The room is packed. The screen is live. Every eye is on you.
And somewhere in the next 45 minutes, you are going to lose them.
I don’t mean that they won’t get it. They probably will. Nod along. Agree.
But.
If you ask them after your talk what the point was, 99% won’t be able to give a concise answer.
Because while you were polishing your presentation, you were asking the wrong question. The same question everyone asks. The question that feels like discipline and sounds like clarity and has been recommended by every coach, every book, every mentor you’ve ever trusted. That question is:
What’s my key message?
You sharpened it. You tightened it. You ran it past a colleague at 11pm and she nodded and said yes, that’s it, that’s the one. You fell asleep satisfied.
You had no idea you’d just walked into the trap.
A key message wants to arrive. But if you want to change minds and drive action, arrival is not enough. You need your message to stick. Better yet: travel.
It needs to be so clear and so present for your audience that they can’t get it out of their minds. That it guides them when they’re facing a choice. That they can – and want – to pass it along so it spreads.
Very few “key messages” achieve that.
If yours doesn’t, it might be because of how you think about it.
A key message is inherently selfish. It points you inward. It’s what you want to say, what you need them to understand, what you’ve decided matters, how you would say it.
Meanwhile, somewhere behind you, someone is trying to explain to a colleague what your talk was about. They’re reaching for your words. And find their own instead. Softer. Vaguer. Missing the point you spent days sharpening.
Which is not their failure. It’s simply the gap between what you wanted to say and what they could actually carry and pass along.
And it is, in essence, my beef with much of the presentation advice out there. This advice tells you how to polish your presentation, make your point clearer, show up confidently, captivate them.
But it never even once asks: What would they pass along? What will be the words they actually use when they tell someone about your talk? And will they even want to?
Everyone sitting in the audience has their own life waiting, their own team expecting a debrief, their ownproblems that have nothing to do with your slides. In short: Their own way of thinking. And sayingthings.
The question was never what you want to say.
It was what they will pass along. Without you. When you’re not in the room to clarify or emphasize or give it one more try.
What is the message that travels from your presentation into their next conversation, their Monday morning meeting, their elevator ride with the colleague who didn’t come? What do they say when someone asks how it went?
That sentence. Unrehearsed. Unsupervised. Completely out of your control.
That is your real message. Everything else is vanity.
Now go back and look at your script and slides.
Most of them aren’t serving it. Some are actively working against it. The jargon. The “professionalized” polished statement. The fancy wording. But also the overwhelming amount of detail, caveats, clarifications that all make sense but distract from the point.
The reason why so many key messages don’t survive is that they were never built to. They were built to make sense. That’s a much lower bar than you need.
A pass-along phrase is built for a longer journey. It has to survive without you. Move through conversations you’re not part of. Land with full force in rooms you’ll never enter.
So, when you think about your next (or last) high stakes moment, what would someone in your audience actually pass along?
Not should. Not could. Would, unprompted, in their own words, to someone who wasn’t in the room? Would your message travel through the hallway conversation you’ll never hear, the team debrief you’ll never attend, the decision you’ll never know you influenced?
Every pass-along phrase is a key message. But most key messages are not pass-along phrases. Is yours?
Keep lighting the path,
Michael
PS: If you have a high-stakes moment coming up and you’re not sure your message is built to travel, that’s exactly what a Clarity Lab is for. One intensive session where we find your pass-along phrase together and make sure your talk delivers it.
PPS: There are three qualities a pass-along phrase needs so that it can actually travel. In essay 7 of the “What the Best Leaders Say” series, I show you what they are, how they work, and how they’ve been used by communicators such as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and John F. Kennedy.
