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Spadework for Your Elevator Speech

An elevator speech is an indispensable tool for promoting your work. What is an elevator speech? It is a sentence or two that you can deliver in the space of an elevator ride that expresses the essence of your unique offer.

Believe it or not, your elevator speech can be a lovely specimen from the garden that is your practice or business, a unique and authentic expression of the offer that you are and thus an invaluable tool of self promotion. This is the first step in creating such a speech.

Take five minutes and invite into your awareness those aspects of your work that amaze and delight you. Jot down words and short phrases as they occur to you. Don't worry about making sense or connections. You are gathering raw material here and, believe it or not, the less sense you make at this stage, the more authentically you will be able to articulate your passion and purpose later.

Choose two words that you find especially evocative. Trust yourself and go with your instincts here. There are no wrong choices. Look up each word in a dictionary and a thesaurus, faithfully copying the definitions (all of them, even those that seem not to apply) and the synonyms. To go deeper, look up the roots of your words in an etymological dictionary.

Reflect upon these words, their meanings and associations, and write down what you notice. Was there a surprise in what you found? An "Aha!"? A dissonance? A resonance?

Keep your notes in your notebook where you can draw on them whenever you need to tell someone about your work.

Sound Track for Your Elevator Speech

Review your notes from the Spadework for Your Elevator Speech. What theme song would you like to have playing in the background when you use an elevator speech? Get a copy of this song and play it often while you work on your marketing.

Write an Elevator Speech

Drawing on (the work you have done thus far in the course) your spadework, write an elevator speech, a one- or two-sentence statement you can make in 15 seconds or less that introduces you and your unique offer.

Your elevator speech should have the general form, "I do (nature of service) for (ideal client) so that they can (benefit to the client).

Here are two elevator speeches I use:

-- I help independent professionals and artists build great businesses and have lives they love.
-- I help independent professionals market their businesses so their work feeds their souls as well as their bank accounts.

A good elevator speech will most likely evolve over days, weeks, or months. Start the evolutionary process by writing your first draft today. In other words, don't wait for the perfect elevator speech. Write an imperfect one, use it, and the perfect one will evolve in time.