Overview

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In today's world, communicating with brevity is key. But how can you ensure that you provide your audience with the essential information if you don't have as much time? In this course, public speaking coach Lisa Braithwaite shares how you can condense your content without compromising your material. Lisa starts by explaining the value of presentations that are under five minutes. She then reviews the core elements of a strong presentation, and shares the key factors that contribute to a micro-presentation. She also goes over concepts to help you practice your presentation, keep your audience engaged, and avoid common mistakes. After this course, you'll feel ready to start crafting shorter presentations that pack a punch.

Syllabus

You Need to Know Micro-presentations

Micro-presentations are happening everywhere, yet most people don't recognize them as a distinct skill until they're already standing in front of an audience with five minutes on the clock. In this module, you'll identify the wide range of professional and community contexts where micro-presentations occur, so you can start spotting — and preparing for — these opportunities before they catch you off guard.

Before You Begin

Building a great micro-presentation has almost nothing to do with slides — it starts with the hard, invisible work of knowing your audience, clarifying your purpose, and committing to one focused message before you write a single word. In this module, you'll apply four essential preparation strategies — from researching your audience to designing a call to action that drives results — so you can build every micro-presentation on a solid, audience-centered foundation.

Key Elements of Micro-presentations

Knowing you need a micro-presentation is very different from knowing how to build one — and the difference lives in the details of structure, opening, core points, closing, and timing. In this module, you'll construct each element of a micro-presentation with precision, so every second of your allotted time does exactly the work it's supposed to do.

Planning for Engagement

Facts and data alone rarely move people to act — it's emotion that drives decisions, shapes behavior, and makes a message stick long after a presentation ends. In this module, you'll build a toolkit of deliberate engagement strategies — from emotional connection to stories, polls, and discussion — so you can design presentations that your audience feels, not just hears.

Practice and Delivery

Even the most carefully crafted micro-presentation will fall flat without deliberate preparation and ruthless editing. In this module, you'll choose the scripting approach that works best for your style and situation, and apply a principled editing process to strip away the fat, the flat, and the fluff — so every word you say earns its place.

Biggest Mistakes

Even a well-prepared micro-presentation can unravel in delivery — and the most common mistakes aren't dramatic failures, they're quiet ones: talking too fast, feeling overwhelmed, or simply not putting in enough practice time. In this module, you'll identify the three biggest delivery mistakes speakers make in micro-presentations and build the practical strategies to avoid or recover from each one confidently.

Conclusion

Completing this course is itself a kind of paradigm shift — you've moved from thinking about presentations as information dumps to understanding them as disciplined, audience-centered acts of communication. In this final lesson, Lisa sends you off with encouragement, a few important resources, and the reminder that the investment you've made in developing this skill will pay off every time you take the floor, however brief your moment in it may be.