Mark Twain talked about the importance of carefully chosen words: the difference between lightning and lightning bug. We wonder if the speaker is making them up, and if the speaker is making this up, what else are they making up? Oprah’s specificity of visual details not only helped us see what she was saying, it caused us to conclude she was telling the truth. She put us THERE by jumping right into her WHERE.ħ. It fleshed out what an incredible full circle Hero Journey story this is. But … ”īy putting us in the scene of WHERE she was and what it was like watching a black man receive an award, we understood the significance of her (the first black woman) receiving this award. I tried many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door bone tired from cleaning other people’s houses. I’d never seen a black man being celebrated like that. His tie was white, his skin was black-and he was being celebrated. She opened the envelope and said five words that literally made history: ‘The winner is Sidney Poitier.’ Up to the stage came the most elegant man I ever remembered. Oprah’s first words were, “In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother’s house in Milwaukee watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for best actor at the 36th Academy Awards. When Oprah revealed that the investigator assigned to Recy Taylor’s case was none other than … (wait for it) … Rosa Parks, there was an audible “I didn’t know that” gasp from the audience.Ħ. Original talks delight us because they introduce something new and meaningful we weren’t aware of before. No try-too-hard language that rang false or self-conscious mannerisms that detracted from the message.ĥ. There was no embellishing, no grand-standing. Imagine all the things she wanted to say yet disciplined herselt to edit out.Ĥ. I can only imagine the weeks of preparation that went into distilling this message into an “every word matters” momentum that swept us up in its elegance and eloquence. Her content was superbly crafted and condensed. This freed her up to be “in the moment” and “in flow” so she could fully focus on giving the speech of a lifetime, the speech she was born to give.ģ. Oprah invested the effort to memorize her talk so she could connect with her audience and speak from the heart instead of being “in her head” reading a transcript (verbatim) from a teleprompter. This was about creating a rising tide raising all involved, not about self-aggrandizement.Ģ. She was there to inspire, not to impress.
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