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About this lesson
Can you effectively communicate your most important messages?
Quick reference
Building a Strong Frame for Your Stories
The foundation of every strong story-driven presentation is a clearly defined set of core messages — no more than five — that everything else supports.
Most Audiences Only Remember a Few Messages
- Even from the best speakers, most people only recall one to five main ideas or takeaways.
- Rarely does anyone remember more than five, even from the most impactful presentations.
- This is why it’s essential to focus and narrow your key messages — otherwise, your best ideas may get lost.
Prioritize and Cut to Your Top Five
- After brainstorming all your potential messages, rank them by priority.
- Keep only the top five — these are the ideas your audience is most likely to retain.
- This can be difficult because all your ideas may feel important, but trimming is key for clarity and impact.
- Save extra content for handouts, memos, or a website — not for your live talk.
Think of It Like a Blueprint
- You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint — the same goes for your talk.
- Your message structure is the frame on which everything else (like stories and visuals) gets built.
- Without a strong message foundation, even the most entertaining stories won’t support your communication goals.
Test the Frame Before Adding Stories
- Before layering in stories, speak your five messages out loud.
- Record yourself — this is just a quick one-minute test to check for clarity and flow.
- Don’t worry about being entertaining yet; the goal is to make sure your structure is solid.
- Practice it a few times so the bare bones of your message feel natural and clear to you.
- 00:05 First question I ask 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.
- 00:16 Now tell me every message point you remember from their speech.
- 00:24 And they may have already told me a few stories they remember, but I want to know their messages.
- 00:27 And all the years I've asked that question, I've never had anyone remember more than 5 messages, 5 ideas from the best speaker they've seen their entire career, sometimes their entire life.
- 00:43 Often people remember no messages.
- 00:45 Quite often it's one message, occasionally to rarely 3 or 4.
- 00:52 And once every six months I'll have one person who remembers 5 messages.
- 00:58 So that's why I ask all of my clients before they start off with their whole speech or their PowerPoint or 89 different stories, Let's truly narrow down your entire presentation to just the top five messages.
- 01:13 So if you did what I asked you to a moment ago, you brainstormed on every possible message you could want.
- 01:19 Now I want you to put them in priority and get rid of anything that isn't in the top five.
- 01:26 Now, this is hard to do.
- 01:28 These are your babies.
- 01:29 Sometimes they're all good messages.
- 01:32 If you're writing a memo, you might put all of them in.
- 01:35 If it's your website, you'd put all of them in.
- 01:38 If you're giving a a memo to a client, you would put all of them in.
- 01:43 But that's not what a speech or a presentation is about.
- 01:47 So that's what I want you to do right now is narrow down what are your top five messages you want to convey in your presentation before you build your dream house or your ideal office complex.
- 02:03 Typically you're going to look at an architectural drawing, maybe an engineer's blueprint.
- 02:07 You don't just start hammering things up and building it up Willy nilly.
- 02:10 You want to see the skeleton, You want to see the actual design.
- 02:14 Well, that's what I'd like to do now is I'd like to see the design of your presentation.
- 02:19 We're going to make it 1000 times more interesting and memorable with stories.
- 02:25 But before we do that, let's see, does it stand on its own or is it like a frame of a house that only has one beam aimed and nothing holding it up, but it just falls over?
- 02:37 So what I'd like you to do now is pull out your cell phone, pull out a webcam, anything you can to record yourself and just speak out loud your 5 main message points.
- 02:49 Now this shouldn't take more than a minute.
- 02:51 I'm not asking you to put any stories in yet.
- 02:55 Let's just practice the bare bones of our message, not expecting it to even be memorable or captivating yet.
- 03:03 But we do want it to be interesting.
- 03:05 We do want it to make sense.
- 03:07 And you need to personally feel comfortable with it.
- 03:09 So practice that.
- 03:11 Record it several times.
- 03:13 Please do that now.
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