Even if you have 60-minutes for your keynote, five hours for your seminar, or 45 minutes for your presentation, you still only have 10 minutes to work with.

Here’s why.

In his book Brain Rules, John Medina shows the latest research from neurologist who discovered that if you don’t hook an audience every ten minutes—max—you lose the audience’s attention. And when the audience is gone it doesn’t return its attention.

In our fast-paced, short-attention world crafting presentations around a tight focus is more important than ever. Presenters often fall into the trap of trying to cover too much content, inadvertently overwhelming their audience and failing to communicate their message effectively. Avoiding overload and overwhelm is critical to establishing authority and building influence.

Getting Your Presentations More Focused

Here’s a three-step process that can help you build the framework of a more focused presentation, whether you are trying to improve sales presentation skills or executive presentation skills.

1. Big Idea

2. Key Points

3. Sub Points

Before you dive too deep into the bells and whistles—multimedia elements, extensive data, and handouts—zero in on one big idea. The big idea is your unique take on a theme. That theme can be second quarter sales, Agile coaching, promotional campaigns, or any other aspect of your business.

Until you have a big idea, don’t move forward. Believe it or not, this is where most presenters put themselves in the weeds. If you don’t have a clear idea of your big idea, there’s no way your audience will after you finish.

Here are some examples of big ideas:

Brene Brown: It’s hard to hate up close.

Simon Sinek: Understanding why you are doing something is more important than what you are doing.

James Clear: Making small changes to your habits will lead to big changes in your life.

Key Points:

Once you have a refined big idea, then set out to create three key points. Key points are landmarks in your talk or presentation that help you to organize your content.

Key points are concepts.

Here are some examples:

· Here’s where we were. Here’s where we are. Here’s where we’re going.

· Here’s the problem. Here’s the solution. Here’s how we’ll implement the solution.

· Here’s what our competition is doing. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s our big opportunity.

The rule of three is critical here. It’s forced discipline. It keeps you from overwhelming the audience. And as you’ll see in the next step, it gives you an easy way to organize your presentation.

Sub-Points:

Step three is to build out sub-points. Sub-points are the stuff of your presentation: the data, case studies, research, methodologies, etc.

Again, the key is forced discipline. Never use more than three sub-points, three content containers under each key point. The sub-points should support the key point. So if your key point is how you are going to implement a new promotions campaign the sub-points might look like this:

· Social media ads

· Partnerships with larger brands

· The 4-step selling process

This is an important thing about sub-points: Things like multi-step sequences count as one sub-point.

I can feel your resistance. I can hear you saying, “But Gerry, I have so much more information I want to get into this presentation.” That’s great but if that’s what you are thinking then you are missing the point. The point isn’t how much you want to get in. The point is how much can your audience absorb?

A great speech, presentation, or seminar will also have stories, exercises, examples. Build the focused framework first. Then plug in the stories, exercises, and examples. If the stories, exercises, and examples don’t fit the framework then they don’t belong in that presentation.

The Ten-Minute Rule:

Your audience doesn’t care how long you spent preparing or practicing your presentation. They care if you are engaging and interesting. To do that, you have to follow the ten-minute rule. Every ten minutes, max, you have to do something that reengages your audience: tell a story, change your pace of speech, turn the PowerPoint on or off, move the audience into an exercise. Do something that disrupts their lack of attention span.

Bam.

It works like that and keeps people from drifting off.

The Power of Focus:

Creating a focused presentation requires intention and planning but pays dividends in audience engagement and message retention. By establishing clear objectives, keeping your design purposeful, and presenting your ideas coherently and interactively, you will not only preserve your audience’s attention but also enhance your credibility as a speaker or presenter.

If you would like to develop your skills in presentation and do it at your own pace, click here to check out a resource that can help you do it.

Become the presenter who can engage, amaze, and influence every audience.

And the more consistently you do that, the more you stand apart from the competition that is still busy trying to impress the audience and accidently overwhelming them.