Our model for creating the best presentations your audience has ever seen is called Fit, Focus and Flair. Focus is what helps you to deliver a streamlined presentation that your audience can sum up in one word, and act or reflect upon for the following days and weeks.
The benefits of Focus
There’s been a lot of research on it, and the consensus seems to be that 8 hours after you shut up, your audience will have forgotten 95% of what you said. It’s up to you to make sure that the snippet which sticks with them is the heart and soul of what got you standing up to speak in the first place.
Presentations, speeches, proposals, almost everything which we work on in business balloons. We come up with more ideas, feel too sentimental about the early ones to bin them, find new angles and approaches to the subject which could interest different members of the audience.
It’s a valuable part of the preparation process – as is cutting the crap, identifying the lines of the speech which really are gold, and scrapping slides 4-9 which cover the mundane, meek and meaningless.
Developing your Focus
The right questions for retaining Focus in your speech or presentation begin with:
- What is the very least that you can say on the subject in the simplest way and the shortest possible time?
- Which 5% of everything you could tell them about your subject, do you want them to remember most?
- How can you deliver this message in the shortest possible time?
Where to go from here
We talk about the Fit, Focus & Flair model a lot on the blog – you can take a look at the most recent posts here. But here are a few of the best to begin with:
- Learn more about memory retention – and where to focus your attention.
- Take our advice on focused slide design.
- In practice: cutting down a document to present.
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