As a speaker, who you speak after is a big deal. This week, I was up against a state senator and then a presentation on 401(k) regulatory updates.

I don't really mind following a politician, because half of my talks include the taboo topics: generations, race, religion, gender, and politics.

But even more interesting than this week's speaker lineup, and where I fell in it, was what happened as I was about to take the stage. Everyone had run over, and the meeting professional sliced my time dramatically. I had to finish by 12:40 at the latest.

So how do you take an hour-long presentation, pare it down, and not talk faster?

When I first started speaking, that would have wrecked me. Now, looking back, I'm so grateful for the many mentors who taught me how to flex in any situation. Since we're in the air so much as speakers, I want to use an airplane analogy to show you how to easily flex your time up or down.

Every flight starts with a destination. In a talk, that's your through line: the one thing you want people to walk away with. It's your bearing and your heading.

When your time gets cut, your heading tells you what can't be cut. Ask yourself: if I only had five or eight minutes to give this whole talk, what would I absolutely have to communicate? Then go down one more layer.

If you haven't nailed down your through line yet, start with The One Sentence That Holds Your Talk Together.

Once you know where you're going, you need to know where you are. On every flight, you pass control towers. You check in with each one and confirm you're where you're supposed to be. Your talk needs the same thing: a few check-in points that tell you roughly how far along you are.

Most talks can be mapped with three towers and a landing. A simple version looks like this:

Your towers might be three key points, three stories, or three steps in a process. What matters is that you can name them without your notes.

Each tower falls roughly at a quarter of the way in, halfway, or three-quarters of the way through. When you reach one, check the clock.

Those calls happen in real time, and I don't always get them right. At this event, as I went through the history of each generation, I cut Gen Alpha and Gen Beta entirely and shortened Gen Z. Gen Z turned out to be the part many people wanted more of. Only one person told me, and everyone else seemed happy, but it was the wrong call.

So what do you actually cut, and what do you add? It comes down to your stories, and there are two kinds.

The first is the water service in the main cabin. It keeps you from getting thirsty. It's essential, and it gets you the rest of the way without drying out, but it's just water. These stories illustrate a point, and you move on.

The second is the first-class custom cocktail or high-end champagne. It takes a little longer to come out. You sit with it, you enjoy it, and you might talk about it later. These are the stories that stick with people for a long time.

Build a bench of both. I have countless stories and illustrations, some word pictures and some personal stories, and I map them to my learning objectives. That lets me swap one in or out on the fly. It also means that when an event brings me back year after year, I can keep the same framework and rotate the key stories.

Better yet, have different versions of the same story. I have one I can tell in about 30 seconds, or, if I have time to kill, in five or six minutes. It has layers. It can turn into a bit and get funny. I've worked it so many times that I can expand or contract it based on the need.

That matters when you have extra time, too. Sometimes you have to burn jet fuel before you land. The worst thing you can do is start circling the airport. Have enough material to keep you in the air, even if you have to burn a little fuel so you're not too heavy when you land.

One warning about slides: when you have a lot of them and click through each one, you start to feel like you have to talk about every slide. That's why I use fewer slides, or none.

This is the most important part. Connect back to your heading. Make sure you land on the right runway at the right airport, and stick it. So many speakers come in for the landing and then take right back off again, either because they realize they have more time or because their content is repetitive.

Know how long your landing takes. Most of my best ending stories run four minutes or less. Save your big finale for when you're nearing that final checkpoint, whether that's two minutes left or eight.

At this event, I changed my landing before I ever walked on stage. My original ending needed a big buildup at the front and a payoff at the end, and I knew I wouldn't have time to set it up. So I stripped it out and swapped in a story I knew would fit. Around 12:30, I pivoted toward my ending. At 12:36, I started my four-minute landing.

Never let them see it. Trying to get through all your content is an amateur move. So is apologizing with "Since I'm almost out of time" or "Since I don't have as much time as I thought." No one in the audience should know whether you went twice as long or half as long. Move your goalposts and deliver in the time you have.

A couple of years ago, my time got cut by five minutes mid-talk. With about six minutes left, I realized I was going to overshoot by way more than that. So I pivoted and landed the plane. Afterward, the show's producer came up to me and said he had no idea how I was going to pull it off. He'd been watching where we were in the slides, and then all of a sudden we were landing the plane. He used that exact phrase. "You landed perfectly," he said, "and no one knows that you cut all the stuff out."

That's what a professional speaker does.

Until next time,

P.S. What's the most time you've ever lost right before you walked on stage? Hit reply and tell me how you landed it. Or how you didn't.