Okay, if you're with me, we're making a lot of progress. If you've done what I've asked you to so far, you've isolated in one sentence, what it is you want your audience to do. That's great. You brainstormed on 50 100 1000 messages, but then you narrowed it down to the top five. You've then come up with interesting stories that flesh out these messages. So you have a story for each message point.
Fantastic. If you want to use PowerPoint, you've come up with an image for each one of your messages. That's great. Now it's time to put it all together and to do frankly, the most important part of this course, this is the single most important thing that will dramatically get you over the hump of being a scared, nervous, uncomfortable beginner of communication skills, and to get over that hump and not just become competent, but frankly, be great. If you could go to a golf coach who said you know what I want to be able to break 150. And the golf coach said to you, I can have you shoot par today.
Wouldn't you do that if you go to an ice skating coach and said, I just want to be able to skate and not fall down, the ice skating coach said, I can make you spin around, jump up in the air fly like an Olympian in the same amount of time in one day, wouldn't you do that? Well, that's essentially what I'm promising you if you do this one thing. Now, it's much much easier than being an ice skater. It's much easier than hitting a golf ball or dunking a basketball that anyone can do when I'm about to ask. The problem is it's kind of like cleaning out your garage. It's not something you want to do.
It's not an enjoyable task. But the task is you've got all these elements together, you have to practice and you have to pull out your cell phone or an iPad. Or a computer and you have to practice on video and look at it. Now, let me say, I know you don't want to do that. Nobody likes doing that. All I can tell you is, that's what actually makes someone a great communicator.
But you can't just record yourself on video that in and of itself does nothing. You can't just watch yourself once giving the speech that not only does that do nothing, it might actually make matters worse, because you just remember how much you hated certain elements. The whole beauty of recording and practicing on videos, you have to do it again and again in a systematic way. You have to look at yourself speak. Figure out what you like, what do you not like? Make careful notes.
Whenever you like, do more of next time whenever you didn't like do last up. keep doing it until you're convinced it's the best you can do at your current skill level. You It might take five takes, if I take 50 takes guess what your audience doesn't care. They simply want your best. Because if you're not interesting for them and not memorable to them, they've got a great solution. Now to your boring speech, it's called checking their email.
And if you see anyone in the audience reading their email, it means you're doing something wrong. It's never the audience's fault. It's our fault. So that's what I want you to do now. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time begging you to do this because I've done that in the past and courses and only one out of 1000 people will do it. But if you want to get the most out of this course, you really want to build your communication skills is the single most important thing you can do.
Practice on video until you like your communication to you like your speech or your presentation.