{"id":9624,"date":"2025-05-28T19:46:35","date_gmt":"2025-05-28T19:46:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/onspeaking.com\/?p=9624"},"modified":"2025-05-28T19:46:35","modified_gmt":"2025-05-28T19:46:35","slug":"talk-about-what-your-audience-wants-to-hear-katla-nordic-leadership-day-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/onspeaking.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/28\/talk-about-what-your-audience-wants-to-hear-katla-nordic-leadership-day-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Talk About What Your Audience Wants to Hear. Case Study: KATLA Nordic Leadership Day 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Ioana

Photo by Pedro Jose Borges-Nielsen<\/p><\/div>\n

Communication has been shaping history since … well… forever!<\/p>\n

What project gets funded, whose idea gets shared, who gets elected – to give but a few examples – are all decided by:<\/p>\n

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  1. who speaks up;<\/li>\n
  2. who does it well;<\/li>\n
  3. who does it again and again and again!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The trouble with this is… if the same people keep speaking up, the same ideas (and systems!) will keep shaping how we live.<\/p>\n

    Part of the reason I do what I do is to enable more voices to express more ideas – ideas we never even knew existed! \ud83e\udd29
    \nSo that we all have more options to choose from, when we decide how we want to live.<\/p>\n

    So I absolutely loved talking to the KATLA Nordic<\/a><\/strong> community about how we can all speak up more authentically,\u00a0more easily, and with more impact \ud83c\udf99\ufe0f as part of their Leadership Day on 17 May 2025.<\/p>\n

    Before I go into how I prepared, here’s the feedback I got at the end of my talk:<\/p>\n

    \"Ioana<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

    <\/h3>\n

    How I made this happen<\/h4>\n
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    You know those speakers who have a plug-and-play slide deck that they use at all events, for all audiences? Maybe they change an example or two, but essentially, they’re ready to go if they get booked for a talk tomorrow.<\/p>\n

    Sometimes, I wish I could be like that.<\/p>\n

    I wish I didn’t have to spend weeks\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>preparing every single talk, workshop, and presentation I give.<\/p>\n

    But every time I think “Ok, now I’ve got it, I can reuse this” – a new client comes along and I just can’t help but ask them the one question that always gets me into trouble:\u00a0What’s important for YOU?\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>Because it’s not about what I think is interesting to share. It’s about what they <\/em><\/strong>need.<\/p>\n

    So here’s the process I went through while preparing for this talk:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    • I copied out the initial email I got from the event organiser and underlined the key words.<\/li>\n
    • I brainstormed and jotted down some ideas I thought might be useful, around each key word, without locking myself into any one of them.<\/li>\n
    • I asked the event organiser for a briefing call to align on which of these would be most useful for their guests.<\/li>\n
    • During that briefing*, I asked the following questions:\n
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      1. \n
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        1. Who are the attendees?<\/li>\n
        2. What\u2019s the reasoning behind the theme? What need does it answer? What does it mean to the community?<\/li>\n
        3. What are some of the current challenges of the KATLA members?<\/li>\n
        4. What should this talk do? Inspire, teach, start conversations, move to action?<\/li>\n
        5. What\u2019s important to you as a steward of the community?<\/li>\n
        6. Will there be other speakers? What will they be talking about?<\/li>\n
        7. How big is the room? What’s the set-up? (round tables, amphitheatre, etc; important to know what type of interaction is possible)<\/li>\n
        8. Where in the line-up would I be placed? (important to know what the energy needs to be)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
        9. I went back to my notes and selected only those ideas that overlapped with the answers I got from the briefing call.<\/li>\n
        10. From all the ideas I had left, I asked myself: what’s the one idea that, if adopted, will impact all the other aspects of communication I would like to cover?<\/li>\n
        11. I used that one idea as my\u00a0one core message\u00a0<\/strong>and built my talk around it: I wanted to encourage the participants to stop chasing some generic idea of “Executive Presence”, as seen in the media, and\u00a0 instead, to explore what Authentic Leadership looks like when it\u2019s rooted in ourselves.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

          *A big thumbs up to Hrefna Gu\u00f0r\u00fan P\u00e9tursd\u00f3ttir who was an incredibly supportive event organiser, answered all of my questions in detail and made my entire experience as a speaker a super smooth one!<\/p>\n

          The result:<\/p>\n\n\t\t