The Easiest Way To Improve Your Presentations
To improve your presentations, take a lesson from President William Henry Harrison. William Henry Harrison was elected in 1841 as the the ninth president of the United States. President Harrison is remembered for a few things; he is remembered as the President who served the shortest tenure in U.S. Presidential history, as well as the first President to die in office. President Harrison is also known for being the last President born as a British subject.
While all of these facts are somewhat interesting, most people actually remember President Harrison for delivering the longest inaugural address in American history.
Even after his friend Daniel Webster edited the speech, Harrison’s address was still 8,445 words. Due to the length of his content, President Harrison made his audience stand outside on a cold, dreary day in March to listen to him speak for almost 2 hours.
The Lesson For You?
Don’t let the length of your presentation be more memorable than your message. Even if you’re elected as President of the United States, if you deliver a painfully long presentation, the length of your presentation can become your legacy, instead of your ideas or accomplishments.
How To Simply Your Message
To limit the length of your talk, identify your main idea, which should be the one point you want to ensure your audience remembers from your presentation. Once you identify the core concept of your content, remove any stats, facts, stories, and ideas that do not directly support that main idea.
In addition, don’t beat around the bush when sharing your supporting ideas. For example, don’t walk the audience through your thought process to illustrate how you arrived at every point that supports your main point. Do the heavy-lifting for the audience; share your conclusions without making the audience experience the process just as you did. If you want to empower your audience to work through the logic as you did, provide all of the details in a handout or a follow-up email, but don’t make them follow you through the process during your presentation.
For example, don’t ask your audience to analyze complex charts and graphs during your presentation. Instead, draw conclusions from the data for your audience before the presentation, and then only share the items that are critical to your main point.
The Before slide shown below is an example of a slide that is too complex for a presentation. Your audience does not want to listen to you explain this many data points. If you walk your audience through all of the details of a chart like this one, your presentation will be boring, and your talk will be ridiculously long.
BEFORE
Instead, create a slide like the After slide shown below. Your goal should be to simplify your slides so that you are only presenting the most critical points. Any tangential items will potentially confuse your audience, as well as make your presentation unnecessarily long.
AFTER
Conclusion
There are many ways to simplify your presentations. The example above is just a sample of the many solutions that can help you cut content from your presentation so that you deliver a more powerful message as well as a presentation that is a reasonable length. As President Harrison teaches us all, if you speak for too long, people will remember your speech, but not for the ideal reasons. Edit. Refine. And repeat until your presentation is not one second longer than it needs to be.
