Now that you feel ready to start speaking, I want to work with you on starting to create your content. The biggest mistake that people make when they're going to write a speech is to start with this slide. Many speakers want to use slides, usually PowerPoint, there's nothing wrong with using slides, as long as they're good. And I'll come back to that another time. But using slides as a way of speech writing is a mistake. And that's because it takes a long time, you will get lost in working on bullet points and transitions and animations.

And before you know it, three hours have gone by and you really have not finished the speech. Let me introduce to you a different way of doing it. I call this the speaking success postcard. And this theory is that you should be able to write your whole speech on a postcard sized piece of paper, just like this. Mark's done this summarized title of speech, three points and a conclusion. What you want to do to do this exercise, take a postcard sized piece of paper, and think about what your central message is going to be, first of all, that will help you create and edit content so that you're not getting distracted.

Next, I want you to ask yourself, How do I want people to feel? This is often a question that we don't ask. But it's very important if you want to win hearts as well as minds. So think about how you feel about the things you're saying. And what do you want them to feel? And then think about how that emotion can go in there in the form of story, for example, and also in how you're using your tone of voice.

Next, what do you want them to think? What do you think? What's your opinion on this? Do you have an original take on this topic? And what do you want them to conclude when you're saying it, you might need to point them towards that conclusion and not assume that they'll make you by themselves, and finally, what would you like them to do as a result of what you've said? This is surprisingly often overlooked, I think.

But having a call to action in a speech makes it far more engaging because people have to use different parts of the brain when they're considering taking action compared to when they're just listening to information. So I call this no think feel and do and if you start to reduce that down, it should ideally all fit on one postcard. Have a go at that now, and let me know how you getting on with this first stage of creating some content