So you're giving an informational speech. The good news is you don't have to be wildly entertaining. You're not the comedian for the night. You don't have to be incredibly charming. You're not the master of ceremonies. And you don't have to be funny.
So that's good news. But we still need a specific goal for this informational speech. I want to know exactly what information do you have? Do you know, that you want this audience to understand? And remember? Now, I gotta tell you right now, the biggest problem most people have when they're giving informational speeches, is they give away too much information.
They throw it all out there. It's abstract, it's disconnected. There are no examples. There are no case studies. There are no stories. Nobody remembers anything.
Okay. I'll ask you the same question I've asked people I've worked with for the last 30 years all over the country. All over the world. And that is this think of the best speaker you've seen. Give an informational speech, or any other type of speech in the last year, the last five years now, how many pieces of information do you remember from that speech? If you had to go through a blackboard now and write it down, write it down your computer.
How many numbers fax bits of information do you remember from the best speaker you've ever seen? I've asked that question for years, and quite often people don't remember anything. Or they remember one point sometimes two, three, occasionally four. once every six months, someone will remember five ideas, five bits of information from the best speaker they've seen in the last five years or maybe ever. And yet, these very same people get up to practice their informational speech in front of me. And what do you know they've got 27 bullet points on the first slide 13 templates.
Like charts on the second slide, and four charts on the third slide, it's way, way, way too much information. So here's the dirty little secret, it's incredibly easy to give an informational speech. It's much harder, or much rarer to give an informational speech, where there's a transfer of information from your brain, into the brains and memories of the audience. So that's really what our focus should be. Not just giving an informational speech but giving an effective informational speech, so that there's an information transfer. And to not assume like in an academic setting, the people are writing it down and studying it because you got the ability to give them a big test next Friday.
Operating under the assumption that this isn't a classroom setting where you're giving this informational presentation. Because of that, we simply don't have the luxury of throwing out why Lots of data and assuming everyone's writing it down and studying it. So everything we're doing in this course, is based on this assumption that it's actually pretty hard to get people to remember information. So we got to spend a lot of time isolating, what are the ideas? The message is the information we want people to understand and remember, and now how do we spend the rest of the time making it memorable? Now we're not doing this to be funny, or to be entertaining, or to be overly emotional, or to convince people to give us their wallets.
It's not about that. It's just this basic low level goal of trying to communicate information in a way that people can digest. That's what it's all about. So the starting point for you is to figure out what are your messages when What's the actual information that's most important to you that you want to communicate in this speech?