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III. Delivering Your Speech
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Body Language
I’ve always heard that speeches, like babies, are easy to conceive, but hard to deliver.
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Your Voice
How important is your voice? The ancient Roman sage Publius Syrus claimed “Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so he is.” A slight overstatement, perhaps, but it would be fair to say that, as a person speaks, so is he perceived to be by his listeners. So listen to what your voice tells you.
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Nervousness
There is no record of President Franklin Roosevelt ever suffering from stage fright. So nothing could have been further from the great man’s mind when he delivered his famous first Inaugural Address on March 4, 1933. Yet there is a passage in it that describes stage fright better than any psychological manual or actor’s handbook: “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasonable, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
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