Show, Don't Tell: What Speakers Can Learn From Performers
There are two kinds of applause.
The first is polite. It comes at the end of every talk, regardless of what happened during it. The audience listened to you. They were respectful. They may even have learned something. And then they went to lunch and forgot it all.
The second is different. It isn't polite — it's involuntary. It comes from a room that has been somewhere together, that has laughed and gone quiet and laughed again, that has felt something it didn't expect to feel in this particular setting. These are the rooms where people come up afterward not to comment on your arguments but to tell you what the experience meant to them. Where attorneys who walked in prepared to disagree are the ones who stay longest. Where a teenager can explain the finer points of trademark law because they lived with it emotionally for ninety minutes and decided to care.
The difference between those two rooms is all in whether the audience heard themselves through you.
After many years as a touring musician and as a speaker with over 2,000 stages under my belt, here are a few lessons I’ve learned along the way:
Lesson one: The setup is not optional.
Most speakers treat the opening as a formality: it’s a moment to establish credentials, provide context, preview the agenda. What they're actually doing is asking the audience to invest attention before giving them any reason to.
Bruce Springsteen opens his Broadway show with an adaptation from his memoir: "Now I come from a boardwalk town where everything is tinged with just a bit of fraud. So am I... I had a magic trick. Now I'm here tonight to provide proof of life — that's my magic trick, and like all good magic tricks, it begins with a setup." Cue the song.
He's not warming up. He's making a contract. He's telling the audience: I know you don't have to be here. Here is why I think it's worth staying. He establishes fraud and authenticity in the same breath, which immediately raises a question the audience needs answered. They're already leaning in (and not just because it’s Springsteen).
John C. Maxwell often said, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” The setup is where you demonstrate that you care about the people in the room, about their ability to see themselves in what you're about to share. Without it, you're talking at people. The audience can feel the difference immediately.
Don't assume you have the room's attention. You have to earn it. The more important your message, the more it deserves that effort.
Lesson two: Find the emotional vehicle.
Early in my speaking career I started opening with a story about performing inside a prison. At the right moment, my guitarist Joe would walk out and play the opening riff of "Paint it Black" — just the riff, maybe a couple of lines — then walk off.
That was it. One riff. Done.
But something happened in that moment. The audience didn't just hear about what it felt like to watch a sea of orange and denim jumping to the music. For a moment, they felt it. And then when I told them what happened next — a group of large white supremacists approaching me right after the concert — the contrast hit with a force that no amount of simply describing it could have produced. They were on the edge of their seats. Not because the story was well-constructed, but because the music had gotten them emotionally inside it before I asked them to think about what it meant.
This is what writers mean by "show, don't tell." The principle applies with equal force to anyone standing in front of a room. Telling an audience that a moment was tense, moving, or surprising produces mild interest. Letting them experience that quality — through a sound, an image, a well-placed silence, a question they can't immediately answer — produces investment.
The emotional vehicle doesn't have to be music. It can be a photograph, a piece of video, a specific detail so precise it becomes tactile. What matters is that it arrives before the argument, not after. You're not illustrating a point. You're creating the conditions under which the point can actually land…and a Power Point slide filled with bullet points isn’t going to cut it.
Lesson three: Create participation, not reception.
In 2022, the Know Theatre of Cincinnati commissioned a full storytelling show. We didn't draw from our existing catalog — we wrote songs specifically for the story, pieces that emerged from particular moments in the narrative. Some were funny. Deliberately, structurally funny, with the audience encouraged to sing along.
The result surprised me. Young people with no particular reason to care about intellectual property law were walking out of that show able to discuss Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act more fluently than many attorneys or journalists who cover these cases. Not because of my explanations, but because they had been inside the story when it happened. They'd laughed at the right moments, which meant they'd also felt the weight of the hard ones. They were participants, not observers.
This is available in any format. You don't need original songs. What you need is to design your talk so the audience has something to do (a question to hold, a moment to react to, a problem to sit with before you resolve it, etc.). A room that is participating is a room that is paying attention. And a room that is paying attention is a room that will remember.
We took that same theatre show and it became a certified Continuing Legal Education (CLE) presentation that I’ve delivered at law conferences and universities around the world. And yes, now we get standing ovations at law conferences.
Lesson four: Aim for connection, not perfection.
There is something daring in every live performance: a missed note, an unexpected and awkward silence. Maybe it’s a line that lands differently than you hoped. These things happen every night on Broadway and at world-class concerts. They happen in the middle of keynote addresses to rooms full of people who know more about the subject than you do (it certainly happens to me).
But the audience doesn't notice (or rather, they notice and they don't care) because when genuine connection has been established, they are rooting for you. You have given them something they recognize: grace under pressure, enthusiasm that isn't performed, the sense that this person has earned the room's attention and is spending it on us.
Perfection is self-oriented. It's about your delivery, your slides, your command of the material. Connection is others-oriented. It's about whether the people in the room can find themselves somewhere in what you're sharing.
When you aim for perfection and fall short, the audience feels the gap. When you aim for connection and fall short, the audience closes the distance. They meet you there. That's the room you want to be in — not because it's easier, but because it's the only one where what you're saying actually changes something.
The difference between polite applause and the other kind isn't talent. It isn't even preparation, though preparation matters. It's orientation. It's whether you walked into the room thinking about what you were going to say, or thinking about what the people in front of you needed to hear.
Performers know this by necessity. Every night is a live event. Every audience is different. The material is the same but the room never is, and the room is always right. The best speakers I've encountered — in law, in academia, in advocacy — have figured out the same thing, usually by accident, usually after too many afternoons watching eyes glaze over at a conference.
You don't have to wait for the accident. The lesson is the same one that applies to every other form of storytelling: show, don't tell. Earn the room before you ask it to think. And trust that an audience that has felt something will follow you anywhere.
I speak at law schools, bar associations, universities, and civic organizations on First Amendment law, identity, and the art of difficult conversations. If you're curious about what this looks like in practice, simontam.org/speaking is the place to start. For university and college programming specifically, simontam.org/colleges-and-universities has more.
