It's on the calendar!
You know what it is.
You have to give a speech, a presentation,
a talk, a briefing, whatever you wanna call it.
You have to talk to people and educate them, inform them, let
them know something about the substance you're working on or what you care about.
A lot of people get tripped up over these terms.
Oh, I don't give speeches, I give presentations.
If you're talking and it's not purely social chitchat and
you're trying to convey some idea, it's a speech or a presentation.
Now, where do you start?
I think you should always step back for a second and ask yourself,
what is it I want these people to do when I'm done speaking?
What's the final action I want from the audience.
And you need to write it down in one sentence.
Extremely helpful.
It can't just be, oh, I want them to think I'm smart.
That's a little too vague or general.
What is it you want the audience to do?
It could be approve a budget.
It could be vote for you.
It could be to invest capital in you.
It could be to raise your allowance.
It could be anything, but
you need to have a very clear sense of the actions you want the audience to take.
The next step is not sitting down, rolling up your sleeves and
typing out a 20 or 30 page speech or a 42 slide PowerPoint.
Don't do it that way.
That is the wrong, wrong way to start preparing for a presentation.
Here's my recommendation.
Get a pad and pen or your smartphone or
a blank screen on your computer and start brainstorming on ideas.
Not full sentences, not full paragraphs, no great works of literature here.
Just brainstorm ideas.
Come up with every single idea that you can think of that's related to
your topic that you think the audience might be interested in and
that is important to you.
Don't worry about editing, don't worry about striking things off.
Let's just get it all out there.
It's extremely helpful for you to see what you have in front of you.
So that you can make judgments, so
that you can be the editor not the audience, of course, the big danger for
most speakers is that they just start gathering every single idea and
writing or doing the bullet points and before you know it they've invested so
much time in gathering more and more and more stuff but that's the whole speech.
Let's take this one step at a time.
For starters, I need you to brainstorm on every single important idea.
Write it down.
Put a space or two between that idea and the next idea.
If it helps you, put it on a big flip chart, or
a white board, whatever it is you wanna use.
But, you need to isolate one idea at a time.
And then look at all of them before you do anything else.
Don't start writing the speech.
I beg you.
Don't start with the PowerPoint slides.
Let's just brainstorm all of our ideas and then look at them.