Push Back against the Undisciplined Speaker

As hired pens, speech writers are always faced with the dilemma of how hard to push back when we think a client is being unreasonable.

by Colin Moorhouse

I am talking about the CEOs who have given no thought at all to what they want talk about at the one and only meeting you are going to have with them.

Or the ones who won’t read their drafts out loud at least once before they face their audience. Or those who want to review the draft with you before they have even glanced at it - resulting in a lot of time wasted as he/she edits and re-edits on the fly. Inevitably muddying the waters.

You may want to push back at all this. Resist. The truth is, no matter how inefficient we think their process is, it is their process, and their money and we need to adjust accordingly.

Where push back is more important and where you must take a stand is in the text itself.

I have always believed that if the speech in the first instance meets the needs of the audience rather than the needs of the speaker to deliver his favorite message, your client will be very well served indeed.

So you have to push back when he/she wants to say everything. To talk about process. To talk features over benefits. About internal restructuring. About all those things most audiences have no interest in.

When this happens I can pretty well tell you by exactly which paragraph the audience will begin to fall asleep.

So, when it comes to the process of getting from first draft to final product, it is their time - billable time at that. Give in to the inevitable.

When it comes to the structure of the speech, the matter of messaging, story telling, and keeping the musical thread consistent, push back hard if they resist.

Push back hard enough to where one of you is going to fire the other, or fire at the other.

Then you know you have done your job.

Our Guest Blogger:

Colin Moorhouse has more than 20 years’ communications and related experience with a variety of government agencies. For the past dozen years he has provided freelance speech writing services to senior public and private sector clients in Canada.

He teaches a two-day speech writing seminar at the Downtown Campus of Simon Fraser University. He has also given his shorter workshops (one day, half-day and one hour) workshops and teleseminars to groups across Canada and the United States. His publishes a monthly speech writing newsletter. See the newsletter and other speechwriting content on his website WeNeedaSpeech.com.

Colin also teaches freelance writers how to market themselves. Check out his other site FearlessFreelancing.com.

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