The importance of goal-setting is often overlooked when preparing for any presentation. It is crucial that you begin with the end in mind.

Ask yourself 3 questions:

• “What do I want to achieve from my speech?”
• “What do I want my audience to receive?”
• “What do I want my audience to do next?”

The purpose of your presentation can range from creating awareness, fostering understanding, generating impact, selling a product, or even to inspire your audience. Remember that the main reason why you’re presenting in the first place is to give, not gain. The associated benefits to this principle are endless and could provide enough material for a separate book!

As such, your goals should be aligned with allowing your audience to benefit from your presentation. Your purpose-setting must be extremely clear, not just to yourself, but to your audience as well. This helps them internally craft the benefits they will gain from listening to you.

Make It Easier and Better – Have a Specific Purpose

The biggest mistake of public speaking is when you start with the wrong purpose in mind. Mediocre speakers operate without a specific purpose which can easily cause stress and anxiety. The nature of your purpose is just as important as the purpose itself. Many speakers often mistakenly assume or even subconsciously decide that their purpose is audience validation and approval. Wrong. This is completely foolish. This causes great pressure on the speaker to be absolutely perfect in order to win unanimous approval and this causes a great deal of anxiety.

Give To Your Audience

Once you’ve established the purpose of your presentation, you can easily craft your presentation around it in order for it to be achieved. Remember that the essence of public speaking is not to GAIN something, but to GIVE something.

When you operate with that frame of mind, you automatically tune your body language, tone of voice and craft content that is useful for your audience. With that, you immediately attract the attention of the majority.

To conclude this section, here’s a quick summary. Before even writing your speech, you need to clearly define your objectives and ask yourself, “What do you want to achieve with this?” and to set goals that benefit not just yourself, but your audience as well. Once you have identified the purpose of your speech, you can move on to start planning your speech.