This morning, when you were brushing your teeth or hair, did you look into the mirror and say to yourself, “Casey, I hope you are perfectly average today?” Probably not. I hope not! Yet, by definition, many of us will be perfectly average today.
I’m not here to assert that you should 10X, 5X, or even 3X your efforts every day. However, I do suggest that you at least take advantage of small opportunities to be above average when they present themselves.
Case in point: Recently, I was at a talk given by a well-known person in her field. I’ll call her Susan because, well, that’s her name.
Susan spoke for just under an hour, consistently delivering relevant information while keeping her audience enthralled. She was certainly a well-above-average speaker until … until she reached the end of her talk.
This is where I believe you should have a compelling conclusion. Susan, however, had no conclusion. After completing her last talking point, she merely said, “You have been a great audience, and I hope you found this information beneficial.” Was her ending terrible? No, not really. Was it average? At best. So what could Susan have said?
If she wanted to keep her ending simple, she could have asked, “What was your greatest takeaway, and how are you going to use that to reach your objectives?” If she wanted to keep the word “beneficial” in her ending, she could have asked, “What did you find most beneficial, and how is that going to make a difference in your work?”
Is either of these examples an incredibly compelling conclusion? Not necessarily. But these little tweaks would have advanced Susan’s ending from average to above average and wouldn’t have required much effort.
So, when determining your talk’s conclusion, arguably the most crucial aspect of your talk, please be sure it is not perfectly average! And the same is true for every other part of your talk.
If you’d like to know more about crafting compelling conclusions, tune in to my QuickBites episode titled, appropriately enough, How to Craft Compelling Conclusions. It was released on July 29, 2021.
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