2. Storytelling, Write it all out!

The power of the best public speakers is in their ability to make you feel their story! This is called StoryTelling…

Key Message!

Remember that goal from the previous article? This is where you need it! You want to achieve something, which could simply be to relay an important message or it could be about making people take a certain action.

This goal should be at the heart of your presentation and therefor the first thing to decide on…

As an example, I once had to provide an update to the complete organisation on a project we were running. This project was constantly breaking speed records and I decided to make the “Continuous Improvement Mindset” of the team the main message, with the ultimate goal to tickle others to follow their example.

Categorize

With your key message and your topic known, it is time to create some categories you will talk about. Depending on the time you have, you will probably end up with around 4 or 5. Once you decided on these, make sure to put them in a logical order. Generally you will use a timeline order in which the events took place and try to make it so that you can include your key message at the last category.

To stick with my last example, my update had categories “Introduction”, “Original Planning”, “Current Planning”, “Continuous Retrospectives”, “Long Term Benefit Prioritisation” and finally “Continuous Improvement Mindset of the team”.

During the intro I sort of build up already about the insane progress and that we would look into the way we did this (without saying anything yet) and at the end you see that key message, where I planted the seed for people to start doing the same.

Fill it up!

Well, this one speaks for itself. Start thinking about what you want to say at each category and write it down. Remember to use the right language, fit for your audience and as with the categories, don’t forget to put it in the right order. Most important, try to already captivate your audience early on in your presentation. Tell them something about your key presentation, but keep them curious until the very end. It is at the end you want to repeat your key message one last time…

Make it flow

This is probably the most important part of this whole chapter and you already saw the first part (logical order) of the flow come back in the text above, but there is one more aspect.

Make the connections between the categories flow as if they are one! Try to write your text in a way that your audience feels like it is a single story, not a collection of topics.

Using the previous example again, the transition between the “retrospectives” and the “prioritisation” was done by actually looking at the outcome of one of the retrospectives, where there were far to many tasks to handle and therefor we prioritised those tasks that had the best “long term benefit”..

Off-course, this can not always be achieved and for those categories that cannot be connected, make sure to use a small 3 second pause.

Where to go next?

Now that you know what to say, lets check in on what you want to show your audience in the article "Visualize, To slide or not to slide"