In today’s world, information is more readily available to everyone than at any other time in history. A simple search on the internet can find everything from a great chocolate chip cookie recipe to the mapping of the human genome. This ability is a great thing for all of us.
As speakers, many times we want to include everything we know into our presentation and we make it very complex. There is a speakers’ maxim that we need to follow though to be more effective. “When you squeeze too much in, you squeeze your audience out.” We need to simplify!
Our audiences need time to process what we present. If we constantly bombard them with information, they don’t have an opportunity to process what to do with it. I suggest that we should never have more than three main points in a presentation. Tell stories to illustrate our points. While we may know more, the audience can only consume a portion.
In the spirit of the topic of this article then, I end by saying that we need to make our presentations easier to understand and allow our audiences to think. Simplify the complex!
