Hello Reader,

This week, 63 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech.

I'm not going to analyse it. Plenty of people have, and you've heard the famous line anyway.

I want to do something else. I want you to be him. For five minutes.

It's Tuesday night

You're 34. You're in a hotel room in Washington. Tomorrow, a quarter of a million people are going to stand in front of you, in the heat, waiting for you to say something worth the bus ride.

You've been working on the speech all week. Your team has been arguing over drafts. It's finally done. It's typed. It's good. Honestly, it's very good. Big words, beautiful sentences, the kind of thing that will read well in the newspaper the next morning.

You go to sleep at 4 a.m.

Now, be honest with yourself. What are you feeling? Not the version of you that gives interviews. The real one, lying in the dark.

I know what I'd feel. Fear that I'd forget a line. Fear that the pages would blow away. Fear that I'd rush. And a small, private hope that people would say afterwards, "what a beautiful speech."

That's the trap. Right there. The hope that they'll admire the speech.

It's Wednesday afternoon

You walk up the steps. The crowd goes further than you can see. You put the pages on the lectern and you start reading.

And it's fine. It's good. People are nodding. It's landing like a good speech lands. Politely.

Then, about ten minutes in, a woman standing behind you shouts: "Tell them about the dream, Martin."

Now, here's the moment. You're at the lectern. You've got seven pages left. Everything you rehearsed is still ahead of you. And someone has just asked you to throw it away.

What do you do?

Most people keep reading. I would have kept reading, for most of my life. You've prepared. It's safe. It works.

He didn't. He pushed the pages aside and started talking. Not reading. Talking. To the people in front of him, about his four kids, about Georgia, about Mississippi. Short sentences. Repeating himself. Looking at faces.

Everything the world remembers from that speech came after he put the paper down.

What I'd tell him, if he were my client today

He wouldn't need me. But if a 34-year-old with a very good script sat across from me tonight, this is all I'd say:

Put the paper down earlier than feels safe. You needed a woman to shout at you before you did it. Most of us don't get a Mahalia Jackson. So decide before you walk up: at what point am I going to stop performing and start talking?

Talk to one person, not the crowd. The moment the speech changed is the moment he stopped speaking to a nation and started speaking to a person in the front row about his own children. Two hundred and fifty thousand people felt spoken to because he spoke to one.

Your best line isn't in your script. It never is. The script is where you start. The room is where you finish.

Back to you

You're not speaking to the National Mall. You're speaking to twelve people on Zoom, or a leadership team that has sat through six vision decks this quarter.

Same moment, though. Every single time. You're standing there with your polished version, and somewhere in the room, someone is silently saying, "tell us about the dream." Tell us the real thing. Stop reading and talk to us.

That's what Conversational Public Speaking is. That one moment, made into a habit.

If you'd like someone to shout it from behind you while you practise, the September cohort of Speak Like It's Tuesday has a couple of seats left. Reply to this and I'll send the details.

Four week. No lectern. If this is of interest to you, drop me a line. We have only 1 seat free, out of 6. We start 7th Sep