As a pageant contestant, you know the importance of being memorable in your conversations, speeches, and especially your interview. You’ve got to be the kinda woman that leaves an impression on people’s minds and hearts.
A boring platform speech won’t get you to the Oscars and an interview that holds no unique qualities won’t be memorable. The key to wow-ing your audience of listeners is to infuse certain elements into your conversation, interview, and public speeches that will leave a lasting impression and be memorable and valuable to the listeners.
In this episode, I want to share with you the 3 things you can infuse into every conversation you have to stand out, be memorable, and provide immense value.
I fell in love with public speaking in high school and then in college I was speaking about once a month, sometimes more. It wasn’t until graduate school and as a professional that I really began to hone my skills and study speaking. When I moved to Los Angeles, I signed on with a professional public speaking brokerage and learned so much more as an on camera host and entertainment professional.
The skills I learned during these moments would’ve been so valuable to me as a 20-something-year-old pageant woman. As you know, pageant titleholders are constantly invited to present workshops, trainings, and give speeches across their community.
Today I’ll share one lesson I learned is that the more memorable and valuable your speech is, the more invitations you’ll receive and the higher the payment you can demand. These tips can be used in speeches, interviews, personal conversations. No matter what form of communication, the three things that people remember and value are the same.
1. Insights
Tell them something about themselves they didn’t know or weren’t aware of. If you’ve done a strategy call or coaching with me, you know that this is a well-oiled skill I have to share things that you may not have seen.
For example, during mock interviews, I always ask the contestant to describe 3 of her greatest strengths. This about what you would say right now. I can guess you’ll say at least 2 of the following 5 adjectives: passionate, hard working, compassionate, fun, people-person. I’ve been doing this for years and these 5 things are the most common adjectives and nearly every woman says them. When I share this type of insight and I’m spot-on, women are shocked and it makes the conversation memorable.
2. Stats and stories
Things that they can share to make them look smart or funny. Facebook statistics show that the most shared content is the content that makes the sharer appear smart or funny. Of course! We aren’t going to be motivated to share something that’s ignorant or bland. We want to pass along information to others that we are impacted by in a positive way.
I happen to not be a very comical person, so the best examples of funny speeches would be commencement addresses by comedians like Jim Carey.
For me, I lean more into statistics and stories that make people feel smart when they retell it or think of it again. When I was competing, the focus of my platform was fitness and health. During my research in the development of my platform, I found that of all the people that exercised regularly, when they were asked what their motivation was to exercise, the majority did not say to lose weight, to be healthy, to get ripped abs, nor even to release stress. An astounding majority said these words, To get a better body. That is why the title and focus of my platform is to help people around the world to get a better body.
3. Actionable content
Actions that they can implement easily and immediately. Actionable content is the most valuable because it allows people to implement change and see immediate benefits.
The more value you bring to a speech, interview, or conversation that more you are worth.
Actionable steps could be as simple as downloading an app, being conscious of a habit, or replacing certain food choices. For example, I’ll give you one right now.
Think of the one area of your physical body that you want to tone or strengthen just pick one. Now, think of one, easy move that you could do to strengthen that area of your body no matter where you are or what you’re wearing. You may have selected your thighs and thought of doing laying leg lifts on the couch in front of the tv or first thing in the morning before you get outta bed. Your simple action step that you can implement immediately to start seeing results is: Do this one exercise every single day for a month. Just the one exercise for the one body part once per day for an entire month. I bet it’s more than you’re doing now, right? I promise, you will see results.
That simple action step is memorable and actionable. You of course can’t control who are the dreamers and who are the do-ers that will actually take action, but you are memorable and valuable.
Your challenge this week is to implement just one of these three concepts into a conversations that you have today. You don’t have to write a speech or schedule an interview. Just practice these concepts in everyday life.
And that, my dear, is how you win a pageant.
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