In an exclusive excerpt from Say it well: Find your voice, speak your mind, inspire any audience White House Speaker Terry Szuplat explores how former President Barack Obama developed his own public speaking skills.
In 1981, students at Occidental College in Los Angeles held a rally against the brutal South African policy of apartheid and racial segregation. The first speaker was a 19-year-old sophomore named Barack Obama. However, he managed only a few sentences before two students rushed up, pretending to be South African security forces, and dragged him away – a bit of political theater to emphasize the oppression of anti-apartheid activists.
“The whole thing was a farce,” he explained years later, and his “one-minute speech” was “the biggest farce of all.” “This is the last time you will hear another speech from me,” he told his friend. “I have no business speaking for black people.”
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Decades later, as one of his speechwriters, I asked President Obama what he meant. His struggles with his racial identity — with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, and being raised mostly by white grandparents — were “part” of the reason he felt at the rally, he told me. But it was more rooted in larger doubts about his place in the world and whether his voice could change anything.
President Barack Obama speaks with Terry Szuplat, senior director of speechwriting, as he waits backstage to deliver remarks on the Iran nuclear deal at American University in Washington, DC, on August 5, 2015.
Official White House photo/Pete Souza
“I think the starting point for effective speaking, at least for me, and for most people I find persuasive,” he said, “is do they have a sense of who they are and what they believe?” At a campus rally that day, he recalled, “I was a cheeky young man trying to figure out who I was and what I believed in.” The gathering gave him the opportunity to raise his voice. But looking back at his younger self, he said, “I wasn’t ready yet.”
After college, Obama worked as a community organizer with churches on the South Side of Chicago. “At that point, I was used to speaking in front of people,” he told me. “I wasn’t naturally inclined to be nervous” – until one day when his swagger proved to be his undoing.
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He was 24 years old, collecting donations in a conference room full of philanthropists. “I felt pretty cocky,” he recalled. “I did not write down my remarks. I felt like I could walk into any room and just skip it, which was a bad mistake.”
He began his presentation. “There’s a bunch of people in suits,” he recalled. “I look a little shabby and a little out of place. About four or five minutes into my presentation, I just started freezing. I lost my train of thought.”
“I was terrible,” he said. “I felt a little sweaty and hemming and jerking, I got stuck and I wasn’t particularly coherent.” I asked if he remembered what it felt like.
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‘Say It Well’ by Terry Szuplat.
Harper Business
“You put it out of your mind,” he joked at first. Then he thought even more.
“You feel,” he said, pausing for words, “stupid and embarrassed.”
But then he did what any of us can do – he worked to get better.
Obama continued to work as a community organizer, often speaking in church basements.
“Sometimes I’d only have 12 people there,” he said. “But step by step, speaking to a larger audience gave me a basic level of comfort in communicating with people.” While doing so, he learned one of the most important lessons in communication – listening before you speak.
“The best speakers are in conversation with their audience” — and that includes listening to what’s important to the people you’re communicating with.
“Everyone has a sacred story,” he told me, “one that reaches to his essential self.” And hearing other people tell their stories helped me understand mine.”
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He also learned to become a better communicator by studying other speakers.
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“You know who were my good coaches?” he said. “All those black pastors I’ve been to church with… The preachers know how to preach. Just listening and listening and watching, I absorbed a lot.” Of all the places he learned to speak, listening to Chicago pastors, he said, “was probably the most valuable.”
A few years later, he had his first big chance to apply what he had learned. As a 28-year-old law student and president of the Harvard Law Review, he was asked to speak at the Law Review’s annual dinner and introduce that year’s honoree — civil rights icon and Congressman John Lewis. “He was one of my childhood heroes,” Obama told me. “I wanted to make sure I did him justice.”
“This was the first time I gave a big public speech in front of a large group of people I didn’t know, in an environment that mattered to me, on a topic I cared about. I took a long time to think about what I wanted to say. I wrote the speech. I memorized the speech. And then I gave a speech” — short remarks, maybe five to seven minutes, in front of several hundred people.
“It was the first time I felt like ‘I have an audience, I’m moving them, I’m telling a story that resonates with them,'” he said.
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President Barack Obama, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner, delivers his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress in February 2013. Pool/Getty Images News
Barack Obama began to find his voice. Over the next decade, he worked to perfect it, including in the classroom. Even while serving in the Illinois State Senate, he taught at the University of Chicago Law School. “That’s where I learned to feel comfortable talking to people for a long time.”
This dialogue continued in his early political campaigns. “When I first started running for Congress,” he said, “I had a tendency in some settings, including debates and impromptu remarks, not to tell stories, but rather to list talking points, facts and policy….I still needed learn how to deliver effective, impromptu speeches to large groups of strangers in a high-pressure situation.”
Four years later – and many more repetitions behind him – he used all the lessons he had learned as he prepared for what would at that moment be the most stressful moment of his life.
At the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston, Obama took the stage — smiling, clapping, waving to the audience — set up the microphone and began to speak. I was there, down on the convention floor, watching him introduce himself to us and the millions watching at home.
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US President Barack Obama. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a shack with a tin roof… While he was studying [in America]my father met my mother. She was born in a city on the other side of the world, in Kansas… They would give me an African name, Barack, or “blessed”, believing that in tolerant America your name is not an obstacle to success.
“I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage,” he continued. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the greater American story, that I owe a debt to all those who came before me, and that in no other country in the world is my story possible.”
At certain moments he spoke in the rhythm of the preacher he heard from the pulpit. He didn’t speak on those of us in the audience but with us — dialogue, conversation. Instead of ticking off silly stories and facts, he told a bigger story – raising his voice as he neared the end of his speech – about who we were as a country, our values, where we came from and where we’re going:
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Yet, as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us… Well, I say to them tonight, there is no liberal America and no conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is no black America, white America, Latin America, and Asian America; there is the United States of America.
I have never heard anyone speak like this – someone who so shamelessly saw our diversity as a people, not as a weakness to be exploited for political gain, but as a strength to be celebrated and nurtured; someone who not only gave voice to that diversity, but embodied it, calling himself “a skinny kid with a funny name who believes America has a place for him, too.”
“There is no doubt,” his adviser David Axelrod told me years later, that “Obama could not have given that speech if he had not thought deeply about his own identity over many years. He knew who he was and understood how his story had shaped him.”
It turns out that Barack Obama was not, as many thought, a “naturally gifted speaker”. After he froze while giving that speech as a young man, he did what we all do – he put in the work and got better over time.
From the book SAY IT WELL: Find Your Voice, Speak Your Mind, Inspire Any Audience by Terry Szuplat. Copyright 2024 Terry Szuplat. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Say it well: Find your voice, speak your mind, inspire any audience Terry Szuplat is available now, wherever books are sold.
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