Standing Up at Speakers’ Corner
Also see this video on YouTube.
Q. Would you Stand Up to make a point you feel strongly about?
I’m down at Brisbane’s Speakers’ Corner, at the end of George Street and right in front of Queensland’s Parliament House.
I wanted to write about Standing Up, because if you’re like most people, delivering a speech or presentation is likely to cause you some anxiety.
Traditionally the scene of protests and gatherings, this particular Speakers’ Corner is an open public space which also serves as a thoroughfare to the Queensland University of Technology campus here at Gardens Point.
As a concept, Speakers’ Corner demonstrates freedom of speech*. Like I’ve done here, anyone can turn up unannounced and talk on almost any idea or subject, although there’s always the risk of being heckled!
And Standing Up for your ideas is hugely important in business today, not only to maintain entrepreneurial innovation, but also to help bring diverse teams together in the workplace – multiple generations, genders, and nationalities…
The Message Map
When it comes to preparing and presenting your pitch with confidence, Carmine Gallo has a great Message Map video. He’s the author of Talk like TED.
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- The message map has an overarching message, supported by three or four points.
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- You can even use it to prepare an adhoc speech in seconds on the back of a napkin!
- To extend your pitch, simply add data, examples, stories and campaigns.
- Finally, it works because it originates from Aristotle’s deductive reasoning logic, developed about 2,400 years ago.
And we all have time to rehearse, so make sure you read your speech out-loud three to five times and you’ll find your lines really roll.
Oh, and by the way, the Queensland Police Service advises that any protests and rallies at Speakers’ Corner must be registered! Check out the official link to Speakers Corner Brisbane for more information.
All the best for Standing Up on your soapbox!!
If you would like to talk about specific communication skills for your team, please get in touch.
*On the topic of Freedom of Speech:
- In 2010, a Speakers’ Corner at Parliament House, was established in Brisbane to acknowledge the 150th anniversary of Parliamentary history and to encourage peaceful gatherings in that area. To mark the occasion, Queensland Governor, Penelope Wensley, opened the Speakers’ Corner, a space to be set aside for members of the public to speak their mind – see photo below.
- In 1999, Lord Justice Sedley (Redmond-Bate v Director of Public Prosecutions – High Court of Justice) described Speakers’ Corner as demonstrating “the tolerance which is both extended by the law to opinion of every kind, and expected by the law in the conduct of those who disagree, even strongly, with what they hear.”
- The old Domain’s garden gates remain at the end of Brisbane’s George Street. These are the last remnants of the old Brisbane Domain. There is also an attached plaque with a message quoting Gilbert Eliott, the first speaker of the Legislative Assembly in the colony of Queensland, in his first speech on May 22, 1860: “I would urge on honourable members mutual forbearance and self-control, and the necessity of not taking exception to words and expressions which might bear a very different interpretation to that which at the time they might be disposed to attach to them”.
