My father had a theory about lawn care. He figured, if the directions called for one bag of fertilizer for a yard the size of ours, then five bags would be five times as good. It sounded reasonable to a six-year old, but the result was that our yard often looked like the back end of a mangy dog; brown, ragged and covered with bald spots.
That “More is always better” attitude seems to be the belief of a lot of speakers too. They describe 15 amazing product features, 12 reasons to choose them over their competitors and 8 support plan options.
The deluge of information blasts the audience, leaving them paralyzed. It’s what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls “The Paradox of Choice”; the more options we have, the harder it is to choose and the less confident we are in the choice we made.
Your audience doesn’t want you to dump all of their choices back in their own laps, any more than a reader wants a novelist to offer a choice of story endings or a restaurant diner wants the chef to consult with them on which ingredients he will use in their meal.
As a speaker, it is not your job to throw everything you’ve got at the audience, but rather to select the arguments and examples that give you the best possible chance of achieving your objectives.
You do that by knowing specifically what you are trying to achieve in giving this particular of the speech or presentation, who in your audience can make that happen and how you are going to persuade them to do what you want.
You distill all of that information down into a single, clear and simple message; one that you think gives you the best possible chance to achieve your objective. And with that, you’re more than halfway towards a strong and persuasive presentation.
Of course, you still need to structure your outline, write your script, create your PowerPoint and deliver your presentation. But those are just details.
Your message tells you what you need to include. It also tells you which four bags of fertilizer you’d best leave out
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