Start With Why: How to Build a SERC Speech
Giving a SERC talk is always a challenge, but surprisingly, the key isn't in the talk itself, it's in how you develop your ideas and how you approach the task. To me, the key to a great SERC talk is 10% speaking and 90% preparation. To that end, I want to take you through my process and hopefully give you a few tools you can use when you develop your own talks.
Step 1: Define Your Why
The first step for me is to decide what I want to talk about, and more importantly, why I want to tell people about my subject. SERC talks come in all shapes and sizes. From history lessons on the Hussite Rebellions, to public interest pieces on skateboarding, to educational talks on how an engine works. Anything you want to share is fair game, but the key question is: why do you want people to hear about it? Are you trying to open people's minds to a new spiritual approach? Are you introducing a new framework to analyze a business? Are you trying to persuade people on your philosophical views of AI? In all those cases, figuring out what you want people to walk away from your talk with is the first step.
Step 2: Build Your Points and Budget Your Time
You have around ten minutes on stage. When you're getting ready to write your talk it often feels like a lot, but in my experience that time gets eaten up quickly. Here's how I budget it:
~2 minutes for your introduction: establish your Why and orient the audience.
1–2 minutes per supporting point: one minute for a simple idea, two for something more complex. (Could be less, could be more, but that's a good rough guess)
~30 seconds for your close: land your message and wrap up.
That leaves you roughly eight minutes of content, which means somewhere between four and eight supporting points depending on their complexity. Ten minutes can feel pretty restrictive, so it's important to have a strong sense of your Why and then let your supporting points serve it directly. If a point doesn't clearly support your Why, cut it.
Step 3: Sketch the Slides
One beginner mistake I sometimes see is people sit down to write their talk by immediately opening PowerPoint first, building slides, and only then figuring out what they want to say about each one. That's a recipe for reading your slides, and having the information behind you take center stage. The most important rule for SERC is: the slides are supplementary.
So instead, take out a notebook. Write down your main idea, your "Why" and then your supporting points with the time you think you'll need for each one. Read each bullet point and talk about it in your mind for a minute. Talk around it, get a sense for what you would want to share. This will help you realize what the slide could be doing to support your ideas without stepping on them.
Only once you've talked through your bullet points a few times are you ready to think about what goes on the slides. A good structure is: an introductory slide, one slide per bullet point, and then a closing or question slide. Each slide should carry one idea, a visual, a keyword, a question, or a diagram. But the key here is talk through the bullet point first, and only once you have a sense of what you want to say are you ready to supplement it.
Step 4: Rehearse
One of the best pieces of advice I've heard is: a talk is rehearsed, a speech is recited. A SERC talk is, first and always, a talk. You never actually write a speech. Instead, develop a strong understanding of your bullet points and your Why, and then talk through them out loud over and over again.
The first time you talk through it, it will be stilted and awkward. The third or fourth time, you'll start to repeat certain phrases or stories. The fifth or sixth time, you'll be repeating different phrases or different stories. By the tenth time you talk through your points, you'll have a broad base of material to pull from and a good sense of how it all flows together. Every time you give it, it'll be a little different, and that's okay the ideas are emerging organically based on what sounds right to you and what feels natural.
This is the key insight: you're talking to your audience, not giving a speech. The slides give you your bullet points, and you talk about each one like you're explaining it to a friend. That conversational quality is what makes a SERC talk engaging, and as a bonus, it takes a lot of the pressure off since you don't have to memorize anything.
This is also a good time to check that your points are still serving your Why. If you're running long in rehearsals, don't be afraid to cut one of the weaker or more supplementary ideas.
Step 5: Consider Your Body Language
A lot of my approach here is very organic. You're almost letting the talk build itself. But the one thing I would recommend being deliberate about is body language. One of the things I generally struggle with when speaking is not knowing what to do with my body. I tend to bounce back and forth, freeze my hands, or focus more on making my hands move than on what I'm saying.
What I've found helps is this: after you've rehearsed your talk seven or eight times, sit down with pen and paper and think about how you could use your body language to communicate your ideas more effectively. For each bullet point, based on how you've been naturally talking about it, write down ideas for physicality. Step forward when you're making your key point. Open your hands when you're asking the audience a question. Use the stage deliberately, move to one side for one part of the story and the other side for a contrasting idea.
Don't plan to use everything you write down. Put in as many ideas as you can think of, and then try to incorporate some of them into your next few rehearsals. The goal is to give yourself options to draw from, not stage directions to follow. Just remember: you've written down options, not directions.
