What are the 3 questions you should ask yourself when you decide on a speech?

There truly is both an art and a science to creating compelling presentations for your audience. While your slides must be organized and well thought out, your message must also resonate your audience and move them to take the action you want. So how do you balance the two – structure & emotion – to create engaging content? I typically start by asking three simple questions about your audience.

Question #1: What do you want your audience to know?

At the end of the day, your audience is only going to complete your call to action if they feel well educated on what you’re asking them to do. It is supremely important that you clearly, succinctly & strikingly lay out the information you want them to retain. Remember not to overwhelm them – stick to one main point you want your audience to take away, and then from there build out the stories, data & information that explains & supports that one point.

Question #2: What do you want your audience to feel?

Now that you’re clear on the more “left brain” side of your presentation, it’s time to address the emotional “right brain” side. Humans are driven by feelings, so if your slides only contain facts, figures and statistics you are completely missing the subconscious, human element in the decision-making process. Think through your main point and the stories you’re using to educate your audience – will they elicit the feelings you want from your listeners? Make sure you’re conveying your points with emotion, and not just rational reasoning, in mind.

Question #3: What do you want your audience to do?

Whether you are putting together a digital course, a client pitch or a keynote speech, you typically always want to have a call to action in your presentation. Whether that is to buy your product, learn more about the topic discussed, get involved, make a change or be inspired your entire presentation should support and emphasize what you want the audience to do. By establishing what your call to action is beforehand, you can use it to check your slides against and ensure your messaging is on point and compelling.

Getting clear on these three questions will ensure that your slides truly speak to your audience, convey your message in a clear way and gives your listeners a finite next step.

I have been teaching clients how to communicate their ideas for 18 years, working with 50,000 people across 45 countries. One client gained $1.5Billion in new business in just one year, through applying simple changes. You can order my new book ‘You Were Born To Speak’ on Amazon.

Presenting is a skill that does not necessarily rely on your expertise –the more I see presentations, the more I am convinced that this is true. Presentation skills should be present on CVs, and should be in fact assessed as a part of screening for many jobs – both in international organizations and outside.

While there is no degree in presenting that can prove your capability of doing it, once you accept that it’s a skill you can pump it up like a muscle.

Observing and giving thousands of presentations to audiences of various sizes and backgrounds, I came up with a basic recipe that informs my preparation no matter what the circumstances of the presentation are. It all boils down to asking (and answering) the three questions below.

1.    What is the message?

It is the most basic and yet the hardest question. The less expertise you have, the more you try to provide reference to others’ works, laboring every step of your work and ultimately, over explaining yourself. The more expertise you have, the more facts or aspects you want to tell your audience, increasing the probability that you will lose the key message among too much information.

There is no way that a 5 or even 30 minute presentation can make up for the time you have spent growing your expertise, and this is often a reality that many presenters – both beginners or seasoned ones – seem to be unwilling to accept. Choosing one thought, fact or a storyline to tell is as important as getting a chance to talk. Of course, with a more prepared audience the amount of concepts can be greater, but still giving too many ideas and overwhelming your audience could result in them remembering none. At the end of the day, if the audience likes your one idea, they may invite you back to hear your second and third…

Hint: Use backwards logic with this one. Once you decide on the idea, you trace back to where you should start your presentation. 

Example: To explain the fragmentation of regulation of value chains I start with talking about Universal Declaration of Human Rights and how most of the people cannot list them. Despite believing in the idea that human rights are good, no one can name how many and covering what they are – this gives a perfect analogy for an “antiexample” of regulation of the value chain. Everyone knows what you are doing for, but no one know the details of specific clusters. 

2.    What do you want audience to hear?

Assessing your audience is important. It is not possible to have an audience identical in both background and level of knowledge. In an internationally connected world, even finding common cultural references is proven to be a challenge. So the new dad joke is maybe better to be kept for a gathering with your friends from high-school, and your reference to Age of Aquarius will be lost without providing a context of a medium length Wikipedia article.

Hint: this becomes easier with practice, but if you are totally lost in where to start, talk about personal experience. Ask a friend, get a coffee with someone who can have related experience – get a reality check.

Example: Once I thought I had to teach trade policy makers but when I turned up those were students from model WTO. Instead of going into slides on development aspects of trade agreements, I started doing “on the spot” survey of the audience on what do they know about how their mobile phones operate. This paved to discussing services trade, data regulation and then, already logically, how such provisions (at that point of time) were covered mostly in regional trade agreements. No one would have understood me should I start showing simulations of regional trade agreements.

3.    What do you want to hear back about?

In the case of smaller presentations, having this question in mind when shaping your material will not only increase your interaction with the audience, but will also provide you a useful source of information that does not need to be time consuming either– you can achieve this through reaching out to the knowledge and experience of your audience. If you are presenting to a large audience where having on the spot interaction is not possible, this question will make your presentation more impactful – it will bring your ideas into the ecosystem of audience’s knowledge, potentially launching critical thinking and generating the coveted impact. 

Hint:  It is useful to know basic characteristics/interests of the audience beforehand. In the worst case scenario, ask your audience a question yourself.

Example: When presenting to lawyers/IR scholars I make sure to do some background work on some literature that I think could be related – and then ask if they can recommend better references, or other strands of thought.

In my opinion, these three basic questions are fundamental for a good presentation that are useful both for the presenter and the audience. I hope this can be useful for others – students, experts, workers, teachers, artists, public speakers or whoever else is engaged in sharing and exchanging their expertise and opinion; I believe that in current day and age we need more broad, cross-cutting, effective and transparent communication – not less.

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