One Minute = One Hour.

Yesterday, my TEDxEast (New York) colleague and I hosted the first ever webinar in the TEDx Learning Series (that we coined) for TEDx organizers literally around the world.  Of course I was ambitious to take on my first webinar with such a broad audience, but our evaluations were off the charts, so luckily success prevailed.  The topic was speaker preparation - and how to get the most out of working with speaker prospects for a TEDx event.

While I’ve been spending some time working on a speaker coaching and presentation training modules for my own business, this webinar allowed me to hone my own presentation skills.  I reinforced that the following holds true for me, just as it does for everyone else!  The take-away:

For every minute that I present, it takes at least an hour to prepare.  When I was a speechwriter, the same held true.  My principal would speak for 5 minutes, we’d spend a collective 5 hours getting ready.   That included concepting, research, drafting, editing, practicing, event logistics prep and so on.

In this case, over the course of the last 2 months, I wrote a white paper on speaker prep (now housed on www.ted.com), re-wrote it with Julie (from New York) into a slide deck, wrote an accompanying script, an evaluation, practiced and practiced the content, then we worked on timing.  Next was learning to multi-task in the webinar platform  (gotowebinar.com), re-writing crib notes, uploading it to the right computer, practice again and then finally, the actual event.

The webinar was an hour total, our presentation was 40 minutes before questions, and my part was 20 minutes.  And sure enough, I can easily account for at least 20 hours of work into it.  I’m not complaining - the experience was actually somewhere between invaluable and fun.  But as I reflect on what it took me to prepare, I’m just reminded a really effective presentation is a marathon with a long training lead  - that is if you want to finish and not be a mess!

And one post script - thanks to Brad Kleinman from Worksmart and e-marketing strategies in Cleveland.  He coached us through every step of the strategy to execution in this webinar platform.  Everyone needs a Brad!

Here is the recorded webinar from yesterday.