10.25.2007

Group's Effective Communicators' Summit-- Day 3

Level 1 of the summit finished up today, so I'm flying home in the morning, and today was the moment of truth.

I gave my 20-minute message today, and then had 1-on-1 time with a coach who walked me through the tape and pointed out some things.

T showed me today that I need to spend more time preparing the normal messages that I do, which are 2 minutes and 10 minutes, on Sundays and Wednesdays, because there's so little time to get the point across that they need extra polish.

He also said that when I have the chance to give longer messages, for example on retreats, I should replace a lot of my talking time with time for my students to discover with each other the points that I want them to know. They also need time to work out how to apply it.

This actually goes right along with my teaching courses. It's applying it and investing the time that will be the trick.

But I also worked out a little strategy for it. When I go into a message, I've discovered, what I need is an outline of the points I want to make and the questions I want to ask, and a few illustrations that go along with it. I don't actually work as well with every word written out. And if the group I'm speaking to is discovering a lot of my material themselves, I'll need to be quick on my feet to respond to them.

This year I've been committing to improving my planning (by doing more of it in advance), my standard material (things I use over again and just needed to write down) and my speaking (first by doing more of it, second by reflecting on it and doing training like this.

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