So you've written down the goals of your presentation in one sentence, that's great. Now I need you to come up with every single idea, every fact every number, every bullet point, every message that supports your goal that would lead your audience to want to embrace your goal. And to do what you want them to do. Come up with it, every single thing you could think of brainstorm it, put it down, organize it on a PowerPoint, if you want, write them all down, and here's what I need to do next. Put them in priority. Anything that isn't in the top five, throw it away, or put it in a PowerPoint that you hand out to people in advance or email to people.

Here's why I say this. And this is really the most important part of this entire course. I've tested audiences around the world who had to listen to engineers. And I always ask them the same question. Think of the best day engineer you've heard speak in the last year last five years last 10 years. Now tell me every message point, you remember.

And sometimes it's nothing. Sometimes it's one point, occasionally two, sometimes three, every once in a while for ideas. once every six months, somebody will mention five ideas they remember from the best engineer they've ever heard speak. By the way, I asked this of every audience I work with in every profession. I've never had an audience member remember more than five ideas. So this isn't a problem unique to engineers.

So I start off with the fundamental premise that it's actually difficult to get audiences to remember ideas. Remember, it's not communication, if it comes out of your mouth. It's documented. If it's just on a slide, it's communication if your audience a understands it, and Be remembers it otherwise, How else will they take the actions you want? The number one problem I have with the hundreds and hundreds of engineers I've worked with over the years is they don't engineer they don't design their speech in a way that would allow it to succeed because they cram way too many facts way too many numbers. Way too many bullet points in it.

They make it a data dump. And engineers like to say, Well, I'm an engineer, of course, I have to put in all the technical stuff. Well, yeah, I thought engineers were supposed to be rational, logical, not just do things based on gut feeling. I would submit to you you don't have a single shred of evidence that's standing up in front of your board of directors or your investors or your colleagues and simply going through data points. After data point after data point and giving them everything you know, is effective. You don't have any evidence that it works.

Therefore, why are you doing it? The number one way you can go from an average speaker as an engineer, let's face it, that's awful, too great. Has nothing to do with the hand gestures, the eye contact, moving around the room, those things can be nice. But the number one thing you can do to instantly catapult yourself above 98% of your competitors is to simply narrow the focus of your messages to the top handful. Now you're not dumbing it down. You're putting a spotlight on what is truly important.

If there's other information you want to convey, email it handy Out posted as a white paper, but do not try to cover every single little bullet point, every number, every data point, every fact, in your presentation. If you do, you will fail, you absolutely will not succeed. So that's your homework right now I need you to look at a speech that you're going to give or one that you did give before, put it in priority and come up with just five ideas. All the other stuff, don't project it. It's not gonna work. If you want to give it to people as a handout, fine, PDF fine PowerPoint that you're emailing, great.

Don't project it all. And don't read it all. I'm giving all of you a couple of my public speaking books in the end of this course, in the bonus section, but I'm not going to read every single point to you in one of these lectures. And I'm not going to show it all up on bullet point, I'm going to focus on one thing at a time. Because all the research says that that's actually how you communicate. So that's my next challenge for you.

I need you to come up with your top five message points that you want people to understand. And remember, because it's likely to drive them to the actions you want. Five message points, 10 words or less, not five big themes where you can cram at nine bullet points underneath each one, but just five standalone ideas. do that now.