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According to the 2009 World Champion of Public Speaking, Mark Hunter of Australia, it’s not the foundation that makes the Speech Structure Building™ special. Neither is it the three A-B-C pillars — the speech body. Nor is it the rooftop, which caps the three pillars, completing the Greek temple form of the Speech Structure Building™.

Mark says, It’s the drainpipe.

The key element of this speech structuring model is the drainpipe, which connects the closing of a speech with its opening.

Two examples of drainpipes:

Szymon from Krakow spoke in one of my seminars about his greatest fears in life. He held a balloon in his left hand. He moved gently towards one of his colleagues. Then - BOOM - the balloon burst right in front of her face. Szymon yelled,

What did you see in her face?

Fear! shouted another colleague.

Szymon replied: Exactly — fear!

What a great opening!

But - when his speech came to an end, Szymon missed out on a great opportunity to use a drainpipe. His message was that we should change our perception about what we fear, that fear only exists in our heads.

In the feedback round after Szymon’s speech, I suggested that he could have picked up another balloon and, without bursting it, passed it to the same colleague, and said, Change your perception!

That balloon would have made a magnificent drainpipe by connecting back to his beginning.

On another occasion my friend, conflict mentor Tobias Rodrigues, used a wonderful drainpipe based on chiasmus, a rhetorical device of reversed repetition. It was his icebreaker (his first speech) at our Toastmasters club in Barcelona.

Tobias opened his speech with the words, My life in your hands.... He reinforced the phrase by using hand gestures — from touching his chest to reaching out to his audience.

Tobias ended his speech by saying, Your hands in my life....

As he said this, he reversed his hand gestures.

I just loved Tobias’ chiastic drainpipe.

It’s the drainpipe which makes your speech round, that brings it full circle. And — as you can see by the two examples, there are no limits to the creative possibilities when it comes to drainpipes.

Boost your content even more by constructing a drainpipe.