It's amazing how many times people ask me, "Where do you get the ideas for your Speaking Tips?"
It’s like my asking an accountant, "How do you know what to tell your client about his income tax?" Or a doctor, "How do you know what to tell your patient about his illness?" Whatever your profession, you've acquired a bank of information and experience that you can draw on to help your clients. You've become an expert and you have enough knowledge at your fingertips to help them solve their
difficulties.
They might, in the process, present you with problems you may not have previously encountered which are unique to that particular client or universal to many. Every time you work with a situation you have not previously faced, you gain more knowledge, experience, and information to add to your arsenal of professional competence.
So when you're asked to speak about your profession at a formal gathering or an informal meeting, you'll have at your fingertips ideas and information to share for 30 minutes or so on a subject of interest to the audience that invited you.
It's the same for me as a speaker's coach and speechwriter. Whenever I sit down to write a Speaking Tip, I go through my memory bank and pull out the most interesting dilemmas clients have asked me to help them solve. I take the gist of the solutions we came up with and use them to create a universal Speaking Tip.
For example, if I've been working with a client who has difficulty talking loud enough to be heard, I'll create a Speaking Tip called "Speak to Be Heard" or "Are You Comfortable Hearing You?" or, going in a slightly different direction, "Saying Too Much vs. Saying Too Little." The ideas for these Speaking Tips come from real life situations faced by people who came to me for help.
Whenever you're called upon to speak about your business or profession, think about the situations in which you deal with real people with real difficulties. There's a wealth of ideas there that you can choose from. First, determine your goal for the speech, then choose from your real-life experience. It's almost like picking one from Column A and one from Column B on a Chinese menu.
Try this technique. Keep a "Subjects to Speak About" file. Every time you come upon a situation from which you learned something new that has universal applicability, make a note of it. Next time you need to give a talk, you'll have a number of subjects waiting in your file. You'll never have to worry about finding something to talk about again.
