Two questions to cut your speech prep time in half

I broke one of my own rules the other day, and I suffered the consequences.

One of my absolute top rules is you have to take the time to understand your audience first, and then build a bridge from them to your message.

But I was teaching a communications seminar a month ago, and halfway through one of the sessions I had to pivot and improvise.

I had to improvise because I had originally planned to use my standard ‘1-minute oratory’ game to train the principles I was talking about.

It’s a simple game: you get given a random topic, 30 seconds to prepare, and you have to speak on the topic for 1 minute without saying ‘umm’ or ‘aah’ and you have to have a point.

I use it in most of my seminars and workshops, and there’s always some laughter and awkwardness at the start as people get used to the rules. But while some people are shy and struggle, it tends to go down pretty well, and soon everyone is speaking with more confidence and ease.

But not this time.

Not because the students weren’t interested – because it was too much of a leap for them.

They were all from a STEM (maths & science) background, and they were so used to talking shop that to ask them to speak on a random topic and have a point was too far outside their experience.

That was my mistake.

How did I fix it?

I went back to the start, and took them through two questions which frame any and every speech.

Which brings me to the point of this story: I want to give you those two questions and show them how to use them in your next talk, presentation, or speech (what’s the difference? I have no idea).

Here they are:

1. What’s my purpose in speaking?

2. What do I want to say?

The first question has only 4 possible answers, which you can remember with the acronym MICE: to Motivate (i.e. get action), to Inspire, to Convince (i.e. persuade), or to Entertain.

Every time you speak, you have one main task. It may overlap with one or more of the other three, but you get one purpose.

That one purpose tells you what to say and how to say it.

Let’s say you’re talking about AI innovation, for example. If you’re talking inform your colleagues about your work, that’s going to be a radically different speech from a speech trying to convince someone to give you more funding.

Same topic – different purpose.

Different purpose – different speech.

Okay, let’s say you’ve got your purpose clear in your mind. The next step is to ask what you actually want to say.

This isn’t as obvious or straightforward as we like to pretend. Because, as I always tell my clients, there’s far more you can’t say than you can.

In any good speech you only get to have one thing to say. One main point.

That’s it.

So this second question is as much about deciding what NOT to say as it is about deciding what to say.

The good news is, your answer to the first question helps.

If you know you’re trying to motivate, for example, you’re going to eliminate a lot of things you might have said if you were trying to inform. And if your purpose were to entertain, well that’d be pretty different again, I suspect.

But at the end of the day you have one purpose or outcome, and one message.

Once you have that, the rest is easy.

Easy? Yes, easy.

You just ask yourself what question the audience has in their minds, and go from there.

Hypothetical example:

My purpose: to convince

My statement: totalitarian societies have rule by law, not rule of law

Okay, so the first question could be ‘why do we care’, it could be ‘what does that mean’, it could be a number of things. But whatever you choose, you simply go through and answer that question. When you’ve done that, a ‘follow-up’ question will present itself. Ask that and then answer it.

Continue until finished.

One caveat: you’ll always have more questions than time. That’s when you have to use your judgement to decide on the ones that need to be there.

But stick to your purpose and stick to your one statement.

Folks, that’s all I have for you today.

You can use that starting today.

But if you’d like to chat about how I can do it for you (because who can be bothered, right?), hit ‘reply’ and let’s chat!

Talk soon,

Alexander