The predicament is familiar: You need to share some critical aspect of your expertise, and you only have a fraction of the time you believe you need.

How do you trim your content when so much of it is important?

Change your question. In fact, change just one word of your question.

Presenters almost always start by asking themselves, “What do I want them to know?”

But something powerful happens when you change it to, “What do I want them to do?”

The impact of using this approach is a detailed part of Accidental Trainer workshops, but the gist of it comes back to this idea: Imagine you are a fly on the wall watching two people go about their work. One of them took the required workshop, and one of them did not. Now, from your position as a fly on the wall, how can you tell which is which?

What do you see? How can you tell from watching their behavior that one of them knows what you need them to know?

What does the “trained” person need to know in order to be able to do what she is doing? And if push came to shove, could she still do it if she didn’t know this bit of content? Or that bit of content? Could she get by and still be effective if she simply knew where to find the information she needs?

Presenters who have the discipline to be ruthlessly honest with themselves as they examine these sorts of questions find that the “nice to know” content begins to fall away naturally, and even the “need to know” starts to shrink. You’ll know it’s time to stop when there is nothing left to strip away.

Now that limited presentation times seems a bit less daunting. And you are probably in for a pleasant surprise at the often dramatically improved impact.


For more about using this approach effectively, come learn how to do “action mapping” at an Accidental Trainer workshop.