It usually arrives as a line in an email, or as someone catching you on the way out of a meeting: can you take ten minutes at the leadership session on the fourteenth and tell everyone where the project has got to? You say yes, the date goes in the diary, and something starts almost immediately.
What starts, for most of us, is gathering. A document opens, last time’s material gets hunted down, and the mind begins collecting what it already knows, because the first question we reach for is the one that feels like the obvious place to begin: what am I going to say?
It’s a fair question, and asking it first quietly turns the whole of preparation into assembly, in which we gather what we already know, put it into an order that looks sensible, and trust the audience to make something useful of it. The difficulty I keep running into is that work built that way can be finished without ever being tested, since nothing inside it will say whether a particular point belongs, whether a story has earned its ninety seconds, or whether the whole thing ought to have been an email.
A piece of work belongs in the gap between being asked and beginning to build, and in my experience, most of us skip it altogether. I’ve come to call doing it reaching your M Point. The M is for moment: your own moment of truth.
What the M Point is
Your M Point is the moment you can clearly and without hesitation say why you’re speaking at all and what you want to be different afterwards. It’s what’s left once you’ve answered seven questions honestly, in writing, before building anything.
The seven questions
- Why am I presenting at all?
- Why does this audience need to hear it?
- What is my message, in one sentence?
- What difference will it make to their work or their lives?
- How do I want them to feel?
- What do I want them to do?
- What does the future look like for them if they understand this and act on it?
Written out like that, they can look almost too obvious to be worth the time. Each one is doing a particular job, though, and none of them can do another’s, so it’s worth taking them one at a time.
One — Why am I presenting at all?
Most of us answer this with an account of how we came to be standing there: somebody asked, it’s on the agenda, it’s my project so it falls to me. All of that explains the booking, and none of it is a reason to speak.
The question underneath it is simpler and harder: what’s so important that I can’t just send an email? If you have an honest answer, you have a reason to speak.
Two — Why does this audience need to hear it?
The word doing the work here is need. Not why they’re attending, or why the invitation went out, but what is at stake for these particular people if they don’t hear this.
The question worth sitting with is whether this is really about them or just about you. If your answer would hold for a different group next week, you’ve answered a question about the subject rather than about these people.
Three — What is my message, in one sentence?
Most of what gets called a message is really a topic. A topic names the subject; a message names the change you’re asking for and the reason it’s worth making. The quickest test is whether anybody in the room could disagree with it, because a subject can’t be disagreed with and a message always can.
Getting from one to the other is more mechanical than it sounds. Write your topic down, then finish these two lines:
After this, I want them to ______
because ______
The first blank takes a verb they would recognise as an action: agree, approve, stop, start, fund, change their mind about. The second takes your reason for asking. Read the two lines back as a single sentence, and that is your message.
Four — What difference will it make to their work or their lives?
This is question two asked again at close range. Two establishes that it matters to them; four insists you say exactly how, in terms they’d use themselves.
The test is whether you can say plainly how what you’re sharing will make their work or their lives better, easier, more successful or happier.
Five — How do I want them to feel?
Almost everybody answers this with what they want to avoid, so not bored, not sceptical, not annoyed with me. People also use words like informed, interested and engaged.
Those are worth knowing, and they aren’t answers, because they describe a room that has been survived rather than one that has been moved.
What I’ve seen is that people act once they understand something and feel something about it: excited, inspired, empowered, concerned, angry.
Six — What do I want them to do?
The test is whether you know what you want your audience to do with the information you’ve shared when they return to their desk, car, airport, or home.
If you don’t know the answer, don’t expect your audience to do anything with the information.
Seven — What does the future look like for them if they understand this and act on it?
The final part of our presentation journey is to give our audience an image of what the future looks likeif they act on our message.
Six asks for the action, and seven asks why anybody would want to take it. Paint a clear picture of how what you have to share will help them. It’s nearly always the last thing you say, and it’s the part that makes agreeing feel like a decision rather than a favour.
Why this is a moment of truth
Answer all seven honestly, and something has changed that no amount of building could have achieved, because you now know whether this presentation needs to exist at all, what it’s for, who it’s for and what it’s asking, along with how you want the room to feel and why anybody there should care.
It’s a moment of truth rather than a checklist because several honest answers are uncomfortable: you’re partly there to be seen, the feeling the room needs isn’t the comfortable one, and sometimes there’s nothing worth asking for.
How to do it
Twenty minutes, with a pen and paper, before you open a single document.
The paper matters. Once a document is open, the making begins and the deciding never quite happens, because you start building the thing instead of working out what it’s for.
Work through the questions in order and write full sentences. A half-formed answer can feel complete in your head, then fall apart as soon as you have to write it down.
Where this sits in the Presenter’s Operating System
The seven questions aren’t a separate method. They’re the first three layers of The Presenter’s Operating System, which is the framework all my work is built on, and each layer goes wrong in its own way.
Why you’re standing up, how you want them to feel, and what you want them to do is Intention, which covers questions one, five, and six. The one true thing worth saying is Message, which is question three. Questions two, four and seven are Resonance: understanding these particular people well enough to build for them rather than for yourself.
In my experience, everything that follows is easier once those three layers are settled, whether that’s making the material ruthlessly clear, returning to yourself in the moments before you speak, or the voice and presence that carry it all into the room. None of that is worth starting while Intention, Message and Resonance are still open, which is my whole argument for the twenty minutes.
What to do next
Put the seven questions somewhere you’ll find them again, and the next time somebody asks you to present, open that page before you open anything else and give it twenty minutes on paper.
If you’d like help with that and with everything that sits on top of it:
- Come to a public speaking course.
- Work with me one to one in public speaking coaching.
- Bring presentation skills training to your team.
Image courtesy of Canva.com
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