Developing Expert Judgment for Your Public Speaking and Presenting Opportunities

Let me ask you.

Think of the best speaker or the best presenter you’ve seen in the last year in your business.

Your line of work not a professional comedian or politician but someone in your industry.

Now tell me every message one think of every message you remember from that speech.

That presentation.

And give it some thought maybe nothing comes up.

Think of the last five years 10 years maybe think of your entire life.

Think of the best speaker you’ve ever heard.

Now try to write down on a sheet of paper or a computer screen every message you remember from that presentation.

I don’t mean that you like their style or that they were funny or their commanding.

I don’t care about that right now.

I just want to know what messages do you remember looked down at your sheet.

How full is that.

Did you write down 15 20 30 messages.

I doubt it.

That’s a question I’ve been asking my clients all over the world because for 30 years I’ve trained presidents of countries prime ministers Nobel Peace Prize winners lots of business executives in every industry athletes.

I ask that question and typically quite often people say to everyone’s boring in my industry.

I don’t remember anything or they’ll say I teach I remember this one speaker I remember this one idea.

Occasionally it’s too.

Sometimes it’s three ideas three messages from the greatest speaker they’ve seen every three months or so someone will remember four ideas and every six months I’ll have one of my clients from an in-person training tell me they remember Five ideas from the best speaker they’ve ever seen and they may have been in the audience with Steve Jobs unveiling an iPod or something like that in all the years I’ve asked that question.

Guess how many times someone has remembered more than five ideas from the best speaker they’ve ever heard in their industry.

That’s right.

Never.

So my first really big rule for you after you’ve narrowed down what you want your audience to do is you’ve got to ask yourself of all the messages you could tell your audience what are the five most important five or fewer.

You are not being asked to speak to be the Wikipedia for your audience.

They can just stay at home go on their cell phone and go to Wikipedia or use google.

So much of being a good speaker a good presenter or a good communicator has to do with judgment and really figuring out out of everything you know.

What does your audience need to know in order to make the decision to do what you want them to do.

So you have to have focus so much of being a great speaker a great presenter has nothing to do with your hand gestures your eye contact or voice or whether you say ah.

It’s about judgment and figuring out how to eliminate most of the garbage that gets in most speeches.

Most people adults in the business world political world government world make the fundamental blunder of simply trying to convey.

Way too many facts.

Way too many numbers way too many data points and it’s boring your audience doesn’t have to know everything about what you do in your job.

If they did they’d have your job when you’re giving a presentation.

It’s your job to focus just on the ideas that are most interesting most relevant most important and useful to your audience.

So what you’ve got to do is brainstorm on every possible idea message you could say in this presentation in this speech and then it’ll eliminate anything that doesn’t make it to the top 5 if you have a message.

That’s just a boring fact and the audience isn’t going to find it interesting or useful.

Get rid of it.

You can always give that as a handout.

It’s not something you have to spend your time speaking about.

More tips in a moment on how to really figure out what the best messages will be.