Say It Like
You Mean It

Before We Begin

Listen First

Shirley Chisholm · 1924–2005

Watch · Presidential Campaign Announcement

Shirley
Chisholm

January 25, 1972

The first Black woman elected to Congress. The first Black American and first woman to seek a major party's presidential nomination. She ran because she decided to — and the party, the media, and almost everyone else had told her not to.

What stands out in this speech is how still she is. No anger, no urgency — just someone who already knows she is right and is done explaining it. She won more than 150 delegate votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.

What We Just Witnessed

She Didn't Ask
for Permission

Shirley Chisholm was not loud. She did not perform urgency. What made her powerful was something quieter and harder to teach: she spoke as if the outcome had already been decided.

She knew her subject completely. She trusted that knowing it was enough. She did not prepare a polished performance — she spoke from what she knew and from what she demanded.

• She was calm because she was clear.
• She didn't argue for her right to be there. She just was there.
• Her preparation served her conviction, not the other way around.
• She spoke to people who doubted her as if they already agreed.

Know Your Why

Confidence Does
the Work

You do not have to have it all figured out. What matters is that you believe what you are saying. When you speak about something you actually know and care about, you are already doing the most important thing. The techniques and the structure come after.

Think of three people whose voices you trust. What do they have in common? They probably aren't the loudest or the most polished. They are the ones who mean what they say. Conviction is the foundation everything else is built on — not the other way around.

Your Presence

Body Language
& Delivery

Content matters — but so does how grounded your body looks while you're delivering it. Researchers consistently find that nonverbal signals shape trust before a single word lands. The good news is that most of this is learnable.

Posture

Stand with your feet about shoulder-width apart and your weight evenly distributed. This isn't about performing confidence — it's about giving yourself a stable base so your voice has somewhere to come from. Restless shifting signals to your nervous system and your audience that you'd rather be somewhere else.

Eye Contact

Make genuine contact with one person for a full thought before you move to another. Not a quick scan — a real hold. This slows you down in a good way and makes each person feel like they're being spoken to, not at.

Gestures

Let your hands move naturally. Gestures that match your words add clarity. Gestures that don't match are distracting. When in doubt, let your hands rest open and visible rather than clasped behind your back or folded across your body — both read as closed off.

Voice

Vary your pace and pitch. Monotone flattens meaning. Pausing on purpose — after a key point, before a question — signals that what you just said was worth sitting with. Most people rush through their best moments.

Your Story

Finding Your
Passion

The best speakers are not the ones who talk about things they know — they are the ones who talk about things they feel. Audiences can tell within the first 30 seconds whether you actually care about what you're saying. That signal is almost impossible to fake and almost impossible to miss.

Finding It

Ask yourself: what do I already talk about when no one is making me? What makes me frustrated or excited in a way I can't quite explain? What do I know that most people in this room don't? Start there.

Connecting It to the Room

Your passion is the starting point, but speaking is a relationship. The best speakers constantly ask: why does this matter to the person listening, not just to me? Your job is to find the bridge between what you care about and what they're trying to understand or solve.

Structure

Strategy &
Structure

A great idea with no structure is just a conversation. Structure is what turns what you know into something someone else can follow. You don't need a rigid framework — but you do need to know, before you open your mouth, what the one thing is you want this person to walk away with.

The Classic Three-Part Move

Tell them what you're going to say. Say it. Tell them what you said. This sounds almost too simple, but it works because it respects how human memory and attention actually function. People need to be primed before they can absorb something, and they need repetition to retain it.

Transitions Are Doing Real Work

The moments between your points matter as much as the points themselves. A weak transition makes two strong ideas feel unrelated. Phrases like "what this means is..." or "here's why that matters..." signal that you're building something, not just listing.

Planning Tool

Building Your
Outline

Before you write a single word of your actual speech, fill in this structure. Most people skip this step and pay for it later. The outline is where you test whether your argument actually holds — and it's much easier to fix here than after you've already written everything out.

Each point needs evidence — not just an assertion. An assertion is "public speaking matters." Evidence is a story, a number, a quote, or an example that makes someone believe the assertion is actually true.

Practice

Try This Now

Reading about public speaking is not the same as practicing it. The only way to get better is to speak. Here are two exercises to do right now.

Exercise 1: The 2-Minute Argument

Pick a position on something you actually care about. Set a timer for 2 minutes. Speak out loud — to a partner, to yourself in a mirror, to your phone camera — making the strongest case you can. When the timer stops, answer one question: what was the clearest moment, and what was the muddiest?

Exercise 2: The Reframe

Think of a topic you know well. Now explain it to someone who has no background in it at all. The goal is not to simplify — it's to find the entry point, the thing someone already understands that your topic connects to. That skill transfers directly to speaking in any room.

Journal Prompts

Reflection

Growth in public speaking rarely feels dramatic. It usually happens in small recognitions — noticing something you did that worked, or understanding why something didn't. These prompts are designed to help you pay attention to that.

• 01What is one thing you said today — in any conversation — that you actually believed? What made it feel different from what you usually say?
• 02Think about a time someone said something that you still remember. What do you think made it stick?
• 03What are you most afraid of when you imagine speaking in front of a group? Is that fear about the audience, about yourself, or about something else?
• 04If you had to deliver one message to the people in this room right now — something you genuinely needed them to hear — what would it be?

Sources

Further Reading

The ideas in this workshop draw on research in communication studies, rhetoric, and performance psychology. These are good starting points if you want to go deeper.

• Chisholm, Shirley. Unbought and Unbossed. Houghton Mifflin, 1970.
• Duarte, Nancy. Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences. Wiley, 2010.
• Mehrabian, Albert. Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes. Wadsworth, 1971.
• Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts. Dover Publications, 2004.
• Gallo, Carmine. Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds. St. Martin's Press, 2014.
• Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. William Morrow, 1990.
• hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.