How do you get it all into someone's mind..?

Odd, isn’t it, how we manage to keep some shelves and cupboards reasonably tidy and others are a total jumble?

I was speaking to a legal boffin at a local networking group last week about presenting and public speaking and came up with a metaphor for one of the powerful techniques derived from hypnosis of creating speeches that really, truly work.

It’s a bit like filling an empty cupboard with stuff.

You can, if you want, just try to cram it all in there, and it may well fit too. However, you might not be able to get at the stuff you need to use most often, you may not be able to find that really important thing when you’re most in need of it, and you won’t be able to find what you need quickly either. You may not even be able to open the door without it all falling out all over you.

No. What most sensible people do is sort through all the stuff they want to store and then work out some system for putting it all in there so the most useful or vital things are easily accessible, and so that the order in which things are stored makes sense and makes it easy to find what you need when you need it. And they also DON’T put anything in there that isn’t of use any more, is irrelevant or broken or might’ve been interesting at the time but has no real practical use.

For a presentation or speech to work properly we need to go through the same process – create the right mental space in the audience to receive what we’re about to talk about, put all the things we offer them in the best places in the best order for them to access and use it and make it easy to sort through it afterwards, and just as importantly, we DON’T say anything that isn’t vital to the goal for our presentation.

However, if you want to know exactly HOW you do that, drop me a line at steve@iceandlemon.com and we can talk some more…