TJ Walker teaches how to cut your presentation down to what matters. Pick one call-to-action, brainstorm single ideas, rank them, keep the top five, and move everything else to handouts. Audiences forget most of what you say unless you make them choose what to remember.
Chapters
I want to make your life easy. I actually want to save you time, not give you hour upon hour upon hour of extra due diligence for every single presentation. So here's my recommendation. You've already isolated in one sentence what it is you want your audience to do, whether they're customers, clients, prospects, colleagues, other people in your industry. Now, I need you to just brainstorm on messages that are important to you and that you think will motivate your audience to do what you want. Don't worry about spelling, don't worry about complete sentences, don't worry about paragraphs, don't worry about what's legal, don't worry about any other kind of restrictions. Just brainstorm. And whether you want to just get a fresh pad and pen or brainstorm on your laptop or it doesn't matter. I just want you to free up your mind and just start jotting things down. Here's the catch, though. I need you to truly isolate one idea at a time. If you have more than 10 or 12 words, you're probably stringing together a couple of ideas. If it's a whole paragraph, that's four or five ideas. I need you to isolate one idea at a time and let's see how many you have. Don't limit yourself. Free up your brain. You may come up with five, you may come up with 10, 20, 30, 50, 100. The sky's the limit. But here's the thing. At some point, you got to put an end to brainstorming and say, no more new messages for this presentation, for this speech, we're closing the floor for nominations of new ideas. Now, what you've got to do is go back and look at every one of your ideas. Don't worry about order, context, don't worry about flow, don't worry about stories, don't worry about the bullet points on a deck yet just look at the ideas and ask yourself, is this truly one of the most important ideas important to me? And is it really going to motivate my audience to take the action I want? And I need you to put these messages in priority, from least important to most important, and then anything that doesn't make the top five throw them away or determine that you're going to give people a PDF or a book and hand it out to them later. Kind of like what I'm doing in this course. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on how to use a teleprompter in the core first 90 minutes of this course, but for those who want it There's a chapter in one of the books at the end there. There's also part of the course on teleprompter in this as well. So it's there, but it's not a part of my core material to you because it's, in my judgment, not the most important thing for you to know if you're trying to improve your basic public speaking skills. So put it in priority. This is hard. The easy thing is just to give people everything. So much of being an effective presenter, a good public speaker, frankly, has nothing to do with the quality of your voice or your eye contact or your gestures, or how funny you are or good looking or any of that. So much of being an effective presenter is simply about using your judgment before you ever stand up to speak. Great speakers use judgment and they simply eliminate the stuff that isn't critically important to their audience. They eliminate unnecessary messages. Mark Twain once said. A lot of other famous writers have been quoted saying this as well. I'm sorry I wrote you a long letter. I didn't have time to write you a short letter. It actually requires more time, more intellect, more thought and judgment to narrow things down to five ideas than it does to just tell people everything you know. Why do I say five? Because I actually test audiences all over the world constantly. Again, this is all I do is public speaking training and media training. I've never found any audience, business people or any other field remember more than a handful of ideas from the best speaker they've ever seen. So don't be greedy. I understand you can tell people 10, 20, 30, 50 ideas about what you do, what your passion is, what your business is. Guess what? Nobody cares about you. This speech isn't about you. It's about the audience. What are they going to take away? What are they going to remember? What's going to be useful to them? What are they going to be able to act on? So much of being a good speaker is about simply not being selfish and realizing it's not about me, it's about my audience. How can I do everything? From the standpoint of helping the audience, that doesn't mean tell them just what they want to hear. You may have some unpleasant things to tell people, but you've got to package those messages in a way that is digestible. The number one problem every one of my clients has in every industry, in every continent, it's not the ums and ahs. It's not the hands shaking number one problem, giving way too many messages in every speech. If you can solve this problem. You're going to be way, way ahead of the crowd. And you can say, well, TJ5 is too few. I've got to do seven. You can do as many as you want. But here's the thing, as we'll talk about later in this course test. If you can get your audience to remember 7, 10 ideas, be my guest. I've never seen it done, but if you can test it and you have evidence it works, do it. But until then, I just want to give you the basic principles that I think will help most people most of the time, and that is narrowing your messages down to just a handful.
