“Get your education because no matter what happens, no one can ever take that away from you.”
Joseph Harold Hicks
Father of six
Korea War Era Veteran
32-year James B. Beam employee
Education has always been important in my family; I was number five of six children raised in a small town and educated in parochial schools. Mom and Dad married young and immediately began having babies, pinched pennies and lived frugally in order to educate us all. The emphasis was always to work hard first, do your chores and your homework, and play after everything else was done.
While not as strict as my parents were with me, and living in a world that is so much more sophisticated today, raising two daughters certainly has its challenges, boys and pandemics aside. The now 17- and 14-year-old daughters of a military veteran and a police officer have it, by some modern standards, pretty rough. We have certain expectations and set the bar high; get A’s, stay organized, work ahead, and do your homework in advance. Set goals and do the hard work to meet them. There are days when we meet with success and days that we all fall a bit short. Time and again, though, my husband and I have emphasized how the habits our children develop now with homework will bear fruit in their professional lives, after they leave the protection of their parents’ home and are making their way on their own.
The same philosophy of doing your homework ahead of time can also be applied to public speaking, whether for an audience of two or 2,000. The principles for doing your homework are the same for both and include three essential steps; first, is planning; second, is knowing your audience; and third, developing key messages you can deliver succinctly.
Plan For Your Engagement
Whether it’s a meeting with your team at work or if you are presenting military concepts to a group of 200 of your peers, planning will mean the difference in communication success or failure. What is the venue? Will you have notes or use a PowerPoint presentation? Will you be standing or sitting? Behind a desk or perhaps a podium? Will you have a lovelier mic on or not? Have you actually practiced, perhaps in front of the bathroom mirror? Thinking through your delivery and a few of the semantics ahead of time alleviates the stress when the day comes.
Know Your Audience
Is your audience your peers or are you presenting to an audience you are trying to persuade to buy your product, your idea or use your platform? Consider who your audience is and how they will be coming into your engagement. Do you have the same goals or are you at odds? Will it be a give-and-take with you and your peers, your boss, or those you collaborate with to accomplish your job? Will there be speaking back and forth in turn, which requires active listening, or will it be a more formal, one-way exchange with the media covering what you’re saying and reporting on afterwards? What does your audience want or expect to get out of exchange? Thinking through some of these questions ahead of time will help you as you prepare your presentation and be an effective communicator.
Develop Your Key Messages
While it’s important to be an active listener for a one-on-one meeting with your boss, preparing for a media interview looks a little different. If it’s for a television interview specifically, you should think through what you’d like to say in soundbites of 12 seconds or less. Speaking succinctly in quotable soundbites is a challenge, for sure, which is why step one, planning, is so important. If you are preparing for print or online coverage, you’ve got more time and space to make your point. What would you like to see or hear the media use in their coverage? If you could only say three things you’d like to see reported from a press interview, what are they? And, even more importantly, does your facts and information support those messages you’d like to convey?
It certainly pays to do your homework; being prepared, knowing who your audience is and developing key points you’d like to make all increase your likelihood of success.