Tip #16: Limit Your Content to 5 or Fewer Main Points | 30 Public Speaking Tips

Welcome to 30 Tips in 30 Days! Over the entire month of November, I will be releasing a short, bite sized episode of Fearless Presentations every morning covering things that are absolutely essential to being a better presenter. Whether you've been speaking professionally for years and years or are looking to just start your public speaking journey, applying just these 30 tips I cover here will instantly and easily make you improve as a speaker. The 6x6 rule is one that's kind of old school but it definitely is something that still applies and can make a lot of people's mediocre PowerPoint's instantly a lot better. The 6x6 rule is simple. You should (usually) never have more than 6 lines of text on a slide and you should (usually) never have more than 6 words in each line on the slide. Brevity and glance-ability are the strongest traits that words on a slideshow can have. If your audience is squinting trying to read the entire paragraph you have on screen then you have failed. Likewise, if you have a single word up on the screen that isn't something incredibly important or applicable to your presentation, you've also failed.Show Notes: 101 Public Speaking Tips For Delivering Your Best Speech(https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/101-public-speaking-tips-for-delivering-your-best-speech/)

Welcome to 30 Tips in 30 Days! Over the entire month of November, I will be releasing a short, bite sized episode of Fearless Presentations every morning covering things that are absolutely essential to being a better presenter. Whether you've been speaking professionally for years and years or are looking to just start your public speaking journey, applying just these 30 tips I cover here will instantly and easily make you improve as a speaker. Going all the way back to the very first tip in this series, over-designing your slideshow or prioritizing your PowerPoint over your speech is one of the most common mistakes there are in speech writing. We have an old blog post on our website with videos being released on the Fearless Presentations YouTube right now over the amount of slides you should be including in your presentation (depending on the length) and chances are, it's quite a bit less than you are doing now. So go check those out to get a full understanding of the tip.Show Notes: 101 Public Speaking Tips For Delivering Your Best Speech(https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/101-public-speaking-tips-for-delivering-your-best-speech/)

Welcome to 30 Tips in 30 Days! Over the entire month of November, I will be releasing a short, bite sized episode of Fearless Presentations every morning covering things that are absolutely essential to being a better presenter. Whether you've been speaking professionally for years and years or are looking to just start your public speaking journey, applying just these 30 tips I cover here will instantly and easily make you improve as a speaker. Not only is your presentation important for the information it has to deliver, it's also important as a piece of entertainment. Nothing you say will be delivered the right way if you are boring, uninteresting, and not thinking of the speech as something that people have to stay engaged with for a long period of time. So whenever you are trying to think of the best way to present the information you have to give, realize that the absolute best way to present it is in a way that people will enjoy consuming it. Adding a bit of pizazz to your speech in the way of physicality, fun stories, funny anecdotes, and pre-planned structure is the best way to go about it.Show Notes: 101 Public Speaking Tips For Delivering Your Best Speech(https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/101-public-speaking-tips-for-delivering-your-best-speech/)

Welcome to 30 Tips in 30 Days! Over the entire month of November, I will be releasing a short, bite sized episode of Fearless Presentations every morning covering things that are absolutely essential to being a better presenter. Whether you've been speaking professionally for years and years or are looking to just start your public speaking journey, applying just these 30 tips I cover here will instantly and easily make you improve as a speaker. This tip is very specifically worded because it's very easy to misinterpret and actually end up hurting your speech more than helping it. Quotes can be a very useful tool. If you are trying to add credibility to a position or decision you're presenting, directly quoting someone successful with your position or decision can make people think "well it worked for that successful person, maybe it's worth hearing out". So quotes are great, the chasms you can fall into come with how the quote is presented. Putting the quote up on the board, struggling to remember the speech, or misremembering it are all things that may actually hurt you more than help you.Show Notes: 101 Public Speaking Tips For Delivering Your Best Speech(https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/101-public-speaking-tips-for-delivering-your-best-speech/)

Welcome to 30 Tips in 30 Days! Over the entire month of November, I will be releasing a short, bite sized episode of Fearless Presentations every morning covering things that are absolutely essential to being a better presenter. Whether you've been speaking professionally for years and years or are looking to just start your public speaking journey, applying just these 30 tips I cover here will instantly and easily make you improve as a speaker. Humor is the great unifier. Even when people are annoyed, hate, or disagree with something that you're saying, a good joke will still make them laugh. Finding ways to sneak funny anecdotes into your speeches, especially when you feel like you're losing your audience, is one of the best ways to instantly win them back over. Show Notes: 101 Public Speaking Tips For Delivering Your Best Speech(https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/101-public-speaking-tips-for-delivering-your-best-speech/)

Welcome to 30 Tips in 30 Days! Over the entire month of November, I will be releasing a short, bite sized episode of Fearless Presentations every morning covering things that are absolutely essential to being a better presenter. Whether you've been speaking professionally for years and years or are looking to just start your public speaking journey, applying just these 30 tips I cover here will instantly and easily make you improve as a speaker. When I first started doing public speaking coaching about 20 years ago, the average attention span of a person was about 2 minutes in a speech. Now, obviously, that attention span is getting lower and lower by the year. It's never been more important than it is now to consistently incorporate stories into your speeches. Stories and examples keep engagement high so utilizing that tool of engagement as often as you can afford is necessary to seeing any success as a public presenter. Show Notes: 101 Public Speaking Tips For Delivering Your Best Speech(https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/101-public-speaking-tips-for-delivering-your-best-speech/)

Welcome to 30 Tips in 30 Days! Over the entire month of November, I will be releasing a short, bite sized episode of Fearless Presentations every morning covering things that are absolutely essential to being a better presenter. Whether you've been speaking professionally for years and years or are looking to just start your public speaking journey, applying just these 30 tips I cover here will instantly and easily make you improve as a speaker. Kind of building off the tip from yesterday, you don't want to just limit your points down to only a few, you also want to make sure they are audience focused. Having a confusing or boringly basic point is a sure-fire way to making your audience rapidly uninterested. Keep you points easy to convey, short and to the point, but not so broad that everyone's left confused and audience retention will quickly improve.Show Notes: 101 Public Speaking Tips For Delivering Your Best Speech(https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/101-public-speaking-tips-for-delivering-your-best-speech/)

Welcome to 30 Tips in 30 Days! Over the entire month of November, I will be releasing a short, bite sized episode of Fearless Presentations every morning covering things that are absolutely essential to being a better presenter. Whether you've been speaking professionally for years and years or are looking to just start your public speaking journey, applying just these 30 tips I cover here will instantly and easily make you improve as a speaker. Getting the audience to remember much from a presentation (especially a really long presentation) is incredibly hard. Giving audiences a huge list of points to remember and hone in on is even more-so fighting a losing battle. Limiting yourself to 5 or fewer points ensures that people can reliably remember everything, aren't overwhelmed, and each point has a proper amount of substance to it. Show Notes: 101 Public Speaking Tips For Delivering Your Best Speech(https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/101-public-speaking-tips-for-delivering-your-best-speech/)

Welcome to 30 Tips in 30 Days! Over the entire month of November, I will be releasing a short, bite sized episode of Fearless Presentations every morning covering things that are absolutely essential to being a better presenter. Whether you've been speaking professionally for years and years or are looking to just start your public speaking journey, applying just these 30 tips I cover here will instantly and easily make you improve as a speaker. The title of your presentation is the very first checkpoint your audience goes through of deciding whether or not they're interested in hearing what you have to say. If you give them something super vague, general, or even hyper specific it's very likely that you'll lose them before you even start talking cause they'll start off confused. Make your title something that gives the entire concept of the presentation while still allowing enough room for the details of the presentation to fill in the gaps.Show Notes: 101 Public Speaking Tips For Delivering Your Best Speech(https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/101-public-speaking-tips-for-delivering-your-best-speech/)

Welcome to 30 Tips in 30 Days! Over the entire month of November, I will be releasing a short, bite sized episode of Fearless Presentations every morning covering things that are absolutely essential to being a better presenter. Whether you've been speaking professionally for years and years or are looking to just start your public speaking journey, applying just these 30 tips I cover here will instantly and easily make you improve as a speaker. Not all speeches are the same amount of time, but that doesn't mean you can't make all of your stories work each for them. Finding different ways to convey the same information in more and less time without sacrificing any content or making the whole thing drag is a vital skill for new speakers. Learning to develop it through making different length versions of the same story is a great way to train that. Show Notes: 101 Public Speaking Tips For Delivering Your Best Speech(https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/101-public-speaking-tips-for-delivering-your-best-speech/)