First question I asked any group of people I'm doing public speaking storytelling training with is think of the best speaker you've seen in the last year, five years, 10 years in your industry. Now tell me every message point you remember from their speech. And they may have already told me a few stories they remember but I want to know their messages. And all the years I've asked that question. I've never had anyone remember more than five messages, five ideas. From the best speaker they've seen their entire career, sometimes their entire life.

Often people will remember no messages quite often. It's one message occasionally two, rarely three or four. And once every six months, I'll have one person who remembers five messages. So that's why I asked all of my clients before they start off with their whole speech. Their PowerPoint are at nine different stories. Let's truly narrow down your entire presentation to just the top five messages.

So if you did what I asked you to a moment ago, you brainstorm on every possible message you could want. Now I want you to put them in priority. Get rid of anything that isn't in the top five. Now, this is hard to do. These are your babies, sometimes. They're all good messages.

If you're writing a memo, you might put all of them in. If it's your website, you'd put all of them in if you're giving a memo to a client, you have put all of them in but that's not what a speech or a presentation is about. So that's what I want you to do right now is narrow down and put it in the q&a section. What are your top five messages you want to convey in your presentation?