What? Isn’t that an oxymoron? How can you plan your spontaneity?
Good communicators are prepared. They know how they want to affect their audience, and they create something especially for them.
As audience members, we know immediately when someone hasn’t prepared for us, right? Unprepared speakers ramble, they go off on tangents, and they talk too long to no apparent end. Sometimes you can actually see the moment when they realize they don’t know what to say next or how to end their talk. It’s like they’ve just walked right off the edge of a cliff, Wile E. Coyote style.
But there’s danger on the other end of the spectrum, too. Someone who is over-prepared can seem robotic—they will get through the entire presentation word for word no matter what happens in the room. Or they can seem too polished, too slick.
The glorious middle ground is this place of planned spontaneity. You know what you want to say and how. You’ve thought a lot about who you’ll be talking to and how you want them to feel as a result of what you say. And yet, you leave room for something new to occur to you, within the framework of your plan. You know that the most genuine moments can happen when you are able to acknowledge someone in the room, work in a reference to a comment made earlier, or when a brand-new and most perfect analogy or expression surfaces in your mind.
Prepare. Then leave room for the magic to happen.
