The most important rule of presentations (ENG)

Tym razem wyjątkowo wpis po angielsku. Mam nadzieję, że nie będzie to dla Ciebie problem. :)

INTRO

Big events are held everywhere: you probably get invitations in social media, see friends joining workshops and notice Facebook group posts promoting new offers. Public speakers try to share various ideas, provide knowledge or inspire you. However, many of them fail at this wasting the audience’s time and leaving it where it was. What mistake do they make?

A short answer is: because they do not have clear goal in mind, which they would be conscious of and able to articulate in *one sentence*. Having one clear goal in mind sounds like a kindergarten tip, but that is not. Why?

ONE GOAL STRATEGY

A One Goal Strategy clearly states how you are planning to move your audience to action. Everyone can come up with and share some stories or expertise. But what matters and what separates a mediocre speaker from an expert is how his speech affects the audience, and more precisely, what action it drives them to take. If you have no target, you will hit something every single time.

There are even more benefits.

First of all, having a one-sentence goal of the speech allows you to filter unnecessary content and stories that do not support it. If you are about to tailor your speech and variety of options overwhelms you, the One Goal Strategy will be your friend: you can match a story with your goal and it will immediately show if they go together well or maybe that you should immediately cut the story out.

Second of all, humans are purpose-driven and that is a huge trap in terms of public speaking. If you approach a speech without a clear goal, your subconscious mind will automatically assign one anyway, what can ruin your speech.

UNCONSCIOUS GOALS

There are 3 typical options. If you do not have a goal of your own, your mind can assign:

1) “I WANT TO BE LIKED”

And you may even succeed! If this goal is automatically assigned, you will probably share funny stories from your trips or react to things happening in the audience, but then… you will drive nobody to take  action. They will like you, but their life will remain unchanged. You may also agree, there are clear differences between goals like “I want to show that everyone can save time by using 3 mobile applications” and „I want to be liked” as they determine totally different choices of content and stories to support these objectives.

2) “I WANT TO FILL THE TIME”

Such a common phrase „So we have 40 minutes to fill…” gives out that the speaker probably has no specific goal and came just to fill waste 40 minutes. And again, everyone can succeed at this: even if a he or she does nothing, time will do the job.

3) “I WANT TO BE RESPECTED AND TAKEN AS A SMART PERSON”

This goal is also easy to achieve: use complex sentences with lots of abbreviations and concepts nobody knows and the audience coming out of the conference will summarize your speech „The speaker is such a smart guy!”. But what action are they encouraged to take? If one-sentence summary is „the speaker was smart”, the answer is clear: none.

Having your conscious goal prevents from these automatically assigned ones and your speech gets so much better! Not to mention that only then it can drive change.

LAST NOTE

What if the audience does not agree with you? Having One Goal implies that your whole speech is dedicated to support it so the audience can clearly see your point of view and understand arguments. However, listeners can choose to keep their opinion, but they will know what exactly they disagreed with, which makes this perfectly fine.

You can experience the power of one goal even in this article. It also has one aim. Can you guess what that is?