How to Speak the Way I Make American Pancakes

I love making American style pancakes on a Saturday morning. They have to be fluffy, there has to be a lot of them and they have to have the most amazing toppings – roasted pecans, blueberry compote, bananas, natural yoghurt, maple syrup. It has become a tradition in our family. The ingredients are simple. But get them wrong, too much flour, too little milk, forget to add the baking powder (as I did once) and the whole thing tastes horrible.

Communicating with confidence is much like knowing how to make the best pancakes and doing it again and again and again until it becomes natural. I am 15 years into coaching people to become confident communicators and those ingredients never change. But back-to-back meetings, no time to breathe, AI creating content for you – all of it has the potential to steal from the combination of your unique voice with the message you need to bring. From content creation, to delivery, from listening, to breathing, to your posture, you have to make sure you have the right ingredients. You decide how big the pancakes are, you can pick the toppings. You just need to get the base right. So let’s go!

The eggs
This is the content, the actual stuff you need to say, the data you need to bring. It sits on its own. It has its own life, but raw and unmixed and uncooked it is deeply unpleasant and horrible to eat.

The milk and flour
This is the stuff that makes the mixture with the eggs – the ability to present well, using your voice, your energy, your good posture. But without the eggs it would just be a big gooey mess of no substance.

The baking powder
This is the thing that takes the pancakes from flat to fluffy, from potential to reality. And this really is what I call the structure –how you structure the data in your voice. Here are three things you need to do to ensure the mixture is not just raw egg, or flour only, but mixed well with baking powder.

1. Write and then speak in short sentences.

2. Create scenes out of your data to get a beginning, middle and end. See one piece of powerpoint as one scene. But speak the scenes out in short sentences.

3. Go for a pitch walk. Actually get out for a walk and talk out loud, allowing for other sounds and distractions to get in the way.

If you don’t do these three things your pancakes will remain flat. And it doesn’t matter what you do, they won’t rise, your presentation won’t rise, your pitch won’t grab people’s attention, it will remain flat. It doesn’t require hours of work but it does require a bit of work, leaving your comfort zone, your desk, speaking out loud, making sure those sentences are short, choosing to create scenes instead of endless pieces of text. It is a mindset shift. But it works. I have seen this done thousands of times and I have seen people not want to do it. I dare you, as we head into the month of August, choose to use three elements to bring a lift to your presentations. And if you do them the rest – the data, the voice, the posture – they will follow.

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