THE PUBLIC SPEAKING SERIES. More on the goal!

A friend of mine once unboxed a birthday gift sent by another friend who had promised to surprise him on his birthday. Upon tearing the heavy package open, my friend found a huge book buried at the bottom of the box! He sighed loudly in disappointment because the gift had not met his expectations; my friend is not the type who appreciates books so the gift was worthless!
As a speaker, your audience have expectations of you. As stated before, these expectations may be in the following forms:

The expectation to be informed
You see, the strength and character of a football team in a game can be measured largely by their formation. From the defence to the attack, the structure of a team's tactical formation is a major decider of the game's outcome.
The same goes for the audience you're speaking to. They are about positioning themselves at a particular place in the game of life and will need the pieces of observations that will come from you to form the basis of their inFORMATION. Their winning or losing may depend on it.

The expectation to be reformed
Words are powerful! Some members of the audience may be listening to hear you tell them what will make them change certain aspects of the way they do things.
A business owner whose business had been doing poorly for lack of proper customer relationship management, but who attended a seminar where it was identified as a problem and given tips on how to correct it will certainly go back to the business and reform it by doing something about the organisation's customer relations.

The expectation to be transformed 
Transformation is the recalibration of the system that runs a process.
A person who is experiencing negative outcomes in life due to wrong beliefs and worldview may be sitting in the audience, waiting to collect from you, the sledge hammer with which to dismantle the existing structure of his life and erect a new one. The sledge hammer are the words you say.
It is your responsibility as a speaker to find out what the need(s) of your audience is/are and tailor your message along such lines. If the buyer of my friend's birthday gift had tried to find out what his needs were, he would have bought him something more useful.
How do you deliver your message to an audience? That's coming up next!

© 2017, Emeka Akpa. All rights reserved