I once asked a keynote speaker how she measures success. She told me it’s about the people waiting by the stage afterward, the conversations that happen after you’re done delivering. That’s how she knows someone’s curiosity was sparked, and that’s where she knows she made a difference.
Then she said something I didn’t expect: don’t write your keynote.
That surprised me, so I started doing some research. Joel Schwartzberg, a presentation coach and speechwriter, makes the same case, and he takes it further. His argument is simple and a little uncomfortable: the moment you start focusing on how people perceive you, you’ve quietly swapped your goal. Instead of moving an idea into someone else’s head, you’re managing an impression. Writing the whole thing out leaves the audience out of the room. It becomes a performance, not a delivery.
The blunder is to walk into a room with something genuinely remarkable, and somewhere between the parking lot and the podium, decide the assignment is to seem impressive. To polish, memorize, and often try to impress. And the actual point, the thing a speaker knows better than almost anyone alive, gets buried under a performance.
Four ideas from Schwartzberg’s framing worth carrying into your next talk:
- Deliver, don’t star. An actor performs a monologue, a speaker delivers a speech. Ask what your audience should walk away knowing, not what they should walk away thinking about you.
- Stop measuring yourself against famous speakers. You conceived it, built it, and practiced it, which makes you more qualified to deliver it than any celebrated speaker you admire.
- Take yourself out of the spotlight. Most speaking anxiety isn’t really fear of speaking, it’s fear of humiliation. If the audience remembers your idea and forgets you a little, that’s a win.
- Skip the script. Reading aloud is a form of performing, and it costs you spontaneity and credibility. Notes that hold your structure while letting you speak in real time will always be absorbed better than a beautifully written page read word for word.
“It’s never a pursuit of perfection,” he said. I’ve thought about that a lot since.
My late father, Pat Wertheim, (www.patwertheim.com )who earned plenty of frequent-flyer miles on the keynote-speaking circuit, had a two-layered approach. Make your first 30 seconds to a minute on stage unforgettable. Treat your entrance as a performance, often a song he’d written himself, or a story about some unbelievable criminal blunder he had seen, something just renegade enough to put all eyes on you and get the room laughing. Then, once you have their full attention, drop the performance and deliver a keynote they’ll never forget.
Start with performance, move to delivery. The opening earns their attention. The rest earns their trust.
A pretty high bar, but he was never one for low expectations.
This connects to something we talk about a lot at RevVizion. Authenticity isn’t a soft value, it’s a functional one. People decide whether to trust you long before they evaluate your technology, and they make that call based on whether you sound like a person who actually believes what they’re saying.
Your point is the product. Everything else is packaging.
Source: Joel Schwartzberg, “Are You Presenting or Performing?” Toastmaster magazine, November 2022. He does great work, and he’s worth a follow.