The biggest difference between good speakers and great speakers

Good speakers are focused on their speaking. Great speakers are focused on their audience’s hearing.

What makes the difference between a good speech and a great speech? They share many common qualities: important subject, accurate research, clear writing, organized material, relevant illustrations, passionate communication, and so on.

But they differ in one important area.

Good speakers are focused on their speaking. Great speakers are focused on their audience’s hearing.

If you were able to measure where a speaker’s primary concern lay, good speakers would have a big arrow pointing to their mouth. Great speakers would have a big arrow pointing at their hearers’ ears.

The good speaker’s primary question is “How can I get this out?” The great speaker’s main question is “How do I get this in?”

The good speaker is concerned with “How can I teach this?” The great speaker gravitates towards, “How can they learn this?”

The good speaker asks, “Is this the best structure and outline to help me deliver this message?” The great speaker asks, “Is this the best structure and outline to help my hearers embrace this message?”

The good speaker concentrates on delivering his manuscript. The great speaker concentrates on his hearers receiving his words

The difference is sometimes subtle and difficult to detect in the moment of speaking, but always vast in the long-term impact of the words.

In TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, Chris Anderson explains that the most successful TED talks not only have a compelling idea at their core, but the speakers have spent time thinking about the best way to get that idea out of their head and into the heads of others.

Most good speakers think it’s enough to have a good idea and to express it clearly. The best speakers go the extra mile; they put in the extra time and tears to figure out the best way to transfer the idea from their mind into others’ minds.  As Anderson puts it:

Language works its magic only to the extent that it is shared by speaker and listener. And there’s the key clue to how to achieve the miracle of re-creating your idea in someone else’s brain. You can only use the tools that your audience has access to. If you start only with your language, your concepts, your assumptions, your values, you will fail. So instead, start with theirs. It’s only from that common ground that they can begin to build your idea inside their minds.

I love that metaphor of re-creating our idea in our listeners’ minds. The good speaker uses the materials of his own mind to do this. The great speaker reaches into the minds of his hearers and uses the materials he finds there. Without this, idea-transference will never happen. With it, the possibilities are endless.

Is God not the best example of this? He didn’t communicate with his own concepts and words. That would have not only baffled our minds but exploded them. Instead he used the concepts and materials he found in our own minds. Indeed, in his ultimate communication, he used the materials of our own human flesh, our own human souls, and our own human minds. “The Word became flesh.” And all because he was focused on our hearing not his speaking.

Good speakers are focused on their speaking. Great speakers are focused on their audience’s hearing.

More articles in the Preaching Lessons from TED Talks series.