How to Get Prepared for Your Speech
Great presenters are always prepared and are fastidious about the details and they leave nothing to chance. They dot the ‘I’s’ and cross the ‘t’s’ as it were. They have an absolute commitment to excellence. One of the greatest hindrances to excellent presentations is the person delivering is just not prepared. I’ve witnessed countless presentations where the speaker was just not prepared and I really felt for him, in fact I wish I had a lever to a trap-door that I could open up and save him from the shame and his lack of preparation.
Throughout Step Up and Speak I teach you a host of ways to prepare so you can assemble your information in a logical flow as well as methods to practise your presentation so you’ll never have to stand there looking like a deer caught in the headlights.
For now though, let me tell you how you can begin to prepare yourself for your next presentation.
1) When you think, read or see something that is relevant, you must record it (written or otherwise) …which I’ll talk about in detail later in the course, the next thing you must do to prepare is to ‘ponder it’. What do I mean by ‘ponder it’? Well, if all you did to delivery your next presentation was to pick up a magazine on your chosen subject to read it to the audience, and that was your whole presentation, just reading from a magazine…it would be missing the one critical ingredient…YOU!…It would be missing YOU, your convictions, your opinions and your beliefs. When you add those elements to your talk, you are adding a human factor to the information.
When you ponder, think over, contemplate…what this means to me and my audience, then that is part of your preparation. Your mind is like a gold mine of information and life experiences and it’s just waiting dormant for you to come along to bring them to the surface to add value to you and your listeners.
2) Practise, Practise, Practise – If you want to become a GREAT speaker, you must learn to practise…correctly. Talk to any great athlete or sports-star and what do they have in common? They practice for hours a day so when they step up to the plate as it were, they are ready…emotionally, mentally and physically. After preparing your talk, you’ll want to take it with you wherever you go and practice out loud.
