Learning Public Speaking

photo by Keith Allison

We all know the big news of the day – The Apology of Tiger Woods.

It was all over TV, the Internet, and my Twitter stream.

So, let’s grade the speech. And it was a speech. It was clearly written beforehand by a speechwriter and practiced in front of a controlled audience before the world saw it on Friday.

So my take on a few different fronts: First, what do I think?

Disclaimer: I have never been a Tiger Woods fan. So I was not wounded when all of this came out. I became interested due to the gossip. So he did not need to apologize to me.

However, I thought that the apology was pretty good. He told the world that he was sorry and, to me, seemed sincere. But did he do enough to repair his image? Only time will tell.

There will be people who will not forgive and will not believe any apology.  There is nothing he can do about that.

But there are people waiting to see what he had to say and I think those people will give him pretty high marks.

As a speaker, there will be some who would say that they did not like the part of the speech where he attacked the media. I would agree. I groaned when I heard that. Even if you have a valid point, that was not the time or place for it. Make the speech about you and not others. He did that for most of the speech and it was effective.

He also talked about what he learned about himself in the last three months, including what he learned in rehab. I thought this was good because the audience was curious about what he did since the incident on Thanksgiving.

Another complaint could be that the speech was written and he did not “speak” from the heart.

For speakers, this is an important lesson. Eye contact is important.

Even with a written speech, you can present it to maintain a level of authenticity. Eye contact can help establish trust and allow your audience to trust you. A speech that is read is seen as a speech that is not “real”. He did read a good bit of the speech, but I did not have a big problem because I found him believable.

Apologies are not easy to make.

He said he was selfish and foolish. He is the worst person in the world? No. Did commit an atrocity that should ban him from society forever? No.

He is a public figure who has asked for forgiveness. People will decide whether he earns it or not. But I thought it was a good first step.

(Also, we will talk more about the speech and have some clips from the speech in a podcast that will go online Sunday.)

Grade: A-

Here is a large part of the speech:

Related posts:

1. Podcast Ep. 30: Evaluating Tiger Woods’s apology Show Notes: This week, Drew talks Tiger’s apology. What did...
2. Ep. 21 – Favorite Mistakes, Part 2 5 to Speak Ep 21 This episode talks about the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.