Creativity – schmeativity! When it comes to writing a speech, how often do you feel like a duck swimming in water – where you’re trying to make it look like you’re calm on the exterior, but you’re actually paddling like blazes underneath? It’s no fun when you find yourself fighting tides, right?

Any manner of ‘stuff’ can get in the way of harnessing your imagination to create a great talk. The most common of these include: ‘other priorities’, ‘distractions’ (increasingly of the online variety), and good old-fashioned ‘procrastination’.

And if anyone is foolish enough to ask you, “So, how’s that speech of yours coming on?”, does that hit your buttons? Any chance your response might include a well directed glare from your evil eye or maybe even a stroppy few words like, “I’ll do it when I’m good and ready”?

Sound familiar?

Of course, as the clock keeps ticking and brings you ever closer to the time when you’re supposed to be upstanding, ready to speak up and inspire, the pressure mounts; As can the sense of overwhelm.

And worse, even when you do get started, you may be unlucky enough to encounter a few more gremlins bent on upsetting your plans. And top of that list, as I mentioned in a previous article on overcoming writer’s block, can be your internal censor – which can result in you trying to filter, overhaul, or ignore ideas before they’re fully formed.

But fear not. It’s my pleasure to welcome productivity coach and author of Chaos to Control, Ciara Conlon into my expert chair today to share ideas with you about getting rid of productivity bugaboos, once and for all, and to find awesome ideas with a lot less stress.

6 Essential Tips to Harness Your Creativity and Write Your Best Speech

Listen in as we talk about:

• Why you may, on occasion, find yourself struggling to form a winning idea or battling overwhelm
• Powerful productivity tools you can use to kick start your speech writing
• Why embracing structure helps you to unleash your inner creativity
• A surefire strategy that clobbers inertia and puts you back in control
• Why getting away from your desk pays
• The truth about where your focus must lie
• And more

Your Turn

What snags have your experienced when writing speeches?

What were your solutions and did they work?

Share your good, bad, and downright ugly experiences…I’d love to hear from you.

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Interview Transcript

Eamonn O’Brien: Today we are going to talk about how do you get more inspiration and control for your inspiration for your ideas and maybe how you can learn from productivity coaches in the way that you channel that creativity.

On that note, I’m very, very pleased to welcome Ciara Conlon, and Ciara, of course, you are a speaker, you are a consultant and you are also the author of Chaos to Control but you are also known as the productivity coach.

Ciara Conlon: That’s right. That’s me.

Eamonn: Delighted to have you here. As a speaker and as somebody who is a productivity coach, when you are creating a speech or content, a lot of people struggle coming up with ideas and overwhelm. What causes that and what can you do about it?

Ciara: Well, overwhelm, I suppose, is very common when you don’t know exactly what you are trying to achieve.

It comes back all the time, the first thing with productivity or with achieving anything is to be clear about what am I trying to achieve here and as we all know, I’m thinking about the audience and what they want to get out of it.

The first thing is really to make space for it.

Eamonn: Make space?

Ciara: Make space, exactly.

It’s like what they say about creative people, writers, you just have to show up.

The first tip that I give people is really to make space in their calender, to schedule time to think about what they want to achieve and what’s going to be in the content.

Eamonn: Blocking, if you like?

Ciara: Exactly, exactly. That’s a great place to start because even if you are lacking ideas or you don’t know where to start, at least create a space even if it’s a half an hour.

Eamonn: But you’re away from distraction?

Ciara: Yeah.

Eamonn: Number one, we need some space. Now, what about tools? I know you have a lot of expertise in both creativity and in productivity.

Are there tools between those things that can help channel ideas?

Ciara: There are. There are lots of different tools out there but, I think, really when it comes down to it, it’s important, I suppose, as well to distinguish about creativity and how that differs from being imaginative or having the ideas, because we all have lots of ideas but if we don’t actually capture them and then take action.

Eamonn: We do. But people want to get at the good ones and that’s the thing. They have so many things floating around in their heads.

Ciara: It’s important to have somewhere to capture the ideas, first of all.

I would use a tool by the name of Evernote, Evernote.com.

It’s a note taking app, but it’s very useful because you can take pictures, you can write notes, you can record voice notes, so any time or in any place that you get any idea or are inspired by an image or a quotation or something.

Eamonn: It’s a way of assembling things and then being able to pull it?

Ciara: Exactly. Even you can store it in different types of ideas and then when you want to do a talk, let’s say when I am doing my talk and I may do talks on the power of focus or how to manage your e-mail, so if I capture ideas I will then use key notes, let’s say focus, and then when I’m ready to do a talk on focus I have all my notes there captured that would help me.

Eamonn: You can access it, yes. You are using actually a lot of structure, I suppose.

Ciara: Absolutely.

Eamonn: It’s interesting, years ago I worked with a fellow called Arthur Van Gundy over in America, and he had been and, I assume, he is still known as one of the gurus on creativity and he would always talk of the importance of structure to unleash creativity.

Is that your experience?

Ciara: I would totally agree with that idea as well because there are so many creativity myths, that you have to be somewhat crazy maybe to be totally creative or there needs to be an element of chaos.

I did come from a place of chaos and that’s the title of my book, Chaos to Control, but that really describes who I was.

I used to think I was creative but the fact was I was achieving nothing.

Until I found productivity and until I learned how to structure my life and to have systems and to use procedures which all sounds rather boring and routine but that’s what unleashed my creativity.

That’s what gave me the power to create and to take action and to follow through.

Eamonn: You were channeling, I suppose? Tell me, as you were doing that, did you find any particular techniques that helped you to get more out of your ideas?

Now that you are focusing back to core things and now that you want to expand on that, how do you do that?

Ciara: How do I do that? One of the things that I do is I do a regular mind download so I get everything out of my head.

Eamonn: That’s like Professor Dumbledore in Harry Potter, I like that.

Ciara: Not quite as magic. But just taking the time to get everything out of my head, because I think the clearer your mind is the more creative that you can be because there’s more space in your mind so de-cluttering.

I advocate de-cluttering all different parts.

First of all your mind, get everything out, dump it all down on paper, de-clutter your space, your environment and just, again, have that ability to be able to focus.

Taking away all the clutter and the disorder allows you that.

Eamonn: Is that the starting point?

Ciara: That’s a starting point but that’s a regular activity.

I think you need to keep doing that in order to be able to maintain that level of focus and clarity.

Only when your head is clear of all the clutter of life then you have the ability to.

Eamonn: If you had one or two thoughts on what you found really helped you to take ideas up to another level where people were really that much more engaged with them, what do you do to get at that?

Ciara: I suppose to get to the next level the things that I would do would be really to go out and be inspired to get ideas, to observe others and see what they are doing, because I might think that I’m doing it to the best of my ability and that I’m doing it really well but then when I go out and…

I can take inspiration from any place, even take a day out to go to a museum or a gallery, things like that.

Eamonn: You are getting connected.

Ciara: Exactly. You are getting ideas.

Eamonn: You are getting ideas, yeah.

Ciaia: I would read a lot, I would watch a lot of other people speaking and videos but again, it’s making them matter or remembering what it is about them. Having somewhere to capture those ideas and the little sparks that might…

Eamonn: Finally, because I’m really enjoying this conversation, if there was one thing that you know now as a speaker that you wish you’d known when you started at the onset, what would that be?

Ciara: That it’s all about them.

Eamonn: Yes, it really is.

Ciara: I think that, I suppose, transformed a lot of what I was doing taking the focus off myself and thinking more about the audience, I think, has helped.

Eamonn: And doing it in a de-cluttered way which is wonderful.

Ciara: Absolutely.

Eamonn: Good. Well, thank you really for coming in. I really appreciate that today.

Ciara: Thank you.

Photo credit: Bart Hiddink