Posts Tagged ‘goals’

Speech Writing Success: How To Make It Happen

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
Image Credit You Can Be A Winner, You Just Have To Know How To Get There…

You Can Be A Winner, You Just Have To Know How To Get There…

So there you are: you’ve agreed to give a speech and now your mind has gone completely blank when you’ve tried to start to figure out what you’ll say. Where did your energy go? Perhaps more importantly, how are you going to get it back and create a great speech?

It’s All About Your Goals

If you’ve ever read a book or attended a workshop on motivational techniques, then you already know about the power of goals. If for some reason you haven’t, then you’re going to learn now.

In a nutshell, if you want to accomplish something, like writing a great speech, then you need to first start by creating a goal and, this is the important part, writing it down! Yes, I know that it seems too easy, but trust me – this really works.

Setting Goals Is How You Start To Be Successful

Sure we throw the word “goal” around a lot, but do any of us really know what it means? It can mean many different things, but for our purposes here lets assume that when we talk about goals, we’re talking about something that you want to achieve.

You would think that when it comes to the goal of writing a great speech, all you have to do is to think to yourself “I’m going to write a great speech” and that would be that. Right? Well, actually there is a lot more to it than just that.

The experts say that thinking about the goal is really just the first step. The next (and some argue the most important) step is to write it down. For some reason this has the effect of making the goal seem to be more “real” to us. Finally, the last step in the process is actually taking action to make the goal a reality. There may be many steps that you need to take, but taking the first one is what will get you on your way…

Visualization: Can You See What I Can See?

If you were a professional sports figure, then in the past few years you would have found yourself getting caught up in the “visualization” craze that swept through the sports world awhile back. Simply put, this is where you take the time to imagine yourself being successful before it comes time for you to perform. Since the mind can’t tell the different between real and imagined actions, it thinks that you’ve done this before and you’ve just improved your odds of completing your goal.

When it comes to writing a great speech, visualization can be a big help. Speech writing can take quite some time and so having taken the time to visualize yourself successfully creating a great speech helps you to stay focused and on track while writing.

What sport figures go through is called process visualization. What you’ll go through when you are writing a speech is called outcome visualization. You can “see” what you want to produce and that will help you to get there.

Becoming A Speaker Of Action

In the end, all of the goals and visualization in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t get up out of your chair and take some action. It’s this final step of the goals process that separates the people who plan great things from those who achieve great things.

What All Of This Means For You

You can write a great speech. The key to doing this is to make sure that you have clear goals for what you want to achieve.

Knowing your goals is only the first part of a process. Next you need to take the time to visualize yourself creating that great speech and then, most importantly, you need to start to take the steps that will be necessary to get you to where you want to be.

There is no secret to writing a great speech. You have the ability to do it right now. Go set some goals and you’ll be half way to creating that great speech…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: What kind of goals do you think would help you to create a great speech?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Can we all be honest here? PowerPoint is a part of everyone’s life no matter how you feel about it. We all seem to fall into one of three camps: we fear it, we love it too much, or we just don’t really know what to do with it. With a little help, I think that I can help you out here…

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Posted in speech writing | No Comments »

Business Stories: Out Of Place Or On Target?

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
Stories Can Be A Powerful Part Of Any Business Presentation

Stories Can Be A Powerful Part Of Any Business Presentation

One question that I keep getting asked over and over by speakers that I am working with is if storytelling is such a powerful communication tool, then why isn’t it used more in business settings? It’s a good question, but the answer is a little bit complicated.

Where Did All The Stories Go?

I can’t tell you how many business presentations I’ve sat though that at the end I couldn’t have told you what was talked about if my life depended on it. It’s not that the speaker was necessarily bad, it’s just that nothing that they said caught my imagination and so nothing stuck.

This is where stories come in – people remember stories long after you get done talking. We remember them because it’s a fundamental way that humans have exchanged information for as long as we’ve been around.

For some reason, people have decided that stories don’t have a place in the environment of business – perhaps they don’t think that they are “grown up” enough and that facts and figures should only be used. This is completely wrong.

What Is The Value Of A Business Story?

Dr. Caren Neile has been looking into the use of stories in the workplace and she reports that Makingstories.net president Terrence Gargiulo has identified 9 key values to using a story in a business presentation:

  1. They empower the speaker.
  2. They can be used to create a particular environment.
  3. They can be used to bond individuals together.
  4. They can help your audience to engage in active listening.
  5. They can be used to resolve differences between both individuals and groups.
  6. They can encode information.
  7. They can act as tools to help with brainstorming.
  8. They can be used as weapons.
  9. They can be used to start or enhance a healing process.

The professional storytellers define the act of storytelling as being “… a face-to-face oral narrative that employs non-verbal communication and imagination“. One side effect of this definition is that when stories are told in a live business setting, they are much more powerful than when they are just written down.

What Kind Of Stories Work In Business Presentations?

Dr. Neile reports that Annette Simmons, who is the president of the company Group Process Consulting, believes that there are six types of stories that can be used in a business environment:

  1. Who I Am: this type of story is used to gain an audience’s trust by having the speaker explain where they are coming from.
  2. Why I Am Here: this story type is a way to communicate your agenda to your audience.
  3. The Vision: this story paints a vision of the future that the audience can see and can then decide that they want to be a part of it.
  4. Values-In-Action: this story shares the good things that can happen when the audience has shared values and the bad things that can happen when those values are violated.
  5. I Know What You Are Thinking: this story shows how connected the speaker is to the audience and that he/she has their best interests in mind.

How Can We Use Stories During Business Presentations?

Stories that your audience can relate to are the best kind of stories to use. This means that you need to spend the time to uncover the true stories that already exist within the organization: the successes, the failures, and people behaving both badly and wonderfully.

The power of business stories is that they provide one of the most effective ways to achieve agreement about how to resolve issues and meet goals. It’s  no longer a question of IF they should be used, but rather a question of HOW MUCH they should be used.

Questions For You

Have you ever used a story in a business presentation in order to make a point? How was it received? Did you feel awkward using a story? Does your senior management use stories when they are discussing the company’s vision and goals? Does this make you buy in to what the company is trying to accomplish? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I just got back from spending the better part of a week up in Chicago at a big health care conference (HIMSS09). This was an amazing opportunity for me to sit back and watch somewhere in the neighborhood of about 100 different presenters get up and do their very best job at communicating. One of these presenters was Dennis Quaid – the actor…

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Posted in stories | 6 Comments »

SMART Goal Setting Tips For Those Of Us Who Give Presentations

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
To Improve Your Presentations You Need A BAG And SMART Goals

To Improve Your Presentations You Need A BAG And SMART Goals

So you’ve given a few presentations (or maybe you’ve give a lot of ‘em). You feel relatively comfortable when you stand in front of a group of people and talk. You may not really like doing this, but you are reasonably sure that you are not going to faint or burst into flames while you are doing it. What’s next? The key to getting better at giving presentation is to dig deep down inside of yourself and find the answer to one very important question: just what are you trying to accomplish?

The answer to this question can be any one of a whole bunch of things. These include acceptance by your peers, more money, a promotion, admiration, or even simply to be seen as being successful by others. There is no wrong answer here – you get to choose what will motivate you to become a better public speaker. Now it’s time to BAG it. Yep, we’re talking about crystallizing what drives you and using that to create a Big Audacious Goal (BAG). This is some big presentation goal that you have not yet achieved but that if you became better you could. This BAG goal will serve as a constant reminder as to what you are trying to improve towards with your presentation skills.

If your BAG is where you are trying to get to, then it’s time to come up with a way to get there. You may have heard this before but one of the best ways to make measurable progress towards an objective is to set SMART goals for yourself. What does S.M.A.R.T. stand for you ask? Why that must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-lined. Perhaps a bit of an explanation is required:

  • Specific: You need to be very clear on exactly what you want to accomplish. “I want to be a better presenter” is too vague. “I want to give 5 more presentations” is very specific.
  • Measurable: Business loves metrics these days and so do your goals. How are you going to track your progress? If you want to give 5 presentations, then you need to track how many you are giving each month. If a month goes by and you have not presented, then you are falling behind.
  • Attainable: I call this the Tony Robbins syndrome. If you set a goal to be as good/successful as Tony Robbins, then you are probably going to fail (how many Tony Robbins does the world really need?). However, if you set a goal to be the best presenter in your department, then you just might be able to do this.
  • Realistic: Once again, let’s keep your goals real. If you want to get paid $1M to give speeches to your company, then perhaps you should create a more realistic goal.
  • Time-Lined: What do you need to accomplish by when in order to make this goal a reality?

There you go – with a BAG and SMART goals you now have the ability to become the presenter that you always dreamed that you could be!

Have you ever created a BAG for yourself? Are you still working towards it? Have you set SMART goals to reach this BAG? Were you able to stay with those goals? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in goals | 9 Comments »