How To Prepare a Speech in Five Minutes

Have you ever been asked or told to make a presentation with little lead time? In my business career there were times when I was strongly requested to make a presentation in very short order.  I had a lot of experience at work and in Toastmasters so I developed a simple approach to these situations.  You might find the approach helpful.

Every speech should have structure, kind of a table of contents that helps you organize your ideas, and then for the audience to follow along. It’s my practice near the start of a speech to tell the audience the structure, and as the speech concludes to remind them of the structure. Even if your speech is almost entirely a story, you can apply a helpful structure such as lesson learned, story itself, how to apply the lesson in other situations.

Past-Present-Future

My starting point for most presentations is past-present-future. This is a simple routine for me.  If you struggle to even start preparation for a presentation, begin with past-present-future. Your product may evolve, but you’ll be off to a great start.  

With this structure, the time frame doesn’t matter. The time frame could be this morning, now, later today. It could be last quarter, this quarter, next steps. It could be 1967, current results, improving current results. It could be how we got here, current situation, options for progress.

Having a plan for impromptu or planned speeches provides speakers with confidence which will be apparent to audiences.  Such structure is helpful to audiences as well as they will hear and interpret the organization. We like organization.  People may disagree with your message, but they’ll feel the message was well delivered, because they heard structure.

Other Structures

There are many other structures available, but in my opinion, none are as simple and intuitive as past-present-future.

For your consideration, another structure is A-I-D-A, for Attention-Interest-Desire-Action. Another is O-B-A for Opening, Body, Conclusion, which I find is far too rudimentary. 

 

Practice, Practice, Practice

I have been a member of Toastmasters since 1987 and I remain for many reasons. One is to regularly practice these skills including 2-minute impromptu speeches and quickly prepared 5–7-minute speeches.  Public speaking is a skill and skills require practice if you expect them to be sharp.