My mom had a very significant birthday today, so we kids threw her a party and invited a bunch of family and friends. Everyone had a great time — especially my mom, which is really the important part.<\/p>\n
At some point in the festivities, each of us kids got up and gave a speech in tribute to our mom. My brother came up to me a few minutes before the speeches were to start, because he wanted to talk about the speeches we’d be giving.<\/p>\n
“I wrote out an entire speech,” he said, “but I think I’m going to throw all of it out and just get up there and say something spontaneous.”<\/p>\n
I had already come to the same conclusion. I had a few general ideas in my head of things I might say, but I really didn’t know just how it was going to come out. But I was confident that it would be ok, because it had<\/i> to be ok.<\/p>\n
So it was agreed. Each of us got up to speak without a script, saying whatever moved us.<\/p>\n
And in both cases it worked out great. When I told people afterward that our speeches were improvised, they were shocked, since everything had gone over so well.<\/p>\n
I gave some thought to this later in the day. Why is it that something you say in the moment and off the cuff can work better than a script that you had slaved over to get just right?<\/p>\n
I’m not sure, but here’s a clue: If I’m a little surprised by something I say in a speech, maybe the audience will be too. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My mom had a very significant birthday today, so we kids threw her a party and invited a bunch of family and friends. Everyone had a great time — especially my mom, which is really the important part. At some point in the festivities, each of us kids got up and gave a speech in … Continue reading “Speeches”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15216"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15217,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15216\/revisions\/15217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}