Your Compelling Message – The First Key to a Compelling Presentation

On top of any nervousness you may be feeling when you have to give a speech or presentation, do you sometimes worry about either failing to get your point across or boring your audience?

In this replay of a Coffee and Coaching Club meeting, I share these scary statistics from a recent study about audience retention of information shared in a speech:

• Immediately after a 10-minutes presentation, listeners remembered only 50% of what was said.
• By the next day, that number had dropped to 25%.
• At the end of a week, it was 10%.

YIKES!

So what characteristics can you incorporate into your presentations to make them more memorable?

1. Share stories that support your message.
2. Refer to specific examples in your stories.
3. Link your ideas to familiar ideas or practices.
4. Use repetition to reinforce your main point or points.

Beyond these basic ideas, it’s crucial to organize your thoughts in a way that makes sense to your audience.

The best way I have found to do this is to share a verbal outline with the audience.

1. Mention that you are going to share 3 important pieces of information (perhaps strategies as an example), then verbally label them.
2. The first strategy is this.
3. The second strategy is this.
4. The third strategy is this.
5. Then, in conclusion, mention that you shared these three strategies, and name them.

If this seems to be a bit much, here’s a quote from one of the greatest orators of the last century, Sir Winston Churchill:

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time–a tremendous whack.

And the last, and perhaps most important point to make: Make sure that what you are sharing is worth the precious time people give you to listen to it.

I invite you to check out the video for more thoughts about this whole topic of creating a compelling message.

You can also find other presentations from the Coffee and Coaching Club series on my YouTube channel here. Please be sure to subscribe.