Hey, girl! Welcome to the Win A Pageant podcast, I’m your coach, Alycia Darby. There are plenty of opportunities for you to answer questions during your pageant interview, on-stage question, introduction, pre-pageant media it can get overwhelming to prepare if you have no specific plan.
Most women want to be so perfect, so they craft these elaborate answers to every question under the sun.
“Ok, if they ask me why I chose to study science, I’ll say…”
“If they ask me what my favorite subject is, I’ll say…”
It seems like a great idea. Especially if they give you the questions in advance like many pageants do. I was working with a client in Pennsylvania who was given all 50 possible questions that could be asked on stage. Before our coaching call, she started writing different answers (all truly wonderful) to each question. It took her forever and when I asked her one of them she would scroll through her long word doc to find her answer and ….. it was awful.
Don’t do that. Writing Your pageant answers is a huge mistake! Instead, I’m gonna teach you what I taught her to help you overcome this crazy desire to be overly (and obnoxiously) prepared.
Writing out answers to possible questions will inevitably confuse you, force you to stay within a box you created for yourself, hinder your personality, and drive you crazy! Ha!
Instead, I want you to plan your answers.
Lump them into categories
If you get a pile of possible questions, like my client did, first lump them into categories. It’s likely they are asking the same thing in many different ways. Make big categories like education, platform, passions, family, memories, etc. I did this for my client and the questions fit into three main categories:
1. why did you choose your platform
2. What have you done with your platform
3. What are your platform goals.
Of course the questions were all different like “If you win, what will you want to accomplish?” and “If you had $5,000 to spend on your platform, what you would do with it?” One solid answer will fit both of these questions… see what I mean?
Analogy for Planning Answers
When you plan your answers, it’s like spilling a box of Legos onto the floor in front of you. If a judge asks you for a blue one, you can quickly grab a blue one. If you don’t have the Legos in front of you when you’re asked for a blue one, you gotta walk to your kid brother’s toy chest, dig out the Legos box and then spill it on the floor. Or worse you gotta drive to Target to buy Legos! That’s how it feels when you get asked a question and you haven’t planned an answer for it. Or you are asked for a blue and you only have red and yellow.
This analogy is sorta silly, but I think you get what I mean.
You need to plan a story to share for a variety of life categories, not specific answers.
Lemme give you an example. Let’s say that I want to communicate that I raised $25,000 for my platform in a week with a kick-starter campaign. That’s the answer. It will work with many different questions like:
Q: “If you won, what would you do first for your platform?”
A: I would launch another campaign! Last year I launched a kick-starter campaign that raised $25,000 for my platform. I’d plan another launch for 6 months from now and use every appearance and social media opportunity to get people excited about it so when it launches it would quadruple the success!
Q: “How would you spend $5,000 toward your platform?”
A: I’d hire a kick-starter expert. Last year I launched a kick-starter campaign that raised $25,000 for my platform. I did it all from my own skill set, but with the help of an expert, it’s likely I’d be able to 10x that result!
Q: “What is your biggest accomplishment?”
A: My kick-starter campaign
Q: “What legacy do you want to leave?”
A: Kick-starter fundraising success!
See what’s happening here? I’m using the same planned answer – not memorized or written out – to respond to similar questions.
Most women want to say more, but the key here is to only have a few Legos on the floor in front of you and each one of them is excellent. When you plan your answers you prepare enough Legos to respond with excellence and not be overwhelmed.
This is a Game Changer! When you unlock this strategy, you unlock a whole lot of space in your brain and you streamline your message to make sense to the judges in a very short amount of time.
And that, my dear, is how you win a pageant.
I’m honored that you’d join me on the Win A Pageant podcast. If this podcast has been a blessing to you this year, then I’d love for you to share it with someone. This time of year is a great opportunity to catch up on old podcast trainings and if you shared it with someone else they may enjoy listening during holiday travels or while you’re on break from school and work. You can text it or email a link to someone straight from the podcast app, or send them to WinAPageant.com/Podcast.
It’d also be a beautiful gift to me! I put a lot of work into bringing you these podcasts each week and it would mean the world to me if you would share it with some of your pageant sisters. God blesses you so you are able to bless others!
This holiday season I’m traveling with my husband and our friends to explore Vietnam and Cambodia. I’ll be back on January 9th, so the next podcast will be on Win-A-Pageant Wednesday, January 11th.
Have a blessed holiday season and be sure to bless everyone around you!
Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you in the new year!
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