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What Can You Do with Ten Pounds?
You’ve probably heard something similar as you settled in at a meeting, seminar, or even a conversation.
I heard the warning right at the beginning of the virtual workshop. “Because there’s a lot to cover in a short amount of time,” she said, “I’m cramming this all in for a bunch of professionals who know it’s better not to have so much content in an hour.”
She apologized a couple of times later in the session for talking so fast and saying so much. But her message was so important, see … this was just the way it had to be.
Or maybe it didn’t?
I thought it could be just me. The subject was way outside my area of expertise. I have a lot to learn about it, and I just can’t keep up. It occurred to me that the content and the delivery might have been fine for everyone else on the Zoom screen.
But the first person who called me after it was over said, “Whew! That was just too much material. And she talked so fast, I couldn’t really keep up with it.”
My sentiments exactly.
As the host of the session had said, we knew better. So did she. And yet, she did exactly what we all knew she shouldn’t do. And the truth is, speakers and leaders are doing the same thing in conference rooms, corporate training rooms, and virtual meetings all day long. They’re “cramming this all in” even though they know people can’t absorb it.
Because they think what they want to say is more important than what their listeners need to hear.
So how do you avoid overloading your listeners?
Maybe you can condense your material.
Rigorous editing often proves we can convey the necessary information and make our point in way fewer words than we first thought. Eliminate repetition, hedging, runway phrases and the like, and your message will be more muscular. And shorter.
You’ll have more impact, not less, when you pare down your presentation.
Provide some information differently.
If they absolutely must know everything you want to tell them, you may need to tell them some of it in a different way.
Provide a document with additional details that you didn’t go into in the meeting. Yes, there’s a risk not everyone will read it. It’s no greater than the risk that people in a meeting have tuned you out while you blathered on past their limit for learning.
Recommend another resource to supplement what they’ve heard from you. Maybe they get it partly from somebody else at some other time.
Or schedule a second meeting, split your content in two, and deliver the rest of it when you and your listeners are fresh and ready for more.
The bottom line is: respect the people you’re talking to.
When we keep our focus on what they need to hear instead of on what we want to say, it gets easier to manage the minutes.
You can add a page to a document. You can add an image to a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. You can add an event to everyone’s Outlook calendar. But you cannot add even one minute to an hour.
So. What can you do with ten pounds? A lot of things. What you cannot do is fit that ten pounds into a five-pound bag.
