Why the San Leo approach makes your speaking clearer.
I’m currently in Italy, in San Leo Bastia, Umbria, taking a bit of a summer break, and it is HOT!
Not just London-hot-of-late hot, even hotter. We’re talking 39 degrees as I sit here and type, and we do not have air con!
It’s been making me think about everyone back home who were probably getting up to do their normal daily routine in the heat, and how they coped.
And then yesterday morning I got chatting to an old boy at the local café bar as I attempted to practise my Italian and not melt, and he laughed when I said it was “molto caldo” (very hot), and that I thought it was too hot to get things done.
He then told me that we had our approach to the heat all wrong.
We needed to take the San Leo approach….
DO LESS.
That’s it!
Literally stop running around trying to do so much and cram everything in. Still do things. Achieve things. Just not so much when it’s so insanely hot.
And his friends who were there nodded and agreed. It wasn’t just his pearl of wisdom. It was understood by everyone to be a good idea, which I rather loved.
And it reminded me – there’s a really similar principle in speaking.
Less is more.
Which I know is not a new idea, and I know we all say it, but do we always actually do it? Because when we have to speak, especially when the message matters, it can be very tempting to try and get everything in.
All the context and all the background.
All the examples and all the data and stats.
All the things that feel important to us because we know the subject, and we’ve done the thinking, and we want people to understand the full picture.
But the full picture is not always what people need from us.
What they need is the clearest possible version of the point we’re trying to make.
And that means leaving some things out.
When you restrict yourself in terms of the amount of time you give yourself to speak, or the number of ideas you choose to share, it almost always gets better.
Sometimes it can be hard, a bit like when we have a million things to do and we feel unable to slow down because we have to get them all done at once, or completed that day, but often end up doing them rushed, or badly, or both.
When actually limiting the tasks for the day usually means everything gets done better all round.
It’s the same when it comes to creating a piece of speaking.
When we make the choice to include less content, the results are usually much better.
So try this:
Next time you have to plan a piece of speaking, halve your time limit.
Someone wants a 20-minute presentation? Prep ten.
If you’ve been asked to give a ten-minute team debrief, make it five.
Not because you need to race through it, obviously. That would rather defeat the point. But because as soon as you restrict the speaking time, you have to think much more carefully about what you really want to say and what you can actually choose to leave out.
It forces you to get clear.
And your audience will always thank you for clarity.
No one ever said at the end of someone’s speaking, “I wish they had rambled on for another half an hour.”
Nor did anyone ever complain that you gave them 30 minutes of their life back because you spoke for 30 minutes, not the hour you’d been allocated.
And ultimately, it means your speaking delivers better results, because if your message is clearer, then less time is spent reading between the lines, or doing guesswork afterwards by an audience trying to work out exactly what they were being asked to do, or meant to understand.
So if you have speaking to deliver in this heat, particularly if your workplace doesn’t have AC, make your audience happy by taking the San Leo approach:
Do less.
Get clear on your message.
Leave some stuff out.
And send the warm people off to cool down way quicker than they thought they might be able to!
Want your team to get better at this kind of speaking?
If you’d like help making your speaking clearer, whether that’s for yourself, for an event, or for your team, you can get in touch via the form below or drop me a line at contactme@jodarby.co.uk or message via LinkedIn.
You can also find out more about Jo’s corporate group training via Voice in the Room.