168: Turning a 40-Minute Talk Into 15
I'm sure that you have an amazing presentation ready to go, but what happens when an opportunity comes across your desk, and they're looking for that same talk in a much shorter timeframe?
In today's episode, I'm going to show you how to take your signature presentation and cut it down into a bite size talk without sacrificing impact. Join me for my guided step-by-step process!
If you loved this episode and it motivated you to work on more polished presentations, I’d love for you to leave a review on iTunes and tell me about your biggest takeaway. Take a screenshot of you listening on your device, post it to your Instagram Stories, and tag me @jessicarasdall.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Are you risking the flow of your presentation?
Have you ever watched a show on your favorite streaming service that was edited to include commercials, yet you’re watching it without commercials? You can tell that something was cut out of the program—something is missing and it doesn’t flow.
When we cut down an existing presentation, we’re doing something similar. We don't want the audience to feel like something is missing. You want to provide a seamless experience. This isn't about slicing and dicing—it might even help you get more laser focused on the transformation for your audience.
We are horrible self-editors
When it comes to turning your 40 minute presentation into a minute presentation, remember that less is more when it comes to presentations. The truth is that we are horrible self-editors in that we read what we meant to write and not what we actually wrote. It’s important to always get feedback on your final presentation, ever if you’re starting from scratch.
How you can turn your 40-minute talk into 15-minutes:
You shouldn’t be taking a presentation and editing within that document. So, let’s walk through the steps to get your 40-minute talk turned into a 15-minute talk:
Start with a blank doc.
Write out the four phases you’ll speak too:
Hook your audience
Build your case
Serve from the stage
Build a lasting impact
Outline your new talk with the right flow
Pull from your original talk
Give it a final walkthrough from your audience's perspective—you have to finish it by being able to deliver it.
If you're not already a member of the academy, we'd love to invite you to apply to join The Speaking Strategy Academy. You'll get instant access to our A-Z speaking training system with video lessons, transcripts, scripts, templates, and more.... access to our live group coaching calls, personalized 1:1 feedback on your work from me, and an opportunity to present your work live in front of our community for hot seat coaching and feedback. What are you waiting for, friend? Apply today!
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Read the Transcript from this Episode
Transcript for Episode 168:
I'm sure that you have an amazing presentation ready to go. But what happens when an opportunity comes across your desk, and they're looking for that same talk in a much shorter timeframe. In today's episode, I'm going to show you how to take your signature presentation and cut it down into a bite size talk without sacrificing impact.
Welcome back to another episode of The Speak to Scale Podcast, where we're partnering with small business owners just like you to grow and scale your impact by speaking on stages, podcasts, webinars, and more. I'm your host, Jessica Rasdall. And I'm so excited to chat with you today. Because I know as a small business owner myself, that you are committed to showing up and being the face of your company, you probably have a signature presentation ready to go, you've put in a lot of work to develop that talk. Maybe it's 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 or 60.
Maybe it's an hour and a half hands on workshop. But there will eventually come a time where a great speaking opportunity comes across your desk. But you only have maybe 10 1520 minutes on the stage. How can you take your high value presentation and chop it down into a shorter timeframe without sacrificing the value of that talk? Well, in today's episode, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. But it's probably not the way you think. So let me first show you what happens when we just take our talk and start slicing and dicing it. Now if you've been around here for a while, if you hang out with me on Instagram, if we've ever had a conversation, you probably know that I love watching TV at night. And I'm not the gal who enjoys the bachelor or TV drama like it's just not for me. I'm the weirdo who watches the Discovery Channel all the time. I love Naked and Afraid and building off the grid. And like all alone I love like the weird survival shows, you know, while I'm sitting in my air conditioning, I'm giving all these contestants a hard time. But I love that kind of TV out I love the Food Network. I love HGTV. So it was a no brainer for me to buy, you know yet another streaming service when they started releasing discovery plus. And when I got the discovery plus app on my firestick it was just a few dollars more maybe even $1 more. To get the subscription with no commercials, it was a no brainer for me. But I noticed something right away and I can't unsee it. If you have discovery plus, you're probably like, Oh, I know, I know friend.
What happens is all of the shows on this streaming service, or designed and edited and cut and formatted for TV with commercials. And when you opt in to watch them without commercials, it feels so weird. The shows were designed to have that break. And when you pull the commercial out, the entire flow of the episode is off. When we start slicing and dicing our presentations, we risk ruining the flow of our talk just like that. There's going to be parts if you if you go cut out a section that maybe you repeat yourself, maybe it sounds like you're talking in circles, maybe you're leaving out key important details. And we don't want that, you know, we don't want our audience to feel like something is missing or that they you know that you pulled something out that would have been important to them. We want this to feel like a seamless journey from start to finish. Getting your talk to where it needs to be in a shorter timeframe is not about slicing and dicing. Yes, you're going to have to pull things out of your talk and less is more when it comes to presentations. But having to cut your talk down to fit a smaller timeframe. It's not a bad thing. In fact, it might even help you get more laser focused on the transformation you're providing to your audience. Because I'm sure your other presentation, your longer one is amazing. But maybe there's some stuff in there that you added to fill space stuff that isn't necessarily important to your audience. Now most of us when we're in a scenario where we have to take a larger piece of content and break it down into a smaller one just like a presentation. We head on over to that document and we start cutting things out. And that's where we do it wrong.
That's when we start editing our existing presentation and we wind up like the shows on Discovery plus that will say what they are supposed to say before the commercial break, there's no actual commercial break, and then they say it again, it feels repetitive and awkward, and you can tell something was taken out. We don't want to do that. And we really don't want to start editing our own presentation like that, because we're horrible self editors. You know, when we go through our talk, and we read it, we read what we meant to write, not what we actually wrote on paper.
All you have to do is ask my team. I don't know how they read through my jumbles. Sometimes. I'm glad they understand what I was trying to say. But I will read through something that I wrote, and I will read right over my mistakes right over my typos. And it's not just me, I noticed this a lot. You know, we are a homeschooling family. And whenever my daughter and I are working on her language arts assignments, which is not her favorite subject, so it's real fun time. But whenever we're working on her writing, and editing the, you know, the little essays, she's writing the things she's doing. We go, I have her edit it first, and then we go through it together and edit it. And she will read right over things I'll ask her again, like, is all of our capitalization correct?
She's like, Yeah, she just will read right over it. That's what we do, we read what we meant, not what we wrote. So instead of opening up this great presentation you have, and starting to edit and slice it and dice it, I want to show you a different approach, something that has worked really, really well for me, so that you can start rewriting your presentation without reinventing the wheel. So a little asterisk here, a little bonus point, if you are one of our speaking strategy Academy members, and you're listening to today's episode, head on over to the Academy, I've added an extra lesson, a new bonus lesson that is showing you how to do this broken down in real time.
And I'm showing you a ScreenFlow of myself, cutting down and repurposing a presentation from one event for another, so head on over there and watch that. But for the rest of us here, let me start showing you the way that I do this, the way that I can take a longer piece of content, I can take a client's presentation, I can take something that was meant for a larger timeframe and break it down into a smaller one. In fact, if you really want the inside scoop on this, I'm doing it right now. Because today's episode is a smaller excerpt of a larger presentation I recently gave on a summit. So I'm taking that summit presentation, and I'm pulling out the parts that I need for you. So instead of opening your larger presentation, you're like 16 minute, 15 minute, 40 minute talk. And simply slicing and dicing, what I want you to do is open up a brand new document, open that new Google Doc up or wherever you're typing this thing in and start fresh, I want you to list out the four phases of writing your talk.
If you don't know what that is, head back over to Episode 164, where I show you how to write a speech, it's going to show you exactly how to do that. If you're a vault member of ours, we have an entire workbook that breaks this down for you. If you're not a vault member, stay till the end, I'll give you a hook up with a discount on how to grab that workbook. But what I want you to do is in that new document is write the four phases to hook your audience in, build your case, serve from the stage and leave a lasting impact. That's the flow we're going to take your audience through in this talk.
So now you've got this fresh sheet of paper, this fresh document, and you know, your big four sections, what I want you to do is quickly within that outline what's going into the new talk, you don't have to write a new talk. But this is a new scenario. And again, Episode 164 will walk you through this, but really start to ask yourself, who am I speaking to at this event? Where are they when they first walk into the room? Where do I want them to be when I'm done with this talk? You know what? What transformation will I have provided? What will they know that they didn't know before? What will they be able to do? What will they feel what what change is happening in this room, and that's going to help you figure out what needs to go into this talk in those four phases. In order to make this really impactful again, in this part we're just outlining so bullet points.
So maybe you're saying you know at first I want to talk about This. So, for example, what we're talking about today, if First I want to, I want to show people that they can slice their talk down, I want to give them a really good visual with that I want to talk to them about discovery plus, then maybe I want to tell them who I am. And like, why they should trust me. Now I'm gonna, you know, I'm going to show them how to physically do this. And then I'm going to give them their next steps like, right, what are your big bullet points? What are the big things you want to hit on? Once you know what that flow looks like, Then, and only then, can you go open up your old talk the longer talk, because what I want you to do is go pull those excerpts from your existing presentation, copy and paste them into your new outline, pull what you need to expand on the bullets you listed.
That's going to help you be very intentional with the content that you add to your new talk. Rather than cutting things out of your old one, I want you to pull from the old one and add it to the new one. It sounds like such a tiny shift. But the way you approach it is so much more helpful. Think about when you're like purging your closet when you're Marie Kondo doing things, right? She doesn't just have you go through and get rid of everything she has you go through and decide what are the things you love? What is it that you're keeping, there's a different mindset involved when we decide to keep something rather than decide to get rid of something.
And I want you to take that same approach with your presentation. So let's say you've done that you opened a blank Doc, you wrote your four phases, you outlined your bullets you pulled from your old talk. Now what I want you to do is give it a good final walkthrough a few times, put yourself in your audience's shoes and read through that outline. Does this make sense? Does this flow? Does this deliver the results that I'm promising? Is it leaving them better than I found them? That's what you want to do, we need to make sure that what you pulled together is cohesive, you might need to cut a few things out, you might need to add some new things, we might need some transitions or visuals or stories, this is your chance to really finesse the presentation and in its shorter format, make it very impactful. But don't stop here. bonus tip here. I want you to get up out of your chair, and practice delivering that presentation. That's where you're really going to find. Are there any gaps? Is there anything that I'm missing? That's why inside of the academy when a student, you know they will a student will send me their work. They'll send me their outline, they say, you know, I've done I've worked on it, can you look this over? Are there any changes you think I should make? And if they're not asking for feedback on a specific section, which of course I'm happy to give. But if they're just asking does this whole talk work, I'm not going to read it and give them feedback. Why? Because I don't know. It's not until we see the presentation. It's not until it's delivered verbally, that we can really tell if it's finished. So I respond to that student with a link for them to schedule a showcase. presentation, that just means that our students have an opportunity every single month to deliver their talk in front of our group that's like their dress rehearsal, they can deliver their presentation and we can all give them feedback. But until you get up out of your chair and practice that presentation, you don't know if it's ready. just reading the words on paper is not enough because the way we write it is not always the way we present it. And I want you to Yes, start with the outline. Start with your presentation and that document, but you've got to finish it being able to deliver it. So let me recap that for you one more time, just in case you're like just a missed one of those steps. friendly reminder, rewrite your talk, but don't reinvent the wheel. So start with a new document or a blank piece of paper. Then write out the four phases of crafting your talk, which you can find in Episode 164 a full lesson on how to write your talk.
Then, I want you to outline your new talk in that flow in this order. Finally, pull from your original talk for all the meaty content in your statistics, your teaching points, whatever you decide to keep the things that you love that have meaning to you. And finally give it that walkthrough from your audience's perspective. Make sure from top to bottom that that presentation works. add anything else you need, do all the finessing there. If you need some support in doing this, if you want a four phase workbook to help you craft that presentation, we Have one inside of the speak to scale vault that is perfect for this, it pairs beautifully. It's essentially a workbook to help you craft your presentation and help you get started in a really easy way. If you head over to our show notes, it's linked directly there for you. Or you can go to the speak to scale vault calm and use the code podcast for a special discount for me, so that you can get started right away. Listen, your presentation is valuable, and it's important. But I want to make sure that if you're ever in a scenario where you have a limited time frame to present, that your content and your presentation, still pack a punch. You've got this and you don't have to sacrifice the value of your talk, just because you have a shorter window to present. Go right that talk friend and I will see you next week for another episode of The speak to scale podcast.
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