Your Public Best - Lillian Brown [71]
• Try having milk or herbal tea instead of coffee.
• Avoid fatty meats or fried foods (no sausages).
• Include some whole-grain bread product, passing up the doughnut, Danish, or pastry.
• Eat a piece of raw fruit rather than drinking orange juice, which can get stomach acid churning.
• If the hotel food ends up tasting unsatisfactory, as is often the case, at least try to settle for some herbal tea, whole-wheat toast, and fruit.
Instead of reading the morning newspaper or talking with colleagues as you eat breakfast, go over the body of your speech in your mind and review our notes. At a minimum, memorize a key word or phrase for each major section of the speech, so that at least you have reviewed the order of the subjects it contains. This way, even though you may be mostly reading a typed speech or speaking off the cuff (with your cards only holding the opening, a list of subjects in their proper order, and the close), then you will still be able to change subjects with authority and without breaking the rhythm of your speech by fumbling around with what comes next.
One memory aid that you can use to help you to memorize the important points of your speech is to assign one point per finger. Then, once you are on the podium, you can use your fingers (unobtrusively, of course) to help you recall the order of points.
After you have finished breakfast, you will be all ready to go ahead and give a wonderful speech.
BEING A SUBSTITUTE SPEAKER
It happens occasionally that the scheduled speaker for an event will be unable to give his or her speech. The speaker may have been called away on urgent business—to the White House on political business, to Moscow on diplomatic business, to Tokyo on economic business—or he may have suddenly taken ill, had a death in the family, been involved in a transportation accident, become stranded somewhere due to a hurricane, or whatever.
One has the impression that some people, from a variety of professions, could give an excellent speech to nearly any audience on a surprisingly wide variety of topics at the proverbial drop-of-a-hat’s notice. A list of such people might include car manufacturing executive Lee Iacocca, politician and minister Reverend Jesse Jackson, former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, journalist/writer/TV news-show host William F. Buckley, Jr., singer Pearl Bailey, corporate genius Donald Trump, and publisher/businessman Malcolm Forbes.
Your name may not appear on such a list of luminaries, but, nevertheless, you may one day find yourself asked to be a last-minute substitute speaker. If you feel comfortable speaking before that particular audience, you should go ahead and accept such an invitation. It will be a good test of your speechmaking skills, and you may learn from the experience and even enjoy yourself.
Furthermore, like the understudy “whose star broke her leg and she got to go on and the rest is history,” you may even step up one more rung on your professional ladder because you did so well. This may prove to be a valuable opportunity to enhance your reputation in your field.
Preparation
The first thing to do under such circumstances is, of course, to find out as much as you can about the audience, your hosts, the site, transportation to and from the site, etc., exactly as you would for a regular speech.
After that, you should find out about the scheduled speaker: his or her name, title, and organization; the subject he or she was to speak on; if it would be possible to obtain a copy of his or her prepared speech for your reference; and a little about why he or she cannot make the speech.
The latter is a good thing to know since you might refer to the reason in an opening joke, if the circumstances of the cancelation are not unhappy. For example, transportation jokes and weather-related delay jokes can be shared by all and insult no one.
Next, you will prepare your speech. This preparation will, of course,