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.

The other day, I picked up my four-year-old son from his pre-school and as we were driving out of the parking lot, he asked why he had to be buckled into his carseat. I explained that we all have to wear seatbelts. They keep us safe, and besides, those are the rules. (I’d been talking about rules a lot lately. At four, he’s pretty interested in how to push boundaries so I try to give him some clear parameters.)

He replied, “Mom, what are rules?”

That’s a great question. How do I explain rules to a four-year-old?