I lived in Japan for four years. What did I learn?
I learned that there’s a process for everything, and quality comes from thinking it through.
I’ve honed a process that helps me prepare for public talks: from idea to content to stage.
But what I’ve seen is that most people don’t have a process.
And this is what accounts for audience confusion and disengagement—not to mention speaker anxiety. Here are the three moves that make talks feel sharp (and calm your nerves).
1. Focus is a virtue
It takes discipline to be a strong speaker—discipline in your ideas and discernment in how much of them you’ll share.
Too often I see smart people dumping content like an LLM.
They want to share everything they know about a topic.
Usually because they’re passionate, but this can also show up when they feel like they have something to prove.
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If the audience has to do the editing, you’ve already lost them.
That’s not sustainable.
Which is why…the phone.
2. Start with the audience
The way to capture attention is to put your audience at the center of your talk.
Without your audience, your talk is just a monologue at best—a vanity moment at worst.
As the saying goes, “If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.”
Who are these people in front of you? It’s time to get curious.
Here are the questions to ask yourself before creating any content:
- Who is your audience?
- What do they understand, believe, know about your topic right now?
- What objections do you perceive they will have to your content?
- Why should they care?
The bonus here is that focusing on your audience from the beginning helps your nervous system relax because it’s hard to be curious and anxious at the same time.
3 . Clarify objective and intention
“I’m just sharing information.”
I hear this a lot when I ask someone their objective for a talk.
But if you were truly just sharing information, you could send an email.
What happened to the days of great oration, when speakers took the stage to move people? When did we become so safe?
When you stand up in front of people, you’re engaging in rhetoric—whether you mean to or not. You’re shaping belief and action.
This is what it means to be a leader.
So be specific:
- Objective: What do you want your audience to DO after your communication?
- Intention: How do you want them to FEEL so that they are more inclined to do it?
It’s tempting to open your computer and start writing, but a better process is: audience first, objective + intention, content last.
We were given the ability to speak so we could coordinate and collaborate.
That’s why great leaders are great orators.
If you have a talk in the next 30 days, DM me ‘TALK’ with your objective and I’ll help you sharpen it.
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THE BIG PRINT
If the audience has to do the editing, you’ve already lost them.
TAKE IT FROM… Cicero, Rome’s most influential orator.
Cicero believed persuasion begins with understanding the audience.
His speeches were more than eloquent, they were strategic—grounded in what people believed, feared, and needed to hear.
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