Public Speaking Structure: How to Be Clear, Confident, and Memorable

If your message feels strong but your delivery feels scattered, this episode is for you.

In this episode, I break down why structure is the missing link for so many speakers — and why confidence without structure often leads to rambling, over-explaining, and forgettable talks. Structure isn’t restrictive. It’s what allows your message to land clearly and powerfully.

You’ll learn:

• Why most speakers struggle with clarity, not confidence
• What actually happens when a talk has no structure
• How structure builds authority and trust with an audience
• The difference between scripting your talk and structuring it
• A simple framework you can use for podcasts, panels, and stages

This episode is for speakers, coaches, and leaders who want to sound clear, confident, and intentional — without memorizing a script or overloading their audience.

I also share how we build structured, signature talks inside Standing O, and how speakers practice clarity and delivery inside SpeakEazy so their message lands every time.

You don’t need to say more.
 You need to say it better.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome back to the Public Speaking Icon podcast. I'm your host Coco Gunn, also known as the voice Architect. You guys can hear my dogs in the background. They're probably gonna be, you're gonna hear a little of them. A little of them in this episode today. So this is a topic that I know many of you ask me or we discuss in our calls on in my dms, and it's this idea of I, I feel like I talk too much and I don't feel like my message lands. So the struggle. A lot of you may be thinking to yourself, I ramble too much. How do I stop rambling? And it is a thing, and it's typically tied to a lot of different things, but we're gonna talk about that today and why it's important for you guys to understand how important structure is in cracking your speech. So this episode is actually, you know, speaking to maybe the podcasters who ramble too much, or the speakers that ramble too much. Or if you're a panelist on stage and you feel like. You're constantly having to overexplain yourself, but also for speakers who know what they're talking about. You know, your speech inside and out, but for some reason it is not landing, and I'm seeing this more often than not, and a lot of it just comes down to this transition phase. Everyone is wanting to be on more stages. They're wanting to have that visibility piece, but they don't recognize or realize that there's more to. A keynote speaker than just the speech itself, and that is presence and, and, and, and body language. There's so much more into it and they're confused and they're frustrated because, or most speakers are confused and frustrated because they are losing the attention of the room. They are literally talking. And no one's paying attention to them. So if you have, you know, if you don't, you know if, if, if you have all these great ideas, right, and you feel as though, you know, I don't understand why, you know, I'm not getting the feedback or no one's engaging, or I can't get people to. Understand there is a huge, huge issue here, and the issue is not that you have lack of confidence, right? Because I'm sure you've run this speech a million times. The problem is, is that your speech doesn't have structure, and I always talk about this with my clients, how important it is to take your audience on a journey. Imagine them being in a rollercoaster cart with you and you are going in the ins and outs, so loopy loops of a rollercoaster, that experience that you have. It's something that you were thinking about all the time because you're getting the highs, the lows, and the in-betweens inside this amazingly crafted speech. But if you don't have that structure that allows for that journey to happen, your message is never going to land. That's just how it is. So I want you to think of structure as something that is a tool that is an assistant to you and not a box. Okay? I'm not talking about fitting you in this box and. You feeling as though you're stuck? That's not what I want. I want it to be able, I want the structure that you create. Whether you do something that I do or you, whether you create it on to be the freedom in your speech, right? The ability for you to, you know, go on this. I say go on this journey.'cause I talk about it all the time. It's more freeing when you have things set in alignment. It's kind of like what people say about memorizing their speech versus having bullet points. I'm a bullet point person. Because that gives me the freedom to go off on a tangent, but know when I need to come back. But when you memorize one small mistake and it's game over for you, so I want you to reframe this mindset, right? I want you to think of structure as this, this, this thing that you create that allows for you to still have the freedom of, of speaking and that enjoyment, but take the audience on a journey. Inside your speech. So what happens? There's a lot of things that do happen When you don't have structure, you end up rambling instead of actually leaving the room. And it happens all the time. And it's just one of those things'cause people think speaking is easy and I have an idea of what I wanna talk about and I'm just gonna go talk about it. And no structure. It's kind of like the three little pigs straw house, brick house. The straw house didn't have structure one small, whew. And it went down, right? Same thing. Your speech has to have structure. It has to have shape. If not, you're gonna look like a, a, a oak tree sprouting as opposed to a bamboo tree that goes straight up and it has little branches here and there. Those are the side stories. Those are, those are the bullet points. I never thought of that analogy. Ha co coco. So it it, if you don't have structure, you also will think to yourself, I have all these things I wanna say. Right. All these things, and you end up rambling and before you know it, you're completely off track. You completely forgot what the topic was that you were covering, and now you're, you're embarrassed. And at the end of it, because of all the rambling, there's no clear takeaway for your audience. So they don't know what to do next. They may not know where to find you. They probably wouldn't even know what you were talking about because one minute you were talking about, you know, the, the moment you started your business and then the relationship that you were in that affected your business. And then that relationship ended up, you just all over the place. And I know that you're probably, if you're, this is you, you're probably laughing in your car right now and being like, yeah, that's me. How do I fix it? Let's, let's fix it. Another thing that happens when you don't have structure is you overexplain, and I know I have friends that I'm like, Hey, I got the point. Gimme short, sweet, and structured. Boom, boom, boom. A b. And typically over, over-explaining happens when you're trying to prove your expertise and it doesn't end up making you sound smarter. It makes you sound as if you don't know what you're talking about because you keep adding on and adding on, and adding on and adding on. So structure says, okay, these are the things I want you to learn. Here's point A, point B, point C, subtopics three, however many you have the structure, and you can still add in the personalized stories or storytelling into. The speech, but now you have a way to keep yourself in alignment. And also guys structure helps you keep timing. If you're given 20 minutes, you need to structure for 20 minutes. IE the person that had a nine, nine slide deck at an event, 99 slide slide deck, and they had a 30 minute presentation, but I digress. Uh, the other thing is flat endings. Okay? No moment that lands. So you're just going all over the place and there's nothing that hits with the audience. You know, throughout your speech, you have to call, you have to have what I like to call gut punches. Things that trigger the audience to be like, Ooh, that made me feel triggered, or oof, that made me feel excited. Or, you know, that's what you should have throughout your speech. And those are landing moments. And when you don't have structure, those don't even exist. You think that you're, you're giving a landing moment, but then you keep talking and nothing lands. So there's actually, when nothing lands, you guys, there's no reason for the audience to ever rem remember you at all. Because you're just talking, you're just, you know, going off on a cuff and it's, it's, it's fine. And it's funny. It's fine to do that. I think sometimes in podcasts, but on stages you don't have the time. And the audience has probably heard seven or eight, I don't know, speakers within, depending on the event size. So they're already looking for that. Gimme the g, gimme the gut punches so I can take notes. You know, sometimes you don't have to tell the backstory, just get to the point, and that's what structure allows for you to do. And so let's break down actually in detail what structure actually does. Okay. For a speaker, the first thing it does is it creates safety. You know exactly where it is that you're going. You don't know. There's no detours, there's no exits. You know, point A to point B is where I'm taking my audience. So now I'm in this, this space where I can see clearly, okay, this is where I have to go. And it's a safe route.'cause you created the route. It also builds authority. Clear speakers, of course, are trusted and that's the thing that you guys have to remember. People buy and listen to people that they trust. And when you are structured, when you're clear, when you are concise with what it is that you're saying, it's going to build lots of trust with the audience versus someone that is not, and they're all over the place with all kinds of topics and rambling. It also increases your confidence level because confidence actually comes from clarity, not the hype of you getting on stage or your introduction or your bio. Right structure allows for you to see clearly and feel like, all right, I know, I know exactly where this is gonna lead to. I know exactly what my audience is gonna do, and it builds that confidence to say, all right, I'm good. I, I know exactly the pattern. I know exactly the path. And lastly is it makes you memorable audiences. Remember frameworks and not paragraphs. And this goes for some of you who are obsessed with flooding your slide deck with words and reading off the slide deck. Please stop. That's a no-no, and the audience is gonna remember, you know what? They're gonna remember that a speaker was on stage reading off a slide deck. They're not gonna remember those highlighted moments that you had them gut punch because you're reading. Give them a structure, take them on the journey, whatever you wanna call it, beginning, middle, and end, point a, point B, point C. You know, the T, the drama of the show. That's what I do. Like. I give you the T, they give you the backstory, I give you the emotional part of the story, and then I close out with the actual performance of what happened. And I'll like dive into that later. But you can catch some of that on my content. But it it, it makes you memorable when the audience feel like they were along with you for the ride. So let's talk about the shift from talking to landing. And I want you to do this, uh, these three things, okay? One is stop thinking in script. Okay? Start thinking in points. The thing is, yes, you can use a script, but if you have not become great at your delivery. It's gonna sound like you're reading and that takes time. So give yourself bullet points. I'm gonna talk about point A, here are the subtopics of point A, dun, dun, point b, subtopics, bubu, give it po talking points. So that way, you know, and, and the talking points should be like a storyline, like a journey. You know, for example, if you're, if I'm talking about creating a podcast, right? I will probably start with what is your podcast topic gonna be? Okay, great. What are you gonna title? Your what? What are your, uh, what are you gonna title it? Okay, great. What platform are you gonna use? Those are steps that I can follow from start to finish and my audience can follow along, which is gonna make me more memorable versus me saying, okay, let's start a podcast. But first, let's talk about all the podcasts that you like, and then also the all these platforms that you can use to do your podcast. Right. You all hear my dogs in the background. So I want you to think about those three things, and that is gonna take you from someone that just talks to actually your speak. Your topic. Your topic, excuse me, your topics actually landing. So I want you to think of points. Instead of creating a script, stop crafting a script. You guys, even for your podcast, it sounds unnatural. It sounds like you're reading now, you can perfect this skill if you want to. By reading fictional books out loud, that's a great skill for you because now you'll be paying attention to the punctu punctuation and the energy and the mood in what you're reading, and you'll be able to create that, which then helps you do better at doing scripts. Most of you guys are creating scripts because you don't know how to talk on a microphone, and you feel like, well, if I create the script, no one's gonna know I'm reading it. Yeah, we do. Just so you know. So you gotta work on it. Alright, I want you to think of one message per moment. Okay. Not everything. Not everything, you know? So what, what does that mean? We don't wanna hear every single thing that you know about this topic. We don't have time. But what we do wanna hear is the topic and then your, your value to that topic. And you can do three, you can do four, whatever you, whatever your thought process is. But we don't need to know every single thing about this one topic. Not the backstory, none of that. Get to the point so we can be like, yeah, I remember that. Boom. Maybe you can relate. And the last thing I want you to do is ask yourself these questions. What do you want them to feel when you are doing your speech? What do you want the audience to feel? And then what do you want them to do? Because ultimately you're moving them to do something. They have to take action QR code. Stand on their feet, join your membership, whatever the case may be, you're gonna want them to move, be inspired. You know that those are all things that are actions that you want them to take. They don't have to be actual actions with a credit card, but they can be things that you want them to put in place based off of the structure that you created for them. So stop talking, stop thinking in scripts. Make some bullet points. Okay. One message per moment. We don't need the whole entire backstory on one topic.'cause then you won't get to the other two topics. And lastly, you need to ask yourself what do you want them to feel and what do you want them to do? Now I'm gonna give you this really quick structure and you can title it whatever you want. We always say opening middle and close, beginning, middle, and end. However you wanna structure it, right? But these are things that these are like just a simple structure that you can use when crafting your talk. The opening name the problem, right? What are you gonna be, what? What is the problem and why is it a problem? Number two is the middle. Refine the problem and teach one clear idea. So this is the problem. Let's dive a little deeper into why this problem is happening. Okay? Let's talk about the one thing that you can do to get better, and then lastly is your close calling the audience forward. What do you want them to do? What, how? What kind of action do you want them to take? And honestly, you follow this, it's gonna be, it's gonna get crafted and created differently for you as you build speech, as as you build speeches. But this is a starting point, opening middle, close, or if you wanna call it beginning, middle, and end. This structure is used in every aspect in movies and podcasts, in your speeches, and you just have to be really, really, really clear on what you want in each one of those sections. So this of course, like I mentioned, it works for panels, it works for podcasts, it works for stages, and this is actually a foundation that you can use to craft your signature talk. To be honest, every single speech that you give is a journey that the audience is taking with you. So as you're going through this, this process, remind yourself, okay, am I rambling? Am I talking too much? Why am I rambling? Oh, because I don't have structure. I don't know my beginning, middle, and end. And you're just saturating the space, whether it's a podcast or it is on a stage, and before you know it, people aren't gonna remember what you're talking about because you're so far off that nothing is landing for them. Now if you wanna work on this, I wanna learn more about this. I have a speaker, speaker community called Standing O, which is a community for aspiring speakers, new speakers that are looking to develop and work on their speaking skills as they're getting ready for maybe their next keynote or prepared to get on any stage. The speaker community, we have four calls a month, so every other Wednesday we do what I like to call the PSM calls, which is the public speaking maintenance calls where I teach a skill set in public speaking. And then we actually. Implement that speaking skill on the call. I also do two hot seat coaching calls per month as well. So this is live feedback from me and the community members on anything that you may be working on. Speech content, podcast panel interview. We wanna make sure that you hit those stages and feel as confident as you possibly can. Now, if you are in the Orlando area and are available on March 12th, I am holding my first in-person speaker lab called Speakeasy or Orlando. And I'm really excited about this because this is going to be a workshop for two hours from. 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM where we work on your skill sets, get you on stage. I give you hot seat coaching, and we also be working on your improvisation skills. That is happening March 12th at Binks Orlando from seven to 9:00 PM So I'll leave you with this. Remember, you don't have to say more. This is not about more information for the audience. You just need to say it better and that, that, that better quote unquote, comes with structure. And let me tell you this, when your message lands, you land. And that is so, so, so important. So I'll catch you guys on the next episode. Until then, chow.