#2 Finding your Speaking Sweet Spot - A Sweet Analogy

17 Jan 2025 · 2 min

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1:38

In this instructional video, the speaker introduces a visual analogy using Venn diagrams and assorted sweets to illustrate how speakers can categorize and pinpoint their niche, or "speaking sweet spot." The talk begins by recalling how children sort objects by color, then expands the categorization to multiple dimensions—color (yellow, green, red), chocolate vs. non‑chocolate, animate (jelly babies) vs. inanimate, and personal preference (nice vs. disgusting). By layering these dimensions, a Venn diagram emerges that highlights the intersection of green sweets that contain chocolate, represented by a green Smartie, as the metaphorical sweet spot. The speaker connects this multi‑dimensional categorization to the process of defining a speaking career, encouraging viewers to map their own attributes onto similar intersecting categories to discover their unique niche.

Chapters

As speakers, 2 things we love to use are Venn diagrams and illustrations. So let me use the illustration of different kinds of sweeties that will introduce the concepts we're going to explore today. When we were little children in preschool or kindergarten, we may have been given different types of toys or shapes, and the teachers would have taught us to separate them out into separate colors. Or shapes or categories. So we're looking at this bunch of different sweets that we have here, and one of the first things we can do is we can separate them into 3 different colours, into yellow sweets, green sweets, and red sweets. And then of course we can make some other distinctions. We could separate these into different categories of sweets with chocolate and sweets without chocolate. Some of these sweets are little jelly babies, so we could say that we can categorize them as sweets that are alive and sweets that are not alive. We can also separate them in terms of our preference. So we could have sweets that are nice and sweets that are disgusting that we choose not to eat. So let's return to the categorization of sweets by color and then coordinate that with the categorization of sweets with chocolate or sweets without. And then we have a Venn diagram of green sweets that have chocolate, and there is our green Smartie in the middle. It is that kind of categorization and distinction that we're trying to make with our speaking careers. So let's dive in.