This blog will help you to give your new year’s and Christmas speech extra impact. It is an extreme version of the following tip for creating a great speech:
Audiences will remember the last thing you said best. If that is really good you can use the rest of your speech to arrive there. For writing your Christmas speech I will go one step further:
This will give both of them more impact. Why? Because they come as a package. Traditionally a Christmas speech looks back on the past year and celebrates the successes. The new year’s speech looks forward to the coming year and sets goals to aim for. It is great when these two are connected by a shared theme, image or metaphor. This should be something you can use the whole next year. For that reason it works best to start by choosing the theme, image or metaphor you want to use in your new-years message and then make your Christmas message match it.
This way of working will make it easy to connect the previous and new year. An other advantage is that repeating an idea in different ways and on multiple occasions will help it to stick with your audience. Last but not least when you start creating your new years speech before Christmas: you don’t have to work (as much) on it during the holidays.
I wish all of you a Christmas speech which makes you look forward to delivering your New Years message.
If you want input on making your New Year/ Christmas speech memorable book a 45-minute speech brainstorm zoom session (which includes a copy of his pitch pocketbook as an extra holiday gift).
This is what Petra van den Dries and Ludo Smulders said about Franks coaching for their Christmas speech at UWV Breda: