By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to end your speeches more emphatically. Reading time: 4:54.

Those two words, powerful on the lips of every effective leader at the end of a project, are powerless at the end of a speech. That’s why the most effective leaders find a more powerful, more productive and more permeating way to conclude a speech.

They drive toward their conclusion in high gear- with an attitude! Not a platitude (albeit politicians who can’t resist blessing America). Maybe that’s why of the 217 speeches listed in William Safires’s anthology: Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, only seven conclude with “Thank you.”

Indeed, effective speakers leave their audiences thinking the way effective comedians leave their audiences laughing. Consider these different ways of leaving your audience thinking:

If you were concluding a speech on the importance of embracing change, you could say:

“Our tomorrows need new and different solutions today. We have to recall the insight of President Abraham Lincoln on the brink of the Civil War. Lincoln said,

‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present and future,
as our circumstances are new, we must think anew and act anew.” Continue reading →