A lot of the amazing clients I work with have very packed schedules, and sometimes come to their speaker coaching calls feeling scattered or overwhelmed.

What I love to be able to do as a coach is to help them work on their talks and presentations, amidst all their work and life challenges, in a way that is so simple that it can actually be fun. 

I am going to share a simple tool that I use in case you’d like to try it out too. The purpose of it is to break down what feels ‘too big’ into something that is small enough to feel highly doable. 

Let’s work through this together. 

Take a talk that you are working on, or would like to consider. All we are going to do is create a window into your talk. 

Literally….

You see that doodle…It’s one 20 minutes time window. 5 minutes each windowpane.  

You’re not even going to ask your brain to work for 20 minutes if that’s too much. You are going to break it down into 4 boxes of 5 minutes.

Then you can totally make a 5-minute start. It’s up to you if you stop there and come back after other life things. You’ll know what to work on next when you do. Or feel free to move right on to the next 5 minutes if you are on a roll.

You also get to decide what you want to focus on for each windowpane. E.g. it could be…

1) 5 mins – POSSIBLE TITLES

2) 5 mins – MY MAIN POINT

2) 5 mins – IMAGES I MIGHT INCLUDE

3) 5 mins – 3 POSSIBLE ENDINGS 

You get to choose. We are just making a start. 

When I work with clients in this way, they are actually shocked by how much progress they make, and how fun it can be.  Particularly the ones who set really high standards and expectations for themselves. (That’s me too!) Sometimes it can seem like 5 minutes isn’t good enough, or we should wait until we can do more. Then the pressure builds.

Or…we can give ourselves the gift of making a start. A precious window into our talk.

You can apply the same technique to other speaking related tasks too e.g. researching conferences to speak at. Break the task down and make it clearer until it’s so doable that your brain says ‘Yes! Let’s do this.’  

Then congratulate yourself for every bit of progress, and importantly getting into motion, in a focused way. It all adds up.