I am a strong believer of writing speeches that works on people from all over the world. The reason for this is, as a global speaker, I speak all over the world (I spoke in 24 countries last year alone). But also because many speaking assignments for professional speakers will be for international/global audiences (meaning people in the audience will be from many different countries).

For both these scenarios (speaking globally, and speaking for international groups) you need to have a speech that is universally human – a speech that goes to the core of humanity.

I recently delivered a new speech (a speech I had never delivered before) and I knew the audience would be diverse (from 14 different countries from 4 continents).

So how did I know that the speech would land?

I tested it on 4 people from 4 different countries. An American, a Frenchman, an Indian, and a Filipino.

And when I say “tested” it I mean I ran through the whole speech – one-on-one with a member of the audience to get their feedback BEFORE I went.

To get feedback before your speech – let’s call that “forwardfeed” – is crucial so that when you do go up on stage many of the “wrinkles” that you could find in your speech yourself get wrinkled out.

The funny thing is that all the different people who gave me input on what to change gave DIFFERENT input. That is the beauty of testing out a speech on people that are not only different from yourself, but also different from each other. The more different the better.