You have thirty seconds to command the attention of your audience. Don?t waste it!

General Eisenhower said, ?Leadership is the ability to decide what has to be done and then to get people to want to do it.?

Consider quoting live persons. When I?m talking about getting and keeping customers, I say, ?As Bill Gates said, ?When you lose a customer, you lose in two ways. First, you don?t get their money. And second, your competitor does.? And pantomime stabbing myself in the heart, which usually gets a laugh.

Quotes can be informative and surprising. As the great philosopher, Raquel Welch, said, ?Style is being yourself, but on purpose.? I add, ?Every time you address an audience, you have to be yourself, but slightly larger than life, in other words... on purpose.?

A great source of quotes is your audience or those they know. At a 4-day Texas Instru-ments conference, I told the audience, ?I?m here to tell you how to future-proof your careers.? I had heard their chairman use the word future-proof two days earlier. He said that TI strategy was to future-proof the shareholders? investment. I borrowed his words to connect with the audience, though they were technology users, not investors. The phrase had the company stamp of approval.

What made that engagement so successful was the fact I quoted every person who had spoken before me over the three days. Any recent quote related to the organization you are ad-dressing can make a connection between you and your listeners.

BE CREATIVE. If your audience has not heard your quotes before, your message will seem fresher and more original. Do you have any quotes from: your father, mother, siblings, grandmother/father? Teacher or coach? Managers who inspired you? Your brilliant or successful clients? Yourself?