Helping with a speech, Sharpiepresents24
Help!
Sometimes friends ask for help with a presentation, or speech & I’m always happy to do so. A week ago a great friend contacted me from another city & the evening before he had to make an important speech. Not much time, not much information but I agreed to help & with a 10pm deadline & using a couple of the ‘7 Steps’ here’s what happened....
Brainstorm
Story
The first thing to do by myself was to brainstorm an idea. He’d already written a speech & sent me the text. The core of it was details on a financial deal he was proposing to investors & there was not much room to change that. He’d put in an introduction trying to relate his investment to a recent news story & I decided to work on that story part.
Change
His story was quite good, but it was about a news event that I didn’t really like. It was topical, it was Indonesia related, but it didn’t link very easily with the underlying investment story. So I decided to completely change it & to change it into something related directly with the investment, but in an unusual way:
Relate
They say there’s no such thing as luck, but in this case, first I had met & knew a bit about the company he was proposing to invest in. Second, without giving the game away, the company name was directly related with some other Indonesian research I’ve been doing. I decided to focus in on the name.
Research
Education
The more you read & the more things you look into, the easier it is to brainstorm. If I hadn’t happened to be doing some other research work, in this case for my Sharpfokus weekly, then I wouldn’t have had the ‘luck’ to be already thinking about the company name, even though in a different context.
Google
I decided to tell the story behind the name. It’s an ancient story. I knew it a little bit, but not much. Reference is why people used to keep large libraries. No need any more because we have the internet & google to search. Over the next 2 hours I was able to find out the history of the name & the story behind its popularity.
Read
Reading for research is not normal reading. There’s much to choose from, but you can’t read everything. The more you fo this for your presentations, the better you’ll get. You’ll read something & then when you realize it’s not ther right direction, you stop & read another until you get what you want.
Write
Surprisre
Once i had what I wanted which was the story behind the name & a key name trait to link to the company, it was time to write. One thing you can easily do is surprise your audience when you start speaking, you don’t have to shout or use some special words, just do something unusual, like...tell the story behind your company name.
Short
The key in this case was to keep it very short. I think we’d all be amazed what we can achieve in a very short speech or presentation. My friend didn’t want anything long, he just wanted an introduction. I wrote out the story in short sentences & we ended up with just 7 of them after a bit of editing:
Hold
We used surprise to attract the audience attention by telling the story of the company name before pitching the investment. We kept the story to (appropriately) 7 short sentences. Then we added 1 more trick. We didn’t mention the name until the end of the story, the last word. This gave a theatrical emphasis as we switched straight into the investment story.
Result
The whole process was done on an iPhone using Safari & Google to research, Evernote to write & WhatsApp to communcate. I sent the speech at exactl 10pm & by 10.30pm we’d agreed edits & finished. We didn’t talk. Next day, he said the speech went great & he had plenty of compliments afterwards. Hope this gives you some useful ideas for using ‘7 Steps’.
Sebastian
Sometimes friends ask for help with a presentation, or speech & I’m always happy to do so. A week ago a great friend contacted me from another city & the evening before he had to make an important speech. Not much time, not much information but I agreed to help & with a 10pm deadline & using a couple of the ‘7 Steps’ here’s what happened....
Brainstorm
Story
The first thing to do by myself was to brainstorm an idea. He’d already written a speech & sent me the text. The core of it was details on a financial deal he was proposing to investors & there was not much room to change that. He’d put in an introduction trying to relate his investment to a recent news story & I decided to work on that story part.
Change
His story was quite good, but it was about a news event that I didn’t really like. It was topical, it was Indonesia related, but it didn’t link very easily with the underlying investment story. So I decided to completely change it & to change it into something related directly with the investment, but in an unusual way:
Relate
They say there’s no such thing as luck, but in this case, first I had met & knew a bit about the company he was proposing to invest in. Second, without giving the game away, the company name was directly related with some other Indonesian research I’ve been doing. I decided to focus in on the name.
Research
Education
The more you read & the more things you look into, the easier it is to brainstorm. If I hadn’t happened to be doing some other research work, in this case for my Sharpfokus weekly, then I wouldn’t have had the ‘luck’ to be already thinking about the company name, even though in a different context.
I decided to tell the story behind the name. It’s an ancient story. I knew it a little bit, but not much. Reference is why people used to keep large libraries. No need any more because we have the internet & google to search. Over the next 2 hours I was able to find out the history of the name & the story behind its popularity.
Read
Reading for research is not normal reading. There’s much to choose from, but you can’t read everything. The more you fo this for your presentations, the better you’ll get. You’ll read something & then when you realize it’s not ther right direction, you stop & read another until you get what you want.
Write
Surprisre
Once i had what I wanted which was the story behind the name & a key name trait to link to the company, it was time to write. One thing you can easily do is surprise your audience when you start speaking, you don’t have to shout or use some special words, just do something unusual, like...tell the story behind your company name.
Short
The key in this case was to keep it very short. I think we’d all be amazed what we can achieve in a very short speech or presentation. My friend didn’t want anything long, he just wanted an introduction. I wrote out the story in short sentences & we ended up with just 7 of them after a bit of editing:
Hold
We used surprise to attract the audience attention by telling the story of the company name before pitching the investment. We kept the story to (appropriately) 7 short sentences. Then we added 1 more trick. We didn’t mention the name until the end of the story, the last word. This gave a theatrical emphasis as we switched straight into the investment story.
Result
The whole process was done on an iPhone using Safari & Google to research, Evernote to write & WhatsApp to communcate. I sent the speech at exactl 10pm & by 10.30pm we’d agreed edits & finished. We didn’t talk. Next day, he said the speech went great & he had plenty of compliments afterwards. Hope this gives you some useful ideas for using ‘7 Steps’.
Sebastian