The Key to Creating a Signature Talk with Impact

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

Uh, oh, I thought. Did I say something wrong?

“I’m sitting here with my mouth wide open. I’m blown away.”

So said my client at the 55 minute mark of our hour-long coaching session about her signature talk.

It wasn’t because we had fine-tuned her slides (which we had done).

It wasn’t because we had re-ordered part of her presentation (which we also had done).

It was because we had come up with a larger – and much more lucrative – market and message for her.

Just like that, in a span of two minutes, her entire brand pivoted. And she was simultaneously stunned and excited.

The Back Story

Of course, it didn’t take just two minutes to get to this revelation.

It was the 55 minutes we had previously spent on the call going through her existing presentation and considering which audiences she could speak to.

It was the time we had spent on an earlier call talking about her life and work experiences.

It was the culmination of understanding how her particular message, stories, expertise, and point of view could be added to an existing larger conversation.

That kind of recognition takes deep work, undistracted work, focused work.

Going Deep

In “Deep Work” (a book I recently read that has profoundly changed the way I approach my own work), author Cal Newport argues that in our increasingly distracted and multi-tasking world, we’ve lost the ability to go deep, to work on something with intense focus for several hours (or even days) at a time.

Without this ability to go deep, we can’t produce our best work, be creative, be innovative, and truly set ourselves apart.

I believe that’s why these kinds of breakthroughs happen in coaching sessions: we’re not being interrupted or distracted by emails and social media; we’re not trying to multi-task by watching a video and reading an article at the same time.

We’re there to single-mindedly focus on pulling out the core and the threads of your message.

It takes time and effort – deep work – to flesh out your ideas, to connect them with larger conversations about our society and our world, to think about systems and structures and how your signature talk can shift these conversations, assumptions, and perspectives that people have.

This is what people on the TED stages do and why their talks resonate with us and have a global impact.

Interested in finding your connections within the larger conversations and crafting a powerful presentation that makes an impact? Schedule a free call with me and I’ll give you feedback on your ideas.