you and I can fight Soviet aggression with a strong defense and a strong economy and by helping the rest of the free world.
What’s the benefit to the audience? It gets to go on living; at the time, there was real fear of the Soviet threat that included nuclear aggression. The emotion is fear—and patriotism. Note how the emotional message could have polarized Americans. Perhaps not everyone thought that the Soviet threat was real or was worried about communists taking over the world. But Kennedy gave people a positive side to the message as well. Just about everyone wants a strong economy, after all.
It’s difficult to keep political addresses focused because of the temptation at moments like this to offer a little something to everyone. But Kennedy’s address was better focused than most, and the elevator speech shows how he and his team managed it.
Once you’ve figured out what your elevator speech is, then use that to guide all the rest of the content development. Everything that doesn’t relate to the elevator speech, no matter how fascinating or exciting to you, must be eliminated. If information doesn’t support the key concept, it doesn’t belong in your speech.
Far more speeches fail from a surfeit of information than a deficit. Far too many businesspeople think of a presentation as a data dump—the opportunity to show the audience what they know about a subject.
But that’s not interesting to audiences. What they do care about is how some of the information that you have can help them solve their problems. The elevator speech helps you keep focused on that crucial insight, and it helps keep you focused on the audience itself.
It’s worth repeating: You must focus on one idea and one idea only. Give your audience more than that, and it will quickly get lost in your information, trying desperately to remember irrelevant details and feeling betrayed by you. The audience will think that you’ve led them astray. Many speakers overprepare, because they are afraid that they’ll get asked something they don’t know. But what audiences want is not to be buried in detail, but for you to tell them what’s important, what the key concepts are, what the essence of a body of knowledge is.
Armed with only the material that supports your one key idea, you’re ready to develop the structure of your presentation.
Remember
Focus your talk on one idea, the essential idea for your audience.
Summarize that idea in an elevator speech of one sentence.
The sentence should contain a benefit for the audience, the word you, and a reference to emotion.
Use the elevator speech to focus the rest of your content development.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
