|CHAPTER 2|

The Fast-Focus Method™

“I try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.”

—ELMORE LEONARD, novelist and screenwriter

Be the Audience: Answer Their Three Questions

Most messages, spoken or written, are designed from the speaker’s point of view. That’s upside down. Imagine you’re the audience. What would capture your attention?

Sometimes, I ask audiences what they’re really thinking about. They say:

I’m thinking about my To Do list, and all the things I’m not doing, because I’m sitting here, half-listening to you.

Gluten. Why is everyone so obsessed with gluten-free food? Is gluten poisonous? I just ate a muffin. Did it have gluten? Am I going to die?

In one word: me.

The point is, your audience is probably not thinking about you. But to capture attention, you need to think about them. Be the audience.

Your audience, whether you’re talking to 100 people at work or 1 person at home, has three questions, always the same.

Although these questions seldom get asked directly, they’re the hurdles you have to jump, in sequence, to capture and hold attention:

1.Why should I listen (or read this)?

2.What exactly are you saying?

3.What should I do with this info?

To fast-focus your message, answer the three questions.

First Audience Question: Why Should I Listen?

Fast-focus with a purpose statement.

A purpose statement is like a present. You immediately hook people with something they value. It’s a great way to start a meeting, phone call, or email.

Oprah Winfrey, years ago, gave each of her audience members a mysterious box. One of the boxes, she said, contained the keys to a new car.

Surprise—all the boxes did. Oprah gave away 276 new Pontiacs that day. Value: $7 million.

Want to capture your audience? You’ll need a great present; what will it be?

“Not sure,” you say, “because I don’t have 276 Pontiacs. But wait, I do have 276 PowerPoint slides. Also some handouts.”

Uh-oh.

If you watch Oprah that day, she looks as excited as the audience.¹ And if you walk in with a great present, you’ll be excited too.

But how do you know if you’ve got something good? Well, like any present, it depends on the recipient—in this case, the audience. Oprah’s audience had been specially selected; they really needed cars.

What does your audience need?

Once you’ve figured that out, tell your audience.

A strong purpose statement says what you’re going to talk about and, more importantly, why. Why is the value, from the audience’s perspective. Why answers the audience’s question: “Why should we listen?”

Bad example: Suppose you’re representing your company at a job fair. “My purpose,” you say, “is to tell you why my company is the best place to work.”

Well, that beats saying why it’s the worst, although the latter might be more interesting. “Some of our products don’t really work. A few smell bad. We think they may be carcinogenic.”

It may be your purpose, as the speaker, to promote your company, but the audience has probably heard 20 other speakers say the same thing.

To figure out your purpose statement, take a few minutes to stop being you. Be the audience. What are their concerns?

Well, at the job fair, they’re probably wondering what it’s like to work at your company and if they’d like it.

Ok, start there. “Our purpose is to help you figure out if this company would be a good fit for you.”

Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. But if you help the audience decide, you’ve given them a gift.

Your audience, it turns out, has absolutely no reason to listen to you. Give them one.

What If There’s No Real Benefit? Tell Your Audience the Cost of Not Listening

Your proposition sounds like this: “Audience, if you listen, you’ll either get something good, or else you’ll avoid something bad.”

Let’s suppose you’re talking about something uninteresting, for example, new regulations, to an audience that could care less. Your job: make them care more.

Maybe there’s no real benefit to knowing about the regulations, but there’s certainly a cost to not knowing. What is it?

Try opening your presentation with a picture: prison. “Our purpose today,” you could say, “is to avoid going there.”

Don’t Confuse Your Purpose Statement with an Agenda

My client was unhappy. He’d just watched me present a two-day leadership workshop at his company, and he had only one comment.

“You should have asked the group a simple question, over and over,” he said.

“What question?” I asked. I really had no idea. This happened long ago. Back then, I didn’t think of myself as clueless, but not thinking you’re clueless is probably one of the main signs that you might be.

Client: “What do these leadership skills have to do with selling more beer?”

His question sounded like, “So what’s this got to do with the price of eggs?” I’ve never thought much about the price of eggs, even though I’ve heard the expression a million times. Apparently, some people are obsessed.

My client didn’t care about eggs, and neither did the workshop group. They were sales managers, they sold beer, and what they thought about, all day long, was beer.

My mistake: forgetting the beer.

What’s your audience thinking about? Let’s assume they’re preoccupied with 10,000 things. That’s 10,000 reasons not to listen to you.

Unless you give them one. So give them one, with a purpose statement.

A purpose statement is not an agenda. Almost every executive I work with has an agenda—that’s good—but a purpose statement is more important.

Agenda: “Today we’ll talk about the seven practices of exceptional leaders, three big leadership mistakes, plus what the best leaders eat for breakfast and, if it’s eggs, what’s the price.”

Your agenda is the what. It says, “Here’s what I’m going to talk about.” But it doesn’t give the why. “Why should we listen?” your audience wonders. “We’ve got our own concerns.”

Before you tell them the what, tell them the why. That’s the purpose of a purpose. (True, I’m saying purpose a lot. On purpose.)

Your purpose needs to speak to their concerns.

Example: “Our purpose is to help you sell more beer. How? By inspiring your employees to sell more beer. By leadership.”

Now give the agenda. And keep talking about the beer.

Second Audience Question: What Exactly Are You Saying?

Fast-focus with your main message.

“None of you will remember a single word I say today,” the governor said. That’s how he began his commencement address at my son’s college graduation.

It was a memorable line. On the other hand, it raised a disturbing question: why listen?

Of course, technically, the governor was correct. If you’re about to graduate college, and you’ve taken 30–40 courses, you already know an impressive amount about forgetting.

Let’s edit the governor’s opening. He could have said: “You won’t remember anything I’m about to tell you. Except for ONE THING, and we’ll get to that one thing in a minute.”

If you say that, you create suspense. Then all you need is the ONE THING.

Unfortunately, a lot of other things work their way into a speech. The governor, for example, opened by thanking people. There was a list:

“Faculty, distinguished guests, undistinguished guests, the guests we really didn’t want to invite but we sort of had to, the people we never even invited—hey, who’s that funny looking guy over there? Sir, what are you doing here?”

Well, that’s not exactly what he said. Too bad. Thanking people is a standard start, that’s what makes it dull. Better: Jump right into your talk with an anecdote or a question, then later give the credits.

He ended with a call to action, along the lines of, “Serve and sacrifice.” Nothing wrong with that, except it’s easily forgotten.

Winston Churchill was alleged to have given one of the most memorable commencement speeches, and one of the shortest. Two years into WWII, 1941, Churchill reputedly said, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never!”

That was the whole speech, then he sat down!

Or at least, that’s the legend, which I’d heard—and spread!—before learning the whole story. Turns out, Churchill did say those words, but they were tucked into a longer, 740-word speech.²

Where did the legend of a one-line speech come from?

My guess is that “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never!” was the one line everyone remembered. And Churchill must have delivered it with “a tremendous whack” (as he advised others to do).

He knew the one thing.

Be Patient—Don’t Expect Your Main Message to Pop Out of the Toaster, Ready-Made

You need to figure out what’s most important, the main message, versus what’s secondary, the key points.

Your discovery process might go like this: first, you brainstorm everything you want to say, on a whiteboard or Post-it notes, without even thinking about how it’s organized. Then, you review your ideas, and sort them. What goes with what? What’s most important? Do you see a main theme or a big idea?

Experiment with different arrangements. You might tag one of your ideas as the main message, then later decide, no, that idea is more secondary—it’s a key point.

Eventually, a pattern will emerge. Once you’ve sorted and structured your information, you can visualize it like:

1. A solar system: picture the sun in the middle (your main message), then the planets (key points) around the sun, then a few moons (sub-points), near each planet.

To draw this, place your main message, center page, with a circle around it; then each key point in a smaller circle off to the side. (This is called a mind map.)

2. A tree: imagine the trunk is the main message; branches, the key points; twigs, the sub-points.

3. An organizational chart: display the hierarchy of your info with the main message on top, then key points and sub-points below.

The main thing is to know the main thing.

That way, when you walk into the boardroom expecting to deliver a 20-minute presentation, and the CEO says, “Sorry, you’ve only got 5,” you know what to cut.

Because you know your main message.

Don’t Confuse Your PowerPoint Slides with the Message

Sometimes I use slides, other times not, but one day, while designing a workshop called “Managing Your Employees’ Career Development,” I lost my way. Before identifying the main message, I plunged recklessly into the slides. I admit it, I fell in love with the slides.

Ever do that? You take all your info, slice and dice it into slides, and then play around with the sequence until, ok, it looks semi-coherent.

Your slide deck is done. But you’re not, something’s missing.

What’s your main message? (True, you can figure it out after the slides, but you’ll waste a lot of time that way.)

If you don’t know the main message, your audience won’t either, and by the time you get to slide #27 and say, “Hey, look at this pie chart,” they’ll be daydreaming. Probably about pastry.

Let’s go back to my workshop, “Managing Your Employees’ Career Development,” and identify the main message.

How? Be the audience. Imagine, in this case, that you’re a manager. What are your concerns about employee development? Possible concerns:

You have no promotions or salary increases to offer, and that’s what your employees really want.

You have no advice to offer either. How can you tell someone what to do with his life when, most days, you can barely decide what clothing to wear?

You have no time.

So, naturally, you’d rather avoid the whole thing.

But although your concerns are valid, your conclusion—I’ve got nothing to offer—is not. The main message should illuminate how to develop employees, despite constraints.

Main message: Find coachable moments.

This message needs to be developed, of course, into something that makes sense to your audience and is actionable. (More on coachable moments, page 76.)

You build the main message with key points. One key point could be about assignments—every time you give an assignment, that’s a coachable moment. And you could expand this point with sub-points, what to do before, during, and after the assignment.

Your map now looks like this:

FIND COACHABLE MOMENTS

Assignments

Before assignment

During assignment

After assignment

You know your main message, and that gives you power. Because you can make it stick, with or without the slides.

Sequence Your Key Points so They’re Memorable

Suppose you want people to remember the warning signs of a stroke.

There are five symptoms, according to the Berkeley Wellness Letter: difficulty speaking; numbness of face, arm, or leg; trouble seeing; trouble walking; severe headache.

Ok. Close your eyes and try to remember those symptoms. It’s tough.

But suppose you sequenced the symptoms differently?

This time, let’s try a spatial sequence that moves down the body, head-to-toe:

1.Bad headache

2.Trouble seeing

3.Trouble speaking

4.Numbness of face, arm, or leg

5.Trouble walking

Suddenly, it’s more memorable. Effective sequences often use time or space:

1.Time: Chronological—For example, what to do before, during, and after your next job interview.

2.Time: Today, yesterday, tomorrow—For example, our problem right now (today); how it began (yesterday); what we’re going to do (tomorrow).

3.Space: Large to small (or vice versa)—For example, here’s the forecast for the global economy, the U.S. economy, and our personal bank account.

Still remember those five symptoms of a stroke? Good. You can sequence your info in different ways, but it shouldn’t be random.

When the Conversation Matters—Even if It’s Fast—Know Your Main Message

“Work on your impact,” an executive recently told me, “because, right now, you’re not having any.”

We’d just met, so he wasn’t talking about me. He intended this feedback for an employee, but wanted to test it first.

“What do you mean by impact?” I asked.

“It means,” he said, “You need to collaborate more.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Speak up more at meetings,” the exec said.

Good, now we’ve got a main message. Notice how, in a few drafts, we’ve gone from vague to specific. With feedback, your main message needs to be specific, otherwise it’s likely to be misunderstood.

The exec could tell the employee, “You’re smart and your ideas are good, so I’m always hoping you’ll talk more at our meetings. What stops you?” Then, the two of them could discuss possible tactics.

How can you test your message? Be the audience. What will your audience hear, remember, and act on?

(For more on feedback, please see page 31.)

Keep Your Main Message Short and Simple—10 Words or Less

“What’s the single most important thing you want to say?” I asked a smart marketing exec.

“We’re dedicated,” she said, “to customer-centric, results-driven, streamlined solutions.”

“Me too,” I said. “Who wouldn’t be? But what exactly does that mean?”

“Solve customer problems—fast,” she said.

Much better. No one will recall the first version (do you?). It’s short, but not simple. The second version, though, is easy to understand and easy to remember.

The key points could be about how you’ll solve problems fast. For example, by doing the following:

Hiring the best phone reps

Being available 24/7

Speaking really, really quickly

Your audience won’t remember all the key points. They may not remember any. But you definitely want them to remember your main message. So keep it simple.

Study Ad Slogans

While there’s no reason for your main message to be a snappy ad slogan, we can still learn a lot from snappy ad slogans.

1. Talk like a regular person. “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight,” promised FedEx.

The “absolutely, positively” part sounds like a real human being, worried about a real package.

FedEx could have used those 10 words from before (“Relax. We’re dedicated to customer-centric, results-driven, streamlined solutions”). But that would have caused widespread panic.

2. Focus on one thing. Compare these two slogans from Wal-Mart:

a. “Always low prices. Always.”

b. “Save money. Live better.”

I like the first. A main message is one thing, not two or three. And I really like the repetitive “always.”

For the same reason, “Sheer driving pleasure” (BMW) beats “Power, Beauty and Soul” (Aston Martin). Power, beauty, and soul add up to three abstractions—that’s a laundry list, not a car.

3. Be concise. The best slogans from the past 100 years are under 10 words. Consider:

AVIS: “We try harder.”

WENDY’S: “Where’s the beef?”

APPLE: “Think different.” And before Apple, the motto at IBM was simply “Think.”

A short message is like Miller Lite beer: “Everything you always wanted . . . And less.”

When Your Message Matters, Repeat It Multiple Times and Multiple Ways

One of my fears when traveling abroad is that I’ll forget my passport, or lose it. Or else, in a desperate attempt to not lose it, I’ll lock it in a hotel safe. And then forget it.

But on a business trip from Boston to Zurich, I had a different passport problem. When I went to check in, the ticket agent said I couldn’t go.

“Your passport expires in a month,” she said.

“But I’ll be returning in a few days,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter. Your passport is completely unacceptable,” she said. Her tone implied that neither she nor Switzerland was terribly disappointed.

Although I’ve traveled abroad dozens of times, apparently it’s always been within the first 9.5 years of my 10-year passports. (Some countries, it turns out, require a six-month leeway.)

Your passport may be real, but the expiration date isn’t. If milk worked this way, you’d never buy it. “This milk expires in 10 days,” you’d say. “It’s completely unacceptable.”

Later that night, after driving home, I polled some friends and colleagues: “Did you know about this passport business?” Some did, others didn’t. (“Are you sure you didn’t do something to offend Switzerland?”)

It made me wonder: how do you and I learn things like this? Or, to flip the question, suppose you needed to communicate an important message, like this one, to a large audience. How would you do it?

Well, you could:

Make an announcement: The government, for example, could just send everyone a nice letter, or mention it on the passport application, or stamp it right on the passport itself: “Expiration date? SOONER than you think.”

Dialogue: A company could direct their corporate travel agent to ask each person about her passport before booking any trips.

The agent would ask, “So, when do you think your passport expires?” And then say, “Hmm. Switzerland has a different opinion.”

Tell a story: An ordinary person could tell a cautionary tale like mine, and then rely on word of mouth or social media to spread the word.

Each method has limits. Too often, we assume that it’s enough to make an announcement—that if we just say it, others will hear it and remember it.

Someone must have announced something about this passport business. But I didn’t hear it. Or else I heard it, but didn’t remember it.

What’s the shelf life of an announcement? Less than milk.

Third Audience Question: What Should I Do with This Info?

Fast-focus with a call to action.

Sometimes you go to a meeting and it’s just an update. Nobody wants you to do anything with the info, they just want you to know about it.

Update meetings are useful, occasionally. But if most of your meetings are like that, you’ve got to wonder: is this really the best use of my time?

A call to action spells out the next step. It’s usually about doing something. But if that doesn’t fit, the next step could be to think something or feel something.

Suppose you’re a CEO, giving an update after a tough week. Your call to action could be:

What to think: “If you only remember one thing, remember this: our legal department is the best in the business.”

What to feel: “Feel proud about all of our products that are not, currently, in class action lawsuits.”

What to do: “Buy more stock—the price can’t drop any lower.”

Make Your Call to Action a Verb

Suppose you’re giving a talk about the importance of setting ground rules before starting a project, or a meeting, or a challenging conversation.

Compare these two endings:

1.Ground rules are good.

2.Use ground rules.

Number 1 is an observation. Ground rules are good, but so are lots of other things. Goals are good, a To Do list is good, and drinking milk is good too. Number 1 is basically a greeting card.

Number 2 is a directive. It’s got power.

The Fast-Focus Method™: Summary

Key principle: Be the audience.

Most messages and presentations are designed from the speaker’s point of view. That’s upside down. Imagine you’re sitting in the audience. What would capture your attention?

Every audience has three questions	To answer the questions, use these tools:
1. Why should we listen? (What’s in it for us?)	1. Purpose statement
2. What exactly are you saying?	2. Main message
3. What should we do with this info?	3. Call to action

Focus your opening, body, and close:

a. The opening

Purpose statement: Answers audience question #1: Why should we listen?

The purpose is the hook that entices the audience to pay attention.

Example: “Our purpose is to increase your competence and confidence every time you speak.” (All the examples on this page are from my workshop on Dynamic Speaking.)

Agenda: The agenda says how you’ll accomplish the purpose.

Example: “We’ll practice how to design and deliver a dynamic message.”

b. The body

Main message: Answers audience question #2: What exactly are you saying?

If your audience could only remember one thing, what’s the one thing?

Example: “The single most important thing is . . . ENERGY.”

Keep your main message short—10 words or less.

• KEY POINTS

The key points develop your main message.

Example: “When you design a message, ENERGY means to focus on your audience, and on why they should listen. When you deliver it, ENERGY means to vary your body language, vary your voice. When you feel uneasy, ENERGY means to accept your anxiety and use it.”

c. The close

Call to action: Answers audience question #3: What should we do with this info?

Close your presentation on a powerful note. What’s the next step? What should the audience do?

Example: “Go out and practice, practice, practice. Then, practice some more.”

Note: If there’s nothing to do, then the call to action can also be: what to think (e.g., “If you only remember one thing, remember . . .“) or what to feel (e.g., confident . . . or excited . . . or proud, etc.).