So where are we so far? If you follow the lessons in order, you've got an overall goal what you want the audience to do after hearing you speak, you've come up with your top five ideas, messages that you really want this audience to hear you say, understand and remember, because it's likely to drive them to the action you want. And you've got a good case study and example, ideally, a story for each one of your message points. Now, we've come to a fork in the road, you've got to make a big decision. If you go one way, it's going to take you hour after hour after hour and be a big time suck and not result in anything better or you can go the easy way. Now what most people do is they go the hard way, which is now let's write the speech.

And let's sit down and type away till we have 20 pages of text. Now folks, there are times when that is necessary. If you're The president of a major country, if you're the chairman of the Federal Reserve, if you're a secretary of state or Minister of Foreign Affairs, and you're speaking to the UN General Assembly, and it's going to be written down and transcribed into numerous languages all over the world, sure, there are times when you do have to get a speech, right word for word all the way through. For 99.9% of business people and people in government, that does not apply. And once you commit a speech to writing it out, it just brings you down and it takes a tremendous amount of time, what I'm recommending you do is the easy way and that is simply come up with an outline have a sheet of paper that has your five message points.

And that has a few words to remind you have your story. Your example your case study now I have worked in Countless corporations, government agencies all over the world, where it's just a habit to write out the speech because the speechwriter says, Well, that's what the boss wants. And the boss says, Well, that's the speech writers give me. And everyone's doing this dance and no one ever stopped to think. Does this really help anything? Does the person making the speech really want this?

Countless times I've been in that situation I ask people, does this really help? And typically, the speaker says, Well, I don't really like reading a speech. I'm much better off the cuff. And the speech writers viewpoint is I don't really like writing speeches because it's tedious. It's painful. We go through 20 drafts and the person and say what I asked what I wrote anyway.

So why go through the whole dance is a waste of time. Now, I'm not suggesting someone just get up an ad lib a speech and blurt out stupid things, whatever pops in their head. I'm suggesting a very thoughtful, methodical planned presentation, because again, we've already spent if you've done what I've asked a couple of hours in this preparation, really figuring out what our goal is, what are our messages, what are our stories, or examples or case studies. So I'm not suggesting that this be adlib in the sense that just you know, Tourette Syndrome words are flying from your mouth. But I'm not suggesting that the whole thing the written out so that someone is either even tempted to read or tempted to memorize or sort of half glance down and looking at it the whole time, because I simply don't have any evidence that that helps the communication process.

I do have a lot of evidence that it impedes the communication process because it makes it so boring, and deadly dull because it's a huge data dump. Plus you destroy the person's ability, the speaker's ability to maintain eye contact and seem like a human being. Plus, you waste dozens and dozens of hours. If not More. So this is another big decision you got to make Are you going to write the whole speech out word for word Are you going to go with an outline, I would recommend a single page outline that has your message points that has your examples, a few words to remind you of the case studies, and any other important stories. And then if you have a few big numbers, and you want to get the numbers just right, we'll put that down.

It should all fit on a single page. So please come up with your single page outline. Now, if you want to write your whole speech word for word for it, I can't help you. But you should probably just quit this course now because you're going to be up to two I am writing and rewriting this speech.