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Dear friends,
Hope this message finds you well! I am enjoying spring’s creative energy and writing lots of grants.
This month I want to talk about your elevator pitch. This is a 1-3 minute statement about what you work on. Potential audiences for an elevator pitch include future collaborators, employers, mentees, and funders.
Do you feel resistant to the idea of an elevator pitch? I gave a talk about elevator pitches in my friend’s class last year and here are some common concerns and my responses:
Concern: This feels like bragging
My response: Are your ideas important? Who else is doing the work you do, and if you don’t advance the field, whose health will that affect? I will argue that you have an obligation to stand up for your science. No-one will give you more credit than you give yourself.
A strategy is to pretend you’re writing this pitch for someone else.
Concern: I can’t possibly boil down all my years of training/ slogging to 90 seconds
My response: An elevator pitch does not have to be comprehensive, it just has to draw the person in. They will be intrigued, and then you can sit down with them and talk for hours.
Concern: My stuff is really complicated
My response: You absolutely can explain complicated science in lay terms. Two masters of this are Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the late Stephen Hawking. Watch some of their YouTube videos for inspiration.
Now that you’re on board with working on an elevator pitch, let’s talk about how to craft a good one. An interesting book related to this topic is Start with Why by Simon Sinek. His TED talk is here. He suggests that you start with why you do what you do. If you start by explaining what you do, you can lose people’s attention. If you start with your motivation, it draws in diverse types of people. After that, you want to say how you are working towards your goal. You can then say what you do, in the level of detail that is appropriate to the audience. End with a conclusion that is tailored to the person to whom you are speaking. Here’s an example I wrote for my friend Alison Huang, imagining her speaking to a philanthropist:
Alison Huang is a physician-researcher at UCSF who is an expert in women’s sexual health and aging. She is committed to improving the quality of life for women as they age by tackling universal, challenging, and stigmatized conditions like menopausal symptoms and incontinence. Alison’s work is unique in trying to identify approaches to address these problems creatively- like by using yoga to strengthen the pelvic floor and prevent incontinence, and applying existing medications for new uses to prevent hot flashes. Her work has the potential to give women back their confidence and their quality of life.
My final suggestion is to find a willing peer and try out your elevator pitches on each other. Like anything else, it takes some practice to get this right, and immediate feedback is one of the most efficient ways to improve. If that makes you cringe, record yourself and watch it back. I promise it will help, even if it is painful.
Please let me know if you write/ practice/ hone your elevator pitch, and how it helps you. As always, please share your successes with me so I can find ways to amplify your voice and message. Thank you for reading!
Warmly,
Urmimala