speaker – Ranjith Venkatesh

This New Year, I let a Sky lantern fly next to the sandy beaches of Goa to the sound of fireworks.

A Sky lantern requires a few steps before it can fly.

You need to fix the burning camphor like substance to the base of the lamp.
- One guy in front of me broke the burning disc and had to start again with another disc

You need to open up the lamp on all four sides so that the fire does not get to the sides of the lamp.
- Another guy did not open the sides and they burnt the sides and he had to start again

You need to wait for the warm air to build up in the lamp
- Another impatient guy could not wait for 2 minutes and let it fly only to have the lamp come down crashing and he had to start again

I watched all these guys and thought I had learnt all the ways to fail and managed to get that lamp ready!

But my lamp would not rise up.

A friend walked up to me and told me to give it a nudge upwards and let it fly.

I did just that and there the Sky lantern raised up and started flying.

Sometimes we are like Sky lanterns.

There are so many things that need to be right for us to fly.

But when all the conditions are right, you might need that little nudge to get flying.

Do you need a nudge to kick start your speaking journey and be a Sky lantern?

Let me help you shine as a speaker in 2024!

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Climb & Slide

Galaxy Water Slide World (therme-erding.de)

I was in a Theme Park last weekend and experienced water slides in all their glory indoors and outdoors!

Each slide seemed to have two components – the Climb and the Slide.

The Climb

You could climb to the slide with a tube or a mat or just yourself. I found this initial step of getting a tube or mat itself interesting as it sets you up for the slide later.

You could watch a speech with a notebook or just yourself. I find that I approach a speech differently if I actively take notes or passively listen to it.

The climb itself is sometimes a long way and you need to wait in a queue to get to your chance for a slide. If the queue is long you might switch to another slide. If the slide is amazing, you will wait as long as it takes in the queue.

The body of a speech itself can be long or feel long. Sometimes we wait for messages in a speech to reach us. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.

The Slide

Before the slide you could see the information about for what age is it appropriate, what medical conditions are to be kept in mind and even the weight of the person involved.

Before a message is crafted in a speech, we need to get into the shoes of the listener to see if we can provide a ride that they want to get onto. If the message is not crafted well, our listener will very easily be distracted and stray.

During the slide, the speed gets the adrenaline going and there is pure joy. If you do not like high speeds you might enjoy the blue slides. If you enjoy high speeds you might enjoy the black slides.

During the speech, the way we make our listeners feel can be joyful or hateful or much worse – indifferent.

After the slide, if it was fun – we want more. Sometimes more of the same slide or more of something different.

Likewise after a speech, we want to listen to the speaker again talking about the same thing or something different or we might want to listen to someone else

I went up and down many slides and felt great!

Can we take our speech listeners on many rhetoric slides and leave them feeling great?