How Long Should Your Speech Be?

• 00:04 How long should your speech or presentation be?
• 00:08 Well there was a study done by the United States Defense Department
• 00:13 in 1974 that showed the perfect length of a speech was 18.5 minutes.
• 00:18 Do I believe it?
• 00:20 No.
• 00:21 Not for a second.
• 00:23 The perfect length of your speech is to speak as long as it takes
• 00:29 to communicate your messages and to be interesting and memorable throughout.
• 00:35 I've seen speakers, you've seen speakers that after 30 seconds everyone
• 00:40 in the audience had either fallen asleep or were doing this, checking email.
• 00:46 Maybe the speech only lasted two minutes, but it was two minutes too long.
• 00:53 And yet I've seen speakers talk from ten in the morning till midnight.
• 00:57 The audiences wanted more.
• 01:00 So, your first consideration has got to be what are the ideas that are important
• 01:06 to you that you have to have this audience really understand and remember.
• 01:13 That should be your first consideration.
• 01:16 Now sure, there are times when you're given a very,
• 01:19 very specific time limitation.
• 01:22 You're doing a financial roadshow bidding up to an IPA.
• 01:25 And you're at financial conferences and you have exactly 20 minutes or
• 01:29 someone will ring a bell.
• 01:30 Okay, you need to practice, rehearse on video and
• 01:35 time yourself to get the timing just right.
• 01:39 But beyond that there are many many situations in life, in business,
• 01:44 civic life, your community, where there's no strict time limit.
• 01:50 People are listening to you but they'll zone out the second
• 01:55 you're saying something that isn't relevant or important to them.
• 01:57 But they will listen to you, if you're giving them stuff that's helpful,
• 02:03 useful, interesting to their lives.
• 02:05 So when it comes to focusing on the length of your presentation,
• 02:11 don't sit there with a stop watch when you're just in the outline stage.
• 02:16 Counterproductive.
• 02:17 Focus first and foremost on the ideas that are important to you.
• 02:21 Do everything you can to make them more interesting,
• 02:25 to have stories for each one of your message points.
• 02:29 Then worry about time.
• 02:31 Now here's the situation, we've all been there, where you think you
• 02:36 have 20 minutes, you're in a meeting, the last possible second a boss or
• 02:41 the person leading the meeting leans over and says we're running low on
• 02:46 time we don't have extra time we have less I know I told you 20 minutes you
• 02:51 gotta wrap up in 10 minutes so what do you do in that situation?
• 02:56 What most people do is they say oh, I've only got to 10 minutes.
• 03:01 If I talk twice as quickly and
• 03:03 strip out the stories I'll be able to cover everything.
• 03:07 Big, big mistake.
• 03:09 Your audience isn't going to remember twice as quickly or
• 03:13 understand twice as quickly.
• 03:15 You've got to make harsh decisions.
• 03:19 And what you've got to do is figure out which points to eliminate.
• 03:22 Once you eliminate the message point then you can eliminate
• 03:25 the stories associated with it.
• 03:27 You still want to speak.
• 03:29 You've got a conversational tone.
• 03:32 You still want to alternate your pauses, your speed, your pace.
• 03:36 You need variety.
• 03:38 You need to sounds conversational if you want people to pay attention
• 03:42 even the first 30 seconds.
• 03:45 So please focus on the higher level issues.
• 03:49 Do you really have interesting ideas for this audience?
• 03:52 Do you really have stories, examples, case studies to make these ideas remembered?
• 03:59 Focus on that and time will typically take care of itself.

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