‘I’ Before ‘E’

It still comes in handy just about every day for me.

Aside from helping me spell, the rhyme is a super way to get a vital message out. It goes like this:

You cannot educate, entice or engage people without interesting them in what you have to say or offer first, unless they’re already converted.

There we have it:

Interest people before Engaging, Enticing or Educating them, unless they are already Converted – and therefore open to your ‘E’s.

So many intelligent people with so much to share fail miserably at getting their nuggets of wisdom across. Why? Because they want to get on their soap-box and tell everyone what they ‘need to know’. They want to educate, inform, lecture, all in the space of an interview with the media or a speech. 

It doesn’t work like that. Doing this is more talking ‘at’ people, not to them, and it’s a turn-off. People won’t stay with you, they won’t listen to what you have to share.

However, if you pique someone’s interest, make it relevant to them and give them context, they can do all manner of things to find out more.

They can google for a start, or chat with their friends about the thing that you said that caught their attention. How great would that be?

And so, my thoughts for you today are:

I before E except after C.

Interest people before engaging or educating, unless they’re converts.

Don’t give me google.

Don’t start your speech or media interview with reams of (boring) background information, history or similar. People can, and will, do this later if you’ve succeeded in interesting them in your work/ mission/ product.

No one will remember.

All that effort – crafting tomes of information – is lost if you don’t use the 2 points above, with a special focus on the one  (ok maybe two) things that you want people to take away from what you’re saying.

State the obvious.

It might be obvious to you, but not others.

Why should I care.

Start with why your thing is important. Start with why people should listen, why they should care. If you make a great case for this, you’re sorted. Do it by speaking the rest of these sentences: “This is important because….” and “You should care about this because….”.

All together now: ‘I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’.

#PR #PublicRelations #PublicSpeaking #Media #BeingInterviewed #ThinkBeforeYouSpeak