Picture this.

You’ll got an important pitch coming up to your Leadership team.

But you have so many ideas – disorganised in your mind – that you’re not sure how to choose the best ideas to get sign off on what you want.

Here is a SIMPLE, powerful process to determine your key message(s).

#1 Imagine, a week before the presentation, your boss says that you are restricted to just one sentence for your entire presentation. That’s all. You protest that you can’t do this. However, the boss still insists on only one sentence.

#2 With this one sentence condition – let’s agree – you would need to make sure that it contains most important point you want to make.

So, you review all your content, and after much reflection you come up with the most important sentence and tell your boss. Your boss then says, ‘I’ve changed the rules’.

Now you can have two sentences.

So, you go back to your content, and again after much deliberation identify the second most important sentence. You inform your boss. Now she says ‘there’s another rule change. You can now have three sentences.  Once again you go back to your possible content, and come up with the third most important sentence.

The above scenario with your boss repeats until you come up with the number four to ten most important sentences.

Then your boss says, discard the number four to ten sentences, and just present your top three sentences.

End of process.

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Through this process you have now determined the key messages you should speak near the start of your presentation, and re-state at the end of your presentation.

To be clear, you don’t need three sentences. One might be enough. But five is usually too many.

Own the Conversation

In the next seven days – for any type of presentation – make a calendar entry to do the above process to determine the key messages of the presentation. After delivering the presentation reflect on its impact and/or get feedback from a trusted person.

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p.s. Here is a post on the value of letting people ‘blow their stack’,