Trying to be the best speaker in the room can pull you away from what makes you worth hearing. Someone else gets a laugh, and suddenly your honest explanation feels inadequate. You stop asking what the audience needs and start wondering how to win.

The NBA is moving towards agreements with leading European football clubs for a new continental league, according to a sources-based report carried by The New York Times. That is not confirmation of completed deals. But the prospect raises a useful question for speakers: does sharing a platform have to diminish your presence?

The Problem

The struggle begins when excellence becomes confused with superiority. You no longer want simply to communicate well. You want to be more memorable, more moving or more impressive than everyone who speaks before you.

That ambition can sound reasonable. Speakers work hard to command attention and earn a response. Surely the strongest applause means the strongest contribution?

Not necessarily. Being remembered and being useful are different achievements.

When another speaker becomes your measure, your delivery can turn into imitation. Their force makes you raise your voice. Their emotional story makes you reach for your most painful experience. Their humour persuades you to add a joke that does not belong.

The audience becomes a scoreboard. Meanwhile, the quality that could make your contribution distinctive gets buried beneath your efforts to compete.

The reported basketball initiative brings established names from another sport into view. Without guessing at motives or outcomes, that crossing of boundaries offers a useful perspective: a recognisable identity need not stand alone to remain recognisable.

The Solution

In the discovering-your-It-factor theme of Unlocking Your Unique It Factor, publisher Gerard Grogans’s perspective redirects attention from outperforming others to recognising what you can genuinely contribute.

This is not an argument for lowering your standards. It asks you to apply those standards to your own contribution rather than to someone else’s strongest moment.

Your distinctive quality might be precision. It might be making difficult ideas understandable or speaking about starting over without pretending it is easy. None requires another speaker to become less effective.

Use One Word to name the quality you want your presence to carry. Clarity, courage or steadiness might fit. Choose what feels faithful to your experience and conviction, not what sounds most impressive.

Then let that word guide a practical decision. If you choose clarity, simplify the sentence that hides your meaning. If you choose steadiness, stop borrowing an explosive delivery that does not suit your message.

The word is a rehearsal guide, not a permanent identity. Its value lies in what it helps you change.

You may have to surrender the biggest reaction. Let someone else be funnier or more dramatic. Your task is to make your contribution unmistakable, not to make theirs smaller.

The Key Takeaway

Build your presence around the quality you can genuinely offer, rather than the reaction you want to take from another speaker.

Your Homework

Today, choose your guiding word and record a one-minute explanation of something experience has taught you.

Watch it once. Identify one moment where that quality is audible in your language or delivery. Keep that moment. Then identify one flourish included only to impress, remove it and record the explanation again.

Compare the recordings by asking which makes your contribution clearer—not which makes you seem more important.

Make the recording today, before you feel ready to outperform anyone. Give your own voice room to develop, and keep becoming someone whose contribution is worth hearing.