Far too many speakers attempt to look and sound smart by drowning their audience members in a sea of facts. “More is More” is their philosophy. The problem is that no matter how quickly you speak during a 20-30 minute speech, there is no way you can get your audience to know as much as you do on your area of expertise.
The other reality is that your audience can already get all of the facts on your subject from the internet. People are not suffering from a lack of information or facts. There are more than 100,000 books published every year and, seemingly, another 100,000 blogs run by self-appointed pundits published every hour.
The world does not need more information. Your audience doesn’t really want more information.
Instead, your audience is looking for someone (you) who can sift through all the info they don’t have time to go through and distill for them what they really, really need to know. In short, your audience is looking for wisdom.
Are you providing wisdom for your audience? It would be nice if every speaker could come up with stunningly original and creative thoughts for each audience.
But this is not always required. You can impart wisdom to your audience by giving it a well-organized perspective on your subject matter. This means you don’t get them lost in a forest of facts. It’s not that facts don’t matter. It’s just that facts without context and priority have no meaning. As a speaker, you can give wisdom to your audience by giving them an overriding metaphor or a new thematic way at looking at a particular problem or cluster of issues. By creating themes or overriding messages, you help your audience interpret some small slice of the world in a more coherent, and hence, more meaningful way.
And when you are adding the value of meaning, even if it is how to make award winning paper airplanes, you will be perceived as a speaker who adds the value of wisdom to your audience.
