One. Two. Three...

There’s something appealing about lists… checklists, top tens, favorite tips, to-do lists, don’t-do lists.

You’ve seen them: all of an author’s experiences and expert advice distilled to a series of brief, bulleted instructions.… “The Top Eight Things to Remember As You Rustle Your Notes and Clear Your Throat,” “The 12 Essentials for Correctly Opening Your Speech With a Funny Joke,” and so on.

Folks love them and often depend on them.

Checklists and guidelines can be terribly important to helping craft a message. No question. They can provide structure and cohesion. They contribute to cogency. For some speakers, they also offer a sense of security, a reassurance of order, a bulwark against the jitters (known by some as the “I won’t be so nervous if I know just what to do” method).

Checklists have their downsides, however.

For instance, too heavy a reliance on rigid guidelines, on lists of rules, can bleed the organic qualities out of your presentation.

You become so focused on faithfully observing “the Rules” that you forget about “the Game.”

You end up reciting rather than speaking, concentrating on satisfying a list of must-do bullets in your head at the expense of giving voice to the passion in your gut.

“Wait a minute!” you say. “I’m not giving a sermon about fire and brimstone. I’m just reporting on my project to the management team. Why should I want passion?”

Okay, you may not think it appropriate to bare your soul and emote while delivering a status report at the weekly staff meeting. But dryly conforming to a performance checklist won’t register too many more points on your audience’s comprehension meter, either.

You see, there is an important middle ground — a purposeful balance between high-order theatrics and mind-numbingly rigid droning — that’s appropriate in any presentation. To occupy that ground, to make it work for you, requires you to invest yourself in your message.

So, for those who respond well to rules, allow me to summarize with this one: The audience is the reason you are there. They expect you to serve them in some useful manner and — here’s the key — to make the experience a memorable one.

Being memorable — giving your audience a reason to remember, perhaps act on, what you tell them — is less a function of what you say than how you say it.

A checklist of things to do or not do when speaking may help you organize your content, but it should not and cannot be a substitute for your personality, your conviction, your emotional presence once you step before your audience and become a speaker.