How to Shorten Your Presentation and Make it Great - Patricia Fripp
Channel: Patricia Fripp
Date: 2020-05-12

I'm frequently asked, "Patricia, what happens when I have to cut my presentation?" In professional speaking, it is not uncommon to be booked for an hour presentation, and then have to cut it to 40 minutes to keep the client on schedule. In business meetings, they often run over because people are not professional and they often take a lot longer than they were scheduled, and let's face it if the boss speaks an extra 20 minutes, you are not gonna do anything about it except cut time from yours.

My best advice is one, do not apologize. Do not tell people, "Oh, my time is cut short 20 minutes." Just step backwards and in your preparation, allow for what happens if you have to shorten or lengthen the presentation. Every speech, report, conversation, meeting is built around the big idea you want to get across. In a speech, it will be a premise, a central theme, a big idea, and the structure of your presentation proves your premise, how do you do what your subject is about. 

Every presentation needs to have a good opening to arouse interest in the subject. It can be a story. It can be a question. It can be a rhetorical question. It can be an interesting statistic. It could be as simple as a welcome to the January sales meeting. Just arouse interest, get off to a good start, and then you transition into the body of the speech where you're gonna introduce what will follow. Your talking points, I call them points of wisdom, become chunks of content. So let's just say you have three talking points. If your presentation is cut shorter, you have a choice. You can just deliver two of the chunks of content, or you could deliver all three cut shorter, as long as they are complete thoughts.

Now, how you put together your talking points might be you introduce the idea, give an explanation of what you mean by that idea, give an example. You might give a second example. For example, it could be, uh, something about how do we, how do we learn to update our technology. So you might ss- introduce the idea, give the explanation of why this is important, talk about how you learned to do this, and then give an example of now that you've mastered it, how you help other people, and then the next point might be specifically what you want this aud-, this audience to do with that information. So that is how you develop a chunk of content, and you would have three or four chunks of content that make your case for you. So perhaps if you've got to cut your time, you take one of the examples out. You still have to give the explanation, you have to give an example, and you need to let the audience know what you want to do, but you can shorten it. If you have five points, cut it down to four.

Put your presentation so into a framework. Now, this all happens before you build your PowerPoint, and when you walk on a stage or to the front of the room or in the training center, wherever you will be presenting, hold the overview in your mind so that you can very much cross out examples visually while you are speaking, which proves you don't need too many slides in case you have to cut your time. Then you do a review. If it's appropriate, you take questions, and then you close on a high. Do not apologize. Do not speak too fast. Remember, your audience had no idea what you intended to say. Just deliver a shortened presentation the best way you can, and don't worry. You'll be amazing.

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