You can care deeply about your message and still fail to connect. You can understand your audience and still have nothing useful to say.
That is why public speaking needs both sides.
In Prepare Yourself for Public Speaking, we began with a simple idea: speaking starts with you, but it is not about you. In Know What You Want to Make Happen When You Speak, we asked what useful movement you want the speech to create. Then in Understand Your Audience Before You Write the Speech, we looked at the other side of the conversation: who are these people, what situation are they in, what do they fear, and what are they trying to make happen?
Now we need to bring those two sides together.
Ask three questions:
What matters to me?
What matters to them?
What matters to both of us?
That third question gives the speech a place to stand.
What matters to you gives the speech a reason
You should care about something before you ask people to listen.
Maybe you care about helping new supervisors step into their role without pretending to know everything. Maybe you care about helping students avoid a dangerous choice. Maybe you want managers to stop taking work back from employees and start developing people who can think for themselves.
Perhaps you want to sell something. Perhaps you want people to support a project. Perhaps you are a manager speaking to your own supervisors because you need them to lead differently.
Different speeches have different purposes.
The important thing is to know yours.
If nothing matters to you, the speech can become an exercise in filling time. You may still organize it well and deliver it beautifully, but it will have no real direction.
What matters to you becomes one source of energy, choice, and conviction.
But it cannot be the only source.
What matters to them is the reason they may listen
The audience has its own agenda.
They may not care about your topic in the same way you do. They may not use your language. They may not even believe the problem is important yet.
That does not mean they are wrong.
It means you have work to do.
Suppose you care about delegation.
You may believe deeply that supervisors should develop capable people and stop doing everything themselves.
But the supervisors in front of you may not care about delegation as a concept. What matters to them is that they are tired. They cannot leave work without getting messages. Their employees keep returning decisions to them, and everything seems to end up back on the supervisor’s desk.
Now you can see the connection.
You care about developing people.
They care about not having to carry everything themselves.
The topic is delegation.
But what matters to both of you is something more useful: people becoming capable enough that work does not depend on one person all the time.
That is where the speech begins to gain power.
Ask what winning looks like for them
This is one of the questions I now find most useful:
What will make this audience win?
That question keeps the speech practical.
If I am speaking to new supervisors, what does winning look like for them?
They are no longer individual contributors working inside their own cubicle. Their job has expanded. Now they have to look beyond themselves and pay attention to three things: people, work, and results.
People come first. They have to ask whether their team is capable, whether people have the drive to do the work, and what is blocking them from performing well.
Then comes the work. Are the processes clear? Where are the bottlenecks? What dependencies make the job harder? What keeps good people from doing good work efficiently?
And then there are results. Customers still need to be happy. Targets still need to be achieved. Waste still has to be reduced. Revenue, quality, service, and other business outcomes still matter.
That is the supervisor’s world.
If I speak to supervisors without understanding those three lines, I may inspire them but not help them win.
People, work, and results
This is not just a supervisor framework. It is a way of understanding what people are trying to accomplish in a real situation.
For supervisors, the top line is people. The middle line is work. The bottom line is results.
People make the work happen.
Work produces the results.
And results tell us whether what we are doing matters.
A new supervisor has to learn to move across all three.
Before the promotion, the person may have focused mainly on individual contribution. Now the supervisor must think about the capability of the team, the quality of the work system, and the outcomes the organization expects.
That shift is not small.
If I am speaking to new supervisors, I need to understand that this is what winning looks like for them. It is not simply “feeling inspired.”
It is becoming more able and more willing to help people perform, make work easier, and deliver the results expected of them.
The same question works with other audiences
Now imagine your audience is a group of graduating students.
The category is different, but the question remains useful.
What will make these students win?
They may be worried about finding work. They may be wondering whether they are ready. They may be comparing themselves with classmates who already have job offers. Some may be thinking about family expectations, money, independence, or whether they chose the right course.
If I know that, I will prepare differently.
I may still speak about careers, courage, or opportunity, but I now know what those topics have to connect with.
The speech becomes less about giving them a collection of ideas and more about helping them move toward something they actually want.
That is what useful public speaking does.
It connects the message to a real win.
The speaker also has a win
This is where the conversation becomes more honest.
The speaker also wants something.
If I am a manager speaking to supervisors, I may need them to lead better because their performance affects the whole department.
If I am selling something, I may want them to buy.
If I am campaigning, I may want them to vote for me.
If I am teaching, I want students to learn.
There is always something in it for the speaker.
That is not automatically bad.
The important thing is to make the relationship clear and useful.
What is in it for me?
What is in it for them?
Where is the win-win?
That shared win matters because it gives the speech integrity.
I am not pretending that only their interests matter.
I am showing that my interest and their interest can meet in a place that helps both sides.
Common ground is not the same as agreement
Finding what matters to both of you does not mean the speaker and the audience already agree.
Sometimes they do not.
A leader may care about accountability. Employees may care about fairness. At first, those concerns can sound different.
But perhaps both care about working in a place where people can rely on one another.
A parent may care about discipline. A teenager may care about independence.
Perhaps both care about trust.
A company may care about performance. Employees may care about workload.
Perhaps both care about doing good work without burning people out.
The shared concern is not always obvious.
That is why you have to listen for it.
Do not force your message onto people
A speaker can have a message they love so much that they try to make every audience need it.
That is dangerous.
You have seen speakers like this.
Whatever the event, they give the same talk.
Leadership conference? Same message.
Graduation? Same message.
Sales convention? Same message.
Parenting event? Somehow, still the same message.
The story changes slightly. The first slide changes. The company logo changes.
The speech does not.
That is not always consistency.
Sometimes it is refusal to listen.
If what matters to you has no meaningful connection to what matters to the people in front of you, you may have the wrong speech for the room.
That does not mean your message is bad.
It may simply belong somewhere else.
Do not abandon what matters to you either
The opposite mistake is also possible.
You listen so carefully to the audience that you become afraid to bring anything challenging into the room.
You tell people only what they already want to hear.
That is not service either.
Sometimes helping people means bringing something they did not ask for.
A supervisor may ask for confidence, but you may see that the deeper issue is avoidance.
A team may ask for motivation, but the problem may be unclear priorities.
A student may ask how to become successful, but perhaps the more useful question is whether they are waiting for permission to start.
The speaker still has something to contribute.
The challenge is to connect that contribution to a concern the audience can recognize.
You do not abandon your point of view.
You make it useful.
A good speech often has two agendas
This was true when I was teaching.
The students had reasons for being in the classroom. They wanted to learn enough to pass. Their parents expected value from the education they were paying for. The school had standards that had to be met.
Those things mattered.
I also had my own agenda.
I wanted students to think critically. I wanted them to become more creative. I wanted them to examine ideas instead of memorizing whatever appeared in the lesson.
I did not have to choose one side.
The better question was: How can I accomplish what matters to them while also helping them develop what matters to me?
That is what good teaching can do.
And good public speaking can do the same thing.
You do not need to hide your agenda.
You need to make sure your agenda can serve theirs.
Even an assigned topic can become useful
Sometimes you do not get to choose the topic at all.
A student may be required to report on something because the professor assigned it. A lecturer may have to cover material because it is part of the syllabus.
In those situations, the speaker may feel that the only goal is to “get through the topic.”
That is the usual version.
But even an assigned topic can become more useful if you ask:
What’s in it for them?
How does this topic help the audience understand something, solve something, decide something, or prepare for something?
You may not be able to change the subject.
But you can change the way people experience it.
That already puts the speech one notch above the usual classroom performance.
You are no longer simply transferring information.
You are helping people win something from the time they gave you.
People should feel that they won something today
This is another useful test.
At the end of the speech, what did the audience win?
Did they gain clarity?
Did they learn a useful move?
Did they see a situation differently?
Did they gain confidence based on something real?
Did they know what to do next?
It does not have to be dramatic.
The win can be small.
But it should be real.
If people leave with nothing more than admiration for the speaker, the speaker may have won more than the audience did.
That is not enough.
Do not wait until tomorrow if they can move today
There is another shift I want to make clear.
A call to action does not always have to wait until the end.
Sometimes the first move can happen while you are speaking.
If people are afraid of public speaking, I may not tell them, “Try speaking tomorrow.”
I may ask them to speak today.
If the topic is appreciation, I may ask people to take out their phones and send a message to someone they need to praise.
If the problem is avoiding a difficult conversation, I may ask them to write the first sentence they need to say.
If the issue is decision-making, I may ask them to name the decision they have been postponing.
The speech becomes an immersive experience.
The audience is no longer only listening to an idea.
They are testing it.
That matters because movement creates evidence.
People can feel what the first step is like before they even leave the room.
The shared win should shape the call to action
This is where the article comes back to the central question.
What matters to me?
What matters to them?
What matters to both of us?
Once you know the answer, the call to action becomes much easier to design.
You are no longer giving people a random activity.
You are helping them take a first step toward a shared win.
If I care about helping new supervisors become capable leaders, and they care about feeling more ready, then perhaps the first step is to identify one fear that keeps shaping their behavior and one better response they can try today.
That action serves both sides.
It helps them.
And it moves the result I care about.
Your gift becomes useful at the point of need
This is where the idea of Share Your Gifts becomes important.
You have something to offer.
Perhaps you have experience. Perhaps you have expertise. Perhaps you are naturally good at something another person finds difficult.
Maybe you have learned how to handle a difficult transition. Maybe you can explain something clearly. Maybe you have seen patterns because you have worked with hundreds of people in the same situation.
Those are gifts.
But gifts become useful when they meet a need.
A story that changed your life may not matter to an audience yet.
An idea you love may not be relevant to their situation.
A skill you have mastered may be valuable only when you can help someone see how it connects to what they are trying to do.
The question is not only, What do I have?
The question is, Where can what I have become useful?
That is the heart of contribution.
Find the sentence that both sides can care about
Before you write the speech, complete three sentences:
What matters to me is __________.
What matters to them is __________.
What matters to both of us is __________.
Then add a fourth:
They will know they won when __________.
That last sentence forces you to make the outcome visible.
For example:
What matters to me is helping new supervisors become capable leaders.
What matters to them is feeling less afraid and more prepared when difficult supervisory moments happen.
What matters to both of us is helping them respond to those moments without letting fear make the decision for them.
They will know they won when they can name the fear, choose a different response, and try that response in a real situation.
Now you have something.
That can guide the entire speech.
Build the speech around the meeting point
Once you know what matters to both sides, the speech becomes easier to design.
Begin where the audience is.
Show them the situation.
Help them see why the current response makes sense.
Make the consequences visible.
Then bring in what you have learned, experienced, researched, or discovered.
Your message becomes the bridge between where they are and where they want to go.
And your call to action can point to the first useful move.
This connects naturally with Move First. A speech does not have to complete the entire transformation. Sometimes its job is to make the first meaningful move easier to take.
And sometimes that first move should happen before the speech is over.
Public speaking is a meeting, not a display
The larger Public Speaking work keeps returning to the same shift.
Public speaking starts with you.
You bring your experience, your ideas, your stories, your convictions, and your gifts.
But the speech cannot stay with you.
There are people in the room with their own experiences, fears, hopes, goals, and questions. They are not waiting to become supporting characters in your story. They are trying to make something happen in their own lives, work, or future.
A useful speech finds the meeting point.
What matters to you meets what matters to them. What you have meets what they need. Your purpose meets their desired win.
And somewhere in that meeting, a useful move becomes possible.
That is where the speech becomes more than a performance.
It becomes an opportunity to help people win something that matters.
Before you decide what to say, find that place first.