Welcome to Leading Forward, where we focus on building healthy leaders for healthy organizations. I'm Matthew Hall, and I am bringing you this week's leadership checkpoint. Vivek and Andrea and Ben will be back the next time we're together. But this one comes from me, and it has to do with something I hear a good bit from, particularly people who are maybe earlier in their careers, or they're just now at a point where they're being asked to give more presentations, reports, and the stakes feel like they're going up. It's not just kind of giving a report in a small meeting within your department. It's sometimes giving a report to your board of governors or directors or trustees or giving a report to one of your senior officers of the company, or doing something in a more public setting where honestly your anxiety levels start to elevate just a little bit. So I want to give you just some basic guidelines, some suggestions on how you can be more proactive and better prepared to communicate verbally in a context. Whatever you're in, whatever the context you're in, you can use these. They're pretty transferable. And again, I am not suggesting that I have got all this figured out. All of us are always learning, always growing, always trying to improve in our spoken communication. It matters a lot though. So here's just a few things I have found helpful and I'm going to share with you how you can be a better verbal communicator in public speaking. One is here's where I'd start. Write yourself clear. Write yourself clear. What do I mean by that? Don't try to go up and do it extemporaneously. There are a handful of people in the world who can do that. But if you think about the most effective public speakers you know, even if it comes off as really natural and fluid and compelling and moving, chances are that person spent a lot of time that you never saw well before that writing their talk out, writing their communication out on paper, on a screen, on a keyboard, whatever the medium, they had to write themselves to clarity. So even if it's on the back of a note card, whatever it is, write out your main ideas, write out where you're going. And I would say, as you're just starting, you may want to write it out word for word. Now, please hear me. Please don't read it. There are very few occasions in which it's going to move anybody or be effective to just read out something that you've written. That is most of the time, 99% of the time, not going to work. But I find for myself the task of writing forces me to get clear. And I just want to tell you, as a communicator, before you are anything else, you've got to be clear. If you're not clear, it's not going to matter how passionate or how compelling you are if you're just absolutely confusing. So focus first on writing yourself clear. Secondly, lucid brevity. Now that sounds like antiquated language, maybe. Effective communication needs lucid brevity. Well, you heard a little bit about the clarity there, the lucidity of it. You have to be clear. But you also want to find a way to do it in the most succinct way possible. Don't waste words. I'll admit to you, I struggle with this one. I my my family knows I don't mind talking. And I can sometimes be prone to use three sentences when one will do. And so you have to find a way to have economy of words. Don't waste your words. Say it, make it clear, and then move on to the next point. I think if I keep talking about that, I'm going to contradict the very thing I'm trying to say to you. So you get the idea. Lucid brevity. Third, here's what I would suggest. You have to answer the question of so what. Answer the so what question. So let's say you make a really clear, focused, and even passionate, moving presentation, whatever the context you're in. If your audience doesn't walk away with some sort of so what, you haven't answered the significance question. Why does this information matter? It may be you're giving a quarterly financial report, but yet guess what? You've still got to answer the so what question. What does this mean? What does this information, this data, what does it mean for our company, for example? You have to get there. If you don't get there, you're not done in your preparation or in your delivery in your public speaking. Answer the so what question. And then fourth, and it flows right out of this, if needed, and most of the time there's probably going to be this needed. What is the call to action? The most effective way I know to end a talk, a message, some sort of public speaking occasion is end it with a call to action. What do you want your audience to do with the information that you've just given them? It may be you're trying to equip some of your fellow colleagues or team members to be more effective in their own work. Explain that, articulate that. What is it that you're hoping they're going to carry out of this meeting, out of this session, out of this talk, and put into practice with their teams within your organization? It may be any number of other things, but you have to make clear what the call to action is. For some of you, it may be calling on donors, for example, to give of uh of their own resources to charitably support your organization. Well, you're gonna have to make the ask, as they say. You're gonna have to be explicit on that and give a compelling call to action. But I think if you can do that, it really helps you finish strong and move people towards meaningful action. So write yourself clear, focus on lucid brevity, answer the so what question, and fourth, give a clear call to action. I think if you can do those four things in your public speaking, you're gonna be a lot more effective, and frankly, you might even enjoy it a bit more. This has been a leadership checkpoint. You can find all of our past episodes at leadingforwardpodcast.com. While you're there, rate and review, share it with a friend, and help us get out the word. I'm Matthew Hall. I'll see you next time.