zen-exercise and over-analyze the thing.]

P.S. IF YOU WANT TO BE PART OF THE INDIE FILM PROJECT.

They are, of course, looking for investors, sponsors, distributors and other allies for the funding and development of the film.

However, they would also be just as happy meeting with people to educate them on the subject, as well as network with parents and relatives who have loved ones on the spectrum. They want to share this experience as well.

You can learn more about the project by going to this website: http://www.loveandcommunication.com/

You can learn more about Jim at this website:

https://pwcenter.org/profile/james-christy

You can learn more about Mary, who is an architect and engineer, at this website:

http://phillipuk.com/about.html

Here is a LinkedIn post I did on some issues related to ethics speeches.

This is the URL:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-ethics-speech-ask-how-can-we-do-better-together-thomas-fernandez?trk=pulse_spock-articles

Here is another post I did last year on LinkedIn on three tips for strengthening your speech.

This is the URL:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/surf-right-wave-3-troubleshooting-tips-your-speech-thomas-fernandez?trk=pulse_spock-articles