What are the mistakes that speakers make over and over again when preparing their speech content?  Here are the 5 most common ones that I’ve seen during a lifetime of attending speeches, coaching speeches, and of course giving them (and making mistakes) myself.

When a speaker’s biggest fear is losing the audience’s attention, focusing on bells and whistles instead of storytelling. A sure sign that a speaker is excessively worried about attention is an early obsession with creating many, many slides, with lots of swoops and builds and video embedded.  Don’t misunderstand; I have nothing against cool slides.  But the story should drive the slides, not the other way around.  Moses (and God) worked out the commandments first, then chiseled the stone tablets, in what is perhaps history’s first example of the right use of slides.

When a speaker has discovered the power of authenticity and ends up giving us too much information.  We humans are a fickle bunch.  We want to know the real, authentic story, but we lost interest quickly if we feel that the speaker is indulging in excessive detail in ways that slow the story down.  In other words, we want the storyteller to be expert enough to know what to leave out as much as what to put in.  Imagine if Luke in Star Wars had treated us to a long chapter on the farming techniques he and his uncle had been utilizing to get sufficient crop yields out of a dry planet on his way to Mos Eisley.

When a speaker wants to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and fails to go deep.  When a story is well-told, like Ted Lasso, or Game of Thrones, we can’t wait for the next season, we devour it when it comes, and we form fan clubs to get us through the wait until the next one. That’s because those kinds of stories have big enough stakes and deep enough characters. We care about them, and their trials, and we want to know what happens to them. Too many speakers keep their storytelling shallow for fear of leaving some demographic out.  But the reverse is actually true.

When a speaker only wants to share success rather than the failures that led to the success. It’s completely natural and human not to want to talk about the conflicts, mistakes, failures, and awkward moments that you experienced on your journey to super-stardom.  We tend to myth-make in reverse, leaving out the missteps and seeing our progress as the inevitable result of our brilliance or tenacity or discipline.  But it’s precisely the mistakes that the audience wants to hear about, because we all make them, and they make us relatable.

When a speaker wants to leave out the conflict and focus only on the good times.  Good stories grow out of conflict, hardship, and disagreements.  But we humans want to make our progress toward the sunny uplands of mastery appear untrammeled.  My partner and I?  Never a cross word or a moment of doubt.  Of course, that’s never true, and we don’t believe a story that has no conflict in it.  This is a challenge that every corporate speaker will have to face sooner in their career rather than later, because few corporations (and legal departments) want to admit that things aren’t always rosy.

Don’t make these mistakes in your presentations. Learn them and learn how to avoid them. Great storytelling that goes deep, honestly addresses conflict, and sticks to the point will always attract and hold an audience.  That’s where you want to be.