By Catherine Sandland
I hear this all the time from experts who are asked to speak: ‘I know so much. How do I not do a deep dive? How do I resist the urge to tell them everything?’
There’s a fear underneath that question. A fear that if you don’t share all the detail, all the depth of your knowledge, people won’t believe you’re credible. That they’ll think you don’t really know your stuff. That holding back somehow diminishes your authority.
Let me be straight with you: that’s a myth. And it’s a myth that’s stopping you from having real impact.
CREDIBILITY DOESN’T COME FROM TELLING PEOPLE EVERYTHING
You’ve already established your credibility before you open your mouth. You were asked to speak in the first place, weren’t you? That’s credibility right there. Perhaps it’s your position, your role, your years of experience. Perhaps someone introduces you and reels off your qualifications. Perhaps your bio in the programme lists your achievements, the clients you’ve worked with, the projects you’ve led.
These are the discrete ways credibility gets established. A reference to the number of years you’ve been in your field. A mention of the companies you’ve advised. The fact that you’re standing on that stage at all.
Your audience already believes you know what you’re talking about. What they need from you isn’t proof of that. What they need is insight. Perspective. A way of understanding that they didn’t have before you started speaking.
When you try to prove your credibility by downloading everything you know, you actually undermine yourself. You overwhelm people. You lose them in the detail. And you miss the opportunity to transform how they think.
THE MYTH OF DUMBING DOWN
Here’s another myth that needs scotching: keeping things simple is dumbing down.
It never is.
Your audience is always more intelligent than you might give them credit for. They can grasp complexity. They can follow sophisticated ideas. They can handle nuance. What they can’t handle is being buried under layers of detail that obscure the point you’re trying to make.
My mentor used to say: never overestimate your audience’s knowledge and never underestimate their intelligence. That’s the balance. They may not know what you know. They may not be as informed as you are. But they’re absolutely capable of understanding big ideas when you present them clearly.
Simplicity isn’t about making things basic. It’s about making them accessible. It’s about cutting through the noise to reveal what really matters.
SO WHAT DO YOU TELL THEM?
If you’re not telling them everything, what are you telling them?
You tell them what they need to hear. Not what you need to say.
In earlier blogs, we’ve talked about the difference between how-to expert talks and thought-shifting presentations. If you’re looking to transform people’s thinking, you need to dig deeper than the detail, the facts, the figures. You need to look at patterns. Implications. Contrasts. Contrarian views.
You need to put a spotlight on people’s worries, their beliefs, their aspirations in the area you’re speaking about.
For example, I could talk about presentation skills. That’s the how-to level. But more often, I talk about finding and using our voice. That’s deeper, more resonant. And even more importantly, I talk about making a difference, creating change, generating ripples of change that extend far beyond the room.
See the shift? From technique to purpose. From what to do to why it matters. From information to transformation.
NAVIGATING THE LADDER OF ABSTRACTION
Here’s where it gets interesting. You can’t talk entirely in the abstract. If you do, people get irritated. They want something tangible, something they can hold onto, something they can take away. They need a coat hook for their understanding.
But equally, you don’t want to stay in the weeds of how-to all the time. Because then you lose the opportunity to shift the way your audience thinks or feels. You lose the chance to give them an alternative perspective, an insight they didn’t previously have. You lose the moment where they feel uplifted and challenged in the best possible sense.
So you need to navigate the ladder of abstraction. You need to move between the concrete and the conceptual. Between the practical and the philosophical.
Give them enough detail to ground your ideas. Enough specifics to make it real. But then lift them up to see the bigger picture, the deeper meaning, the wider implication.
Don’t camp out at either end. Don’t drown them in detail, but don’t float so high in abstraction that they can’t connect. Move between the two. Show them the technique, then show them why it matters. Give them the principle, then give them an example. Share the data, then reveal what it means.
WHAT YOUR AUDIENCE ACTUALLY NEEDS
Your audience doesn’t need to know everything you know. They need to understand what you understand. There’s a difference.
They don’t need a comprehensive download of facts and figures. They need context. They need perspective. They need to see patterns they hadn’t noticed. They need to question assumptions they didn’t know they were making.
They need you to shine a light on what matters, not catalogue everything that exists.
When you do this well, when you resist the urge to tell them everything and instead tell them what shifts their thinking, something remarkable happens. They trust you more, not less. They see you as someone who understands not just the detail, but the meaning. Someone who doesn’t just know a lot, but knows what matters.
That’s real credibility. That’s real authority.
THE PERMISSION TO HOLD BACK
So here’s your permission: you don’t need to tell them everything.
You don’t need to do the deep dive every time. You don’t need to prove your expertise by overwhelming people with detail. Your credibility is already established. What you need to do now is use that credibility to give people something they can’t get anywhere else.
Insight. Perspective. Challenge. Transformation.
Navigate the ladder of abstraction. Give them enough concrete detail to ground your ideas, but lift them high enough to see what those details really mean. Move between the practical and the profound.
Trust your audience’s intelligence. Respect their time. And give them what they actually need, not everything you know.
That’s how you create real impact. That’s how you become the speaker people remember, the one who changed how they think, not just what they know.
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