Now it's time for the number one tip when it comes to your success when speaking to foreign audiences. And it's also the number one tip when it comes to your success in speaking to any audience anywhere in the world, including in your company, in your own hometown. And that tip is, you've got to have something interesting to say, and to say it in a memorable way. Now, that may sound obvious, but I work with clients all over the world, and most of them are in the US, but everywhere, and what I see is a problem. That is massive. It's an epidemic.

And that is the problem of people giving a speech is a boring data dump. Here's everything we did last quarter. Here's everything our company does. Here's a whole bunch of bullet points. And it's boring. It's tedious.

It's a data dump. Now you may think that somehow speaking to a foreign audience is more difficult. Often speaking to a domestic audience, what you might not realize is, you might not be any good speaking to that domestic audience, if you actually judge yourself based on what people remember. Now, I operate under the assumption that most business executives really aren't very good. Now, they may look polished, and their tie may be straight, or their dresses perfect. Their hair may be perfect if they have any.

But if you test the audience, if you actually go around the room after the speech, and say, Tell me everything that speaker just said, What would the speaker's main points Tell me every slide you remember? In most cases, people would be like, I don't know. But the speaker seemed very professional and seem smart, and I'm sure we could do business with them. That's not communication. That's time wasting that's taking up space. And that's it.

Kind of going with the flow and doing what everyone else does. So, keep in mind, you don't get credit for speaking the foreign language or saying hello in their language, although that's a nice thing to do. If you still get up and give a boring speech, here are the fundamentals of good speech making, you've got to narrow your speech down to a handful of points. I've been testing audiences all over the world for 30 years. And I can tell you I've never met an audience member who really remembered more than five points. Most common way for people to remember is zero or one casually to three every once in a while four points.

But if you can get your audience to remember five key points, you are going to be wildly successful you are going to be the best speaker that audience member has seen in the last year possibly ever. So Focus start off by focusing on a handful of points that are most important to you. The next thing you've got to do is you've got to tell a story. A story involves a real conversation that you had with a real person could be a client, colleague, customer, a patient, a family member, that's kind of involved a real conversation with a real person about a real problem and where you were the setting. Now, I'll give you in the bonus section, more details about storytelling. But it genuinely is the biggest difference between great communicators and awful communicators great communicators consistently illustrate every key point with a story.

Awful speakers no matter what language or what country they're in consistently Avoid stories because there's no time because they got to cover all the data. They got to go through all these slides and all these numbers and people are falling asleep, regardless of what culture they're in. Now, certain cultures, they may look more attentive and nod, but they're not listening to you because you've bored them. So that's my challenge to you when you're coming up with your speech for foreign audiences. Do the same thing you shouldn't be doing. When you're speaking to domestic audiences use better judgment discernment, narrowly narrowing your messages down to five, and then coming up with a story to illustrate each point.

And the only real difference is, frankly, make sure your stories don't involve football games or certain cultural things that people just wouldn't understand. But if it's a problem with a client problem with community These things translate all cultures.