3 ways to ensure you're relevant and relaxed when it really matters (1 of 3)
What I know about you: you want to ensure that you’re relevant (and relaxed), in your day-to-day professional work, and especially on those occasions with heightened visibility.
This could be giving a public lecture, leading a virtual webinar, or speaking at an industry meeting.
You sense (and research backs you up on this) that these high-stakes moments matter more than the minutes allotted--whether it’s an 18 minute TED-style talk, an hour keynote, or even a 1/2 day interactive event or workshop.
These live public moments live on—in meaningful connections fostered and in powerful word of mouth. Simply put, these occasions present you a discrete amount of time with a potentially outsized effect on your work and reputation.
And that’s a good thing. It’s a chance to stretch yourself and your business into (who and) what you want it to become.
Each of the next three weeks, I’m sharing one essential tool or technique for ensuring relevance, and showing you how to put it into practice.
Relevance Tool #1.
Make relevance a (guiding) metric. Obvious, perhaps. Essential, absolutely. Overlooked, often.
Begin by asking what's relevant to your audience. What message do they most need to hear? Here’s a set of questions from a prior blog post on the Rule of One to help you out.
This change alone will shift things for you.
Instead of offering information, you're guiding yourself to offer insight connected to your audience’s concerns. You’ll be addressing the right problem (obstacle, or frustration), with the right frame.
And that’s means you're building a bridge from the audience’s understanding of their situation (what they want or think they need) to a new understanding that you as a subject-matter expert can offer them.
Making relevance a guiding metric keeps you forward thinking, because it keeps you thinking about your ability to be helpful and useful today and every day. It keeps you from falling behind.
You evolve. Your audience evolves. Markets evolve.
Even core, timeless principles need to be interpreted (and sometimes re-constructed) for a modern, changing world to retain their timelessness. I see much of the communication advice I teach in this light. I bet the same is true in your field.
Metrics after all need to be measurable. So how can you measure that you hit the mark? If you’ve ever heard: “That was just the message I needed to hear today” or “Whoa, that rocked my world,” or “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” or simply, “Amen."—it’s a pretty good indication you’ve got relevance dialed-in. Sure you could go ahead and survey your audience on a scale of 1 to 5 to quantify this effect, but for now this more qualitative metric can suffice. It means you created something that mattered.
And that brings us to a paradox at the crux of all this: it is your “relevant to your audience focus" that’s the first step in becoming a strong ambassador for your own work, one that will allow you to build the next phase in your business or career.
Your turn.
Whatever you are working on today. Stop and ask what would make it more relevant.
Where or how is your audience stuck?
What is the single message or insight they most need to hear to move forward? Choosing one will force you to be precise. And that benefits you and your audience.
How could you simply reframe the problem they think they have?
Don’t worry about the exact phrasing—we’ll get to that next week. For now focus on relevant which means incisive and germane….Push for insight.
Your takeaway: Be that beacon for your audience, by adopting relevance as a guiding metric. So that you can use your expertise to help them make things better in their own world.
Stay tuned for next week’s episode of the Relevance Revival.
p.s.: Oh yes, above I said, “relevant and relaxed”--there’s no faster route to feeling professionally relaxed and grounded than knowing you’re prepared to hit the mark. Feel the tension in your neck, shoulders (or stomach) ease when you know you’re presenting a can’t-miss insight.