The Action Catalyst
REMASTERED: I See Something, with Dananjaya Hettiarachchi (Speaking, Storytelling, Success, Personal Development)
Tue, 31 Dec 2024
Championship speaker and executive coach Dananjaya Hettiarachchi shares the two principles behind crafting a great message, the three biggest things he changed to create a championship speech, pull vs. push messages, the two types of stories that exist, the power of connecting with failure, and why sometimes just being yourself is the hardest part.
There are two types of stories, right? A is where you become the hero. But what I like to do in my stories and in all of my speeches, I play the role of the villain, the anti-hero, or the failure in the speech. People connect in failure more than in success.
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He is the 2014 World Champion of Public Speaking for Toastmasters International. Dhananjaya Hedyarachi. He is awesome. He's a TEDx speaker and is among a handful of human resource development consultants in the Asia-Pacific region that specializes in performance prediction. Dhananjaya, thank you for being with us. It's a pleasure to be on board.
Can you just talk to us a little bit about what is it like competing at the World Championship of Public Speaking?
It's an amazing experience because I come from South Asia. So for us, stepping onto that stage is massive. It's huge. Because when I come from English, it's our third language. It's a dream come true.
That's awesome. And I want to apologize. It's going to be a little fuzzy because Dhananjaya is in Sri Lanka. And so we're catching him on Skype. So let me ask you this question. What do you think is the hardest part of being in the contest specifically?
I think the hardest part for me throughout the years was being comfortable with who I am. For a long time, I wanted to emulate speakers from the West because I thought that that was the way to win the world championship. But for me, I actually discovered my moment of glory when I decided to stop competing and just start being myself. And that was the hardest part.
I think it took me 10 years just to be myself on stage.
How many times had you entered the contest before? I'm just curious. Well, I started competing in 2006. Tell us a little bit about how did you develop the speech and when did you start to tell that story?
Okay, the first cut of the speech, I did it at TEDx speech. Now, what I wanted to give to the audience was, well, there are some people in life that can't figure out what they're good at by themselves. So if you look at my life, I think every achievement that I've achieved in my adult life has been because of the influence of others.
And whenever I wanted to give up, they just stepped in and made me not make that decision. When you associate with the right people, you can achieve great things in life. I did this speech in schools. I did it for children. Got a great response. So I wanted to make this into a five, seven-minute speech. It took me a year to do that.
The challenge is complicated more because in this part of the world, we speak generally faster than the West. We speak at about 160, 165 words per minute. It's just complicated even more. It's not just about cutting back. It's about also slowing down. You have to really pick the most impactful sentences, words, because you need to not only cut back, but you've got to take more time.
You know, a lot of speakers start their speech with a title or a topic. I always start with my message. And when I do that, I take a lot of time on the message. Once I've got my message down, I have two principles. A, it has to be simple. B, it has to be inspirational. So until I get that phrase right, I don't concentrate about anything else.
I just concentrate about what's my short and inspirational message. And then what I do is I start to layer that message with stories that I feel really add value to that message. And then it's about building upwards from that message. So that's the process I actually take.
What are some of the other, were there any big lessons that you learned in terms of specific practical presentation skills?
I think there were three major lessons that I've learned. The first is, I wasn't a very big fan of repetition. I consciously tried to position my message, my key phrase, at least three times within the speech. So I say it once, I say it twice, And the third time before I say it, the audience has finished saying it. So I actively get the audience's subconscious involvement into my speech.
Number two, I wasn't a heavy fan of props. I never liked to use props in my speech, but I used props. And then for me, that enhanced my speech. It gave my speech a more visual and kinesthetic element that really enhanced what I was actually saying. The first thing that I learned, make it about the audience.
I had a pull approach where the audience was getting pulled into my speech as opposed to me kind of thrusting down advice or pushing content down to them. So those are three things that I've learned.
So repetition, props, and allowing for a pull message instead of a push message. How do you create a pull message instead of a push message?
What I normally do, it has to do with how you construct the story. Now, there are two types of stories, right? A is where you become the hero of your story, where you're the hero of the story throughout. Generally, when you're the hero of your story throughout, it becomes a push message. But what I like to do with my stories and in all of my speeches, I play the role of the villain.
Then it's about the audience kind of coming into the speech. They're trying to experiment. They're trying to figure out who this guy is. It becomes more of like I need to dissect this individual in this team. I normally start off either as the anti-hero or the failure in the speech because, as I always say, people connect in failure more than in success. I take some time to explore failure.
I make sure that I connect with my audience through my failures and that will pull the audience to me. But if I become the hero of my speech from the very beginning, what happens is then it's about, okay, I've done something really great and you guys need to now listen to me go and do this. And that then becomes a coaching message.
Hmm. So, uh, last little question, you know, after you win the world championship of public speaking, what's next?
Well, so my Toastmastering career has now ended. Now, my next thing is to just be a motivational speaker and an inspirational speaker for this part of the world. And I've got to now unlearn being a world champion and learn again how to start from scratch in being a paid, motivational, inspirational speaker and make this into a business model full of success. So I'm back to square one.
I'm learning again. And I'm looking to achieve my goal in the next 10 years.
Wow. Dhananjaya Hedyarachi. Thanks for being on the show.
Thank you very much.