GirlCode Workshop Elevator Pitch: It’s time to tell your story
We end our Workshop series with the ELEVATOR PITCH.
“There are only two types of speakers in the world. 1. The nervous. 2. Liars.”
Mark Twain
It’s a little-known fact that more people fear public speaking than they do death! Even the likes of Steve Jobs and Margaret Thatcher openly admitted they feared public speaking and spent days practicing ahead of speeches.
The Elevator pitch workshop, hosted by Taryn Sharman and Perri King from Faith and Fear marketing agency (http://faithandfear.com/ ), took participants through the fundamentals of being able to sell themselves and their ideas.
Broken down into three main areas; Your product, your self, and your story; the workshop taught the participants about the 6 Cs (clarify, connect, content, confidence, collaboration, and commit) and participated in fun, practical presentation tasks to help them hone their skills.
Although everyone started off feeling nervous, every participant made remarkable improvement in their presentation and story-telling skills in just one morning … and all went away committing to “eat the frog first!”
“Remember you are always selling yourself, whether you know it or not.”
Gugu and Denga are two young ladies who have recently launched their business, South African Social Media and Applications, SASMA. Here’s what they said about the workshop:
“We came to the workshop because we have just launched our business and so we realised it was important to improve our presentation skills before going out into the market and pitching our business. We also wanted to develop our interaction skills, and to get a chance to network with others.”
Coming into this workshop our greatest fear was ‘untapped potential’ we will take any opportunity to learn and grow, and become the best we can be. And the workshop taught us so much. Just in one morning, we’ve already improved our presentation skills, have a better understanding of how to build our personal image, as well as developing tactical skills around building priority lists – to help us get through our workload with more grace and less stress! The phrase that will stick with me is “eat the frog first”!
As we build our business, the skills we’ve learnt today will help us present our business ideas to people. We feel like we have a much better idea of what to expect when pitching our business and how to tackle the situations that may arise. Hearing other people’s stories was so inspiring. Just having the opportunity to share stories, we learn how different we all are, but how much value we all have to offer. No matter how long or short our careers are to-date.
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