If I say to you get in the car drive, let's just go for a trip, you might ask, well, where are we going? Are we gonna drive across the country to California, we're gonna drive around the block fair questions. Because if you don't know where you're going, if you don't have a destination in mind, you're going to go around in circles get lost just meander, you're not going to accomplish much. Well, the same thing happens with speeches with presentations. Far too often. People just start off at a speech with a vague, fuzzy notion of a topic.

And they think well, how can I gather everything I know about that topic. And that is the root cause of all of your problems all of the time suck when it comes to your speech. Because if you just go off with a general vague notion of telling people, everything about that subject or everything your company's done in the last six months or everything your government organization does. You just gonna dig more and more and more data and it's just you're gonna be lost. So, so much of what I'm going to stress here in this course is all hinges around this one thing right now you got to make a decision right at the beginning of this speech preparation. Are you gonna do it the way you've always done it before?

Which is just, well, let's start with the research and gather stuff. Or are you going to start with the goal in mind? If you know that today, you're in New York City and you want to drive to Los Angeles and get there the quickest way possible, driving the fewest miles possible on the best roads, you would spend some time planning. You would perhaps get a good GPS and you would go there. You wouldn't just say, No, let me just drive around the block. Let me see where the sun is.

And oh, this looks like a nice road. You'd never get there or you would take you months to get there. Instead of a few days. It's exactly the same thing. With a speech so here's what I want you to do for every speech you ever give in the future, before you start doing anything before you even pull up a PowerPoint, slide software, I want you to write down can be on a single sheet of paper to be on your computer screen. First thing, what is it you want this audience to do?

After hearing your speech, one sentence, what do you want them to do? If you're in business, then you probably want them to be able to client to request a meeting with you to authorize a budget to approve findings you've already done in research. What is it you want them to do? If it's a government agency, and you're trying to encourage people to eat more vegetables? What's the specific action? Now keep in mind, most of the time when people get presentations, the audience doesn't do any thing except a fall asleep or B, check their email.

So if you actually get some members of the audience to do anything, you're going to be wildly successful compared to most speakers. If you get most of the people in the audience to do something, you are going to be one of the most successful speakers that audience has seen in a long time. So that's the starting point. do that before you do anything else do that before you even get to a computer. Just write down a one sentence, what is it you want this audience to do after hearing your presentation