What Will They Remember When You Leave?
Learning the Importance of That One Thing | By: Kristen Haldeman | October 17, 2019
Dr. Julie Morgan, a communication training and education specialist, instructs and insists the most important aspect of any presentation is the speaker knows “the one thing” about the presentation the audience must remember. She illustrates by recounting the classroom of marines that were practicing public speaking and after each speech were met in the hallway individually by the professor who gave them one piece of advice before presenting again. The secret is that each marine was given the same advice: “No one leaves that room until they know your one thing.” And so returns each marine to the podium to present again and enforce the main point.
However, identifying your one thing is not easy. Google “knowing your one thing,” about 12,230,000,000 results appear. I just needed 1, not 12,230,000,000.
Like Google, we all have a lot of things to say on one simple thing. For example, I had a less than 10-minute window to present on an essay I spent nine months writing and in the end totaled 33 pages and 40 references. I had background information, potential concerns and responses, and outlined varied outcomes. And 600 seconds to do it. How did I manage? I chose the one thing I wanted my audience to remember and focused on the essential details that made it clear.
Gary Keller expresses this idea beautifully in his book The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results.He says, “Success demands singleness of purpose…. The ONE Thing shows up time and again in the lives of the successful because it’s a fundamental truth.”
He continues by explaining the bridge connecting the one thing of a presentation to the one thing of a successful life. “If everyone has the same number of hours in the day, why do some people seem to get so much more done than others? How do they do more, achieve more, earn more, have more? If time is the currency of achievement, then why are some able to cash in their allotment for more chips than others?
The answer is they make getting to the heart of things the heart of their approach. They go small. Going small is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most. It’s a tighter way to connect what you do with what you want. It’s realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.”
The goal is to move from 12,230,000,000 results to 1. This is no trivial task, and no one leaves the room until they know your one thing.