How to Write a Valedictory Speech

Video Transcript

"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."