Today is Take a Second Look Day. That means it's a day to repurpose, reuse, or redistribute your content. It can apply to anything in your life. Since many public speakers freeze when they have to prepare a speech or presentation, I thought it would be valuable to apply this "Take a Second Look" concept to preparing a presentation.
Panel Presentations
Let's say you're asked to speak on a panel or to give a stand-up presentation on your topic of expertise. You're staring at a blank piece of paper and wondering how to begin. Who says you have to start from scratch? Use what you already have done. Take a look at past presentations, documents, proposals, blogs, and articles you're written. What is the main topic or theme? How can you repackage it?
If you wrote an article or white paper on Leadership Trends, you can easily turn that into a five or ten minute panel presentation. Identify the main trends, and give a short example for each idea.
Keynote Speech Next, create a keynote from the same article. Instead of listing 10 or 15 trends, take the three most important ideas and flesh them out with stories, humor, and statistics. As you present them to the audience, contrast and compare those trends to the past and present happenings. End with a call to action.
Seminars and Workshops For a seminar or workshop, the emphasis is on skills-building not ideas. Begin the first part of the workshop by introducing the top trends just as you did in your original article. Interaction and engagement are especially crucial to your speaking success when delivering a seminar. So, you can build in a quiz or matching game to test their knowledge of the trends. Once they know the trends, you'll need to speak about the skills to master those trends. After the audience learns about the trends and skills, they 'll need to practice them. The remainder of the workshop or seminar could be skills practice through videos, demonstrations, role plays, case studies, or presentations.
But it doesn't have to end there. You can further repurpose your content by recording a one to two minute podcast or video and post it to youtube.
Proposals What if you're asked to present a proposal? No sweat. Create a blank template from a past proposal. Fill in the blank sections with your ideas and data. Reusing a past proposal will cut down on preparation time. My clients tell me that using my speech writing template helps them to more easily create presentations.
Public speaking is going to continue to be a skill that is in demand. You can no longer avoid giving presentations. But it doesn't have to be difficult. The next time you have to create a speech or presentation, don't sweat it. Simply take a second look.