Preparation is key to giving a great speech. Practicing your presentation helps ensure you’ve planned the right content for your audience. It also helps you internalize what you want to say so you feel confident going on stage. Here’s advice for how to practice your speech.

Very few of us get invited to speak based on our name alone. You’re invited to speak because you know something. You have experience with a topic, and maybe you’ve spoken about it before.

Once the general topic or subject of your talk is nailed down, get to work answering these three questions:

My husband and I were driving my parents back to the airport and laughing hysterically at the story my mom was telling. In an effort to have some fun conversation during our last hour together as we drove down I-5 that morning, I began a storytelling game I like to play based off a fun exercise shared in Matthew Dicks’ book, Storyworthy. My mom went on to tell us that a neighbor saw their tin can tree, got competitive, and decorated his tree with paint can lids.

Your audience wants to know only what is relevant to them. And they want to understand it quickly and easily. They don’t want to climb through the irrelevant or the complicated to understand how you can help them.

The only way to give the audience what they want is to follow the advice I share with every person I help:

Be ruthless.

Giving a good speech often has very little to do with the minutes in front of your audience and everything to do with the time and care taken before you ever stand up.

My friend knew that if the employees expected the same talk at the same time, there was a greater likelihood that they’d just tune it out. If you fly often, it’s likely that after a few flights, you don’t listen to the standard safety message anymore. You’ve already heard the same thing many times before. Why listen?

The challenge, though, is that the safety information is important. In case of emergency, it helps people survive. The information my friend needed to share was important too, and he needed his audience to listen.