From Motive to Message: How to be the Biggest Fish in a Small Pond

A cool and confident person, dressed up in blazers with nice wet gel on his hair, came up in front of the crowd at Anchorvale Community club to give a speech craft and introduced him as “Justin Timberlake “aka “Jaz.” The audience was immediately hooked by his introduction as his actual name according to the programme sheet was “Hijazi” and the synapses in the audience brain fired over other possibly interesting things were in store during his speech – “How to be the biggest fish in smallest pond?”

Over the next 35 mins, he didn’t belie the expectations and took people on a roller coaster of insights from his own experience on public speaking, relationships and life in general. He told us how he learnt during his journey and audience learnt from his life experiences. 

There were 3 key messages in his speech

1. To have authentic self-transformation you need to ask “Why?”
2. To be the biggest fish in the smallest pond and to be a public speaker of repute, share one key message, a message so unique that only you can share to the world.
3. Use the 4M Model to draft the message – Messenger, Message, Method and Motive

He concluded with strong practical ways to apply these ideas in our speeches

Message 1: To have authentic self-transformation, ask “Why?”

His story was about a typical Toastmasters journey.  Jaz like all of us toastmasters went “on road” in search of one thing as part of their TM journey– Ability to impress girls, social skills etc and wound up discovering, especially after the down turn he faced in life after giving up toastmasters for 2 years ,  that Toastmasters was important to him because that is where he discovered himself through learning.

Jaz shared a prolific insight based on his journey. We all know what we want from TM journey – better presentation skill, better communication skill etc. However, when we reach our goal our growth stalls because we never ask “Why do we really want those skills?”

To have deep and authentic self-transformation, Jaz mentioned that we should ask the deep, searching question “Why do we want what we want?” His view is that our deep probe of using multiple “Whys” will lead us to the truth of our personality, unlocking the meaning of life.

This theme set up in the initial part of the speech and was underlying throughout his speech.

Message 2: To be the biggest fish in the smallest pond, to be a public speaker of repute, Share one key message, a message so unique that only you can share to the world.

Jaz, took us on a thought experiment to illustrate the importance of having a message that only we can communicate.

The story was of a fish tank with 5 guppies and 1 sucker fish. Guppies did a lot of things to attract us, but the sucker fish only kept cleaning the pond. At the end while all the Guppies died, the Sucker fish survived.

As public speakers, we can be of repute only if we have a message that only we can explain to the world. That would make us the biggest fish in the smallest pond because nobody else would have that message with the authenticity as ourselves.

Message 3: Use the 4M Model to draft the message – Messenger, Message, Method and Motive

Jaz explained a fabulous view of how to be good public speaker using his 4M model. He shared that while Messenger, Method, Message etc can be mastered, what sticks in people’s mind is the Motive. He used the analogy of Martin Luther King’s speech to explain how great speeches transcended time because of their intention or Motive not because of the messenger, method or message alone.

As such, we should focus on the motive of the message – that was Jaz’s direction.

4M Model                      

In concluding, he explained about 4 kinds of speakers for the audience to benefit from. He mentioned that we should identify which category we belong to and use that to our advantage to communicate the message.

In conclusion to implement the theories, he had a few practical suggestions.

1. Whenever we have to prepare a speech, identify first what we want the audience to do,  then the title and finally the content. When you are delivering you can follow the order as title, content and finally action.
2. Apply the “onlyness” framework – Are you the only one who can deliver the message in your way? This is important to ensure your message sticks and clicks.
3. Always ask, “What next?” So that we can move forward not only in our communication journey but also in our life

Overall, it was a highly illuminating session. We are most grateful to Jaz aka Mohamad Hijazi, ACG, ALB from Jauhari Bilingual Toastmasters for his sincere sharing.

Written By:

Muthu Rama Ganesh, CC, CL