Winning Friends during the Q&A of a Speech – With a Little Help from Harville Hendrix

A Speechwriter’s Notes: The Sense of Place
May 20, 2015
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September 10, 2015
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Here’s a suggestion for organizations that make speeches part of a strategy of constructive engagement with their critics.  One of the usual goals of constructive engagement is to humanize your organization and win friends for it.  Speechmaking can be one of the effective strategies to achieve that goal – especially that “unscripted” moment in speechmaking, the Q&A that follows the formal presentation.That spontaneous exchange between a speaker and an audience offers an opportunity to connect with those who may be giving you a polite, even skeptical, hearing by demonstrating that you can listen and respond directly to them.  How do you connect with someone who may be asking you very tough, even hostile, questions?  We’ve found one of the most effective ways of making the connection is to borrow some of the techniques of “the couple’s dialog,” introduced by Harville Hendrix in Getting the Love You Want, to this most dialogic part of a public presentation.

  • First, before you get to what you want to say with your answer, show that you have heard and understood what your questioner has had to say. In Hendrix’s system, you precisely mirror what your questioner has said. “I heard you say….” Why mirror as closely as you can what your questioner has just said? Because it is the first step to having them feel that they have been heard, really heard, by you.
  • Then, just as important, validate what you’ve heard: “What you say makes sense.” “I appreciate what you are saying…”; “I understand why you’d ask….” In that way you demonstrate your ability to see that what your questioner has said is real, legitimate, and valid for them.
  • Third, find and express the common ground between the two of you: “We have very similar concerns about…”; “We think, too, people ought to know about….” Finding and declaring the common ground makes it possible, now, for you to be heard when you answer the question that has actually been asked.

 

And we do believe that, in this situation, you do answer the question that you’ve been asked (which makes the speech Q&A different from some forms of media training).  We like the four-part answer format:

  • State your answer in language and terms familiar to your audience.
  • Give the reason for your answer; it should be fact-based and grounded in values that make sense for the audience.
  • Provide a concrete example.
  • End with a summary of your answer.

 

Whether you will win arguments with this approach is an open – and in some ways a “beside the point”  – question.  You will win friends.  And you just may win an unlooked for ally.