Ep. 054 — How to Build Audience Anticipation and Stand Out as a Speaker (Part 1)

Release date: March 9 , 2026

Hosted by Roddy Galbraith

A Maxwell Leadership Podcast Network production

Weekly highlights from The Speaker’s Edge — a Maxwell Leadership Podcast Network production hosted by Roddy Galbraith. Learn how to communicate with clarity, confidence, and impact — in business, on stage, and in life.

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This Week’s Big Idea

Great speakers do not treat every line equally. They know how to make their most important ideas stand out. In this episode, Roddy breaks down John Maxwell’s masterful use of the Law of Anticipation — showing how building suspense around a key point makes the audience lean in, pay attention, and remember what matters most.

Key Takeaways

• Not all parts of your message carry the same weight, so your most important points need extra emphasis.
• Building anticipation is one of the best ways to make a key idea stand out.
• Contrast creates emphasis: space, pauses, repetition, and delay all help the audience notice what matters.
• John Maxwell models anticipation by repeating the promise of “three things” without revealing them too quickly.
• When your audience is hanging on your words, your most important idea lands with far more force.

Quote of the Week

“The most important .. must never be at the mercy of the least important ..”

Resources & Practice

Before your next talk, presentation, or meeting, identify:

1. One idea that matters most
2. One phrase you can repeat to build anticipation
3. One pause or delay you can use before delivering the key point

Then ask yourself:

• Am I treating all my information equally?
• What deserves more contrast?
• Where can I make the audience lean in?

That is the heart of this episode: do not bury your best idea inside everything else. Make it stand out.

Get the companion guide here > MaxwellLeadership.com/TheSpeakersEdge

Learn about the Maxwell Leadership Certified Team: maxwellleadership.com/speak

Full Transcript Ep. 054 — How to Build Audience Anticipation and Stand Out as a Speaker (Part 1)

Released: March 9, 2026

This transcript was auto-generated. It may contain minor errors. *Copy text adds attribution automatically

Hey, guys, welcome back to the Speaker's Edge podcast, the podcast dedicated to helping you to learn from some of the world's very best speakers and communicators so you can learn to master your message and inspire your audience every single time you speak. I'm your host for this podcast, Roddy Galbraith. It's great that you're with us today because I have a wonderful episode for you today. John Maxwell is going to be talking about his second favorite law from The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication, the Law of Anticipation, how you can build anticipation for your material so your audience is dying waiting to hear it, and then you've really got their attention. It really gives it great emphasis as well, doesn't it? So if you want to develop as a communicator, the Law of Anticipation that we're going to be exploring with John today is a great way for you to grab your audience's attention. But you're in the right place generally as well, because every week we're talking about different ideas, but the big idea every week is always the same: communication is a learnable skill. You can learn to be a great speaker and communicator, and it's worth your while doing that, because speaking and communicating will do more for your business, more for your career, more for your self-confidence than any other skill you develop. So you can do this, and you should, in my humble opinion, you should spend some time working on your speaking and communicating because it's just such an important skill to develop.

So, great episode for you today talking about building anticipation, as I said. But before we get into the episode, if you haven't downloaded the companion guide, simply go to MaxwellLeadership.com/TheSpeakersEdge, download the companion guide. And if you enjoy the show, we'd love it if you rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you enjoy listening to your podcast. And maybe share it with someone that might find it useful as well. Thanks very much in advance for that. All right, let's get into today's episode then. So we're talking about Law Number 9. Last week we were talking about Law Number 7, which John said is probably his favorite law, the law that he thinks is the most important one: building a connection with your audience.

And remember, in the book The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication, Law Number 7 is the Law of Connection, and at the beginning of that chapter he says this is by far the most important idea in the whole book. So definitely worth going back and listening to last week's episode if you didn't catch it. And then at the end of the episode, Susan asked him what is his next favorite law, which is his second favorite, or the next most important law, and he said the Law of Anticipation. And I have a fantastic clip for you from 2015. It was an International Maxwell Conference in Orlando back in 2015, so a number of years ago now, but it's the best example of building anticipation you are ever going to see. So I'm going to share this clip with you and then we're going to talk about it afterwards.

John:
So when Troy graduated from Eastern Kentucky University, I said, Troy, why don't you come out and live with us for a couple of years? He was in finance and in business. And I said, let me help you get started. I had people in my congregation that owned mortgage companies. I said, I'll get you interviews. We'll get you started. Let me help you get started. So he came out to San Diego and he got, I think, three or four of our companies to interview and they all wanted him. And so he picked the one he wanted.

He's a great kid, smart kid, highly energetic, very hardworking, just a great kid. So he's gonna start, he's finally picked out which company he's gonna work for, and he's gonna start the next day. So he and I are sitting around at home, and I said, Troy, can I have 15 minutes of your time because I wanna talk to you about tomorrow and going to work? I said, are you excited? Oh, he said, I'm really excited. Of course he's excited. He went to college, he spent four years in college, spent a lot of money. He's now starting a career off of something that he's always wanted to do. And he's got a little habit when he gets excited, he kinda rubs his hands like this. Yeah, Uncle John, he said, I'm really excited.

And he's doing that. And I said, okay, now Troy, listen to your uncle. I'm gonna give you three things to do that in one month will set you apart from the other 275 people that work in this company. And what you wanna do is get set apart, Troy. That's before I read Jack Welch's phrase, get outta the pile. Jack Welch talks about in every company there's a pile of people. I mean, there's just a bunch of people, and how do you get out of the pile so somebody recognizes you? So Jack calls it getting out of the pile, and I looked at Troy—that was even before Jack wrote the book—and I said, let me tell you something. I gotta help you because the first thing you do when you go to work is you gotta set yourself apart from all the rest of them. Now, let me explain something to you.

That's not hard to do. Average has become acceptable. Can you get by? Can you keep your job? Oh, don't you like—can you keep your job? Keep your job. If you're going to be a John Maxwell Team coach, I do not expect you to be average, and I do not want you to settle for average, and if you want to be average, do me a favor, go get your refund and don't let the door hit you on the way out. We are not looking for you. We do not want you. We have no desire to have you on the team. We want to just say, go bless yourself for the rest of your average life. May I remind you, average is average.

Average is average. So let's not fall in love with average. Average is average. If you're average, that means there are about half as many people better and bigger than you are than half of them. You're just in the middle. You're in the middle. Middle is not good. There's nothing nice about—there's nothing good about middle.

So I said, Troy, three things. If you do these three things when you go to work, in one month the owner, the leaders, they'll be talking about you. In three months, you'll be promoted. And in one year you'll be making six figures. Life is not complicated, folks. Life is not complicated. We have made it complicated. Listen carefully to me.

Three things. And I tell you this story because we think exceeding expectations is something way beyond us. It's kind of big and it's amazing and it's hope it could happen. I wonder if it could ever happen to me and wow. No, no, no, no, no. Every one of you can exceed expectations. Every one of you. What I am giving you right now, you can do. Look at the person you're sitting beside and say to them, even you can exceed expectation. That was fun, wasn't it? Even you. I'm coming down hard now, but I'm coming down hard because I know what you can do.

And listen to me, if I'm a leader that I should be, I will always press you to be your best. I will always expect the best out of you. I will always believe the best in you. What kind of a leader says, could we have a company that just gets by? Trying to hold myself. I love it. People say, I can't believe what you say. You'd be amazed what I don't say. Oh, yes you would. So I said, Troy, three things.

If you can just do these three things, you will set yourself apart from everyone in the other—Now when Roddy teaches you about speaking, just remember you're watching a communicator right now, and I am raising the level of anticipation. I have four times told you. Come on. I want you to be M-I-N-I-J-M's. I've four times told you three things. Every time I say three things and then kind of move a little sideways, you know what you're saying? What are the three things? What are the three things? And He said those three things were right within my reach, and I could do those three things, and what are those three things? And when's He gonna tell me? Tell me about those three things. And you see, when you kind of stand up and say, I want to know what those three things are, you have done your job. I'm not sure you're hungry enough.

Cut that out. For you that are standing, I'll give you the three things. So that evening in our home, I leaned forward and I said, Troy, there are three things, and if you'll do these three things, you will set yourself apart from everyone in the other—And Troy leaned forward. Because he wanted to hear the three things. This is as good as it gets right here, folks. Here we go. Number one. Are you ready? Number one, I said, Troy—

Oh, it's so good, isn't it? So compelling. He's masterful, so masterful at building anticipation. And unfortunately, this clip is too long for us to include in one episode, so we're gonna have to break it there and hear the second part of the clip next week. I know, I know, when we'll find out what the three things are. But let's just pick up on some of the things that he covers in this first part of the clip. So he talks about not all ideas are created equally. So you've got your speech or you've got your message, but not all of the words in there are the same. Some bits are more important than others, and the most important bits must never be at the mercy of the least important bits.

So we've got to make sure that the most important bits stand out. We can't leave it to chance. So we need to make sure that they're at the forefront of our audience's mind and attention and focus and awareness. So we need to give them emphasis and building anticipation for them so that the audience is eating out the palm of our hand, hanging on our every word, just like we were with John there, is a great way to give them emphasis and to make them stand out. So not all of the information is created equally. Some bits are more important than others. How do we make those important parts stand out? It's the same with a letter, if you think about it. If you're writing a letter and everything's in capitals and there's no spaces, no paragraphs, no white space, it's just words, then nothing really stands out.

But if one of those words is in bold or underlined or is in a different color, it's really going to stand out. So by contrast, the most important ideas can stand out. And so by making them more important, giving them space, having space around them, you can make the best ideas stand out rather than having them just blend in with everything else. So contrast for emphasis, I think, is a great way to think about this. And John does this so masterfully, doesn't he? Building anticipation in such a masterful way. So I love that clip. Like I said, it's a real good one, isn't it? So we're going to break this down, as I said. We'll come back to the three things, three things that help you stand out when you're going for a new job or you're working with a new organisation, or if you've been there for a while, it's never too late to stand out in people's minds, is it? So how do we do that? We're going to talk about that, but it's worth thinking about the parallel there.

John's talking about how you stand out, how you get out of the pile of people in an organisation. And what we're really talking about with building anticipation is how you get your most important ideas to get out of the pile of other words that are less important. So, a great clip. You're gonna love the next part of it as well. Like I said, it's a little too long for us to include all together. That was from 2015 at a Maxwell Leadership Conference. Now, if you want to find out what it means to be a Maxwell Leadership Certified Team member, simply go to MaxwellLeadership.com/Speak, jump on a call with a program advisor, and find out what it means. If you're interested in developing your speaking, it really is a no-brainer because there's nothing like the Maxwell Method of Speaking if you want to develop as a speaker and a communicator.

There's no one better to model than John Maxwell and the Maxwell Leadership Certified Team is really the place you want to go to learn that. There's over 62,000 Maxwell Leadership Certified Team coaches in 168 countries around the world now, so you will not be the first people to go through this program. I've been working with John on the Maxwell Method of Speaking since 2010, so it is really, really good and it keeps getting better and better and better. It's no obligation. Jump on a call with the program advisor and find out more. Just go to MaxwellLeadership.com/Speak. All right, that's it for this week then.

I can't wait to bring you the three things in next week's episode. Don't forget to download the companion guide. Go to MaxwellLeadership.com/TheSpeakersEdge. Remember, communication is a learnable skill. It's a skill that you can develop, you should develop in my opinion, because it would do more for you than any other skill you can develop. Remember, if you keep learning, keep developing, keep growing, you will learn to master your message and inspire your audience every single time you speak. Thanks for listening today, look forward to seeing you next week. Take care, lots of love, bye-bye, God bless.