End it with a Question
When you want your audience to ponder for a few days after they leave the hall, go for a thought-provoking question.
For a spiritual speech, where you teach the audience that anxiety and stress is a product of our minds and God and other humans have not created them, a great question will be “When you leave this hall and go on with life and all the stress and anxiety that comes along, sit and ask yourself on depressing days, why are you suffering? Who is making you suffer? Is it God who is making you suffer or is it you?
Call Your Audience to Action
A speech that does not call the audience to action cannot be called a successful speech. Ask your audience to do something. If you want them to save and invest money. Tell them to stop buying too many things each month and put the money in an IRA account to earn compound interest. Promise a great result so they do what they had been avoiding for a long time.
Give the Audience a Contrast Situation
If you want your audience to clearly distinguish something at the end of the speech, you should go for a contrast situation. Tell them you can’t eat your cake and have it too.
For example, if you are teaching a personal finance lesson, tell them they cannot go out buying a new iPhone every time they launch one. Make it clear to them that they can either save money or spend money.
Quote
A speech that has been conversational and engaging throughout should end at a quote that motivates people or helps them make head and tail of your speech. A speech with a vague end is the speech that the audience will never remember.
If your speech is about environmental pollution and you want the people to take responsibility for being a part of the earth’s slow destruction without offending them, a quote such as “The Earth is what we all have in common” will help you get the point across.
Tell a Story
If you don’t want your audience to fall asleep tell them an interesting story or a funny story. We all remember stories that we heard in a seminar or discussion that happened 5 or 10 years ago. Make sure the story is interesting, it won’t hurt someone’s feelings and it’s not too long.
A short and sweet story can do anything. Wake up the audience and give them a good laugh or shake someone to the core. If you are talking about traffic accidents, tell the story of a victim. If it’s a speech about handling misbehaved students, tell a relevant story.
