Walt Grassl and Patricia Fripp
Last week, in part I, I shared my general great feelings about Lady and the Champs. Patricia Fripp, Craig Valentine, Ed Tate and Darren Lacroix put on an inexpensive yet incredibly valuable speaking conference.
On Sunday Feb 23rd, I had the privilege of introducing Hall of Fame Speaker Patricia Fripp for her keynote speech..
Today, I will share some specific take-aways from the conference (and the EDGE members-only summit, which was held the day before):
- The number #1 objective of every story is to elicit emotion. I learned the 10 essential elements of every great story.
- When giving technical presentations, be broad with senior managers and be more detailed with your peers.
- When telling a story, you are like a night watchman. You want to let the good in and keep the bad out.
- In addition to a joke file, a story file and a foundational phrase file, keep a failure file. Don’t be afraid to share your failures and the lessons you learned from them.
- Use specific language.
- When trying to develop new habits, exaggerate them in rehearsal.
- Get coached for education, not validation.
- Your speech should be clean, lean and meaningful.
- You are not making a speech, you are helping people.
- Powerpoint slides are a visual aid, NOT a scripting aid.
- Make the audience curious enough at the beginning for them to want to tell them more.
- The purpose of Toastmasters is … to be good outside of Toastmasters.
- Find the fact that matters.
- Spoken word is for the rhythm.
- When you succeed, give away the credit.
I think these fifteen take-aways are enough for one post. More to follow next week, in part III.