Build Your Career Webinar – Present with Impact

Abstract:

Does your audience daydream when you present? Are your talking points missing the mark? Does nervousness get the best of you? Could your delivery skills use a boost? If you answered yes to any of these questions, join us for the webinar, “Present With Impact,” where you will learn how to:

1. Analyze your audience
2. Develop one central message that stays with the audience long after you deliver
3. Utilize ten tools of persuasion
4. Incorporate stories
5. Structure your talk for maximum impact

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Transcript:

Eric Berkowitz: Well, good morning, everyone, or good afternoon. This is Eric Berkowitz the director of membership of the actively computer society. Like to welcome everybody, to present with impact presentation by Roger Granis of GrannisGroup . So the the focus of this webinar is obviously presenting with impact. We’re going to look at how you analyze your audience how you develop a one central message that will stay with everybody. Incorporating story, incorporating storytelling into your presentation and utilizing potentials of persuasion. So a little bit about why Roger, you know, Roger is the, actually a son of a lifetime member of IEEE. So he really understands engineers and has dedicated his career to helping them communicate more effectively. And he has worked with some of the biggest teams of business, GP, underwriter laboratories, Sematic, Pepsi, Royal bank of Scotland, and Footlocker, just to name a few prior to forming the GrannisGroup in 2005, Roger spent 17 years at Gartner growing revenues from 22 million to 850 million by building their sales university, launching Gartner’s popular podcasts, talking technology is shepherding the roll out of thousands of company acquisitions. So with that brief introduction about today and about Roger, I am just going to go ahead and turn it off. Roger.

Roger Grannis: Okay. Thank you, Eric. And welcome everyone to present with impact, and we’ll just get started here, moving through a couple of slides. As Eric mentioned, I am the son of a lifetime member of IEEE. There’s a picture of my father and I in San Francisco. It was actually the Friday before I started to work at, at Gartner and moved from San Francisco back East to Connecticut near New York city. You’ll see a picture of a telephone pole in the lower right corner there that’s to remind me to tell you about my father. We lived of course in Northern California, and it’s got some of the most beautiful mountains in, in the world, Yosemite the Sierras, and then along the coast, Carmel Monterey the wine country. So my dad had this long telephoto lens on his camera and on the way to these beautiful places, he would pull the car over and take pictures of telephone poles. He was in the pole line hardware business and sold all those widgets and gizmos that, that kept the power going. So that, that was my father. He was always in the basement inventing something and making models out of, out of wood. So I, I understand the mind and behaviors of engineers and I love you guys. So I want to help you all communicate real clearly. That’s as Eric mentioned, I love helping technical experts like yourselves communicate clearly be more influential present well and if you were in a sales role help you sell more. So Eric mentioned this in my career, started out in at Osborne, which was the first portable computer back in the early eighties. I actually worked for Adam Osborne at his publishing company, as he was launching the, his computer company. You history buffs may know that that weighed more than 24 pounds. So we’ve come a long ways. Then I worked at Gardner for many years and now, now GrannisGroup group. So I love to help engineers speak better, speak well influence and lead. And we do that through workshops, keynote speaking coaching and consulting. We’ve got some free offers available at the end of the program. So stick around and by the way, I want to keep this super interactive. If you’ve got some questions, as we’re going, please note them and we’ll keep an eye out on the question board there. I thought I would start out with some common presentation mistakes I’ve been in the business for a long time, seen a lot of presentations.

And here, here are the three that I see the most and that we’ll be addressing on this webinar. Number one is we feel like we’ve got to present too much information. We, we tend to put too much in, we’re better off picking out the right segments and taking the rest away. When I ran the gardener, a podcast talking technology for nine years, that’s what I would do in the editing booth. I would interview one of the technical experts at Gardner for an hour. Then I would listen, get a transcript, identify the most important points, keep those, arrange them in the right order and then take everything out. So instead of putting more information in, find out what’s important and, and take the rest out. Alfred Hitchcock has a great quote. He says, drama is life with the dull parts cut out. So to create drama or to create high impact with your presentations, whether it’s presented to your peers, your leaders, or in a sales call, identify those peak moments and take the dull stuff out.

The second biggest mistake I tend to see is the presentation is not targeted to a specific audience. Each presentation has gotta be slanted and customized to the particular audience you’re trying to inform or persuade or convince or inspire. And we’ll talk about how to do that in a little bit. Thirdly, the content, when it comes to the content, again, one of the mistakes is it’s not arranged cohesively. So you want to, you want to put in time to develop a nice cohesive organization that helps the audience follow along. Another mistake with the content. You’ve probably seen this, whether you’re in a, you’ve probably seen presentations like this, where the slides, the visuals are filled with words it’s as though the entire talk track is up on the screen and the presenter literally looks at the screen and just reads the content that’s up there.

So we want to avoid that. And then finally under that, it’s, it’s not memorable the message, doesn’t stick. And the fourth point when we get up to deliver, we feel like we’ve got to put on our, put up a front, like, we, we put on the mask of the, of the presenter. So what happens is our true selves. Our true, authentic selves tend to get repressed and the audience really responds better when you open yourself up and just be yourself. Not always easy when you’re maybe feeling a little bit nervous, but ultimately what you want to do as a presenter is be the best version of you and not try to be somebody else not putting on a front. Similar to that, we tend to be rigid inflexible, especially if we’re nervous, we want to memorize the top word for word, and that can really throw us off.

What we want to do is have a really good message. That’s cohesive. It’s memorable that in itself gives us confidence so that when we get up present, we’re just reading the audience, seeing if they’re paying attention. And then naturally you’ll know when to speed up, slow down, maybe go a little bit deeper or skip some things you want to have some flexibility. So those are some common presentation mistakes I’ve seen over the years. You can probably say, Oh yeah, I’ve seen, I’ve seen these before. All right. So how do we solve these? I’d like to invite you to, as we’re going through this, think about a presentation you’ve got to give, and then maybe a apply the principles that I’m about to deliver and apply those to the presentation you’ve got coming up. This is what we do in our workshop. We, it’s not Roger up, just talking.

It’s presenting some ideas, getting some input from the other people in the class, and then actually rolling up the sleeves, as we say, here in the States and get to work and apply and work on your presentation as, as we go. So let’s, let’s do a mini version of that right now. And as I said earlier, please, I, I, the one thing I hate doing is being boring and having people, not getting content out of what I deliver and teach and facilitate. So as we go, if you’ve got questions, please write them in the question box and we will respond to those. Similarly, if you feel like we’re, we’re going too deep or not covering enough, just, Hey Roger, could you tell me more about that? All right. Let’s start with the five step process on how to craft your message. We want to identify we’re going to go through these things, the purpose, the objective, analyze the audience, take a look at some tools to help you make your message cohesive, help you feel like you’ve got your message really clear, and it’s going to get across and engage your audience.

These days, we’ve got to go into a room, assuming I hate to say it. You’ve got to assume that the audience is bored and does not want to be there. If you start with that mindset. And I know I’m exaggerating just a little bit, but if you go in with that mindset, the audience is bored and doesn’t want to be there. You’ll craft a message that will grab their attention. It will be relevant to them, and you’ll make your key points in a way that engages them. So this is the five step process to do that. We start with the purpose. What is the purpose of your presentation? Is it to inform, are you teaching them about a new process, a new procedure a new widget, a new product, a new product. Are you teaching them about that? Are you just informing them?

Do you need to convince them? So the difference would be one is just teaching the other is getting them to change their mind, to mentally be on board with you to support your idea, to take that to the next level, we go to the third purpose and that would be to persuade to actually get them to do something, to take action. So those are the three we see in business. The most, especially as engineers informing, convincing persuading, maybe if you’re a leader you’re leading, let’s say you’re installing a new product. You’re you’re out at a customer site. You’re not just teaching, but you want them to embrace to be excited about this new offering. So you want to be a little bit inspirational appeal to the emotions a little bit, maybe be a little more energetic when you’re delivering, or is it to purely entertain?

Probably don’t see a lot of that as engineers. One thing you might want to do though, is if as my father, wasn’t a lot of his colleagues and, and certainly a gardener. We had a lot of technical people who were not the most entertaining. You could actually make fun of yourself. Maybe make a couple of jokes about engineers up front to just help break the ice a little bit. All right, let’s move to the next one in our five step process to what is your objective? Again, it’s helpful to be clear on purpose and objective, because these is homework you do will help you engage your audience, make your point and achieve your objective. So what is your objective? Maybe it’s to report some numbers. You want to fund the new project. Do you want to teach a new process, be inspirational, deliver some bad news.

Maybe you’re selling a service. So what is your specific objective in sales? We see this a lot, especially before a sales call. What is the one outcome we want from this call? Is it to get a second call? Is it to get a meeting where we analyze their needs more? Is it to get a meeting with the senior leaders where we want to present our solution? So have a specific focused objective is in mind, one of the keys to speaking and having an a, and, and understanding your objective is to be able to summarize your objective in one sentence, a phrase that pays, if you will, what is the one thing you want your audience to know do or remember above all else? This is not easy. And if you start out as you’re preparing your presentation saying, all right, what’s my one sentence.

Put down your ideas brainstorm, but don’t feel pressure to have it super fine tuned. The first draft you’ll probably find out it’s it. You want to start with a rough draft then as you’re working on the presentation, keep going back to this one sentence, this phrase that pays and fine tune it as you go, because as you’re getting clear on your message, you’re shaping your points. That will help you inform that one sentence. So here’s an example. So I do a lot of creative writing on the side, written a novel, it’s not making me a lot of money, but throughout the writing process, it’s helped me reinforce a lot of the things I’ve learned going through speech training and presentation skills, training, and whatnot, that you’ll write a better beginning and ending of your novel or your presentation after you’ve written the actual store.

So, similarly as you’re sketching out your presentation, you’ll find tune and you’ll better understand what the key points are. And then you’ll keep shaping that, that beginning and end. So take that pressure off yourself. When you sit down and you’re looking at a blank screen, a blank PowerPoint deck, and saying, Oh gosh, how am I going to begin this thing? Just put down a couple of ideas and then get to work on the presentation itself, and then go back and write the beginning. And the you’ll, you’ll have a lot less frustration doing it that way. All right here. So here’s what I worked on. Last week I said, all right, let’s, what’s our one sentence for this presentation. So I started out with this draft. I said, all right, how about this? I think they call it an anagram, T a B some would call that an acronym.

We get those, we interchange those words. So this is what I started out with. Target your audience, arrange your message and be yourself. I said, I use the three letter acronym anagram on the last presentation. What else do we have? I said, all right, Raj, what do I really want to say to the I Tripoli folks? I said, well, I want to say that confidence comes from good content. And if you’re, if you’ve got a message, that’s, well-crafted, the confidence will come. And so will the results. All right. So that’s really my purpose. Is it catching? Not really, but that is what I want to say. So I said, all right, how can I make it catchier? So I said, alright, well, crafted content leads to confidence and results. Okay. Not bad. And I said, all right, here’s another way to say it.

Good content for con Oh, good craft, good content for confidence and contracts and contracts getting to, yes, it’s not quite the right word, but it’s keeping with the, all the CS. Here’s another version of creating compelling content is the key to confidence and contracts. All right. Not bad. And I said, can I say with fewer words, compelling content equals confidence and contracts. Not sure we’re quite there, but you get the idea. If you can keep working on it, go through draft after draft, you’ll come up with a message that stays okay with the audience. Speaking of audience, let’s go to step three, analyzing the audience. We’ve got a couple of questions. Will the slides be available? Is the presentation available? I think, Oh, Scott’s answering those on the side to great. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. Alright. Analyzing your audience. Here’s the key point I want to make here.

So I work. I have sat as a sales person and a lot of training classes where the product leader, a lot of times, it’s the engineer, the technical expert comes in to teach the Salesforce about the new product. And you’ll notice the sales team is the last person, the last group to get trained. A new product, goes through a cycle, convincing the CEO that this is something we want to do. Maybe we’ve got to get some outside investors to invest. So there’s an investor presentation. If we’ve got suppliers, who’ve got to teach them about what we need to create this new product. Maybe you can relate to that is engineers. They were going to have a for our customers. And usually what happens is when it comes to sales training, the presenters use a version or bits and pieces from all of the four previous presentations.

Unfortunately the sales teams really gotta be educated. They’re going to be out there getting the revenue, getting the sales, getting the customers to say yes, getting them to buy. That’s a really important group to, to train. But I don’t see customized presentations for the sales team. Again, what, what the engineers, the technical experts do is bring in messages from the other groups. What the sales team needs is who is the audience? What is their pain? What probing questions do I need to ask them in very simple ways? What are the key messages I need to teach them? None of those key points have come from the other presentations. So that’s why it’s super, super important to analyze your audience. Here’s a way to do it. Look at the group in terms of how senior are they, what is their role? This is really important for engineers is 0.3.

How much knowledge do they have of the topic? Are they familiar? Are they a novice? Are they are beginners? Do they have a mid level and not have information? What I see from technical experts is you all are smart, sharp. Well-educated people talented. And you, you I’ll just say we I’ve done it too. We go into the audience and we tell them all the neat stuff that we know. Folks, we’ve got to whittle it down and simplify it, make it appropriate for the right audience. Now, if you’re talking to your engineering peer in a, let’s say a supplier, great. You guys can go deep, go technical bill. Understand. But if you’re talking to, let’s go back to a CEO, a customer, be careful, be careful of getting too technical. Another point in analyzing your audience is how receptive are they? What’s their motivation?

Why are they in the room? Are they concerned about business results? They’re concerned about recognition looking good. Will your new offering help them look good? Are they stressed about something? Maybe there’s a, the test result of an N a new, a new offering didn’t pass, or it’s on the borderline. So they want you to come in and convince them, persuade them that, that you’ve made the adjustments in the product, into the design. And you want to take that stress away. One of the interesting things I’ve learned over the years is that people are twice as motivated to lift a burden, eliminate a problem as they are to gain a success. So if you frame your message in a, especially in this case where the CEO is worried about the structural integrity of a, of a design you’re, if you position your message in a way that eliminates fear versus reassures, that it’s all going to be, well, you certainly want that in there too, but emphasize removing the negative versus just showing the positive, keep those questions coming if you’ve got them.

All right. Here’s what I did in terms of analyzing you as an audience, in terms of your creating a presentation for, in terms of CEO in Sydney, in terms of seniority, how much ownership do you have of this presentation? Well, you’re either managing it, probably you own it, or maybe you’re contributing a piece of a presentation to somebody else. Who’s going to actually give it a, you are making the decision or influencing the content of your presentation. You’re certainly familiar with. Well, how familiar are you with presentation skills? I probably somewhat familiar at least a little cursory knowledge. Are you receptive? I think so you voluntarily signed up, on a day that for many in the United States is a holiday. So you’re here because you’re, you’re positive. You want to be here. What is your motivation? Probably all of the above.

You want to get business results, get some recognition, lifted her and so forth. So that was my quick analysis of you. When you’re analyzing the audience, you want to think about their motivation. We tend to think about just the project or the department. What do, what do I need to deliver for my boss or the team? We want to suggest that you expand your view a little bit and identify on three levels. So what is the, in addition to the project, how am I contributing to the project? What is, how does that link to an organizational goal? So I’m creating something new and in a new engineering breakthrough. Great. Well, how does that impact an overall corporate or organizational goal? So link it to that higher level goal that the CEO and the board and all the shareholders care about. If it’s a, if it’s a publicly held company and then think about the personal motivators of the people in the audience.

So in terms of looking at motivation in terms of you on this, on this, webinar, maybe you want to gain proposals, proposals more easily. So when you’re presenting to senior leaders, you want to get their approvals more easily, the department or a project goal, motivators, you want to propose efficiency and innovations save time, inspire. Now from a personal perspective, this is the one we overlook a lot because people don’t always verbalize what their personal motivators are. They kind of, maybe they keep those kind of private. Maybe they want to use content in your presentation to be more influential themselves. They want to feel more confident about the approach we’re taking. They want to be viewed favorably, gain respect again, I’m sorry. These are really your personal motivators for presenting better. Maybe you don’t want to look nervous or not.

You know, don’t look stupid in front of the audience to be, to use that more casual language. Maybe you want to get praise or promotion. Let’s take a look at these questions here. At which point does downplaying the negative become misrepresentation. Good point. I think you want to just find a balance. We tend to in business focus just on creating the positive. I just introduced that other concept of re of eliminating the negative to just expand your thinking a little bit. So,  don’t go overboard with just positioning it as eliminating or downplaying the negative. Well, and, and you’ve got to come from a place of integrity. So you certainly don’t want to say this concept will eliminate a negative. If, if that’s not the case, you could say our goal is to eliminate worry in our clients. And here are three ways we can go about doing that.

So create a more general framing and then show how you’re going to do that. Thank you, Peter. And we’ve got a question from Roman, how do avoid giving away too much to customers pitching you against competitors and turning you down, but still using your intellectual property. Okay, great. So how do you write, so how do you present content without, so there’s really a couple of things. How do you not pitch against the competitor and how do you not give away too much of our IP? Hopefully I’m interpreting that I’m seeing a two part question correctly, right? The rule of the rule is the guideline is never put down the competition position, your product, your offering, with all the positives. And you can in a nice way, say you, you cover this area where there may be some gaps you don’t want to say, Oh, the competitor a has got those gaps.

That’s I think just the, the, the high integrity approach to selling properties, to not put down the competition. And then how do you present your intellectual property without giving it away? We had this at Gardner a lot. We would bring in the technical experts to give a little idea of, of what their knowledge was and how they could help a customer, but we would frame their answer. We would, we would frame the question and answer before we brought them in. So the sales person would go in, identify the customer’s needs. And then the sales person would say, well, I would like to give you a little trial, a little test drive. What if I were to bring in our expert in this particular area and answer part one of your question. And then if you like that will, we’ll talk about how we might have a longterm contract relationship after that.

So we would frame the piece of intellectual property we would give away before we would bring the analyst. In in fact, one of the problems we had at Gardner with our technical experts is they love to share their knowledge. And so we, salespeople have to tell them ahead of time. This is the question you’re going to answer on the call, and we’re going to not address these others. We want to see, you know, certainly save some that they have to pay for. Hopefully that, that answers that question. And another question, is there a different or an approach that works well when presenting to a board of directors? Yes. My short answer of that is to be brief and to the point, find out through a coach, maybe it’s somebody on the board or somebody who is presented to them before saying, help me shape this presentation and actually work with them to make sure your points are super succinct.

So, for example, when I was launching the Gardiner podcast, talking technology back in the mid nineties, I went to the CEO and I said, Hey, I’ve been listening to some audio programs on creative writing on cassette. I think we could do a similar type of program for our CIO on cassette back then it was on cassette. He said, great, write a one page business plan. And so I went in six months later and he said, Roger where’s. I said, can we do this? He said, where is the business plan? I said, well, I haven’t written it yet. He said, what did I ask you to do well, write a one page business plan. So again, feel free at the end that we’ve got some free consultation available at the end. Send me an email and I can talk to you more in depth about that if you like.

But again, my short answer is be succinct debriefing to the point, touch on what’s important to them. It’s probably related to finance profit and resource resources. Okay. Hopefully that’s helpful. I’m going to breeze through this because I want to get to some important points. And you want to think about other audience factors, how much time, what are their expectations? So this, this actually ties into that question about the board of directors who influences your audience. So the board of directors they’re influenced by shareholders. So they’re going to be thinking about them as you present. Who’s going to be there. How many, how many people, here’s one to think about ahead of time, what questions or objections may arise that will help inform what you want to say in your actual presentation and be prepared and confident for the Q and a session section session at the end.

Good. Some other things. All right. This is really important. As I said earlier, the most, the best way to overcome nervousness and anxiety, and we all have it. Even I have it. I’ve been practicing a long time. You’re normal. Okay. The best way to overcome that. And, and you’re not really overcoming you’re, you’re channeling that energy into a positive way, the best way to get yourself into a confident frame of mind, where you can flex during your presentation and not be distracted, not be thrown off is to have a well crafted presentation. And here are 10 tools to help you craft your presentation in a really engaging way. So, as you’re thinking about the presentation, you’re going to deliver, think about, all right, what are the one or two or three of these tools that would help me the most? I’ve studied this a long time.

Trust me, they work there. They’re great. One is to have a memorable concept, a phrase that pays. This is the one we talked about earlier, a cohesive structure. Maybe you have a campaign title. So here are some examples of phrases that pay drive sober, or get pulled over. You drive you text, you pay the didn’t just pop into somebody’s mind. As I sat down and looked at the blank screen, they work these over and over and over until they got these really clever phrases that would, that will stick with the audience. That’s what your goal is to get that key concept, to Velcro it to the brains of the people in your audience. Here’s another one from those of you in the States who may remember the OJ Simpson trial many years ago, this is how he got off how he did not go to jail.

If it does not fit, you must acquit. This is referring to the gloves that did not fit OJ Simpson. The attorney Johnny Cochran could have just said, okay, jury, see the glove. It doesn’t fit. Does it? No. He turned it into a catchy phrase. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. That’s something that sticks in the, stuck with the jury. I’m oversimplifying a little bit, but that was one of the key things you want to have a cohesive structure. So here are four 30, 30, 30. When Gardner went public one guarded, the company went public at least twice. Over the years. The second time when I was there, Manny Fernandez, our CEO went on a road show to convince the brokerage houses and whatnot to invest in the company. He positioned his presentation this way, 30, 30, 30, 30% growth, 30% improvement in customer retention, 30% a new hire, a new client acquisition.

I don’t remember. Those are the exact things that the thirties represented, but he put the three things into 30, 30, 30, I’ve been a boy scout later and we wanted to increase the number of Scouts. So our campaign was recruit, retain record. When I presented that to our leaders in the troop, a very senior executive with IBM, who I have the most utmost respect for actually got out a pad and wrote that down, this guy is, you know, super successful, what he wrote down, recruit, retain record. It’s a nice summary of the, the things we wanted to do. You could tell a story. You could summarize your key points in an anagram or an acronym like easy events are simple. Yes. Some more examples. Dunkirk, the movie a couple of years ago, their campaign was called. This was rescuing the British troops from the beach, wherever they were.

I think they were in France operation dynamo, de de again from world war two. They called their campaign operation overlord. When I launched a product was called operation leapfrogs, it put, put a campaign title on it gets, it gets people motivated. Tool. Number two is using the power of three. Put your key points in threes. There’s some, I don’t know what it is. There’s something about threes that resonates with people. We see this in stories, the three Musketeers, the three little pigs, three blind mice, I’ve watched a lot of keynote speakers. You’ve probably maybe seen some at your events that you attend. They put their three key. They put their key points in threes. So that is really key. Put your key, just have three key points. You can have sub points, other points less, you’ve got seven key ideas. Try to consolidate them into three key points.

Put the extra four as sub points to the three main ones. You’ll see in the examples I gave the power of three, was there 30, 30, 30 recruit retain record. This is from my local newspaper from maybe six months ago is just about ready to teach a presentation skills workshop at a big bank in New York and wallah front page of the story, 30, 30, 30. How about that? So the power of three let’s look at tool number three. This is probably where you’re spending most of your time, where you’re explaining something. Again, if you want a free consultation about making your complex content more clear, more easily explained, send me an email, be glad to help you. So don’t present too much information. Make sure your explanation is appropriate for your audience, that specific audience and make sure it’s clear, concise, compelling. One of the key mistakes I see engineers make the most is it’s a machine gun delivery rat that tat tat tat tat, tat tat lots of information.

Whoa, boy, slow down, put into three buckets, have a variety of delivery. Don’t feel you’ve got to deliver every last piece of information you’ve ever learned. Okay. Number four, very similar to explanations. Facts, data statistics. You’re probably doing a lot of that. That’s great. If you’re a, especially with engineering, things have to work, you’ve got to have data and tests to back up your claims. So yes, these are certainly appropriate. Make sure, oops. I just know I didn’t freeze off the mouse there. Make sure the facts, data statistics are accurate. You want to cite the source, make sure you’re turning the abstract into concrete. Make sure there’s a clear connection between your data. The point you’re trying to make and the, whatever it is you’re doing launching a new product, whatever it is, stress the new and unusual. Let’s say you’ve got 10 points to make.

You can say you don’t have to deliver them all. You can say, we’ve given a handout that you can read later. It’s got the 10 points in detail. I’m going to highlight three that really stood out in this study. We did so deliver the top three, give the entire tent in a handout. As an example, have your visuals uncluttered tool, number five, a testimony you want to back up your content with maybe a quote people CEO’s used, research a lot to back up their proposals for buying new equipment and services here in the States. Consumer reports is another way of doing that. So you’re getting outside testimony. Another way is to deliver a comparison or an analogy. Here’s one that’s relevant to us when we’re presenting, we’ve all got nerves, we got nervous. It’s the number one fear of people speaking publicly.

So here’s one I made up nerves are like ocean waves, ride them like a surfer and they will propel you throughout your presentation. So think of nerves as energy that you can ride forward. That’s probably sounding a little like California and yes, that is my home state. Alright, tool number seven, paint a vision tomorrow Martin, dr. Martin Luther King. One of the greatest speakers in the world would paint a vision of a brighter tomorrow. I have a dream that one day by Bob and he would repeat that phrase. I have a dream over and over. So that was his memorable phrase that stuck to paint a vision of a brighter tomorrow. When I was single living out in Oakland, California, I had a little money, wanted to buy a condo. So the realtor took me out to some condominiums and I’ll never forget what she said.

She was painting a vision of a brighter tomorrow. And she took me out on a balcony overlooking the Oakland Rose garden. And she said, can’t you just see yourself sitting out here with a Weber, barbecue and a table for two with a candle light dinner. Wow. And you know, wasn’t very successful in the dating department. So she really caught me with that phrase, painting, painting a picture of me down the road with a nice date, barbecue, some steaks chicken. What have you. So you’re gonna have big picture, you know, Martin Luther King vision of a brighter tomorrow, or the vision of Roger with, you know, date out on the balcony. So again, that’s something you could paint with your audience. Can’t you just see us a year from now, when up, up, up, up, up, we’ve seen successfully resolve this problem. We’ve launched this new product, or we have fixed the problem that, you know, framing it in the removing of the negative.

All right. You could use it powerful visual. This certainly captures your attention appeals to the emotions. So a friend of mine, rich Ross lives nearby. We know them through our kids, took karate together.  When was that the kids were growing up his children and he’s got three children. He would get all these offers in the mail for charity. So he said, we’re going to decide as a family, which charity we’re going to send our money to. So he put all the brochures out. His children said, let’s go with that one. And it was this picture cause he did because they felt emotionally connected to the cause it appealed to the emotions. Here’s another picture. Picture’s worth a thousand words. Can’t you just see us celebrating when we’ve eliminated that this issue or whatever, again, this appeals to the emotions. Yeah, there’s another one picture of a beach level.

We’ll all be relaxed a year from now when BA a tool number nine, again, use some or all of these tools in your presentations. Well, again, I wouldn’t use everyone in every presentation, but, it’s a good tool box pull from a number nine is to tell a story. There’ve been studies done that show that people are most engaged when they’re listening to a story. So you’ve got lots of facts and data to give intersperse all of that technical information with a couple of stories. And as you’ve seen, I’ve told personal stories that have nothing to do with work. But I brought them in. You can tell a story and then have the point of the story be business related. I would avoid telling stories just to be entertaining, make sure your story has a point that you’re trying to make here. Lots of storytelling benefits, stories are more likely to stick.

So when, so a day or two, a week after you give your presentation, the people will more likely remember the story than other things. It’s a great way to embed a key point or a lesson. The great way to tell third party examples, where, where you tell, the success of other customers, and you touched the emotions. All right. Let’s, let’s break for a couple of questions. Bruce has asked a question, what are good public sources for pictures? Great. Tell you what, I’ve got a longer answer to that. I know there’s a couple of free resources. I don’t remember off the top of my mind. I use a place called I think it’s R F like Robert Frank, one, two, three, if I’m remembering right, you pay a little bit for pictures, but you can use those. Tell you what, let me, I will send an email after to our hosts and they could forward that information to you after.

So to make a note about that picks a group, I belong to just told me the name of, of a free picture source public domain. You can use them without paying. I just don’t remember off the top of my head. Here’s another question. This is from, from Kent, what’s your opinion, Toastmasters or similar organizations as a way of practicing speaking, is it too artificial or structure to be useful? Okay. First of all, I think the more you practice the better I think Toastmasters is a great way to practice. I personally, don’t agree with the emphasis they put on eliminating every, it feels a little, like, like they’re creating robot presenters that said they’re pretty, they’re pretty good. If you’ve got no other place to practice, I would absolutely use Toastmasters. Maybe your company has public presentation skills training.

That’s certainly something I’ll offer something you, you could do another way to do it. I’ve done this and have friends that do it. They form little, Iunch groups where the purpose is maybe once a week, twice a month, let’s just together, get together Friday at lunchtime and we’re going to practice our presentations. I actually do that myself. As some people, I met at a, a keynote presentation skills class. We get together about every five, six weeks. And we, we, we just get this, get this, we just practice telling stories. And these are not yet in that category, but highly successful keynote speakers speaking all over the world and they, we still practice just telling stories. So there’s another way to do it again. Email me after happy to have, more in-depth conversation. One-on-one here’s a, as you’re telling stories, here is a simple storyteller formula.

Remember I said, don’t just tell a story, make sure it’s got a point. So here are the three things you want to make sure you cover. When you’re telling a story, you want there to be a point. You certainly got the story and you’ve, then you can have also the application. They don’t have to go in this sequence. If you do go in this sequence. Here’s how I’d go. So I’m making this up. So here’s the, so one of the, here’s the point, one of the keys to public speaking is to make sure you’re, you’re able to manage any distractions that come up. Okay. That’s the point. Now I’m going to tell the story just two weeks ago, as I was preparing to give a, an, a presentation for the I triple Lee on influencing skills, there was a woodpecker outside my window, in the woods of Connecticut pecking on the window.

So I said to myself, this is going to be a major distraction. If this woodpecker is presenting during the actual program. So I said, why don’t I use headphones? Why don’t I dial in using headphones? I also asked my son, whereas BB gun is that’s another story. So point it’s important to not to manage distractions when you’re presenting, tell the story about the woodpecker and how I solved it with putting on headphones. Now you go to the application then in the, in your presentation, you go, you would say, how about you? What might be a distraction when you’re presenting? Is it people that maybe are using their eyes, their, their mobile devices? Is it noises that might come up? Are you nervous about a particular question that might come? What are ways you can make sure that those distractions are not derailing you when you’re present?

Then we might go into a little breakout session on how to, you know, manage those distractions again, point story application, or you might want to start with your, with your story where, you know, I tell the story sometimes about going through my backyard. It was four in the morning, I’m heading for the airport, it’s raining and there was a stranger in the yard. I thought I was going to get killed. It turns out it was a woman she adjusts, had you know, had a little argument with her boyfriend and ran several blocks to hide. So as it turns out, I wasn’t the victim, she was. And then the point is it’s super important to first look at the world through the other person’s point of view, or, you know, look at their point of view in addition to your own.

Hopefully that made sense. So you bring in these stories and find points you can make in the business setting. All right. And then finally, tool number 10 is to present three alternatives. This is something you might want to do tying this back to the board of directors. You may in doing your homework before the meeting with the board, find out they want just one recommendation, or you might want to go in with three options, present the pros and the cons of each, and then let them decide this, this technique, if you will works great with somebody or a board or group who really likes to make their own decisions, thank you very much. You go do the homework and then present some options to us. Again, another way to structure your message, and, you know, present with impact.

Okay. Step number five is to structure your message. We tend to in business have these types of presentations, the most persuade and inform. So remember I said earlier, and I’m exaggerating a little bit, but you’ve got to go into your audience with the mindset that they’re distracted, they’re bored. They don’t want to be there. And I do that a lot with salespeople, probably super true with them, kind of a joke. But if you go in with that mindset, you’re going to your frame, your, your, the homework you’re going to do the way you’re going to craft your presentation is to get their attention and to be on point every step of the way. So you’ve got to go in and have some sort of a hook. Let’s take a little bit, let’s look at this persuasion model in a little more detail, you’re going to start with a hook.

Then you want to give the situation. Here’s our current state, here’s the solution using those, those, 10 ways of, of backing up your, making your point. Here’s the payoff. And then you’re going to make a request that they fund the project that they keep an open mind, whatever it is you’re you’re going to do. Here’s some hooks a way to hook the audience. Maybe it’s a startling fact, a surprising insight. Maybe you’re starting with a story. I would recommend you try it. I’ll bet. You’re not telling many stories using it. Use a story. Think about the point you’re trying to make and find a story you may be telling over and over, or maybe this is a customer story that you can not use to make your point a size, cite a statistic, maybe ask a probing question, a startling question, maybe give a quote or a prediction. A lot of senior leaders would prefer a presentation where you give, we use the bluff B L U F model. Give them the bottom line upfront. Here’s what I’m doing in this presentation. The problem with this, I’m recommending this as a solution. Here are the reasons one, two, three. Now, let me go into a little more detail. Now, let me give you the background again, different ways of giving hooks. Then you want to describe the current situation. We’re having a failure rate of this or our customer satisfaction rate is down.

Here’s my solution. I said my, I propose a three step process to improve our customer satisfaction or to fix the glitch or to whatever it is. And your, this is where you’re proposing your solution, using those ways of structuring your message and structuring it using the three point process, three support points with a little bit of transition in between and so forth. Okay. Let me know if you’ve got questions. We’ve got winding down about five to seven minutes left. I certainly want to be available for questions. If you’ve got those back to the model of persuading, describe the payoff show. What’s in it for them. This gets back to the audience analysis. What’s motivating them. What are their, is this motivators, their departmental departmental motivators, their personal motivators, create some and desire. Describe the future States and then have the request, you know, call for action request for commitment, next steps, whatever it is.

Uh huh. Let’s wrap up with some tips on visuals. Here are five tips effects. Let’s go to a question first. Where do we get CPE certification? I think that might be a question for somebody else, right? I’ll let that one go. Alright. Some tips on visuals. Okay. This is an actual slide from an actual client of mine. Okay. You’ve probably seen some of these, maybe you’ve written slides like this. What we want to do is move the notes, move your talk, track into the notes section down below. Okay. So we’re talking about compressor surge here. So here is revision number one. Okay. We started out with, let’s go back to the first slide. Okay. All this text. And I said, all right, what does this compressor compressor, surge look like? What’s a visual. Okay. So we’ve got the visual with five bullet points or just have a picture of the visual and talk to the five visual points.

Okay. Let’s let’s, let’s go to a couple of questions here. All right. What is your view on the animations in presentations? Is it distraction distracting or does it help? I think some animations are good. I use sometimes a movie or TV clips. I pay a license to do that, to help make the points. So I do think some th the key is to have visual variety. So break up with, you know, maybe it’s all pictures, pictures with a few bullets. Maybe it’s just bullets, but certainly having an animation is I think great. Make sure like with storytelling and animation is not there for fun. It’s there to make the point, make a point. Great question. Thank you. I’m not sure I’m pronouncing it right, NASA. And we’ve got con Dane, perhaps. That’s the way it’s pronounced. This is how helpful it’s come at the right time for me.

Again, codeine, if I’m pronouncing it right, shoot me an email. Happy to review what you’ve got. Talk to you about it. I love doing this stuff. Want to help you? Alright. So back in the early, we’re talking about using visuals. So here’s a variety of visuals. So John F. Kennedy in 1961 said by the end of this decade, we’re going to get man on the moon flying back safely. So here are some ways you could support that. Talk with visuals. One would be just putting all words on the screen. We don’t want to do that. Version two is to just have bullet points. Okay. Number three, would it be, have a picture with bullet points? Number four would be just the moon. Now look at your emotional reaction to that. Didn’t you feel a little excitement, a little tinge of emotion when you saw that picture versus just that, and then if you want to have humor, I’m sorry.

Nuts on humor. I’m sorry. Here’s another way to do it. Have bullet points with the shadow of the moon, or if humor, the cow jumping over the moon. Of course, when John F. Kennedy gave the speech, he used no visuals. He created pictures in the minds of the audience. So don’t feel you have to have a PowerPoint with every presentation you give. And another technique that I’ve seen used really well is you’ve got bullet points, but let’s say you’re going to tell a story. Maybe you’ve got a big picture of your backyard or what your son, you know, playing baseball, whatever the story is, or you can darken the screen. There’s a button you can push on your laptop or your remote clicker. You turn the screen white or black, and then don’t have a visual. Now the audience is focused on you. Here’s a, here’s another client example.

So these are, this is exactly what the words that the speaker was saying, a very smart engineer. This was over in England petrochemical plants. He essentially saying petrochemical plants can blow up if there’s dangerous gas in the air, and there is a spark, and he had the words on the screen, something like this. I said, why don’t you just put a picture of a plant blowing up on the screen that will get people’s attention? He said, Oh, that’s a good idea. Here’s another example. Here’s the key point, have one idea per slide. So this is what the slide looked like. So they’re really about four key points there. So what you want to do is break apart the multi, you know, all the details into multiple slides use the five by five rule, five bullet points, max, five words per bullet point, max.

Um, if you’ve got a whole process show, a big picture of the whole process, highlight the one point, see the circle up on the screen and then zoom into that one point. Okay. And the last point, if you’ve got a busy slide, you’ve got to show that all use, call-outs at least bring the eye to the PA part of the slide that you need to show. Okay. Here’s another way to use call outs. You know, here’s, when you get to the point, you’re paying a graphic, a graphic artist to create your slides. I mean, here’s a really good way of this is this is ideally what the slide should look like that, or like that there you go. I’m going to stop there. We are at, at our, oops. I just went. I just, Oh, there we go. See, I whited out the slide and now I don’t know how to get back push to audience.

Let me leave you with a couple of points. Oops. Oh, well, I don’t know. I have tried a technique and I don’t know how to get out of it. See, this is why we practice saved by a question. Let’s go to another question. I feel off the cuff, natural, cohesive and compelling think speech without any visuals will be more powerful example, Martin Luther King. Absolutely. I totally agree with you. Yes, politicians, leaders of the world. They don’t use visuals. Absolutely. In the world of engineering, we probably need to show some visuals because there are technical aspects to what we’re talking about. But yes, in an ideal world, absolutely. And off the cuff cohesive, compelling speech you’re not, you’re not using visuals. We, we tend to use them as a crutch, but yes, I totally agree with you. So, short of that, I would say, have some cut your slides way back and have them up on the screen to support, but not be that not be the show itself.

All right. Any of another customer who’s from Carla, how does, how do you train audiences who expect slides to not need needs slides a great point. Well, first of all, they’re probably thank you. Thank you for not having okay. Slides or overly detailed slides. But that, that brings up a good point is the expectation of audience of audience today that you will have slides. I I’d have to say they are probably expecting slides, but think about all the things we’ve talked about, have slides there to support the talk, not be the talk and you, you, you want to get back to shoot. I am not able to show, could someone text me? Are you seeing slides now? Cause I pressed let’s see here I press my escape slide and my I’m not showing slides right now. So I don’t know if they’re there for you or not. Anyway, think back to the, to the ideal graphics I showed, where there was a jet airplane with statistics or the bar graphs colored. That’s what you want to aim for.

Um, a lot of the presentations we create serve a Merc Nick’s purpose to be viewed during the presentation discussion as well as record the discussion, which is, which is shared with people and who did not attend a meeting. Okay. So you’ve got a mixed purpose. Some will view live. Some will watch a recording later. Okay. Or read later, how do we best ma best, most effectively balance the two. So first of all, we’re at we’re after the time, I’m happy to keep going. Scott, let me know in text and the chat, if we can keep going. I’m super good with that. So yeah. Yeah. I think we keep going along as the questions are coming. That’s great. And, and Scott, let me know. I’m not able to show my slides anymore. We don’t need that. I have a lot of people are timing in that they’re seeing them.

Okay. So what slide are you on now? Like the bullet. Okay. All right. Great. Thank you. So I would have, this is more work, but I would have a, I would have a version of the slides that’s designed for the live audience. In addition to that, I would have a handout, something that you give out hard copy or email to those people who were not in attendance or it’s used as a reference document later. So that could be a PowerPoint with all the heavy content in the notes section, or it could be a word document you’ve got, you don’t even need the pictures of the slides, but you can have pictures of the slides and then the content. So I get the, I get the question, have a version to present and then have a handout handout for the audience, with all the details that they can follow along with or use as a reference.

That same document could be used as the deliverable for those who did not attend live. That’s that’s my answer there. These are great questions. Thank you. All right. From Anthony, if you are competing with other teams, will you be at a disadvantage if you have few slides, even if they are more impactful, great question. I’m thinking you could, okay. Number one, you want to have a super good presentation, a strong hook, good concepts held together cohesively have the facts, but also the stories to appeal to the emotions. Same thing. I think you could have a slot, a live version that’s high impact and a handout version. That’s more detailed because you like your subtext here is if you only hand out that short version of the slides, the audience, it’s probably going to have the longer version from your competitors. So I would recommend get top of the head. Feel free to email me later, would be a high-impact visual and then a separate handout. That’s more detailed.

Okay. Probably another training tool for training presentations can be a game or interaction. Absolutely. Yes. Bravo, when it’s training, so it’s not so much a one way delivery. You want to move into facilitation mode. In fact if Scott would like a presentation on facilitation, that’s a whole nother topic. Happy to do that later, but yes, when you’re training, you want to do, I mean, I’m exaggerating a little bit. Do you want to do as little talking as possible? You want to set up the concepts you want to do a little, you want to set up the concepts, pull the answers out of the audience. So instead of you saying, here’s how you do it, you say, here’s the problem. How have you, in this room been successful, solving the problem in the past. So you could have a, you know, with a group answers or you could break into table discussions.

We’re going to give you 10 minutes each. Here’s the problem you see as tables, brainstorm solutions, and then let’s hear the answers back. So yes, you add the more variety, the better you’re competing with YouTube, you’re competing with Netflix, and so forth. So you, you want to bring in as much variety and engagement as possible. Okay. Next question. Will the slides be available for us to download? I would prefer a, I’ll talk to Scott, prefer a version that’s summarize like a, like a handout version versus the whole slides. Okay. But we’ll work that out with Scott. How about approach for training people? Yeah. So I’ve talked about some of that. Yeah. The mindset that this presentation skills, this webinar was focused on delivering one way presentations, whether to prospects, customers, teammates, what have you training as a whole different thing?

As I said earlier, a different skillset you want to facilitate, pull the answers out of other people have lots of variety. Again, happy to do that. God content on that as well. Okay. Mark does answer. Scott answered other questions. All right. Good. Let me just do it quick survey. Do you want to go through a few slides on presenting or do you want to just let me know? It’s like eight, 10 slides. Not much. Why don’t I just assume you do. You’re still on the line and we’re going to talk about authenticity. Oh, let me go back. Okay. Presentation and delivery skills. I’m not able to see the large slide myself, but, here we go. It’s okay. I think this quote from actor, Michael Kane is awesome. He says the rehearsal is the tension. The performance is the relaxation. So put in the work plan, prepare. And once you’re walking on stage, it’s just time to have fun. Just relax. You, you know, the content don’t feel tied to the slides, use the slides as prompts, but not, you’ve got to cover every single point and read your audience. You can tell when they’re, you know, getting bored or, you know, or they, they want some more detail. Maybe have a friend in the audience that will help. You’ve talked ahead of time. Hey Julie, let me know. You know, should I speed up, slow down, help me read the audience. And you communicate that to me. Okay. Authentic

Yesterday. I touched on this earlier. Be yourself, the audience today, we are hungry for honesty and truth. You’ve got to be polished. You’ve got to be crisp and tight, but don’t get up and be phony. I mean, if you look at the United States, presidential elections, if all other factors aside, the people who tend to win the people who tend to win are the ones who make their points. Clearly they stick to them. They make an emotional connection with the audience. And they’re authentic. When the politicians you start smelling, they’re fake. They’re just talking to the points and you don’t feel it coming from their heart. They go way downhill. So again, I’m not able to read what this is. Push. Let me just go to my other deck and see what I’m sorry, just hang tight for one second.

Here we go. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Preparation tips, practice. Don’t memorize. Be able to speak from bullet points. Okay. Don’t over rehearse. I’ve seen really good speakers in front of thousands of people they have for the first time ever memorize their speech. And the risk of doing that is you feel like you, if you miss a word, you, you, what happens is you miss a word, a sentence, a key point, you get lost back in your head thinking, God, what was I supposed to say? And then you miss that connection with the audience. So something with here’s what I find with every training and presentation I’ve given. Something will be different than you expected. Not necessarily go wrong, but something will happen. Something will be different. Just expect it. So now, instead of going in, worrying about what’s going to go wrong, I just go in, Oh, something’s going to happen.

It will be entertaining for me as a presenter to find out what, what it is. It’d be like that woodpecker who was pecking on my window. Oh, okay. That’s what it is. I think it’s good to have a warmup routine. When I shift from writing to speaking, I have to change my mindset and I actually go through a little physical warmup that I learned in acting school. Just, you know, buzz, the lips, work, the tongue law a little bit. The best, tip I got from, first play I was in community theater many years ago was to take from the director, take three deep breaths, right before you go onstage, it gives, it helps like happy chemicals release in your body. It gives you a surge of energy. It helps you overcome the nervousness, the guidelines for eye contact. Again, in a classroom, we would be practicing this.

But what you want to do is, is to look at one person. We call it one person per thought bite. So about two or three seconds, you want to look at somebody in the left front of the room for two or three seconds. Then you want to go to the back left of the room two or three seconds, maybe up to the front, right. Two or three seconds, bang, bang, bang. So you’re moving around the room. You don’t want to like scan the audience like a, a, you know, like, like a radar machine spinning around. You want to make that eye contact with individuals for two or three seconds. In terms of movement, the key things are to use your movement to emphasize your points. So let’s say you’ve got three key points. You’re T you’re talking from position a for 0.1. And then you say, let’s now talk about my second key point.

And at that point, you’re walking to the other side of the stage. When you’re teaching it in class, somebody asked about facilitation. You want to move the front quote front of the room around. So get, get out there, move to the back of the room, move the stage around mingle with the audience, come up next to a table that’s maybe in the middle so that you’re not locked to the front of the room. So, again, one of the common things that I see, Oh, let me, I didn’t change the slide on the screen. I’m sorry about that. There we go. Yeah. Move the stage around, move on purpose. You want to avoid pacing, although frankly, some of the best comedians they’re pacing back and forth. Ideally what, what I recommend is getting having the stage move around, but present 0.1 a, you want your feet together, arms at your side, except when they’re coming up to gesture and you want to avoid like standing on one foot, that kind of thing.

So be grounded, two feet solid, then move and then get grounded in a new spot. Yeah. Don’t lock or hide. I, when in my early days of training, you know, I wasn’t quite confident. So I would, I would have you know, stand next to the projector and kind of stay there. And my client said, dude, you gotta move around a little bit. So yeah, move around. One of the key ways to look confident is to is, is just, just your posture. I was doing a women’s in leadership conference for, actually Pepsi a few years ago. And I had two co trainers, two females, and one of the women went up to the presenter of a female and said, darling, if you would just lift your shoulders back and pull your chin back, you would look so much more confident up here. And it was just a simple move, but it made all the difference.

All right, let’s look at the questions. Yes, please. Yes, please. Okay. Bang, bang, our having little note card reminders considering being unprepared or somehow negative. No, I don’t think so. I sometimes will present and I’ve seen great presenters go up with a yellow pad of paper and they’re just using it as prompts. I think the audience would rather have you stay on point than wander around, not by, by not remembering what you’re saying. So yeah. Note cards are great. There’s nothing wrong with having a pad or a typed out sheet. You know, you don’t want to be reading from it, but have that as a, a prompt for you. You could set that on a table in the front when you’re not needing it. You could put it on the lectern if you want, you know, I would recommend coming out from behind the lectern when presenting, but have there is as a, you know, a guide for you and when we’re presenting and we were, let’s say, forgetting where we need to go next that pause will feel like an eternity for us, but for the audience, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.

Some of the best speakers I’ve seen, really know how to use the power of the pause. Let’s say they’re using, they opened their presentation with a hook. They ask a question, what will happen if we don’t address the safety issue of the couplings on the bridge support, and then just pause. They might even ask it again. What will happen if we don’t address bang, bang, bang, and then th th use the pause two delivery skills, pausing and changing the pace and volume of your delivery. Deliver a little bit fast, deliberate a little bit, slow pause. Let the audience think. If you lose your place, don’t worry about it feels like forever for you. It does not seem that way to the audience controlling nerves. Let’s look at a couple things on that.

You are absolutely normal. Everybody gets nervous. No, you’re opening. If you’re confident in your opening, the key points there, you get off to a good start that lets the nerves settle down. Remember it’s just a conversation. Maybe there’s somebody in the audience that is your friend. I will talk to people before I present and I’ll find somebody that it just feels positive. And I’ll think about that person as I’m delivering, but do you want to dedicate the presentation to somebody, somebody in love, keep, keep them top of mind, maybe prayer or meditation works for you. I mentioned that taking three quick steps. Here’s something I learned in San Francisco acting school. So it’s a little California. It’s a little out there, but what the professor said was when you walk onstage, receive the energy from the audience, you know, it sounds a little, little West coast, a little touchy, feely, a little weird, but there is energy in the audience.

And if you open yourself up and feel it that’s again, that’s, that’s opening yourself to be authentic and to receive that energy, it just tried it. I have found it works. And remember, people want you to succeed. So those are some, some, some tips there. Here’s wind up here in a couple seconds. Roger’s rules of order. Okay. So here are my personal personal tips. Don’t come up with a preamble. Don’t come up and say, Oh, you know, I’m, I don’t present much. I’m a little nervous right now, or, Oh gosh, I got stuck in traffic. I’m a little bit distracted right now. Stop, come up. Don’t apologize. And take the room, take it, own it. As a person with a sense of humor I have learned to be careful with jokes. Okay. First of all, I say, do not ever tell a joke. I would tell stories that might be humorous, but don’t tell jokes and be very careful. Be very sensitive. Especially today. People are sensitive to being made fun of the rule, the rule I heard back in college, my speech professor, when in doubt, leave it out. If this voice inside your head saying, you know what, this might just not be appropriate. Just, just don’t do it.

And remember people want you to succeed. Let’s go to a couple of questions and I’ll go to my closing story with Steve jobs. Okay. Knowing that using the same tone for seven minutes ends up losing your audience. How do you manage a long speech presentation of 45 minutes and the suggestions for keeping an audience engaged for the whole duration? Yes. Well, it starts with all doing everything right? Analyzing the audience, having your key points structured in a compelling way. I would suggest just having some audience interaction, maybe it’s pausing for question and answer. You could do this sort of gets into training. You might want to have a find ways to engage. The audience could be question and answers. It could be having them think about a concept and asking them something like, how would you apply this to your situation?

Take 30 seconds and think about it, that’s just letting them apply. You could do a, again, this is more training, turn to your neighbor and share an idea that you’ve learned so far. And that’s more training. You could do a quiz up on the screen. You could ask a question, what’s the, maybe you did a survey about a product that’s not working. What what do you believe is the number one reason our product failed? Well, then you have like four answers up on the screen. You could have people raise their hands. How many think it’s a you know, the formula for pouring the, the mold wasn’t right. A, B, C, D get ways to get the audience in their head and participating so that there are some ideas top of the head, a couple of ideas change the format where somebody asked earlier, can I do animations? Absolutely. You could have maybe a, maybe not a co presenter, but somebody else deliver a piece of the content. Let’s say you’re delivering 45 minutes. And you want to explain a technical aspect of your, of your talk. And you could say, I’m going to have juice, Julie Stevens come up and present this. Julie is a PhD from MIT. She knows a lot about the blah, blah, blah. But if you do that, make sure you’re controlling the and practice with Julie ahead of time. So she’s not going into too much detail.

Okay. Good. All right. Another question about the handouts. Okay, great. Any last questions I’m going to go to my closing. Oh, we were saying for free offers. Let me just wrap up with story, then we’ll go to the free offer. So, we all know Steve jobs. When I was working for Osborne back in the early eighties, I traveled to Boston and I heard Steve jobs speak to the Boston computer society. And he told the story about when he went to Reed college in Portland, Oregon. And he said, I went into the, in the, in the restroom at Reed college, there was a quote that said, using the three quotes from three different people using the words do and B and he, it said to be, is to do, Socrates said that one to do is to be Plato said that, but he said the only person who made a lot of money using those two words, made them magical by using them this way.

Doobie Doobie you do that’s Frank Sinatra. So his point was find a way to make your presentation interesting and compelling with a little bit of magic. And that will stand out from the others. Alright, so you want the free offers? You’ve waited. Here we go. I like them. Okay. I’m moving the wrong slide. There we go. Okay. So again, we offer workshops, coaching, and consulting, and certainly speaking, if you’ve got a conference coming up, you’re looking for a speaker to cover influence persuasion. Storytelling would love to do it. Please let me know. Okay. And that is the end. And here are the offers. Let’s see. I can’t okay. Got him shift. Shoot. I, Scott, can you help me? I, because of my goof up on the screen, I can’t move to the last slide. Anyway, let me tell you what they are. It says free offers, email.

Scott, can you help get to there? Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Alright. So if you want a summary card at this presentation, send me an email. There’s the email address at the top? roger@grannisgroup.com and right present summary in the subject line, if you would like to talk to me a little bit further consultation, right? Present free consultation in the subject line. There’s no, I’m not. I’m not going to sell you anything. I like helping. I, AAA has been good to me and vice versa. So that’s, that’s up to you. If you’ve got any about workshops and services, like I say, you want a speaker, you would like a presentation workshop like this and your company just put IEEE inquiry. I can let you know more about what I do. Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you for listening. Thank you for staying on longer and hope. This has been a value, and I’d love to help you, further. And, as I say, there was some ways to, to engage. And again, thank you. I hope this is helpful. Take something out of this and apply it just one or two ideas might make a big difference.

Eric Berkowitz: Great. Thank you, Roger. That was very, very interesting and entertaining. I hope everyone learned something. This is part of our early career, young professional series. We’re hopefully going to be putting on more of these in 2019 for the rest of the 2019, and hopefully on a, on a reoccurring basis in 2020. So if you do have any suggestions for topics that you’d like to hear about, please feel free to email me, just email membership@computer.org. And we’ll follow up with you again. Thanks for joining us today. And we look forward to seeing you on future calls. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.

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