126: How to Be Interesting When Pitching an Idea
Coaching for Leaders
Dave Stachowiak
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2014
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Here’s some advice that many of us have heard when we starting giving presentations or speeches for the first time:
“Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em, tell ’em, tell ’em what you told ’em.”
That’s lousy advice. Here’s how to do better.
Four great and interesting speeches, with varying levels of importance:
- Honoring the dead – The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln
- Civil rights – I Have A Dream by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
- A successful product launch – The iPhone Announcement by Steve Jobs
- Human personality – The Power of Introverts by Susan Cain
Three commonalities that these four very different “pitches” share. They all:
- Tell a story of the problem
- Articulate a vision
- Inspire action
Resources you may wish to investigate:
- The Quick and Easy Way To Effective Speaking* by Dale Carnegie
- Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences* by Nancy Duarte
- SPIN Selling* by Neil Rackham
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You've probably heard that time-honored advice when giving a speech. |
| 0:04.0 | Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them what you told them. |
| 0:08.0 | On today's show, why that's lousy advice and how you can do better. |
| 0:13.2 | This is coaching for leaders, episode 126. |
| 0:17.4 | Produced by Innovate Learning, |
| 0:19.9 | Maximizing Human Potential. maximizing human potential. |
| 0:29.0 | Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is coaching for leaders and I'm your host Dave Stahoviac. This is a weekly coaching show to help us |
| 0:37.0 | all be better leaders through improve communication, human relations, and personal productivity. |
| 0:44.6 | And today, an examination on how to be interesting when pitching an idea. |
| 0:51.6 | And I come to you as someone who has been boring at many times in my life |
| 0:57.8 | pitching an idea or making a speech and I am hopeful that I can give you something through my experience |
| 1:06.6 | of coaching and training folks over the years and watching presenters that will be helpful |
| 1:11.9 | in helping you get your message across and help people |
| 1:14.7 | take action and for you to be interesting as a presenter. |
| 1:20.1 | And as I think back to speeches that I've given that have been less than stellar, one of them, was the very first speech I ever gave at a Toastmasters Club. Toastmasters is this wonderful worldwide organization that is a nonprofit |
| 1:39.1 | and goes out in the world and has all of these clubs all over the place for people who want to get |
| 1:46.0 | better as communicators and in particularly giving presentations. |
| 1:50.2 | And I heard about Toastmasters when I first moved to California, gosh, 14, 15 years ago |
| 1:56.2 | and decided that that was something I needed at that time in my life and in my career to get better at speaking and I was right I |
| 2:04.8 | didn't eat it and I showed up for my first toastmasters meeting and at the |
| 2:09.8 | time I don't know about currently but at the time the first assignment in giving a |
| 2:14.8 | Toastmasters talk your very first presentation was to give a introductory |
... |
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