Why your purpose is the only thing that belongs on your speaker card

Picture this… You have just been introduced by the moderator and make your way up onto the big stage. In your hand are your speaker cards, neatly glued onto stiff paper, logo and all. You take the centre of the stage near the edge, meet your audience with a smile, say your opening words and look down at your cards. Instantly you realise they are in completely the wrong order — and you forgot to number them. After a few drawn-out seconds of shuffling, you accept there is no point trying to sort them out now. The tech booth is running your slides, and you glance up at the screen behind you. It is not the latest version of your presentation. Someone has mixed them up… Your pupils widen, sweat starts to bead, your hand wants to tremble and your mouth goes dry like the last drop draining from the bathtub.

This is when it becomes clear what should be tattooed on your cornea, imprinted in your spine, coded into your DNA — and perhaps even written on your palm.

Your purpose.

So how do you formulate the purpose of your presentation?

When you work with the purpose of your presentation, focus on the specific purpose within the rhetorical situation you are in. Many salespeople I meet want to phrase the purpose with a business focus: we want to sell more of X. That is where we completely lose our way.

Your purpose should help you choose your arguments.

Your organisation's overall purpose is not what matters here. The purpose should specifically steer the content and arguments of this particular presentation. An example from a client I helped with an event many years ago makes it clearer. I was helping a foundation create an event for its ten-year anniversary. Their own stated purpose was, in short: we want to increase revenue, attract more donors and raise awareness of the organisation. You can easily see that the road to more revenue is more donors, and the road to more donors is greater awareness. So when creating a relevant purpose, our focus is awareness. The other two goals do not even need to be part of it. The question we ask is how to raise awareness, and in what way. We knew we would create an event of some kind, and based on what the foundation does, we landed on the purpose: we will create positive feelings for Foundation X. With that as our purpose, we soon see how the content, the design, the colours, the invitation and everything else can begin to take shape. In short, that purpose helped us choose our arguments.

Your purpose should inspire you and stir feelings in you for what you are speaking about.

When you formulate your purpose, aim to use strong verbs such as inspire, awaken, create, engage… so that the purpose itself inspires you and stirs feelings in you — because that is the way to inspire and move your listeners.

Back to the story: your pupils widen, sweat starts to bead, your hand wants to tremble and your mouth goes dry… Here you have a choice. Open your presentation with apologies, blame and nerves. Or let go of every idea and fully accept the feelings moving through you. Take a deep breath, let your mouth and eyes smile, which helps you relax, and focus on your well-formulated purpose: I will create positive feelings for the Foundation. With the breath you take in those positive feelings and recall what created them for you in your work with the Foundation. As you raise your eyes and meet your audience, take them in and feel, with empathy, the purpose you so want them to understand and share with you — the energy turns away from you and towards the people you want to reach. Then the words are there in you, they live in the air between you and your listeners, and the only challenge left is whether you dare to trust them… Immediately you remember the story that made you swap a well-paid job in finance for a modestly paid one at the charity. You move naturally from the feeling created by the story to the more logical arguments for the Foundation's work, and then land in a story from last week, when you visited several places the foundation has supported, and dare to dream about your continued work and its impact… I am not saying this way is easy. But we need to set goals and visions for our talks and presentations that allow us to feel, to move others and to be ourselves on stage. The only thing you really need to remember is where you are going. And the only thing you can largely control is exactly that: where you are going. The road there you can never fully predict.

A course or workshop is the starting point of a development journey. A large part of the development happens after the training. For that development to take place, the training needs to leave a strong imprint. Insight, understanding, experience and emotionally charged motivation are key to succeeding on the journey.