TJ Walker says the biggest mistake in public speaking is data dumping: presenters cram in every fact because they're insecure, which loses the audience. He compares it to wheeling a pile of files at someone. The real skill is narrowing your points and structuring them clearly, not stuffing slides with details.
If you've been with me since episode one or listen to this podcast regularly, you've heard me stress one particular theme. I have to devote an entire episode to it right now. And it involves the number one flaw of most public speakers in every industry, from every continent, every line of work, people I deal with. And it is data dumping. If you use a speech as an opportunity to just dump all the data you have on a subject, you're going to fail miserably. Why do people do this? It's my belief that they're insecure. People feel like, wow, I don't want anyone to accuse me of leaving something out or being stupid. So if I just tell people everything, I'll cover my. You know what? It's as if they were preparing for the speech, and they went around the office with a wheelbarrow for two months and went to every office, said, give me all your files on subject X. And they got all the files from Mary and all the files from Carmen and everything from James. And that wheelbarrow is just getting fuller and fuller and fuller. Now it's the day of the big speech. They're pushing the wheelbarrow in. It's about 8ft high. It's almost going to topple over. They're trying to figure out, what do I leave in, what do I leave out? And the thought process goes something like this. Well, if I leave this out, Sam could accuse me of being less than thorough. He'll criticize me if I leave this out. Jane could be upset that her project wasn't mentioned. I better put that in. If I leave this out. Well, TJ Is the nastiest guy of all. He'll try to have me fired by lunch, so I better put that in. So the only way to get it all in is if I speak really, really quickly, talk quickly, I dump all the data. Boom. Unfortunately, that is how most people prepare and deliver their presentations. And it's a complete, utter failure. Mark Twain once said, and he's not the first one, a lot of famous people have said something similar to this, which is, I'm sorry. I wrote you a long letter. I didn't have time to write you a short letter. It actually requires more thought, more analysis, more intelligence to narrow your number of points down. If you don't do that, you're not going to succeed. So much of being a good speaker, frankly, has nothing to do with the quality of your voice or your eye contact or hand gestures. So much of it is about simple judgment. You've got to make judgment calls of what does your audience have to know versus what might be nice for them to know if they had your job? You can't confuse the two. If you start off your presentation with 50, 80, 90, 100 messages, you're guaranteed to fail. You can have the most expensive, most wonderful materials for building your dream home. The fanciest of marble, redwood, the greatest materials ever. You can have wonderful landscape artists, wonderful designers. A 10 million dollar 50 million dollar budget for your home. If you're building it on quicksand, it won't matter. If you're building it on a foundation of popsicle sticks, it won't matter. It's going to be a horrible house. If you don't have any blueprints or architectural designs, it won't matter. You need a design of your presentation, and a part of it is a structure where you've narrowed down the number of points. And that's why you can't data dump. I'll tell you one area where you can data dump your handouts. You can email people a PDF that's 10,000 pages long. If they want to read it, they will. If they don't want to, they don't have to. You can give people a paper handout after your presentation, but let's first make sure they truly understand and remember the points that are most important to you. Then, and only then, try to put more data in to fill in the big buckets of ideas. But until you've nailed that, don't commit the number one flaw of most public speakers. Please don't be a data dumper.
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