Written by: Chesline Pierre-Paul, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Speaking engagements, when leveraged critically, become both streams and instruments wherethrough purposeful visibility and established authority are architected for the elevation of yourself, your voice, and your brand as industry maven.
There is an irretrievable synergy, a wordlessly posited poetry of rhythms, foci, gravitas, creation, and disruption, that elevates your speech into a self-contained story where mere communication transcends its own state and becomes a living piece of paradigm-breaking intelligence.
Have your speech be a self-standing monument of maximizable impact, articulate digestibility, grace, and elevation. How can you become masterful at layering words into a thoughtscape that exponentializes what intelligence comes to be in this room, in this instant of unfractured possibility?
How to over-deliver a speech using a paradigm-shifting lens that is generative of heightenment, intelligence, grace, and palatability? Here are the few prompts I use with my clients that will help you succinctly compute the substantial core of your talk by leveraging uppermost impact in the shortest consolidated time frame available to you. Conversely, these prompts furthermore press your noggin for more of its capacity to articulate a cohesively soulularly mind-expanding talk. Read on: →
Ask yourself:
What dominant narratives will you de-prioritize so that “the obvious” be a marginalized currency in your talk? What will you render a non-consideration and will purposively and intentfully not dignify with the privilege of strategic and creditable visibility?
What wholly unattended gaps will you call attention to so as to illustrate a structural deficit protected by your industry? Think of clichés and cliché-sustaining narratives that are reiterative, enhanceable, unchallenged, and entertain brokenness and ineffectuality as defining principles.
What counter-narrative can you force into the open that will offer itself as a solution (however partial) and way forward as it relates to the structural gaps you’ve outlined?
What level of transdisciplinarity can you summon so that your evolved paradigm forces into disruptive harmony worlds that are removed from one another and yet remain, irrespective, so inter-dependently as harmonious as they are complementary? What intelligent paradoxes will you mobilize and articulate so that transdisciplinarity becomes mobilizable as cross-industry innovation?
In the midst of all of the above, how can you comprehensively prune your talk so that its capacity for digestibility and impact be honored?
Lastly, as you wrap up, how can you integrate a bias towards execution as context for transitioning from your established conceptual framing to a tangible measure of impact? What implementation-ready examples will you put forth so that your audience may fully integrate your teachings in ways most organic and useful?
Here are a few examples of what that can look like;
Debunking the colonial construct that upholds "native speakerism" as a defendable reality and standard of accomplishment in language teaching and coaching. Here the shift in paradigm stems from debunking the supremacist falsehood that the epitome of mastery is a privilege undividedly tethered to biology and birth, quintessentially; when in truth, mastery is undyingly intentful, labor-intensive, targeted, and refined in scope and application.
Decolonizing digital media landscape by (re)building platforms where the historically erased, removed, and tokenized are now autonomously centered as comprehensively self-represented thought leaders, paradigm-shakers, and self-established mavens that give new heights of uncompromised legitimacy, humanity, and powers to voices of nonconformity and resistance.
Once you’ve ushered yourself through these prompts, you will have generated a host of unrevised thoughts, that for all their disorderliness, are high-caliber in their compositionality and intellectual integrity. At which point, you’ll take a few seconds solely to hierarchize your thoughts into a flow where the top 3 thereof will be maintained to the exclusion of all else.
Some thoughts will reveal themselves satellite to others, that is to say, subpoints and counterpoints. Some will prove tactical reformulations, and others slightly misattuned and falling outside of the scope of consideration your talk establishes. Remember, less is more. Be unflaggingly intentful in your apportionment of silences; look at the flow and feel of your speech, and modulate it around a dynamism of counterbalancing silences, crescendos, and decrescendos.
Why? This instills a rhythm that precludes monotony, a poetics of silences, parlance, and flow that supports whatever intelligence you are grounding in your speech by allowing for it to be all the more so maximally digested and centered. What’s more, your silences engagingly punctuate your speech as they italicize targeted segments and grant them more directed focus and capacity for gravitas.
Then, the key as you go on to practice is to be iterative, not reiterative. That is to say, use keywords as destinations for your mind to land upon in a thought sequence, but do not memorize verbatim the entirety of your piece. Allow each iteration to be self-contained and unrelative to any other. Why? So that each time you enunciate your piece, it be colored by “the you” that is in attendance and not by “a you” that is removed and rehearsed. This way, your presence- and emotional truth drive more unscripted poise, fluidity, and energetic aliveness in your talk. For you can solely organically produce engagement in an engaged state.
Before each practice session, prime yourself by asking yourself the following: Who do I want to show up as in this instant of possibility? Possible answers are: I want to be present, whole, and grounded. Whatever the answer, you summon that energetic poise into your speech, and that becomes what determinedly colors it with brilliance, deliberation, unscripted grace, composure, and energetic aliveness.
Lastly, practice amidst a very small posse of trusted souls, 1-3 folx with whom you’ll practice a few times. Ask for their input as soon as you are practice-ready and work the brilliance of their insights into your piece.
By honoring the afore-shared steps, is how you imbue elevation, refinement, simplicity, and impact with digestibility and augmented humane intelligence.
Conclusion
You start with debunking normative paradigms by foregrounding your own and using transdisciplinarity as fuel for engineering these new elevated paradigms and thoughtscapes. Then, you punctuate your flow with elective silences and tactically intersperse evocative language and metaphors as a means to encapsulate your most complex, refined, and mind-expanding ideas. And lastly, you show up in all of your state of energetic presence, groundedness, and vibrancy to augment engagement through how you hold space with purposed deliberation.
This method has allowed me to become a multi-award-winning speaker in 5+ languages, cover in great depth and expanse dense theoretics, abstrusely perplexing academic research, and more, thus effectively rendering transformationally potent even the least palatable of topics by punctiliously and forcibly instilling and catalyzing high-level impact and engagement. Always.
For more on how to over-deliver on the best talk of your life yet, from a place of unconstricted aliveness, poise, and composure, book me for a free discovery call. Today. Remember, transformation is only the beginning.
You can also sign up for my e-course on public speaking called: “Public Speaking: Speaking Truth Into Power.”
Chesline Pierre-Paul, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Chesline Pierre-Paul is a transformation coach, thought leader, digital media & language activist, and social impact expert on innovation, economic empowerment, & rebellious leadership. They deploy healing, cross-industry innovation, and positive disruption to concretize and accelerate the transformation and global impact. They have been featured on; Woman in Language, This Is It Tv, She Owns Success, Polyglot Conference Global, The Hambone Show, Happier By The Minute, The Accented World Podcast Callum Connects, to name a few. They bring into harmony worlds that are customarily divorced: activism and entrepreneurship, and they leverage the disruptive distance between the two to activate and stabilize next-gen global thought leadership. Today.
