Brainstorm Your Topics

• 00:04 It's on the calendar!
• 00:06 You know what it is.
• 00:07 You have to give a speech, a presentation,
• 00:10 a talk, a briefing, whatever you wanna call it.
• 00:13 You have to talk to people and educate them, inform them, let
• 00:18 them know something about the substance you're working on or what you care about.
• 00:23 A lot of people get tripped up over these terms.
• 00:26 Oh, I don't give speeches, I give presentations.
• 00:28 If you're talking and it's not purely social chitchat and
• 00:33 you're trying to convey some idea, it's a speech or a presentation.
• 00:37 Now, where do you start?
• 00:40 I think you should always step back for a second and ask yourself,
• 00:44 what is it I want these people to do when I'm done speaking?
• 00:50 What's the final action I want from the audience.
• 00:53 And you need to write it down in one sentence.
• 00:57 Extremely helpful.
• 01:00 It can't just be, oh, I want them to think I'm smart.
• 01:02 That's a little too vague or general.
• 01:05 What is it you want the audience to do?
• 01:07 It could be approve a budget.
• 01:09 It could be vote for you.
• 01:09 It could be to invest capital in you.
• 01:12 It could be to raise your allowance.
• 01:14 It could be anything, but
• 01:16 you need to have a very clear sense of the actions you want the audience to take.
• 01:23 The next step is not sitting down, rolling up your sleeves and
• 01:28 typing out a 20 or 30 page speech or a 42 slide PowerPoint.
• 01:35 Don't do it that way.
• 01:36 That is the wrong, wrong way to start preparing for a presentation.
• 01:41 Here's my recommendation.
• 01:43 Get a pad and pen or your smartphone or
• 01:46 a blank screen on your computer and start brainstorming on ideas.
• 01:52 Not full sentences, not full paragraphs, no great works of literature here.
• 01:58 Just brainstorm ideas.
• 02:01 Come up with every single idea that you can think of that's related to
• 02:06 your topic that you think the audience might be interested in and
• 02:09 that is important to you.
• 02:11 Don't worry about editing, don't worry about striking things off.
• 02:16 Let's just get it all out there.
• 02:18 It's extremely helpful for you to see what you have in front of you.
• 02:23 So that you can make judgments, so
• 02:25 that you can be the editor not the audience, of course, the big danger for
• 02:31 most speakers is that they just start gathering every single idea and
• 02:35 writing or doing the bullet points and before you know it they've invested so
• 02:40 much time in gathering more and more and more stuff but that's the whole speech.
• 02:47 Let's take this one step at a time.
• 02:49 For starters, I need you to brainstorm on every single important idea.
• 02:55 Write it down.
• 02:56 Put a space or two between that idea and the next idea.
• 02:59 If it helps you, put it on a big flip chart, or
• 03:03 a white board, whatever it is you wanna use.
• 03:06 But, you need to isolate one idea at a time.
• 03:12 And then look at all of them before you do anything else.
• 03:14 Don't start writing the speech.
• 03:17 I beg you.
• 03:18 Don't start with the PowerPoint slides.
• 03:20 Let's just brainstorm all of our ideas and then look at them.

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