Meeting Days

You Cannot Persuade if not Persuaded

Apparently, you cannot persuade your audience if you cannot persuade yourself. This is the lesson I learnt at Kwanza Kenya Toastmasters Club yesterday.

I set out to deliver a speech for project No. 3 from the Specialty Speeches (item 226E). The project is titled Sell a Product. When I started developing the speech, my aim was to sell a skipping rope. But every time a rehearsed my pitch, I could feel I was not convinced. As a result the speech, as happens with most of my Toastmasters project, deviated from my stated object and I started pitching for exercising with a skipping rope. Several days to the meeting, the speech had become a hodgeponge hybrid of selling a skipping rope, selling the exercise method vs jogging in the morning.

I could feel something was amiss and I seriously considered cancelling taking the speaking. But I remembered I never cancel. I have never canceled in my five years in Toastmasters and I wasn’t going to start now. I kept on hoping that somehow an epiphany would come to illuminate to me what I was trying to say.

While taking the last minute rehearsal outside the club I realised that I did not have a title for the speech. But that should be easy, I said to myself. I only need to look at my speech purpose. I racked my head over it for quite a while before settling on the unique selling point as the speech title. But when I revisited the speech I could not identify the unique selling proposition. What had happened is that in the process of modifying and re-modifying back the speech, the speech’s specific purpose had fallen off the radar. Suddenly I understood what was bothering me. The speech lacked a specific purpose! Yet I knew that the relatively short time required to exercise with a rope was the unique selling point. But it was too late to tune the speech now

The only thing left was to try to fluke through it with a bit of audacity. I did. But neither the audience nor the evaluator was fooled.  As I stepped away from the lectern to a lukewarm applause I knew I had blown it and later the evaluator confirmed the same. I would have been quite disappointed if he did not recommend that I rehash the speech.

I learned that I must always write down the specific purpose.

Following below is the text of the speech speech.

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Specialty Speeches 3. Sell a Product

Time: 10-12 minutes

Objectives:

•           Understand the relationship of sales technique to persuasion.

•           Skillfully use the four steps in a sales presentation: attention, interest, desire, action.

•           Identify and promote a unique selling proposition in a sales presentation.

Title: Exercise – Seven minutes is all you need

Now you can eat whatever you fancy, whatever you want whenever you want safe in the knowledge that you can burn the calories anytime. If intake of extra calories is the major consideration of what you eat fret no more because I have a perfect plan for you. It has worked for me and am sure it can work for.

It is so simple and easy and you don’t even need any fancy machines, heavy weights, or complicated equipment.

All you need is skipping rope

It is simple but effective. It is so light you forget it is in your purse when travelling such that you can take it anywhere with you. Jumping rope is an excellent form of exercise because it is easy to do, inexpensive and requires very little space.

Let us look at three pluses going for it compare to compared to other common and popular exercises routines

1.  It’s a full body workout

Skipping a rope is a holistic exercise. It exercise your entire body from lower legs, to calfs to thighs. It is perfect for burning cellulite. It works your arms and shoulders and neck. Because of it’s fast pace it is excellent as a heart exercise. It encourages gut motility, thus killing flatulence and constipation

Skipping a rope works you mind. As you execute circular motion with your arms and linear motion with your legs, the brains coordination function is being exercised. As you add more and skipping patterns and alternations, the brain grows additional neuron heads to manage the new processes, increasing strength, agility, speed, timing and rhythm.

Skipping a rope is a medium impact exercise. There it increases bone density, but isn’t as hard on your joints as running.

2.  You can do it anywhere

Because it requires very little space, you can do it anywhere. All you require is about five feet long three feet wide and seven eight high. That space is available in a small house – unless yours is the Huruma flat type in which case you should be waiting to be evacuated by the Kindero boys or something worse.

Being able to do it indoor is great news. You don’t have to risk being mugged on the morning-jog while taking in foul air in the freezing rain. Jumping over broken sewer out flows might appear a viable way of practising for steeple chase, but only if you like sailing close to the wind.

Cycling too is fun until you encounter the mad morning drivers under the influence of the next government tender. Again preparing to cycle takes quite a while - You have to get dressed for the weather, get your helmet, test your bicycle out yet you need quite a lengthy ride to feel the heat as it were.

Jumping rope, on the other hand – you just put on some shoes, grab your rope, jump to your heart’s content for a few minutes either inside or outside – and then you can easily go right back to what you were doing! It terms of calories used, one minute skipping the rope is equivalent an hour of running.

I have a minute for one two questions as you tell me whether you would like a green handled or yellow handled one.

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