What do you want your audience to do? Before you start with the first slide before you drink a whole bunch of coffee so you can stay up late typing away at this 30 minutes speech. Take a breath, calm down, sit back and just ask yourself, what is it? I want my audience to do. Now, if you're going on a job interview and you're presenting to one prospective employer, the one thing you want that person to do is give you the job hire you if you are running for office, you want the audience to give you a vote or give you money. If you're speaking to a new business prospect, you want them to hire you or sign a cut.

What is it? You want your audience to do? Now this sounds basic, and yet I see countless times with people of all varying degrees of success skill, seniority, within the private sector. businesses, corporations, governments, all making the same mistake. Their first inclination is to just start gathering information. They get this big wheelbarrow and they go around the whole, the office gathering information.

Smithers, give me all the files you have on the such and such project. Jane, give me all your slides that you did on this subject last week, I want to build that and they're going around the room with this wheelbarrow. And the data is gathering and it's stacking higher and higher and higher. And before you know it, you're just swimming in this sea of data timeout. First thing you have to do is figure out in one sentence, what is it you want your audience to do? I want you to write it down.

I want you to post it here in the discussion section, the q&a section of this course. You need clarity on that because if you don't know what it is you want them to do, there's no way you can convince them of that. It's the old joke if you don't care where you're going, it doesn't matter what road you take. Write down the exact, specific thing you want your audience to do. That's the starting point for every speech. It's the starting point for every presentation.