Hi everybody I'm John Graden. One of the great
honors for anyone's career is to be asked
to deliver a valedictory speech. This is the
farewell speech at graduation high school
or college. When you are delivering a presentation
like this, there are certain expectations.
And you want to meet and exceed those expectations
at the same time though you want to kind of
come into a different angle to make our presentation
a little more memorable. What I mean by that
is it's not unusual for people doing a valedictory
speech to talk about the past and talk about
the future, try and motivate and inspire these,
the audience of graduates. And that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that, you want
to follow that kind of structure, we'll talk
about that in moment. But what I'd like to
see you do and what I like to do is I want
to find out some personal stories from that
audience. I want to know a student or two
or three over came tremendous challenges to
be sitting in that chair. And I want to use
those stories to create an emotional connection
with my audience. What this also does for
me, it allows me to use one of my favorite
principles. This is a principle I learned
from the martial arts and it's called align
and redirect. Align and redirect which means
I'm aligning with my opponent or my partner
and I'm redirecting them. Rather then going
force versus force, I'm aligning with them
and then using their power against them. So
in this scenario when I start to talk to the
student on a personal level about the story
of one of their own, then my credibility rises.
When your credibility rises your connection
gets stronger. When your connection gets stronger
the impact of your presentation is magnified.
So if we want to have a powerful impact on
our audience we want to take the time to do
a little research, align and redirect, tell
some powerful stories and make sure that all
of these stories have wisdom points that these
students can learn from them and can call
upon in their future. I'm John Graden and
I love doing presentations just like that.
I'm a motivational speaker, I enjoy working
with college aged kids, high school aged kids
and corporations and that's just the kind
of program that I enjoy doing. So thanks so
much for listening I certainly hope that helps
you make a great valedictory presentation.
Thanks.
