Audience Relationships: Be Yourself

Video Transcript

"Now, we are...we've talked about how we're going to know our audience, and we're going to basically write and adapt our speech to present it to those specific people. But I want to caution you about something. You still must be yourself. Whoever you are, whether you're formal, whether you're casual, whether you're articulate, whether you're less articulate, whether you're loud, whether you're shy...whatever it is, you need to be yourself when you present your speech, regardless of who you're presenting it too, because if you try to pretend to be something that you're not, your audience will be able to pick it up. They'll be able to know immediately that you are being false, and it will be very difficult to establish a good relationship with the audience if they perceive you as false. So be yourself. Maybe you're going to adapt your speech, maybe you're going to maybe adapt your style a little bit to whoever it is you're presenting this speech to, but you don't want to try to be just like them. You don't want to...you're speaking to a very high-brow social group, you don't want to pretend to be high-brow if you're not because then you'll come across fake. So be yourself, let the audience see who you are."