The Ability to Express Yourself in Thirty Seconds
Life is a short description, you promote your skills while looking for a job, or your products when you want to work, even when you ask for a date with your partner, you are self-promoting.
Time is simply the greatest problem you encounter when speaking in any field of life. If you have an extensive life story, unique interests and personality, how do you shorten your first meeting to a few seconds?
Speaking quickly appears to be a skill that only start-ups or telemarketers need. However, the truth is that we must all speak each day, often with greater limits.
Communicating, not selling:
The idea of selling often disturbs me, it evokes in my mind images of used car sellers or advertisements for miraculous pills, or promotion of dubious products at a discount can we not be honest, and why should we put our principles at risk?
I fully agree with this proposal. We need to be honest and never try to meet anyone again, send that first email, or ask for a date, cheat or manipulate.
However, this doesn’t change the main problem, even if you don’t try to handle, you still need to express yourself skilfully, so that good people want to know more about you, and not waste your time with bad people, whether your goal is to sell or simply to promote yourself, you still need to give a brief presentation.
Why Elevator Pitch is important?
The name Elevator Pitch derives from the hypothetical situation:
You are in an elevator with a significant customer or prospective investor, you have only a short time between the ground floor and the top floor to get him interested in your idea before he leaves, so what do you think?
Maybe the greatest value I got from my comprehensive business school training was the chance to practice the elevator pitch. I am certainly not competent, but this practice has opened my eyes to the frequency with which we must promote ourselves on short notice, and to the difficulty of doing so skilfully.
Actually, the traditional elevator talk makes work easy. When you happen to meet a person, you are not supposed to list your characteristic in front of him quickly, but rather you should express yourself with precision and skill in many cases.
What are the ingredients for a successful promotion?
There are several things to make a good speech. Confidence, shortness, interest and relaxation are evident. The same goes for devotion to practise, soliciting feedback, observing what works and what doesn’t.
One thing that strikes me over and over again is the concept stored in our memory, the idea that, in general, collects more information about a person using stereotyped signals.
Ideas stored: Do we think stereotypical?
The basic idea is that because the human brain is incapable of handling complex ideas quickly, cognitive researchers believe that a big way for the brain to make meaningful decisions is to pre-process thoughts. This means it’s a lot easier to follow an already memorised idea than to think of anything new each time you stumble upon it.
A good example of writing an essay is to guess what kind of arguments I will have to support my point of view if I use the following words:
- Sobriety.
- Classifying.
- Drainage.
Now let’s compare that if you used the following words:
- Intensive focus.
- Organisational.
- Fit in as fully as possible.
Indeed, pairs of words may also be synonymous. Simplicity and focus are often used in contexts of very different tests types, but they basically represent the same idea.
However, when I use the word simplicity, I get a great deal of pre- tortured mental associations, which are different when I use the word intense concentration, if you are like me, then simplicity evokes a state of calm and inner peace away from anxiety, while intense concentration implies obsessional ambition, even though the two words had the same practical results.
Is the elevator tougher on special people?
Remembering thoughts mean it’s much easier to express yourself when you project a stereotype. Whether you are a pro player or a computer expert, the way you speak risks strengthening these associations in the mind of the other person.
But what about that mathematician who is a vegetarian and a mathematical follower? Or a computer expert who is a world-class tango instructor and actor?
I think the lucky ones have a much better chance of succeeding in those situations. If you categorise easily, it’s hard to mess up your first presentation, but it is also hard to awaken people’s curiosity, and if you can hide stereotypes, you are likely to interest others, but in this case, others may misunderstand you.
Improve elevator conversation at work and in personal life:
As I said earlier, I am not an expert in self-promotion, it look me almost four years to create an appropriate two-sentence description of the Code and my resume, and I am still not satisfied. Improving elevator conversations and my ability to communicate has been a constant goal over the last few years.
Here are just a few of the steps I took to improve your first 30 seconds:
1. Focus on the effect of words:
I try not to use merely technical words to prevent misunderstandings.
2. Inconsistency in starting promotion:
By showing inconsistency in your own expression at the beginning of your presentation, you find that you may temporarily disturb the normal response to the rating. If I meet a language programmer who also practises dance, I will be more willing to accept other features that do not match the stereotypes I have of this person.
3. It’s all about the image you want to display:
The clothes you wear, the way you talk, body language, and anything that expresses your offer, I really try to notice when those things don’t fit the picture I want to project to the other side.
4. Find the easiest way to provide information:
The best presentations don’t tell the story of what you’re trying to promote. It’s easy for good presenters to leave the impression that they’re not trying to promote something.
5. Note ideas stored in other people’s memory:
Try to find out what triggers the original impressions on the minds of others.