Is Your Speech Missing This Key Element? If So, It's Costing You

The Missing Key

A common element I see missing in presentations is one that can make or break the impact of your talk.?

Many speakers offer inspirational or motivational talks which shine a light on a new and better life we can live. These can give us hope for a new and better life.?

But, they won’t have much impact if you leave out the most important element…

The HOW.

The feel-good emotion and motivation of an uplifting talk is short-lived if we omit this key element.

A Common Malady

Why do speakers leave out this important part of a talk?

I don’t believe it’s malicious. Instead, they suffer from the curse of knowledge. They know their topic so well it doesn’t occur to them most people don’t know how even the most basic elements of it.

This problem crops up in all fields.

When I was a financial advisor, we often talked with clients about investing. This is a complicated and scary topic for most people.?

To earn their trust, we broke down the components of investing into easy-to-understand “chunks” and metaphors.?

One of our favorites was to describe how ancient Chinese merchants would ship their goods on several boats down the Yangtze River to their customers. The reason was the rough areas of the river were so treacherous not all ships safely made it down the river.?

To lessen their risk, they spread out the risk on their inventory onto several ships.?

This story created a clear and understandable image for clients and helped them understand the HOW of our investment strategy.

We didn’t get into all of the details of the strategy at this point. Those were saved for subsequent meetings if our clients asked for them, which they rarely did. Most were satisfied and felt comfortable with our approach because of the pictures we’d helped them create in their minds.

Leave Them With the Most Important Element

When you create your next speech, definitely share the journey of clients who were in some type of distress or pain when you met them, then talk about the implication of that problem.?

And if you want to increase the odds they’ll implement your idea, introduce the solution you provided. This is the HOW.?

Again, not too detailed, but enough to tell the listener you have a process that works.

Do this, and you enhance the chances you’ll leave a meaningful message with your next audience.

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