TJ Walker says audiences remember at most five ideas from a talk, so pick your five core messages and make each one fit in 10 words. He's trained speakers for 30 years and built this advice on what actually sticks.
Chapters
So that's great. You've narrowed down what it is you actually want the audience to do after you've given the presentation. Now you've got to open things up and start brainstorming. You need to brainstorm on every single idea, message number fact that will motivate your audience to actually do what you want. But here's the cat, here's the hard part. It's actually easy and gathering more and more and more and more. You may come up with 50 ideas, 100, 200. You may come up with a whole book and have a thousand ideas. That's not the challenge. The challenge is you have to put these messages in priority. Remember, the people you're speaking to do not have to know everything you know, otherwise they'd have your job. Your job as a presenter is to think about everything you know. What do the people you're speaking to have to know? And you got to weed out all the rest. So that's the challenge. You've got to narrow it down to just five. Why do I say five? That seems arbitrary. I'll tell you why. It's based on empirical evidence from my own career. I've trained CEOs, beginner speakers, intermediate speakers, junior executives, how to present my whole adult life for more than 30 years. And I always ask people, when it's a live, in person presentation, the same question. Tell me the best speaker you've seen in your last year in your field, in your industry, someone you saw in person. And now can you tell me what messages you remember from this fantastic speech? And I'll go around the room and quite often the answer is zero. People say, tj, everybody's boring in our field, our industry. Or sometimes they'll say one message, sometimes two, occasionally three. Every three months or so, someone will remember four ideas. And every six months someone will remember literally five ideas. Literally just a handful of ideas. In the more than 30 years I've asked that question, I've never had anyone remember, remember more than five ideas from the best speaker in their field they've ever seen. So if you want to be not just a good speaker, not just a competent beginner presenter, but actually great, come up with five messages and get those remembered by your audience. By the way, this makes life a lot easier for you. Most beginners think, oh, I don't want anyone to know I'm a beginner. I better work really hard and do extra research and come up with more, more, more, more, and I better tell them more and have more slides with more data that way. No one can see through the idea that I'm an actual beginner. I don't know anything. No, no, no. Nothing's going to make you seem more like a beginner than speaking quickly and rushed and doing a big data dump. So forget all that. You do have to look at all the ideas, but then you've got to use your judgment and narrow it down to just five ideas. So that's what I want you to do on whatever topic you're using for this course, and whatever topic you're likely to speak on the most in the future. Come up with literally five ideas and write them down. An idea should be something you can say in 10 words or less. You get five of them. Write those down in the discussion group. As far as what you want to talk about, write that down now.
