A Public Speaking Lesson: Why Strategy Matters Before You Step on Stage

10 hours ago
4 min read

On Friday, March 6th, I stepped on stage in front of nearly 150 women at a beautiful venue in NYC for the Business of WE Leadership Conference & Dinner in celebration of International Women’s Day.

I was the first of seven speakers to go on stage, so I knew I had some pressure on me to kick things off strong. Being a professional speaker, and someone who teaches public speaking skills to others, there is always an added layer of pressure to show up and crush it. Especially when you know clients are sitting in the audience.

The weeks leading up to the event were a bit of a blur. I had been sick for two straight weeks, then jumped right back into a calendar packed with back to back meetings. In my somewhat coherent moments during the haze of being sick, and in the short windows between rescheduled meetings and client sessions, I was trying to hammer out my talk.

I knew I only had seven minutes to make a big impact, and normally that’s not a problem for me. As long as I follow my SPEAC Framework, that is.

But somewhere between being sick, feeling behind, and trying to build a talk in 15 and 20 minute sprints between meetings, I threw my own process out the window.

Instead, I did something I almost never do.

I took the multi page document where I had dumped all of my ideas and fed it into ChatGPT, asking it to help me polish and finalize my talk. (I’ll often use ChatGPT as a brainstorming and research partner, or to help me refine written communications, but almost never presentations.)

What it gave me was honestly pretty good. My ideas were organized. The additional research I had asked it to include was woven in nicely. It looked clean, logical and polished. I read through it several times, made a edits to make it sound more like “me,” and started building my slide deck, which was due the Wednesday before the event.

But as I was building the deck, something felt off.

The more I worked on it, the less inspired I felt. And that’s a problem when you’re about to stand on a stage and try to inspire other people. Especially when you only have seven minutes to do it.

By Tuesday, the day before the deck was due and just a few days before I was set to take the stage, I made a tough call….

I trashed the whole talk.

I kept the main thesis - authenticity is the little black dress of business - but everything else went. So I cleared my schedule for a few hours and started from scratch.

This time I went back to the process I’ve been teaching clients for more than a decade. The same framework my company is named after, and the one I’m always telling people works if you actually use it.

SPEAC - Strategize. Prepare. Elevate. Articulate. Connect.

I started with the strategy piece. Who exactly was I speaking to? What was the purpose of this talk? What did I want these women to think, feel, or do when they left the room? What was the core message I wanted them to walk away remembering?

Once that was clear, I identified the key talking points and organized them into my main points, the speech landmarks as I call them. That took me about an hour to do.

After that, the rest of the talk practically wrote itself. No AI needed. Just my ideas, my stories, and my voice.

And it was so much better.

More importantly, it felt like me. I felt excited about it again, and could tell that when I stepped on stage I’d be able to deliver it with the kind of energy and conviction that actually moves people.

From there, everything else came together quickly. The deck fell into place, and practicing the talk felt natural. And when the night of the event arrived, and I stepped on stage, I felt confident and ready.

Since the event, I’ve had numerous women reach out to tell me how much the message resonated with them and how inspired they felt by my talk. There is no better compliment than that!

The ironic part is that the talk itself was about authenticity. More specifically, about how authenticity is the little black dress of business: timeless, versatile and confidence boosting the moment you put it on.

The real lesson here is that you can’t skip the process. You can’t outsource your voice, and you definitely can’t rely on something (or someone) else to inject your passion, purpose and perspective for you.

AI can organize ideas. It can polish words. It can even make things sound impressive. But it can’t be you.

If you want to learn how to do this for yourself, my SPEAC Success e-Course walks you through the exact process. Inside the course, I take you step by step through how to apply the SPEAC Framework™ to develop your message, structure your talk and deliver it with clarity and confidence. I also teach my Authenticity Blueprint™ so you can bring your passion, purpose and perspective into every message and story you share.