Organise Speech with a clear message
A clear message is vital to make your speech understandable.
Morning, you lovely lot. I’ve been thinking this week about what we say when we talk, and as you know, I work with business owners, women predominantly, in getting a clear message, finding their voice, and getting their message out there about exactly what they do, knowing their stuff. And, today I’m off to do some appraisals for a voluntary organisation I work with, I chair a forum, and absolutely love the time I give to the organisation, that’s my balance if you like. And, we do appraisals, it’s a fancy term, basically, we just sit and have a cup of coffee, and check out how the committee are doing. And it occurred to me that I need to use the same approach while doing the appraisals as I do when I’m telling anybody about my business, and what I do.



I need to know, before I start these appraisals, exactly what message it is I want to give to these volunteers. Now, they’re not paid workers so I can’t treat them in the way I would a paid worker. They’re all volunteers and have different backgrounds, and different qualifications. But more than that, they all have different levels of confidence. So I’m going into this appraisal very aware that my key message is about their development and how grateful we are for what they do for our committee, and our forum. And to understand how better I can help them to develop and progress as people as much as help the organisation that we’re volunteering for.

So with that in mind it’s interesting that the way we speak to people, often when it’s not thought through, if it’s not a formal thing like your elevator pitch, or a speech or a presentation, that we sometimes, you know, just let words fall out of our mouths and hope people will understand the quirks and the personality behind them. And I think that’s fine, we don’t want to be thinking about everything that we say. Yet there are more situations that we can think of where we would do well, if you like, to think about how we’re going to get a message across to somebody, and if we want a particular result, how we organise the way we talk to them.

There are many many situations where we need to talk to staff, we may need to talk to funders or someone actually that you need to have a discussion with in your life that’s causing a bit of an issue. And if we could learn to order and organise how we want to say something, knowing the message we want to get across, we may come out of that discussion in a calmer and more rewarding way than it turning into a free for all.

So with that in mind, I’m going into these appraisals today with my amazing bunch of volunteers that I work with, to do these appraisals with a very very clear message and organisation around how I’m going to chat to them. Because it is a chat, it’s not like a formal employee appraisal. And it’s going to be about how we can help them develop, what training they need to develop, how I can maybe change my approach to chairing if people aren’t comfortable with it, that sort of thing.

And I wanted to share that with you today because talking is just talking, but speaking and having the right voice, and that means a clear message and the organisation in certain circumstances, is going to make your life a lot-lot easier. And it makes the person you’re talking to a lot more comfortable, they’ll get to the point a lot quicker. So I’m going to leave that with you today to mull over. Please let me know your thoughts on this, and let’s start a discussion on whether the idea that we understand our voice and our message can work in other places than just the elevator pitch, or a speech, or a presentation, or anything like that. And that understanding how to organise our thoughts into a clear voice might just make life a little easier.

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