Public Speaking and rhetorical Techniques. Speak Like a Pro Email Newsletter Article

People often ask me which anecdotes are most appropriate for business speeches - sport, history, art, politics? My answer is that it doesn't really matter. Any anecdote can be appropriate in the right context. The skill with using anecdotes is making them relevant to the subject you are speaking on.

So with that in mind I'm going to give you a few I've plucked form the 'ancient world' and some ideas about how you can make these relevant to the content of your speeches or presentations. The great thing about using anything from the ancient world is that it makes you sound incredibly intelligent, even if the nearest you've been to the classics is watching the movie 'Troy' with Brad Pitt.

Making Unpleasant Decisions

Let's say you are making a speech at the annual company conference and some of the things you had to do in the previous year were unpopular nut necessary. You could use this anecdote:

About two and a half thousand years ago, there lived a king in Lydia (part of modern day Turkey) called Candaules. Now Candaules was married to a woman who he thought was the most beautiful on earth, and he used to wax lyrically about her beauty to his courtiers, especially a bodyguard called Gyges. One day, sensing that Gyges thought he was exaggerating, he said that he would arrange for the man to see his wife naked just to prove what he was saying was true.

Now Gyges was horrified and begged him not to do it, but the king was adamant and arranged for him to hide behind the royal bedroom door one night so he could see her disrobe and then sneak out before she could see him. This he did, but unfortunately the queen saw him and horrified by what her husband had done, decided to take her revenge.

She summoned him the next day and gave him two choices; he could be executed on the spot for his impropriety, or kill the king, seize the throne and take her as his wife. Regicide being the most horrific of crimes, Gyges was appalled, as you might imagine, and begged the queen to give him an alternative, but she was adamant. One of them had to die. It was kill or be killed.

He chose to live, and murdered Caudales after hiding behind the same bedroom door from where he had spied on the queen.

Sometimes life is like that. Sometimes we find ourselves faced with a problem where the options are all as distasteful as each other. But we still have to select one of them. This was the situation we faced last year, when the only two options facing us were to downsize the company or go under. We chose the former as the lesser evil ..

Unintended Consequences

If one of your business decisions turned out to have unforeseen consequences, you could try this one:

When the Persian King Xerxes was planning his invasion of ancient Greece, there lived in Lydia a very wealthy man called Pythius. So wealthy in fact, that he was reputed to be the richest man in the empire after Xerxes himself. Now Pythius offered to give his whole fortune to finance the invasion, and as he was the only person who had ever actually volunteered any money to the king, an extremely impressed Xerxes not only refused his offer, but actually increased his wealth as a reward and elevated him to the title of 'personal friend'.

Whether all this went to Pythius' head or not we don't know, but a short while later, he asked the king for a favour. Xerxes said, 'anything' and Pythius said it was only a small matter, almost too inconsequential to bother him about. He said he had five sons in the royal army and begged Xerxes to allow one of them - his favourite - to stay behind to look after him. He could take the other four with pleasure.

Xerxes was incandescent with rage. He was personally marching to war with his whole family, including his wives and harem, and the ungrateful wretch had the nerve to ask him this? His response was that Pythius and his four other sons could live because of his earlier generosity, but the favourite he loved so much was to pay for his father's impudence with his life.

And the son (whose name we don't know) was cut in half by the king's executioners, with the two halves placed on opposite sides of the road for the army to march between, as a sign for all others.

Sometimes, we do something with a certain result in mind and what we get in return is the exact opposite of what we intended. Which is exactly what happened with our disastrous PR campaign recently ..

If one of your business decisions turned out to have unforeseen consequences, you could try this one:

On the 10 th of January, 49 years before the birth of Christ, the soldiers of the 13 th legion stood stamping their feet in the cold, poised on the banks of a narrow stream. On their side was the province of Gaul; on the far side, Italy and the road to Rome. Their commander, Julius Caesar, gazed into the fast flowing waters deep in thought.

Caesar had been recalled to Rome by his political enemies but one of the sternest laws of the Roman people was that it was illegal for a provincial governor to enter Italy with his army without the permission of the Senate.

If he crossed it alone, his political enemies would ruin a hitherto brilliant career. If he took his troops with him, he would effectively be declaring civil war. The stakes were just too high for rational calculation, so like the gambler he was, he decided to risk it all.

He gave the order to advance with a quote from the Greek playwright Menander, 'The die is cast' meaning 'the dice have been thrown'. Throwing caution to the wind, his troops entered the icy waters and the result was a war that not only engulfed the whole Roman world but sounded the death knell of democracy in Rome itself.

This is where the phrase 'crossing the Rubicon' comes from. It means an act from which there is no turning back. Similar to 'burning your bridges'. Well, last year we crossed the Rubicon ourselves when we committed this company to a radical new strategy ..

If your demise is being predicted by the competition (or press) and you want to express defiance, you could tell them about the assassination of King Philip of Macedonia:

Everyone has heard of Alexander the Great and knows that he conquered the Persian empire. What many don't know was that the invasion was actually planned and intended by his father, King Philip.

Philip had sent envoys to the oracle at Delphi asking whether he would be successful. The reply he received was 'The bull is garlanded. All is done. The sacrificer is ready.'. Philip confidently interpreted this to mean that the Persian king would be slaughtered like a victim at the sacrificial altar.

A few months later, Philip was assassinated at his daughter's wedding, leaving Alexander to inherit the throne. The oracle had been correct. What Philip had failed to realise was that it was he who was the sacrificial victim, not his enemy.

Often people make overconfident, dare I say arrogant, predictions which turn out to be false. Our competitors have been making a lot of predictions themselves lately ...
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