If you are worried about keeping your audience's attention as you speak, think about these ideas as you prepare your remarks:

Provide order, structure. If your audience is forced to work in order to follow your argument, they may lose interest. Make it easy for people to follow what you are saying: provide an easy-tounderstand structure that will carry them from one point to another.

Keep it simple. Your audience is going to come away with one or two of your main ideas. One or two. Not ten or fifteen. If you cannot express in a sentence or two what you intend to get across, then your speech isn't focused well enough. If you don't have a clear idea of what you want to say, there is no way your audience will.

Keep it brief. In New York a few years ago, a prominent steel company chief ended a 90-minute presentation before 400 of his executives and managers by striding from the stage and down the middle aisle. No one applauded until he was halfway out of the room. “They didn't know he was finished,” a critic recalls. “They hadn't been attentive enough to recognize that.”

Talk, don't read. Scripted speeches, particularly those written by someone other than the speaker, almost never sound authentic or convincing. I once asked a number of Fortune 500 executives for samples of speeches they had given in the previous year. A friend who is a senior executive at PepsiCo said, “I hope you don't intend to use those speeches as teaching examples. Most chief executives,” he said, “are terrible speakers simply because they won't give up the script.” They bury their heads in the text, ignore the audience and hope for the best. It rarely comes off the way they hope it will.

Relax. Breathing steadily and naturally will help you focus, relax, and deliver a convincing, entertaining and interesting speech. If you fall into a pattern of rapid, shallow breathing and can't seem to finish a sentence or a paragraph, just stop for a moment. Breathe deeply, then exhale. Bring your breathing under control once more, and then continue.