Create the structure

- Every great speech has a clear beginning, middle and end. The beginning tends to be a bit short and to the point. The main goal here is to set up the problem or challenge that makes your keynote necessary. What's the interesting or critical situation that we all need to think about? And what is it that you will suggest we should do? It's common to deliver your main assertion up front to let the audience know exactly where you're going. The middle section is intentionally longer to ensure you can properly deliver a few key points to support your main assertion and build momentum towards some form of climax. You've described the situation and shared your main idea or solution and now you defend it and sell it to the audience with good content, delivered correctly. Typically you'll use three to four main points to support the solution you're offering. Finally, we have the end section, which like the beginning tends to be very focused and shorter. Here is where you typically use a very brief summary, possibly one final example to highlight your proposed solution, and then a call to action, which is just you asking the audience to do something very specific, whether that is to adopt a new tool or support a new proposed regulation. So this is where I want you to start, with structure not the actual content. Okay, to kick start your planning be sure you know exactly how much time you're going to have to deliver your keynote. For example, let's say you're given 30 minutes to deliver. A common way to divide that up would be three minutes for the beginning, three mains points that each have eight minutes of time, and a three minute closing. Keep in mind there is no perfect formula here. If you learn how to deliver your content effectively you can change these numbers a little and it shouldn't be a problem at all. If they give you one full hour you might decide to use a five minute opening, five main points each with 10 minutes of time, and five minutes to close. There is no perfect balance here. But do keep in mind your time constraints. If for example you have an hour and you plan out an hour, you risk not wrapping up in time, and no one likes it when a speech runs long. On the other hand if you plan for 50 minutes and run long for five full minutes, you're still under your allotted one hour. When you define your initial structure I also want you to remain flexible. As you begin to fill in your structure with actual content you're likely to find some sections need to shrink and others need to expand to accommodate the chunks of content you wish to share. That's normal, not a problem. Okay, now you understand structure and we can start thinking about what great content looks like.