The year was 2001 and I was doing a guest speaker spot on presenting at a prominent foreign university. The speaking points were commited to memory, the slides and video were all prepared and I was superbly groomed. About two hours before I was to stand up and deliver I met with the event sponsor and his tech guys and did my best to walk them through the presentation. I had organized the talk into three "big buckets" covering style, content and impact. Each bucket had two or three subpoints.

It became apparent about halfway through the run-through that I had lost them. Their English was excellent for a second-language and they had considerable contact with foreign guest speakers. Yet the volume of information I was presenting was large enough that they would not be able to capture and take away anything of value. And most of my audience would be in the same boat.

Armed with this sudden realization, I took 30 minutes to ruthlessly cut two of my buckets and one speaking point from my remaining bucket. What I was left with, while less than I'd hoped to speak about, was the essence of my talk ... that part that I wanted them to take away more than anything else because it would create a marked improvement in speaking skills for most of them. I took the sponsor and tech people through the new rehearsal and I could see the compregension and relaxation on their faces - this made sense! Yet it was same thing I had presented to them less than an hour ago.

My talk was a hit. People came up afterwards to compliment on the clarity and impact of it. Months later I was still receiving email about how useful the speech had been. I walked away with an first appreciation of one of the ENDURE* priciples. If you want an important idea to reach out and capture the audience keep it as simple as possible. You have to deliver the pure Essence of what you want to get across.