Why Your Talk Is Twice as Long as You Think
Alright. This one's going to sting a little, because I still do this to myself sometimes.
You write a talk. You practice it in your head, maybe mumble through it while you're doing dishes. It feels like five minutes. You give it, or you time yourself for real, and it's eleven.
That happened to me. I was so sure I had a five-minute talk. Timed it. Eleven minutes. I went back and found out I'd padded the whole thing with backstory nobody asked for. Where I grew up, how I got called to the position, a whole thing about the weather that day. None of it was earning its spot. Cutting that stuff out was harder than writing it in the first place. Way harder.
Here's why this happens to almost everybody.
In your head, everything sounds fast
When you're thinking through a talk, you skip around. Your brain fills in gaps instantly. You don't say every word out loud, you just sort of feel the shape of it. So the talk feels short and tight.
But when you actually open your mouth, you say every word. Every transition. Every "so anyway" and "like I was saying." Those add up fast, and they don't feel like padding when you're saying them. They feel necessary in the moment. They're usually not.
The fix: time yourself out loud, every time
Not in your head. Out loud, standing up, with a timer running. This is non-negotiable if you actually want your timing to be right. I don't care how confident you feel about your pacing, you're wrong until you've clocked it.
Here's the steps:
- Say your talk out loud, full volume, like you're really giving it.
- Time it start to finish. Don't stop and restart if you flub a line, just keep going like it's real.
- Write down the actual number. Not the number you hoped for.
- If it's too long, go back to your bullet points and start cutting. Not trimming words here and there. Cutting whole chunks.
What to cut first
Backstory is usually the first thing to go. You don't need to explain how you got the idea for the talk. You don't need three examples when one lands the point. If a sentence is just there to ease into the next sentence, it's probably dead weight.
This ties into something I've said before and I'll keep saying it: say the point, then support it. If a piece of what you're saying isn't supporting the point, it isn't earning its spot on the page. Cut it. It's fine. Nobody in the room is going to miss the sentence you cut. They're going to miss the point if you bury it under six sentences that don't need to be there.
Say it back to me, not just to yourself
Here's a trick from the shop, actually. When I train a new guy on a machine setup, I don't just talk at him and hope it landed. I ask him to say it back to me in his own words. I had a guy once who nodded through the whole thing, seemed completely locked in, and then ran the part wrong. Turned out he didn't want to admit he'd lost me somewhere. He was too nervous to stop and say so.
Same thing happens with a talk you've practiced alone too many times. You think it's clear because it's clear to you. Try explaining your talk's main point to somebody else, out loud, without your notes. If you stumble or ramble, that's the part that's not actually clear yet, even if it sounded fine in your head. Have them say it back to you too. If they got the wrong point, you know exactly where to go fix it.
A word on nerves and length
Nervous people rush. I've said that before and it's true here too. When you're worried about time, the instinct is to talk faster to fit more in. Don't. Cut the content instead and keep your pace slow. A short talk delivered slow and calm beats a long talk crammed in at double speed every single time.
Before next time
Time your two-minute outline from last lesson, out loud, for real. If it comes in over two-thirty, go find the backstory you don't need and cut it before we meet again.