On August 15, Saudi Arabian security engineer Mohammed Qahtani won the title of Toastmasters International World Champion of Public Speaking. He survived seven rounds of a competition that lasted six months and included 33,000 competitors from around the world.
He and nine other finalists competed at the Toastmasters annual convention in Las Vegas, and he took home first place for his speech, "The Power of Words," which you can watch below:
We spoke with Qahtani about his winning speech and discussed what others can learn from it.
He immediately gets the audience on his side
Qahtani starts his speech with a sight gag, pretending to consider lighting up a cigarette before the audience's reaction convinces him not to. He transitions from this into a sober defense of the tobacco industry before saying, straight-faced, that all of the facts and figures he cited were made up. The audience then roars with laughter.
"When you get an audience laughing, you've got them on your side," Qahtani says.
However you choose to engage an audience, by getting them to laugh, cheer, gasp, or any other emotional reaction, it's important to get them on your side from the beginning. Qahtani says it can be easy for a speaker to forget that an audience wants a performer to do well and is waiting to be entertained.
He doesn't lose sight of his message
The punchline of his fake defense of Big Tobacco is that you can convince people of a lie, even an absurd one, if you deliver it in the proper way.
Every presentation needs to have a thesis — a message that the audience is convinced of and will take with them. Qahtani's message is straightforward: We must be conscious of the power our words can have over other people, for better or worse.
His speech is a series of stories: Why a pseudo-defense of smoking can be convincing; how he taught his young son a lesson; why academics have a difficult time imparting the dangers of global warming, and how a single phone call ruined a friend's life. These stories are variations on a theme, leading to a satisfying conclusion that ties them all together.
He makes it personal
A friend once told Qahtani, "When you're on the stage, the most important thing is the audience. Don't care about how you look; where you are on the stage; how you sound — just care about the audience." Qahtani has used this advice to stay focused on how his audience reacts, and, rather than going through the motions, he adjusts his delivery depending on how his audience engages with his material.
In "The Power of Words," he cheats a little bit with the story about a friend dying from an overdose. The story, about a promising young man's tragic path to self-destruction partially due to an estranged relationship with his father, is real, but it's a story Qahtani borrowed. He says that if he presented it as a secondhand story it would lose some of its immediacy.