Let me ask you think of the best speaker, the best presenter you've seen in the last year in your business, your line of work not a professional comedian, or politician, but someone in your industry. Now, tell me every message one think of every message you remember from that speech, that presentation. Go ahead, give it some thought. Maybe nothing comes up think of the last five years, 10 years, maybe think of your entire life. Think of the best speaker you've ever heard. Now, try to write down on a sheet of paper or computer screen.

Every message you remember from that presentation. I don't mean that you like their style that they were funny or their commanding. I don't care about that right now. I just want to know what messages Do you remember? looked down at your sheet How awful is that? Did you write down 15 2030 messages?

I doubt it. That's a question. I've been asking my clients all over the world because for 30 years, I've trained presidents of countries, Prime Ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners, lots of business executives in every industry athletes. I asked that question. And typically, quite often people say, to me, everyone's boring in my industry, I don't remember anything. Or they'll say, yeah, teach.

I remember this. One speaker, I remember this one idea. Occasionally, it's too sometimes it's three ideas, three messages from the greatest speaker they've seen. every three months or so someone will remember four ideas. And every six months, I'll have one of my clients from an in person training tell me they remember five ideas from the best speaker they've ever seen, and they may have been in the audience with Steve jobs, unveiling an iPod or something like that. In all the years I've asked that question, guess how many times someone has remembered more than five ideas from the best speaker they've ever heard in their industry?

That's right, never. So my first really big rule for you, after you've narrowed down what you want your audience to do is you got to ask yourself, of all the messages, you could tell your audience, what are the five most important, five or fewer? You are not being asked to speak to be the Wikipedia for your audience. They can just stay at home, go on their cell phone and go to Wikipedia or use Google. So much of being a good speaker, a good presenter, a good communicator, has to do with judgment and really figuring out out of everything, you know, what does your Audience need to know in order to make the decision to do what you want them to do. So you have to have focus.

So much of being a great speaker, a great presenter has nothing to do with your hand gestures, your icontact, or voice or whether you say are it's about judgment, and figuring out how to eliminate most of the garbage that gets in most speeches. Most people, adults in the business world political world government world make the fundamental blunder of simply trying to convey way too many facts way too many numbers way too many data points, and it's boring. Your audience doesn't have to know everything about what you do in your job. If they did, they'd have your job. When you're giving a presentation. It's your job to focus just on the idea ideas that are most interesting, most relevant, most important and useful to your audience.

So what you've got to do is brainstorm on every possible idea message you could say, in this presentation in this speech, and then eliminate anything that doesn't make it to the top five. If you have a message, that's just a boring fact, and the audience isn't gonna find it interesting or useful, get rid of it. You can always give that as a handout. It's not something you have to spend your time speaking about. more tips in a moment on how to really figure out what the best messages will be.