How I Went About Writing my Brother’s Wedding Speech

Typically when I write one of these posts it always stems from a period of my life when I’m feeling reflective. 

Today is no exception. As I sit on this flight back from Dallas, I’m getting quite reflective. Return flights from some of my trips have led to some of my best prices of writing. One prime example of that is when I wrote my first draft for brothers speech for his wedding day, ironically enough about 2 years before the actual ceremony.Getting in front of a crowd and speaking has always somewhat excited me, and this was no exception. So what I want to do with this article is to give some sort of clarity as to why my speech turned out the way it did and share some of the lessons I learned.

The first questions I asked myself was what was the tone I wanted to set with the speech and what do I really want it to be about it. Do I want it to feel like a roast? Or do I want to speak from the heart? I always enjoy speeches that come from the heart and show some emotion. I’ve never been the type to try to give a joke riddled speech. That’s just not my personality. Knowing I wanted to give a more serious speech, I just wanted to answer one question for the audience: what does my relationship with my brother look like over the years? And in answering that, I was hoping to also showcase what my brother truly means to me.

This subject in particular, I had a lot to say about it. I can go on for hours on end talking about what my brother means to me. But obviously I can’t get on stage and give a 2 hour speech. Nobody would care. I had to keep it short, sweet and powerful. This led to my first key decision, which ended up being the outline for my entire speech, to only share 3 stories that depict Ghani and my relationship in 3 very different phases of his life. I ultimately decided on 3 stories because I liked the old beginning, middle, and end framework many stories use. 

The hard part with this is coming up with good stories that say what you want to say. The first story has been in every single version of my speech dating back to that 2 year prior return flight from New Zealand. This story meant the most to me and I think that comes across in my speech given how much I was crying during it. My brothers words truly did shape a lot of my life. Telling myself I’m the best is something I still do to this day. He helped me believe in myself and for that I am forever grateful.

The second story, I think help encapsulates how our relationship evolved when Ghani moved to LA. I didn’t get to see him everyday like I used to, instead we were left to having a couple of phone calls a week. So I just picked one of my favorite conversations we had, which was the time he had indirectly asked my advice for his second date with April. I think this moment really shows the trust and respect we have for each other’s opinion, especially in a subject I have no idea about. We truly do trust each other with anything.

With the third story I wanted to touch base on the future of their relationship. And lucky for me, about 2 months before the wedding Ghani shared how April gets him through the day. I’ve seen my brother go through a lot of ups and downs and seen him go through some stretches where he wasn’t very happy. But I truly believe that with April in his life, giving him the strength to truly pursue what he wants in life that those unhappy days are long behind him. And I can’t stress this enough, but seeing people you love being happy is truly one of the greatest feelings in the world.

Admittedly I don’t know if my speech was any good. But I did have a lot of fun writing it and ultimately struggling through it. If I had one piece of advice for anytime who is about to give a speech: I would just say to speak from the heart, and to not care about what people think about it, just have fun doing it! If you have any feedback I would love to hear it.

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Prabh