Today's topic in the Remarkable Speaking for Ordinary People Video Blog Series is How to Organize Your Speech So Your Audience Can Actually Use the Information.
This may seem totally elementary, but it is woefully disregarded way too often. I want to eliminate that possibility for you. Remarkable speeches are memorable because they have awesome content that people actually remember and use (plus other stuff we'll talk about throughout the series.)
And for those of you (like me) who like to scan a post before you decide to invest in the video (or the meat of the content), here are the hi-lights to help you decide if you want to spend the 3.5 minutes on the video itself:
- Too much information is overwhelming to your audience. People often give way too much information (thereby overwhelming the audience.) Let's don't have you do that, okay?
- Choose three main points (or chunks, as I like to call it, even though it doesn't seem all that appealing when I think about it) under ONE main idea (the title of your speech should reflect this one big focus area.)
- Add compelling stories, super-specific tips, and exciting statistics or data to each of those main points only as they serve to further illustrate and amplify those main points.
- Cover nothing beyond the main topic of this presentation and the three main points you have chosen. You will struggle to let go of “really great information” you want to share – let it go anyway. You will think the information you are leaving out is “really important” – leave it out anyway.
If you do all of this for real, you'll structure yourself a really powerful presentation (assuming the content is excellent quality.)
There's more in the video, including an example to illustrate structure. As always, I invite your feedback, thoughts, ideas and suggestions. In particular, I'm wondering about your experience of seeing really great presentations that you remember well. What did they do with the structure that helped you take it all in? Do you use strategies I don't mention here in your own presentations that we can all learn from?