What if Your Alloted Speaking Time Has Been Cut

So what do you do if your allotted time has been cut short? It's a common occurrence. You've been told you've got 30 minutes to speak, you're about to stand up, and the organizer of the conference or the event, the meeting whispers in your ear, hey, sorry, we're running a little behind. Can you chop it down to 20 minutes? And now you've got to stand up and speak, and you've prepared the 30 minutes of content. What do you do? A lot of people, their natural instinct, unfortunately, is to do the absolute worst possible thing. That is to speak faster than normal, not take questions and try to go through the whole presentation. Big, big mistake. My recommendation is you've got to be comfortable enough with your material, really have a strong sense of, of what are the most important ideas. Focus on those. Tell your stories, make it memorable. Again, the common mistake, you race through the content, you strip out the stories because you say, oh, there's no time for stories. I've got to go through all the points. Big, big mistake. If you strip out the stories, you basically destroy the audience's ability to, to remember your messages. Those of you who are regular listeners know that that's one of our biggest goals, getting people to remember your messages so they can take action. If you've removed the memory device, which is what the story is, you've virtually guaranteed failure. My recommendation is if you had 30 minutes allotted and you had 30 minutes of content planned, you need to eliminate several of your most important points and then talk in the same speed, the same conversational style that you would have otherwise. Focus on fewer points, and make sure the points you do talk about, you've illustrated with examples with stories. If you're going to have images, put up those images. If you have any, notice, even if it's five minutes before your presentation, that you're going to have to cut it short. Quickly delete the slides you won't use. If you don't have time to delete the slides, what I would do then is just quickly advance through them. Don't comment, don't waste time talking about how you now have less time than you were promised. Don't whine, don't. Don't waste time about not having as much time, because it actually takes time and wastes time to talk about the fact that you have less time. So never talk about time. Simply speak. Give your audience information that's interesting and memorable and say it in the most conversational way. Use every second to maximum effect. That's why you don't whine or complain or talk about time.