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If you only remember one thing about the building blocks for keynote speakers, I hope it’s this: every speech is a relationship before it’s a message. You can preach at people, you can lecture to people, or you can build meaning with people. And the more you choose with, the more your ideas stop sounding like something you said and start becoming something they can carry.

Rhetoric is the history and practice of non-fiction storytelling. Storytelling is about creating a narrative where you take the audience from point a to point z. And rhetoric is how you get them there. Most people think that Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric is “persuasion.” But that’s only partly true. Rhetoric is “the ability to find the available means of persuasion in any given situation.” Rhetoric isn’t focused on the result … because you can’t control what the result w