What is the Taxi Test? It’s a test you apply to the headlines on your slide deck before you send it out.

The question you are asking yourself: If someone only reads the headlines on your slides, will they still understand what you are proposing and why?

Imagine that the decision-maker (the person who green-lights your project or not — in this example, let’s say the CEO, and let’s say the CEO is a she) is riding in the back of a taxi on the way to the airport. She is on the phone with her spouse, deciding who will pick up the kid from football practice. As soon as she hangs up, she needs to call one of the board members back, because she was on the other line when he called. A stack of papers about other stuff she needs to make decisions on sits next to her. The taxi goes careening around a corner, and half of the papers fall to the floor.

In other words, it’s chaos.

This is the environment where your project will get green-lighted or not. This is the environment where you need to shine.

We all like to think that everyone thinks as carefully and as deeply about things as we do. And they probably do, but about other stuff. They hire you because they want YOU to think about your things carefully and deeply, so they can do their other stuff.

The reality is that your life’s work is going to get green-lighted, or not, in the space of about 40 seconds. The Taxi Test is reading your headlines to make sure that if they, and only they, are the things that get read when the decision is being made, the decision-maker will still know what the point of the presentation was about.

Here’s an example:

Original:
Welcome – Sales History – Potential Problems – Suggested Solutions

Edited:
Sales are down – Lead processing is the problem – Reorg the Sales Department

See the difference? You don’t even need to see the slides now, to know what is being recommended and why.

Pro tip: Don’t just read the slide headlines out loud to yourself. Actually write them down, on a separate piece of paper, give that piece of paper to a friend or colleague, and ask them to repeat back to you what you are proposing and why.

Why?

Because it leads to way too much unfocused effort and time wasting.

You’re going to waste your time learning how to set meetings and talk to receptionists.

I don’t mean to malign receptionists, they are great people and the world needs them.

But you have an assistant who is going to do that stuff. What your company needs from you is to sell things and to make investors happy. “I need business English” is way too broad a phrase for either of those, and you’re going to waste hours and hours and weeks and weeks and all you’ll have to show for it is that you’ll be able to do low-value activities. You won’t be equipped to do what your company needs from you.

So be more specific:
“I need English so I can sell these blue curtains to those French customers.”
“I need English so I can sell my company’s software in Europe.”
“I need English so I can tap into the investor pool in London.”

I’m a native English speaker, have been all my life. But I’m still learning English. Sure, I might be at a higher level, but I’m still learning English.

And I’m happy to descend into this endless rabbit hole, because, well, I just am. But that’s just what it is, an endless rabbit hole. I’ll never reach the end of it.

You don’t want to wake up 20 years from now and realize 80% of your time was spent learning stuff you never used, do you? Your company needs you to sell stuff NOW, your company needs you to get that investment NOW. And you want to do those things and still make it to your kid’s piano recital, or home for dinner at a reasonable hour.

So don’t use that phrase, “I need business English.” Tell us what you want to do with it.

In this episode of The White Rabbit podcast…

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1cn5bJITDjfxZBOjUeJoSE?si=708e2514c8354bef

…Alper makes an interesting point, that the value of a presentation is not in convincing people to support you, it’s in reassuring your convinced people, your “fertile ground,” that they are in the right place.

It makes me think of the cockroach model. Please forgive the metaphor I’m about to use, it’s all about cockroaches, poison, and death, and the topic doesn’t deserve a negative metaphor, but it’s the only one I can think of at the moment…

When you’re designing poison for a cockroach trap, don’t use a poison that will kill the cockroach right there, use a poison the cockroach will carry back to the nest and give to other cockroaches.

A presentation is similar. It’s your opportunity to give your fertile ground the tools they’ll need to go back to their pals and tell them that your idea is a good one.

99% of my clients are not native speakers of English.

(Fun fact: Did you know that, by far, most speakers of English are not native speakers of English?)

And, quite dependably, every single one of those clients asks at some point, “How is my English,” or some other question that shows that they are comparing themselves to someone else, most often a friend, a spouse, or a coworker.

That is completely the wrong question to be asking. Don’t waste any time on that one. Comparison to others only leads to heartbreak and irrelevant navel-gazing.

The right questions to be asking are:

1. Why am I here?
2. Am I making progress against whatever that is?

Every single person is going to have a different answer to question #1. Some people want to raise money for their startup. Some people want to get a large project approved by buyers in another country. Some people want to make a major career move. Some people really like to learn phrases like “to chase the dragon,” and that learning answers some need that only they truly understand (and if you recognize my reference to that phrase, you are correct, our conversation the other day is what prompted this post).

Every single person is going to answer question #1 (why am I here) differently. And if the answer to question #2 is “yes,” you are in the right place and you are doing exactly what you need to be doing.

This is a great article, it made me so excited and I jumped for joy many times upon reading it!

One of my favorite points it makes: Know the board members. Not on average. Every. Single. One. They’re all different.

I call it “stalk the board” (https://recipientlabs.com/go-retail/), but the article uses a more diplomatic term.

The reason? It is highly likely there will be a HUGE range of technical knowledge on the board.

A couple members are going to know, for example, exactly how cookies work. But a couple other members are going to have absolutely no idea whatsoever (“what’s a cookie?”).

The reason for the pre-meeting research is that you don’t want to answer a question from someone in the second group like you would if it were coming from someone in the first group. That’s just a guarantee that you’re going to piss them all off and they won’t like you or anything you have to say.

Stalk the board. You don’t have time for anything less.

The article (CIO magazine).

This podcast episode goes into how to stalk the board (otherwise known as “research the board”), step by step, and what to, and not to, expect from your work:

The second step in our series is to reduce your ahh count. It’s much easier to listen to somebody who is not saying “uh” all the time.

Let me give you an example.

Option 1:

I, um, went, um, to the, um, store.

Option 2:

I went to the store.

Read them out loud. Compare them. Which one is easier to hear? Probably the second one, the one without all the ums, right?

The pushback that I often get is that the client will say, “Well, I need the ums because they give me time to think.” On the surface, that’s a perfectly good argument. Nobody wants an engineer who doesn’t think. If you’re going to drive across a bridge, you want that bridge to be built by an engineer who thinks.

But the thing is, every time a sound comes out of your mouth, your audience members have to think, even if it’s just for a microsecond, “Is this a word, and if not, I can probably just discard it. But if I discard it, there’s a hole, and I’ve got to connect the words that came before it with the words that came after it.”

So now the audience is having to do twice as much work just to get the same point. If you said the exact same thing without the ahs and ums, then the audience would have to do half the work to get your message.

So instead of filling those gaps between the words with ahhs and umms, fill them with silence.

You’ll still get your time to think, but your audience will be thinking, “This person is thoughtful and in control.”

The question I typically get next is “how do I do that?” Basically, the answer is “become comfortable with silence.”

I know, it’s hard to become comfortable with silence. Silence feels awkward. So the exercise that I’ll start with is the client will utter any sentence about anything. And then as part of the exercise, you say that with spaces in between the words, so “I’m going to the store” becomes “I… am…going…etc.” Never in your life will you actually speak like that, but via the exercise, you become more comfortable with putting silences between your words and with the fact that nobody’s going to die if you do.

In fact, not only is your audience not going to die, they are probably going to love you for it, because it gives them time to think, which is what they need, and what your ahs and ums would have robbed them of the opportunity to do.

If you stare at one long enough, it’ll attack.

Screen-based teleprompters are great. They allow you to read a script while looking at, or at least appearing to look at, the camera.

But don’t fall in love with your teleprompter so much that you forget to break eye contact every once in a while to do something miscellaneous (glance at the wall, shuffle papers, stare into space, whatever).

If you stare at the teleprompter for more than about 20 seconds at a time, your audience may start perceiving in you hostility and aggressiveness that don’t actually exist.

“The aspect ratio is off.”

Said no one in your audience, ever.
 
They probably aren’t sitting there thinking, the aspect ratio is off, I don’t like this guy.

But they might be sitting there thinking, I don’t know what it is, but something is off. Maybe it’s the color of his tie or something.

The customer has a weird feeling. They can’t quite put their finger on it, but something feels weird.

And so the end result is the same. They go with someone who doesn’t give them that weird feeling.

Fixing those problems is easy. But it takes years to learn how to make it easy.

You have better things to do with your time than fix aspect ratios. Build bridges, for example. So you go build bridges, and we’ll fix the aspect ratios.

Make mirror neurons work for you.

What are mirror neurons?

Basically, it’s that humans tend to do what other humans are doing.

You know how if you’re at a party talking to someone, and they are smiling, you’ll smile too, even though you’re not sure why you’re smiling? And if someone points their foot at you, you’ll often point your foot at them?

That’s mirror neurons at work.

Now put them to work for you.

One way that you can put them to work for you is by becoming less nervous, because if you’re up there and you’re nervous, then your audience is probably going to get nervous too.

I know, being nervous is actually completely normal. Humans are social animals, so when a bunch of people are staring at you, you get nervous. It’s completely natural for a public speaker to be nervous.

But one way that you can reduce that nervousness is by practicing a lot, practicing way more than you think is necessary.

The result is that when it’s time for you to get up and give that speech, your brain will not be 80% occupied with “Okay, what am I going to say next?” That thought, “What am I going to say next,” will only be taking up 10-20% of your brain.

In other words, by practicing a lot, you’re basically reducing the brain space that you need for your presentation.

And the unused brainspace can just revert to the things that you’ve already been practicing all your life, like how to talk to people at a party and what to do with your hands.

You’ve been practicing those things all your life, but if 80% of your brain is busy just remembering the things that you’ve got to say next, then there’s very little room for that other stuff.

The result is that because you are relaxed, your audience is too.

Use vivid language. Use words loaded with color. Emotion. Sound.

Why? If you use dead or uncolorful words, then when your audience leaves the room, they’re going to forget what you said. They’re going to forget you.

And when you’re giving a pitch presentation, being forgotten is not the effect you want.

If you use vivid words, your pitch is more likely to be rattling around in the decision-makers’ brains even after they’ve left the room.

Here’s an example:

–The door closed quickly.

–The door slammed shut.

Both sentences mean pretty much the same thing. But which one is more memorable?

Probably the second one. It has sound. It has feeling (your skin can feel the rush of air of the door slamming shut). Maybe even there’s some emotion, in the form of anger, or at least a gust of wind from an open window.

None of those things are present in the first sentence. And so when your audience leaves, or when you leave the stage, those sounds and emotions are more likely to remain in the audience’s heads.

Of the four tips, this is the hardest one to do yourself, because there’s so much noise going on inside your head. You have The Curse of Knowledge really bad. So this is how we go about fixing it:

First, we’ll take what we call a baseline, which is to record the client delivering the presentation. Then we make a transcript of the baseline, and we go through that transcript, looking for opportunities to use more vivid language. We rewrite the transcript with the more vivid language, and then once we’ve rewritten it, the client continues practicing, but with this new version instead.

There is a magic number for how many filler words are fine. It’s six. There are some people on the logical extreme, and they’ll say you need to hit zero. And sometimes that would be nice, to hit zero filler words, but in my opinion, don’t worry about it too much. Less than six per minute, and you’re probably fine. More than six per minute, and it’s probably a problem.

The reason it’s a problem is that your listeners’ brains have to process that uhh just like they do any other word. When you say the word door, or light, or jacket, for example, they have to momentarily think, what’s a door, or what’s a light, or what’s a jacket.

And when you say uhh, they have to process it too. Their brains go “what’s an uhh?” And then they realize, oh, it’s not a real word, I can discard it. And then they have to think, what was the word that came before it, and what’s the word that came after it, and they have to reconnect them.

So you’re up there talking, and you’re thinking, this is great, all these filler words give me time to think! But you are making your listeners do a lot of work, and because you’re so hard to listen to, your audience starts thinking, I don’t like this person, get this person off the stage.

Fortunately, the solution is pretty simple. You don’t have to stop taking time to think. Just fill the spaces with silence, not filler words.

It was the most important presentation of her life. Not just of HER life. Of the lives of every single one of the people who worked for her, too. After all, their jobs at her company were how they put food on the table to feed their children.

But they weren’t going to be able to feed their children anymore.

Why not?

Because during her pitch to investors, the projector bulb blew.

It was a piece of bad luck. It wasn’t her fault. But none of that matters. The investors ended up giving their money to someone else, her company went bankrupt, and she had to lay off all those workers.

Learn how to present naked. Learn how to make your words do the job alone. Yes, it’s 100 times harder, and yes, you are going to need some slides at some point, because investors are going to want to see charts and tables.

But if you’re using slides as a crutch, and that crutch gets kicked out, and you didn’t learn how to present naked, you’re going to go home empty-handed.

Don’t feed the monster. Kill it.

You don’t need prettier slides. You don’t need fancy animations or most of the bells and whistles that are built into PowerPoint.

You probably don’t need to spend hours and hours preparing, if you’re already an expert on the subject.

Do learn the handful of basic story structures. Maybe throw in a few slides. Probably 5 or 6 max. They don’t even have to be that pretty. If you know your audience, they’ll love what’s on the slides. If you don’t, no amount of pretty is going to help you.

Slides are noise. There are 30 million new slides made every day. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “You know what I need more of in my life? PowerPoint slides.”

What the world needs more of is the ability to take a one-hour idea and crush it down into 3 or 4 sentences.

That process is painful and reductive, and often can only be done by a third-party, because the idea generator (you) is too close to the subject.

But do it, and you will reach a level of clarity and focus that no PowerPoint deck will ever bring to you.

They say that 60% of tech projects fail or underperform.

(That number varies, but it’s usually north of 50.)

Which means tech spend is, like a second marriage, the triumph of hope over experience.

Your budget committee presentation is going to be mostly numbers, team bios, timelines, etc. There’s probably not going to be a bunch of touchy-feely imagery in there.

But just between you and me, keep in mind that in your audience there’s a fair amount of hopes and dreams floating around. 

A lot of public speaking coaching is directed at speaking to large groups. You know the images: A speaker, holding a microphone, standing in front of hundreds of people, usually on a stage or something like that.

But most big decisions are not made by hundreds of people. When you need to get budget approval for a big tech project, for example, that approval might be coming from the board, which is probably about 8-12 people sitting around a conference table.

This is where you “go retail” and “stalk the board.”

By “go retail,” I just mean convince a group by convincing one person, and then convincing another person, and then convincing another person. Don’t see them as one group of people, see them as a collection of individuals who just happen to be in the same room.

By “stalk the board,” I don’t mean get binoculars and crouch in the bushes outside their houses, that would just be weird. But make a list of each person on the board or budget committee, and what kind of argument convinces that person, and then make a Post-It note for each person, and put those Post-It notes on your bathroom mirror where you will see them every morning when you are brushing your teeth. This is an early, but necessary, step in preparing your pitch.

Your argument during the meeting will tend to have a little something for everyone. If you are using slides, for example, there will typically be 2 or 3 slides of graphs for the numbers-minded, a few slides with short catchphrases for the vision-inspired, and, maybe, an image of a customer simultaneously on the phone and laptop if it’s customer service software you are pitching, so the board can start to envision the software being used.

Because your board presentation will probably be short (10 minutes, for example), keep in mind that you will not have the time to completely answer the questions of any of these people. Your job during those 10 minutes is not to completely convince everyone of everything, it’s just to paint the big picture for everyone and to signal to all the different mindsets in the room that you can think and speak like them too, and when they need more information, you are the right person to come to.

By the way, you will often need to come to this meeting equipped with your printed-out collateral (often also referred to as “leave behinds” or “supplementary material”) so after the meeting, the board members can dive deeper into your project while they are riding in the taxi back to the airport, or while eating lunch at some restaurant next door.

The short answer: Nothing.

If you’re a CTO, ChatGPT and AI are helping your coders a lot. They probably save them boatloads of time. They might even be helping clean up their code or even write blocks of code that would be a waste of time for a human.

But when you’re making a mission-critical presentation, ChatGPT and AI will only make you slightly better than average. And when you are asking the board to authorize a $10 million spend, or telling a recalcitrant customer service department why a new piece of software is going to make their lives better, “slightly above average” is not where you want to be.

You see, those situations require that you take a complicated idea that normally needs hours to explain, and sum it up in 5 sentences. And that is definitely, definitely, not something ChatGPT is good at.

Make sure that if someone reads only the headlines of your slides, and nothing else, they will still get your message. For example:

• Slide 1 headline: Sales are up
• Slide 2 headline: But average pick lines per order are too
• Slide 3 headline: So to protect profitability, we need to do 3 things to the database
• Slide 4 headline: Thing 1
• Slide 5 headline: Thing 2
• Slide 6 headline: Thing 3

Imagine that your boss is reading your presentation in the back of a taxi on the way to the airport, and she has a million other things to do on that ride. She only has time to read your headlines, so your headlines need to do 100% of the job. Will your deck survive that situation?

Elsewhere, I’ve held up Angus Young, admiring him for his complete lack of detachment.

Today, I hold up the opposite, a King of Cool, Mad Men’s Don Draper. When you need to be cool and collected in a hot environment, channel your inner Don Draper.

But now that I think of it, Don Draper wasn’t cool, collected, and detached at all. In fact, in one of my favorite scenes (a video of which I’ll share in a few days, because in less than two minutes it displays some of the most critical presentation tips ever), he’s almost crying over slides of his estranged wife, and even his product naming idea was inspired by his heartfelt desire to go back to a simpler time.

What do you think, do Don Draper and Angus Young have something in common? Was Don Draper, the famous man of coolness and detachment, more “plugged in” than we give him credit for?

Flagging is a way for you to call attention to the main point of your message. There are some key words and phrases that wake people up and tell them to listen carefully. Here are some of them:

If you take just one thing away from this, it should be…
The most important thing to remember is…
What it all boils down to is…
The bottom line is…
The most critical issue is…
At the end of the day…
That’s a really good question. The answer is…

You can also use:

The best part is…
The focus of the debate should be…
First and foremost,…
The key thing we’re focusing on right now is…

It’s not that faces are good or bad, it’s just that they’re very distracting.

One thing that we see often in almost every corporate presentation is there’s an introduction of the company. In that introduction, there will usually be a couple of slides with pictures of human faces.

We call these slides “happy workers slides.” A “happy workers slide” often shows an ethnically-diverse assortment of smiling people holding clipboards or gathering around a conference call speakerphone.

While this slide is up on the screen, the speaker will be introducing himself (“Hello, my name is XYZ. I work for company ABC. Blah blah blah.”).

The thing to keep in mind is that the human eye is naturally drawn to faces. It’s a human instinct with millions of years of evolution behind it.

And remember that you’re competing for attention with your slides.

So if your slides include faces of people, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll lose in that competition.

No amount of presentation brilliance is going to allow you to overcome the pull of that instinct to look at other faces.

It’s not that human faces on a slide are always good or always bad, and it’s not that eye contact with your audience is always good and things that interfere with it are always bad.

Just keep in mind that if there is a slide showing a human face looking at the audience, it is almost guaranteed, as long as that face is up there, that the audience will look at that face, not at you, and, for a few seconds at least, will not listen to what you are saying.

“Stories are good, you should use them more often. And it’s important to put yourself in your stories.”

That’s good advice.

But these days a lot of people pass out advice like that, and then you ask them to explain themselves, and they tell you stuff like, “It makes you seem more authentic. It makes you seem more vulnerable.”

They use a bunch of words that nobody understands. Nobody really knows how to implement the advice.

There’s a simpler and more direct reason that stories work well, and that is just that people are social animals and they like to see how other people interact with other people.

So sometimes a story is as simple as, “I walked down the street and I went to a restaurant for lunch, and I learned about XYZ. After lunch, then I had to go to get a haircut, and I learned about ABC.”

Maybe the actual point of your speech is to teach people about XYZ and ABC. The reason that you’re using a story to do it is because it holds people’s attention longer. A well-told story can hold attention for pretty much ever.

Of course, keep in mind what your audience is there for and what they want. That’s the golden rule. In a business presentation, your audience probably wants to know something like the quarter’s sales numbers. They don’t care about your daughter’s boyfriend’s personal hygiene challenges.

Maybe in a personal story, you’re going to talk about your daughter’s boyfriend’s personal hygiene challenges because people want to know about stuff like that and how that affects you, but with business audiences, your stories are probably going to be shorter and they’ll often just be three or four sentences.

When you list things, put the most important thing first. Don’t save the best for last:

–Most important thing
–Second most important thing
–Third most important thing
–Fourth most important thing

Someone in your audience might get called away, your boss in the back of that taxi might get a call from her child’s school, or maybe the projector bulb blows up in the middle of point #3.

If any sort of interruption happens, you want to make sure the most important thing already got covered.

The most effective presentations aren’t presentations at all. They are conversations, and you probably already have all the skills you need, you’ve been using them since the day you were born.

Let’s say the big boss is coming to your regional office and he’s going to have a full day of all the department heads presenting their annual plans to him.

Your end goal is that you want to stand out, so the big boss remembers you in particular.

The easiest way to stand out is to do what other people are not doing.

Start out by thinking about what are the other department heads doing? What they’re usually doing, if their presentation is to be thirty minutes, is start out with about an hour of content, and then gradually cut things out until they get down closer and closer to forty minutes.

Once they get to 40 minutes, they often say we can’t cut anymore, so they take that forty minutes and they try to cram it into thirty minutes.

Now remember, for a second, who these people are. They, like you, are the world’s experts on their subjects. They spend all day, every day, working deep in their subjects. The big boss is not deep in their subjects — he or she has a million other things to worry about.

So they are the world’s experts, but they end up speaking too fast and doing everything they’re not good at, because they’re trying to use unfamiliar “presentation skills” to cram 30 minutes of content into 40 minutes. Their presentation ends up being terrible, and they go home knowing the big boss doesn’t realize how brilliant they are.

You, however, go the other way. You, like the presenters before and after you, know your subject better than anybody in the world, so distill it into a couple sentences. We’ve even seen one of our clients take an entire year’s strategic plan and distill it into six words.

The result is that the others will get up there and start presenting to the big boss, and their messages will get lost, and they’ll disappear into the crowd, and they’ll be trying to do a million other “presentation things,” but they won’t be doing what they’re really good at, which is talking about the subject they’ve spent years working on.

You, however, get to get up there and confidently talk about the things you’re really good at, using the skills you’ve already been practicing every day for your whole life.

Instead of trying to smoothly cram 40 minutes of content into 30 minutes (which never works, by the way), and using a bunch of unfamiliar “presentation skills” to do it, you walk into that room knowing how to distill your entire message into a few words, and the rest of the time you get to use the same communication skills you’ve already been working on your whole life.

Yes, it’s kind of counter-intuitive, but the best way to present is the way that doesn’t use “presentation skills” at all, and instead unlocks the skills you already have: the communication skills you’ve already been practicing your whole life, and the subject matter expertise you bury yourself in every day at work.

Now, distilling your message into a few words does not mean you get to be lazy, or that you’re going to oversimplify things. You’re not going to walk into that presentation room, magically deliver your entire message in 15 seconds, and then confidently strut out of the room while everyone says, “Oh my god, that was the most amazing presentation I ever saw!”

In fact, learning how to express yourself in just a few words is at least as hard as trying to remember 30 minutes of presentation, and it often results in conversations that last the full 30 minutes.

Because the big boss is going to want to ask followup questions. He’s definitely going to want to drill down into more detail. So those 30 minutes of slides that you made, all that data, all those charts, you’re probably going to need those. You’re not going to be able to magically throw them all away.

This approach is going to do two things:

1. It’s going to remind you that you are the world’s expert on this subject, and you will find yourself finding the confidence that comes from knowing it.
2. More importantly, it allows you to spend most of those 30 minutes having a genuine two-way conversation with the big boss.

Remember that the point of this presentation is to stand out. And what is the key to standing out? Doing things that others are not doing.

What are others doing? Puking out a bunch of data, and then leaving the room, and then someone else comes in and does the exact same thing, and then they leave the room, and then someone else comes in and they do the exact same thing.

And then you come in, and you’ve focused your message so much that you can cover it in just a few minutes, and then you get to spend the rest of the time having a natural two-way conversation with the big boss.

And your competitors, the other department heads, they’re not going to be able to do this, because they are going to be rushing through, and every time the big boss asks them a question, it’s going to slow them down and interrupt their train of thought, and they are going to be rushing through their answers to the big boss, because they are thinking, every moment I spend talking about this is a moment I don’t get to spend talking about one of the other initiatives in my 30-minute presentation.

They will not be present while they are responding to questions from the most important person in the room. You, however, will be.

We guarantee, the big boss is going to have questions for you.

We’ve never seen it not happen.

We guarantee that he is going to drill down deep. We guarantee that you are going to walk out of that room feeling drained, like you have drawn on every mental resource available to you.

The difference is, now answering the big boss’s questions is a conversation, not a presentation, and you’ve been practicing your conversation skills since the day you were born.

Steven Pressfield, the author of The War Of Art, one of my favorite books, once said:

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.”

Since you’re a professional, you know what Pressfield knows: nothing conquers fear quite like taking action.

Acknowledge the fear, then set it aside and get to work.

This goes double for public speaking. Your audience wants to hear from you. Your duty is to speak to them. You will never stop feeling fear, so learn how to deliver your message anyway.

A related video: You’ll probably never not be nervous

The most effective presentations aren’t presentations at all. They are conversations, and you probably already have all the skills you need, they just need to be unlocked.

Let’s say the Big Boss from Headquarters is coming to your regional office for a full day of all the department heads presenting their annual plans to him, or their major initiatives for the next year.

Your end goal is that you want to stand out in front of the Big Boss. The best way to stand out is to do what other people are not doing.

Start by imagining what the other department heads are doing. What they’re usually doing is, if their presentation is to be thirty minutes, they start out with about an hour of content, and then they gradually cut things out until they get down closer to forty minutes. They they cut some more until they get to thirty minutes, or at least they try to.

What often ends up happening is they get to under forty minutes and then they say we can’t cut anymore, so they take that forty minutes and they try to cram it into thirty minutes.

These people end up trying to go too fast and barely having time to say what they walked into the room to say. They’re not doing their specialty, not doing what the company is paying them for. They’re doing something else, presentation skills, or, more correctly, what they imagine those presentation skills might be.

Their presentations are almost certainly going to be terrible. The Big Boss is going to be in pain. By the end of the day he’s going to be aching to get out of there. His head is going to be ready to explode.

So go the other way. Do what the others are not doing:

You know your subject better than anybody in the world, so distill your subject into a couple sentences. We’ve even seen one of our clients distill his message into six words.

The others will get up there and start presenting to The Big Boss, and their message will get lost. They’ll be trying to do a million other “presentation things,” but they won’t be doing what they’re really good at, which is talking about the subject they’ve spent years working on.

You, however, get to walk into that room confident that you can sum up your message in just a few words if you need to.

You get to get up there and talk about the things you’re really good at, using the skills you’ve already been practicing everyday for you whole life, because the “presentation things” aren’t getting in your way.

Yes, it’s a little counter-intuitive, but the best way to present is the way that unlocks the skills you already have: the communication skills you’ve already been practicing your whole life, and the subject matter expertise you bury yourself in every day at work.

Now, this does not mean you get to be lazy, or that you’re going to oversimplify things. You’re not going to walk into that presentation room, magically deliver your entire message in 15 seconds, and then confidently strut out of the room while everyone says, “Oh my god, that was the most amazing presentation I ever saw!”

No, on the contrary, the reality is that you’ll probably need the whole half hour, but the difference will be that The Big Boss will be asking you questions, asking you to dive deeper and brainstorm with him right there on the spot. He will remember you as the one who electrified his brain when everyone else put him to sleep.

Wherever you look, your audience is probably going to look there too.

This is a human trait. You’re not going to get around it. There’s no amount of presentation training that is going to help you overcome it.

If your audience sees you looking at your slides, they will probably also look at your slides. That doesn’t mean that looking at your slides is inherently bad, but it does mean that, since you compete with your slides for attention, when you look at them you are almost guaranteed to move the audience’s attention off of yourself and onto your slides.

Another way that this plays out is when people are participating in panels. When you are on a panel, even when you are not speaking, you are basically performing. Wherever you look, the audience will look too. If, while you are not speaking, you look at the floor, or at your hands, or at the ceiling, your audience is also going to look at the floor, or your hands, or the ceiling, too, and not at the speaker. You are distracting the audience.

So keep in mind that when you are on a panel or when you are using other people on your panel, that you are performing the whole time, not just when you are speaking. Wherever the audience should be looking, you look there too.

By the way, we recommend that you run a little test, just so you too can see how natural and unavoidable this little human quirk is:

Get a couple friends. Go out on to the street. Look at the sky.

Chances are pretty good that people passing by will also look at the sky. If they’re busy and they’re hurrying to get somewhere they might only look at the sky for a second or two, but they’re going to look at the sky.

The other day a reader said, “My boss asked me if I could do an unplanned talk for 10 minutes. What do I say, how can I organize my thoughts?”

Here’s what we suggested…

Two things humans almost always find fascinating:

1. Change or movement (think of early humans out hunting, watching the savannah horizon: Fixed things, like a tree, don’t get much attention, but a moving lion or tiger, the humans will watch that and discuss it for hours).

2. Will these changes or will this movement affect me?

So if things are changing at [your organization] or with [your program], just spend your 10 minutes talking about that. Start with a general principal, and then give a case study / example / story about how clients are responding to that change.

For example:

Over the past half year, I’ve seen a bunch of things evolving, but here are the biggest three things you should probably keep your eye on…

Thing-I’ve-seen-change-recently #1. For example, a couple months ago we saw a client run into this issue during their experience with [your program], and this is what happened (you describe the challenge, and then you tell the audience how it got resolved).

Then there’s Thing-I’ve-seen-change-recently #2. For example, a couple months ago we saw a client run into this issue during their experience with [your program], and this is what happened (you describe the challenge, and then you tell the audience how it got resolved).

Then there’s Thing-I’ve-seen-change-recently #3. For example, a couple months ago we saw a client run into this issue during their experience with [your program], and this is what happened (you describe the challenge, and then you tell the audience how it got resolved).”

From the audience’s perspective, you’re giving them advice on what to look out for, and how others are solving it. The [audience members] get to take that knowledge back to their own people, and use it to help their own people prepare for [your program].

When the speechwriting is almost done, it’s time to move on to the delivery training.

Why do we say “almost done”?

Because we need to make sure the speech we’ve written is going to work in real life, and we can’t start to gauge that until we start the training. Does the speech hold up when it gets into a more dynamic “stress test”-sort of environment? Does it sound right coming out of the mouth of the speaker?

There are many facets of delivery training, but one is particularly important for lead generation activities:

Cultivating audience participation.

An audience that knows it’s okay to participate is an audience that is more likely to come up to you after the speech, or at the breaks, to introduce themselves and find out more. If you don’t break the barrier between speaker and audience, that barrier will remain and you will only get about 30% as many opportunities to follow up with potential customers afterwards.

There are many ways to drum up audience participation, but here we’re going to mention a couple in particular:

1. Start with a time shift phrase

We all recognize time shift phrases from the stories of our childhood: “once upon a time,” “way back when,” etc. And so we’ve been trained all our lives that whenever we hear a time shift phrase, it’s time to sit back and listen. Time shift phrases put us in listening mode.

Examples:

–Last year, we noticed that…
–Two weeks ago, when I was cleaning out the trash…
–Yesterday, someone asked me why…

2. Open a question

The human brain is a question-solving machine. It’s so obsessed with solving questions that it will invent patterns and answers that don’t really exist. Sometimes, that obsession causes us to do stupid things, like vote for the wrong presidential candidate or date the wrong person.

However, a speaker can (and should) use that tendency to his/her own advantage.

Plant a question in the audience’s minds. Better yet, if you know your audience well, you already know the questions on their minds. So ask one of those questions, and let the audience watch and learn as you journey towards an answer.

Examples:

—Profit margins at many agencies are falling. Why?
—Stock levels at wholesalers are typically much higher than they need to be. The technology to bring them down exists, but still they stay high. Why is that?
—The boards of many companies tend to be too quick to support the CEO’s decisions. You might think you know why, but today I’m going to float another theory past you.

Often, there’s a tendency to want to answer the question quickly. After all, you may be thinking, you’re an expert, and shouldn’t you know the answer already?

And in fact, you probably do know the answer already. But the audience already knows you know the answer. That’s why they asked you to speak. They want to see how you think, how you go about solving problems, how well you can understand a situation.

So resist the temptation to answer the question immediately. Let it hang out there, unanswered, for a while. Your audience wants to know what you did between the time you asked the question and the time you answered the question. They want to learn from you. Don’t disappoint them.

On a related point:

Make the question a little more complicated than you can answer completely during the presentation. Leave some possible answers unaddressed. Not too many, because then you might seem like you don’t understand the complexity of the issue. But enough so that audience members come up to you at the break and say things like, “Yeah, but what about XYZ?” And then you get to talk about XYZ and cut the conversation short and say things like, “I’ve got to go, here’s my business card, call me and we can discuss this more.”

By the way, when we say in the sessions “open a question,” we mean “ask a question.” When we say “close the question,” we mean answer the question.

3. The list goes on and on. There are many ways to enhance audience participation. For a deeper study of them, consider signing up for our Communications Tuneup weekly course. Studying and practicing those techniques is a big part of what we do in there.

But the main takeaway to remember at this point is that 80% of those ways, including the two you just read about here, are structural. They are not personality-dependent. They do not rely on some magical charisma that allows you to work a crowd like god knows what.

Some charisma helps, sure, it never hurt anyone. But the truth is that most audience participation techniques rely on seeds that were already planted in the audience’s minds years ago. There’s no magic to stirring audience participation. It just takes a little practice so you know where to find the existing triggers and how to pull them.

A reader asks, “How can I ask difficult questions?”

You know the kind of questions, the ones where you wonder beforehand if you dare ask them, the ones where you stop first and think things like is that question too forward, or too bold, or is it too early in the relationship, etc.

Yes, asking questions like that is risky, but the upside payoff is huge. People almost never make it to the C-suite unless they’ve shown they can ask difficult questions well. Also, if you’re an outside consultant, your clients will almost never see you as a trusted advisor unless you know how to ask difficult questions.

So knowing how to do it well is an important skill to have.

Here are three tips for doing it well:

1. Keep your eyes lower than the other person’s eyes.

Not lower as in “look down at the floor, away from the other person” but lower as in slightly below the other person’s eyes in elevation. In fact, to avoid confusion, let me restate that: Keep your eyebrows a little lower than the other person’s eyebrows.

And it doesn’t have to be a lot lower — in fact, keeping your eyes a lot lower would probably seem funny. And if both people are playing the same game, there will be a ridiculous-looking competition where both people will slouch lower and lower towards the floor until both people are practically falling out of their chairs to see who can get lower.

2. Keep your body loose. Remember mirror neurons and the tendency of people to act like people around them? You want the other person to stay loose and relaxed when you ask them the difficult question, to keep their defenses down, so you need to do the same.

3. And probably most importantly, use the other person’s words and phrases, not your own. For example, if the difficult question is how do you achieve “A” and “B” at the same time, even though they are mutually exclusive, get the other person to say “A,” and then to say “B,” and then you say, “Wait a minute, I don’t understand something, a few minutes ago you said A, but you also say B, and those seem like they are kind of contradictory, so how do you do both?”

Once you’ve asked the initial question and a couple followup questions, and no one has died, you can relax a bit and begin digging deeper into the difficult subject, knowing that you’ve been accepted into the club that gets to talk about that stuff.

There’s a story about Ernest Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway is in a bar with a bunch of other writers. They make a little bet with each other.

They say, “How many words do you need to tell a story?”

One of the writers, he says he can tell a story in 10 words. Another writer says, “I can tell a story in 9 words.” Somebody else says, “I can tell a story in 8 words,” Somebody else says, “I can tell a story in 7 words.”

Ernest Hemingway says, “I can tell a story in 6 words,” so there’s silence at the table.

What is that story? He says, “For sale, baby shoes. Never worn.”

Now take a beat to imagine what that might mean.

…

Notice that that story did not take shape until it had some time to rattle around in your head. When it first started, it had no action, no movement, no life of its own. It only took shape, it only took life, in your head.

Stories don’t take life when you tell them. They take life in the heads of your listeners.

Go slow and speak less.

Yes, I know it’s counterintuitive. I can barely believe it myself, even though I see it happen almost every day.

Here’s an example:

These days I’m helping a client prepare for a speech at a major committee meeting. It’s an important meeting, and an important speech, but it’s a short speech — about 8 minutes.

When he first started practicing, it was almost impossible to cram everything into his 8 minute time limit. He was rushing, and the words alone were taking 10 minutes, and then there was a video too, and some slides, and it just didn’t look possible.

So I listened to the little voice in the back of my head, the one that was saying “Tell him to go slow and see what happens.”

He did, and within three practice rounds the speech had fallen to 5-1/2 minutes. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling of surprise and amazement that I had, sitting behind the camera, listening to the final few words fall out of his mouth, watching the timer: 5:19, 5:20, 5:21, 5:22, 5:23, press stop.

I think what happens is that when the speaker slows down, the mind clears. The brain focuses, and the fat is cut, naturally and easily.

One of our readers had an excellent question about HGOMM…

(HGOMM: the five elements of a marketing story, outlined here: https://recipientlabs.com/hgomm/)

His question: Can you send an example of a short marketing story with these 5 components?

Yes, of course. An example…

There was a guy, Can. He was making the rounds, speaking at Rotary clubs, hoping to spread the word and generate some business. But he wasn’t getting the results he wanted — his audience seemed to be falling asleep whenever he would talk. So he called us. We helped him restructure his speech and work on his delivery techniques. They weren’t easy changes for him to make, they were a little bit out of his comfort zone. But it worked, and now when he speaks he gets the results he wants.

Hero: Can
Goal: Wants to use speaking to get more business.
Obstacle: People are falling asleep at his speeches.
Mentor: Us
Moral: If you want results you haven’t gotten before, you’ve got to do things you haven’t done before.

The first four, HGOM, are usually pretty easy to express. But that last M, the moral, is more difficult. Different audience members will see different morals, and sometimes it’s hard for the speaker to express the moral (as he sees it, at least) clearly. Here are a couple tips for getting over that:

https://recipientlabs.com/the-moral-of-the-story/

One of our readers had a very good question.

She watched the Feel Sense Describe video, and asked, “That’s nice, but how do I do that when I’m talking about numbers?”

Good question. Here’s a voice response with two suggestions:

By the way, we love to get followup questions, we answer all of them, and sometimes we even record our answer (like this) for all to hear. So if you have a question, don’t be shy, ask us. We promise we won’t use your name in the recording, unless you want us to!

Transcript:

One of our tips and tricks subscribers emailed me. She watched this video Feel Sense Describe. And she asked me, “Okay, Matt, that’s nice but how do I do that when I’m talking about numbers?” And that’s a very good question. We get that question a lot. It’s a very common question. And I’ve got two things to suggest.

One is, don’t think of the numbers themselves. It’s almost impossible to get emotionally excited about those numbers. You know, when you say a number like 1,263, or 9,300,200 and blah, blah, blah … it’s almost impossible to get emotional about that. Instead, think about the humans or think about the people behind those numbers. Think about, you know, the kid who went to a funeral, or think about the graduating student who just graduated from university, and she paid for university because her father had a life insurance policy, or something like that. So think about the humans behind the numbers. That’s suggestion number one.

Suggestion number two is about mirror neurons. And mirror neurons are very strong in any social animal, like humans. By mirror neurons, here’s what I mean. Some years ago, there were some researchers, and they had, let’s say, five groups of monkeys. And they had all of the monkeys, they were wired up to some computers that showed their brain waves or whatever. And so anyway, monkey group number one did something. I don’t know, they picked up a stick, or they picked up a piece of food, or something like that. And the researchers looked at the electronic brain waves that were happening in these monkeys, and they saw the electronic brain waves happening. The thing is that the researchers also noticed that the monkeys in groups two, three, four, whatever, those monkeys they weren’t actually doing anything, they were just sitting there watching the monkeys in group number one. And the exact same electronic brain activity that was happening in group one, was happening in groups two, three and four also.

And what the researchers realized was that, just by watching other monkeys feeling an emotion, the monkeys in groups two, three and four, they also feel those same emotions. And so, one way you can use that in a presentation is whatever emotion you want your audience to feel, dig deep into yourself and find the source of that emotion, and display that emotion yourself. So if you want your audience to feel excitement, then dig deep into yourself and find something that excites you. If you want your audience to feel happy, or sad, or angry, or patriotic, or whatever, dig deep into yourself and find the source of that emotion.

And that brings me to point number three. I’ll finish here with point number three. Point number three is kind of a bonus point. I hadn’t planned on mentioning it. But point number three is that, whatever that source of emotion is in you, you don’t actually have to talk about it. You don’t actually have to mention it in your presentation, cause the point is not to mention it, the point is just to show the emotion on your face. So, if you show the emotion on your face, even if you’re not talking about why you’re feeling that emotion on your face, your audience members will see that emotion on your face and then they’ll start to feel that emotion too.

And then point number 3.5, and then I promise I’m going to finish up. I could go on for hours about this subject but I promise I’m going to stop. So point number 3.5 is make sure that the emotion that you’re showing on your face or in your body language, or whatever, make sure that its real. Dig deep until you find a real, genuine source of that emotion in yourself. People are really, really good at seeing fake emotions. And so, if you try to fake an emotion, your audience is going to see that and there is no way that they are going to feel that emotion too. In fact, they’ll probably think you’re not worthy of trust or something like that. So make sure that whatever emotion you want them to feel, dig deep until you find a real and genuine source of that emotion in yourself, and then connect with that emotion.

Okay, so I promised I would stop there. So I’m going to stop there. I love these questions. Whenever you have a question about anything that we send to you, just email us, or call us, or whatever, and ask us the question. We’ll answer the question and, if it’s a good one, we may even do like here, do a recording. Okay, over and out. Take care. Bye-bye.

In another blog post, we mentioned that stories happen in the listeners’ heads. In presenting, do not underestimate the power of this dynamic. It is a special talent pretty unique to humans. It allows us to organize into groups of millions (nations), or even billions (religions).

Your job as a presenter is not necessarily to describe your idea, it’s to plant your idea into the heads of the audience members. It is to plant a seed in the heads of your audience, a seed that will grow into something larger than you alone could make it.

Your audience members, if they are humans, have a special power. Let that power work for you.

More on this dynamic (the revolutionary ability of humans to see and develop the ideas of other humans, even when those ideas are abstract) is in this great TED speech:

A key part of the speech:

“What enables us alone, of all the animals, to cooperate in such a way? The answer is our imagination. We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values.

“All other animals use their communication system only to describe reality. A chimpanzee may say, “Look! There’s a lion, let’s run away!” Or, “Look! There’s a banana tree over there! Let’s go and get bananas!” Humans, in contrast, use their language not merely to describe reality, but also to create new realities, fictional realities. A human can say, “Look, there is a god above the clouds! And if you don’t do what I tell you to do, when you die, God will punish you and send you to hell.” And if you all believe this story that I’ve invented, then you will follow the same norms and laws and values, and you can cooperate. This is something only humans can do.”

The acid test of a good financial speech:

When you read the speech to someone who is not in the target audience, and ideally who barely even understands the subject, can you hold their interest to the end, without losing the interest of your target audience?

If you can hold the interest of the target audience AND the newbies, you know you’ve written a good speech.

Three tips for working a conversational style into your presentation:

1. In the first 30 seconds of your presentation, ask a couple audience members a simple yes or no question related to your topic (If you are speaking about nutrition: “Murat, did you eat breakfast this morning?” “Ayşe, how about you, did you eat breakfast this morning?”).

The reason: This signals to the audience that they need to listen, that this presentation is going to be like a conversation, and they might need to talk at any time. If you don’t do this, the audience might quickly go into a passive listening mode (or actually, a non-listening mode, where they’re thinking, “Oh thank god, I can go to sleep now, the speaker is going to do all the talking.”). Later, when you need them to start answering questions, they’ll be asleep.

2. If you are going to ask the same question to multiple people, sprinkle your question randomly through the audience. Instead of starting at one end of the room/table and moving predictably from person to person, mix the order up and point at random, unexpected people.

The reason: If you follow a predictable order, your audience will often stop paying attention. The ones who haven’t spoken yet will start silently rehearsing in their heads (“There are three people ahead of me, I better figure out what I’m going to say.”). The ones who finished speaking will be thinking, “Thank god that’s over, I wonder if I did okay?” The only ones paying any attention will be you and the current speaker.

3. If you use a conversational style, you need to focus your message much more.

The reason: You’ll have less time to talk. If your normal talk time is 20 minutes, for example, you might only have 10 minutes to deliver your message. Plus, you’ll be busy steering the audience (letting them talk freely, but not going too far from your topic). If you don’t focus your message, it’ll be like you’re juggling with too many balls in the air.

If a presentation is part of your sales funnel, a conversational style will often double your conversion rate for that particular stage. You’ve already been practicing this skill in one-on-one situations all your life, but transferring this skill to a presentation environment requires a lot of deep practice. It definitely pays off though (no pun intended).

One of the best arguments for how people make decisions based on emotion, even when (perhaps especially when) they are making decisions about money…

Especially after expenses, most actively-managed funds perform worse than their benchmark.

If you listen to many finance people talk about themselves and their industry, they’ll tell you how rational and analytical things are, how everyone’s looking at the numbers only, etc. And perhaps, on a day-to-day executional basis, they are.

But really, at the root of all the work these people are doing, is that the client, at one point, said to himself, “I’m going to pay a little more in order to have my money looked after by an actual person.”

If the customer were really making a rational decision, he would just put his money in low-cost index funds, and most fund managers would be flipping burgers at McDonalds.

All day long, I am surrounded by people who are fluent speakers of English, or nearly fluent speakers of English.

One of the main questions people ask me is how can I speak better English?

I tell them, if you are a fluent or near fluent speaker of English, then asking how can I speak better English is the wrong question to be asking.

Once you get to that level, it’s not a question of speaking better English anymore, it’s about putting more vivid images into the audience’s head.

A key idea to remember here is that good stories happen in the reader’s head, not in the writer’s head.

Or, for speakers: a good speech happens in the listener’s head, not in the speaker’s head.

Your job as a speaker is to off-load as much of the processing power into the audience as possible, because the images they create in their heads will be far better and much more vivid than any images you could describe in any language. As a speaker, your job is not to find the right words per se. Your job is to kick off images in people’s heads.

A couple of ways that you can kick off these images in people’s heads:

One is to tell a story, preferably a story about yourself. A common story structure goes like this: Today I want you to X. I remember years ago, I wanted to X too. Here are the challenges I faced and how I met them.

Another way that you can cause these images to happen in people’s heads is to ask questions. One of the great benefits of this tactic is that your speech actually becomes really easy, because you basically just get to stand up there and be silent and listen while the audience does the talking.

For example, if you are talking about the process of starting a business, questions might be: Have you ever tried to start a business? Why did you think about starting your own business? What kind of business did you think about starting?

The minute you stop asking questions, the audience just kind of gets to sit there passively and listen to you and maybe think about other stuff. When you stop asking questions, you bring the cognitive processing responsibility, the heavy lifting, back onto yourself.

The presenter is not the star of the show, the audience is the star of the show.

The fastest way to Death By PowerPoint is to think you are anything more than a midwife to the audience’s dreams.

Sometimes public speaking doesn’t go so well…

http://fortune.com/2015/09/15/bmw-ceo-collapse/

One of the things I love most in the infographic below is the part that says avoid looking at your screen when pitching. Yes, this goes for pitching (selling) an idea or service. But it goes for just about any other situation, too.

When you look at your computer screen, you break eye contact with the most important people in the room, your audience.

And remember, humans tend to look where other humans look. So if you look at your computer, your audience will probably look at your computer, too. Except you’ll see a screen filled with lots of interesting charts and numbers, while your audience will see the logo on the back cover. “Oh, he’s got an Apple,” or “Oh, he’s got a Sony,” is that what you want your audience thinking about?

One more thing…

Have you ever been out to dinner with someone and then they whip out their phone and start playing with it? How does that make you feel? Do you want your audience to feel the same way?

So stop looking at your computer!

Don Draper shows us how presentations are done right…

Notice three things in particular:

1. He starts his story with “my first job” — time-shifting phrases (“my first job,” “a couple years ago,” “once upon a time”) tend to relax people and briefly draw attention to the speaker.
2. He includes a few tangential details (“old,” “Greek,” “Teddy,” etc). Small details (names, places, colors) start the audience painting a picture in their heads, so they can imagine what you’re talking about. The details are not there to convey information, they are there to start the picture-painting process in your audience’s heads, so you don’t need a lot of details, just a few.
3. He speaks slowly and pauses between words. His audience uses this time to paint a picture in their heads — if he spoke too quickly, or used a lot of filler words (ahh, emm, etc), the audience would have no time to paint pictures, and his speech would be boring.

One more thing: Notice that he gets his audience’s attention first, and then he starts using his slides. Remember that you almost always, always, compete with your slides for attention.

Oh, and notice that when he starts using his slides, he starts talking even slower. He knows that if he throws too much data at his audience, they’ll absorb nothing.

By the way, this scene is Don Draper from the show Mad Men. It’s one of my favorite scenes from TV. The presentation only lasts about two minutes, but it’s one of the best presentation examples I’ve ever seen — timing, pacing, imagery, storytelling, communications efficiency, etc, almost everything is in there.

American author Kurt Vonnegut diagrams some basic, but very classic, story structures…

Believe it or not, the structures he outlines here even work for speeches about corporate debt and global financial crises.

Videos can make an excellent addition to your presentation. Most of the time they work, but every once in a while they don’t, and then you’re left there on the stage feeling embarrassed and saying something lame like “Hey, there’s supposed to be a video here, but I guess Murphy just walked into the room.”

So how can you avoid that embarrassing moment?

Insert a black slide before the video slide. Then insert the video slide. Then insert another black slide.

So the sequence looks like this: slide #1: black; slide #2: video; slide #3: black

If the video works, great! If it doesn’t, slide #2 will be black. You’ll have three black slides, and the audience won’t even know there was a problem.

Pro tip:
The standard way to introduce the video goes like this, for example: “Mountains are beautiful, here’s a video about that…” [switch to the video slide, and pray that the video works]

But even better, just say, “Mountains are beautiful…” and then switch to the video slide. Notice that you didn’t announce the video, so if the video doesn’t work, you can just stand in front of a black screen and tell a story about going to the mountains when you were a kid, and the audience will never know there was a video problem.

A common issue we see is people speaking too fast, trying to cram too much content into too little time.

Fortunately, there’s a very natural way around this. It’s something we’ve been practicing our entire lives, and we do it so naturally we don’t even realize we are doing it.

That is, watch your audience, talk to them, find their rhythms. For some reason, when people get onto the stage, they think they’re supposed to do all the talking. If someone spent the entire time at a party talking, you’d probably think, “What a jerk!” Why do we think that’s acceptable behavior when we get on the stage?

The best way to slow down is to shut up and let your audience do some talking, too. Make them answer questions, let them voice their opinions. Pause and smile at someone, they’ll probably smile at you too! (humans tend to do what they see other humans doing)

Do the same things you do when talking to people at a party or chatting with them in the hallway at work. Finding the rhythms of other humans and matching those rhythms is something you’ve probably been practicing your entire life. Use the same exact skill when you get up onto the stage.

Another perspective on speaking slower…

The Fastest Way To Say More.

There are a lot of reasons to watch videos of yourself practicing. Watching videos of yourself helps you improve your body language. It helps you improve your content, and it helps you improve your opening and closing.

But mainly, watching videos of yourself helps you get out of your head.

Watching yourself on video, watching yourself from the outside, is a reminder that the noise going on inside your head is almost never, NEVER, the same as the noise going on inside the heads of your audience.

You might be feeling really nervous. You might even feel like vomiting or fainting. But your audience is probably not thinking about any of those things.

And remember, when you are presenting, what’s going on inside the audience’s heads is more important than what’s going on inside your head.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re nervous. The only thing that matters is this: “Is your audience getting something out of your presentation?”

And if the answer to that is yes, you can relax, because, remember, your presentation isn’t about you.

It’s about your audience, and they only want to be able to answer “yes” if someone asks them, “Did you get something out of that presentation?”

They only want to answer “yes,” and your only job is to give them something they can say “yes” to.

Brevity is vital. But one thing that often gets lost is that brevity is not enough. If you can’t quickly articulate to an executive why he/she should care about your presentation, brevity won’t save you.

When people talk about a flood of information, what they usually mean is that there’s a flood of information they don’t care about.

As a speaker, there are a couple numbers you should know.

One is your average WPM — how many words do you speak per minute (the average human speaks about 120-130 words per minute). You do that so when you are writing a speech, you know about how many words you have to express your idea (for example, “I speak about 120 wpm, and my speech is 5 minutes, so my speech needs to be about 600 words).

Another number you should be aware of is what grade level do you typically speak or write at? Can a university student understand your speech? A high schooler? A middle schooler?

Speaking only so highly-educated people can understand you is not necessarily something to be proud of. In his famous product keynote speeches, Steve Jobs spoke at a middle school level, and sometimes even lower.

How can you get “your number”? Do a Flesch-Kincaid test. They’re free and easy. Go to Google and type “Flesch-Kincaid test” — you’ll get a results page filled with free F-K calculators, like this one:

perrymarshall.com/grade

Copy/paste your text into the calculator, hit enter, and watch the score magically appear.

I love Flesch-Kincaid tests so much that sometimes I paste in a speech, just for fun…

I grabbed the transcript from one of my favorite speeches, a Ken Robinson TED speech, and checked it out. What did he get? 5.7. This is one of the best speeches ever, but even a 6th grader could understand it.

Then I grabbed a Wikipedia article on nuclear fusion. Its score? 13.5. Oh, no wonder my brain hurts! You’ve got to be a university student to understand this one!

Sometimes you’re speaking about a hotly-debated topic, something that not everyone in the room agrees with you about.

Here’s a tip for those situations: Before you talk about the hot issue, get the audience to agree with you on something else.

Two professors, one from Toronto and one from Hong Kong, did a study. They showed participants an unrelated political video (like a speech by Barack Obama or John McCain), and then they showed them a video of a Toyota ad.

They found that Democrats were more likely to be persuaded by the Toyota ad after watching the Obama speech, and Republicans were more likely to be persuaded after the McCain speech.

“Agreeable” is a mood. Put your audience in the mood to agree, and they are more likely to keep agreeing with you.

Here’s a tip for those times when you’re speaking to a potentially hostile audience, or coming dangerously close to a hot, explosive topic:

In your opening sentences, remind the audience you share common ground with them, but also acknowledge the debate.

It’s important to do both.

Remind the audience of your common ground, so they remember you ultimately have the same goals as them. Remind them that you are their friend and ally.

Acknowledge the debate, because often, about half of a person’s hostility comes from simply wanting to be heard. Often, only about half of a person’s hostility comes from the debate topic itself. Acknowledging the debate won’t make it go away, but it will reduce the strength of the hostility in the room. People will know you hear them, even when you don’t agree with them.

Here’s an example of how you can start a speech like that:

“Thank you for inviting me today. Common ground, blah blah blah, paint a picture of the common vision, blah blah blah. Yes, there are debates, debates about whether to A, or B, or C, but in the end we want similar things for our company. That said, today I’d like to stick to… (begin discussing your topic here).”

Sometimes, the purpose of your speech is to try to resolve the debate, and then you probably have no choice but to run towards the bomb and let it explode.

But sometimes the resolution is for another speech, at another time, or maybe for another person, and you just don’t want the bomb to explode in your face while you’re on stage talking about your thing. This technique is for that.

Yes, you compete with your slides for the audience’s attention. When the audience is looking at your slides, they aren’t listening to you. So we preach, over and over, keep your slides simple, keep your slides simple.

But in real life, you don’t always control the design, or even the timing, of your slides. Sometimes a committee does, or a board, or maybe your boss. You might feel like the slides are too heavy with data (charts, graphs, numbers, etc), but what can you do?

Here’s a tip:

When those data-heavy slides flash on the screen, there will be a moment, at the very beginning, where your audience will be confused. They’ll be thinking, “Oh my god, what do I do with all this information? And there’s this person speaking too! Where do I look, what’s important?”

Seize that moment of confusion. Tell the audience that you are going to stick with the big picture, and reassure them that the details, via handouts, will be available to them later. Try this:

“Thank you everyone for coming. Yes, I know this is a lot of data to absorb. But have no fear. I will stick with the big picture, and then, if you really want to dive into the details, don’t worry, you can take the slides home with you and spend all the time you want tonight looking at as much detail as you want.”

Right at that moment of greatest confusion and panic, when your audience is looking like deer in headlights, that’s when you grab them with this. A drowning man is so happy to have a floating lifesaver ring to grab onto. Be that ring for your audience, and they’ll listen to you, not the slides.

In this speech Jesse Jackson, campaigning for US President in 1984, speaks at a church. There are two things I would like to point out in this speech, and they both have to do with point #3 in overcoming the Curse of Knowledge (make it concrete — use simple words and clear imagery):

1. At 1:45, he discusses economic policies, but he does not use academic, brainy terms like “balance of trade,” “equilibrium,” or “investment deflection.” Instead, he uses simple words and clear imagery: cars, vodka, and airplanes.

He says:

“When you buy Honda and Toyota, that’s foreign policy. Russian vodka, that’s foreign policy. (unintelligible), that’s foreign policy. Mercedes-Benz, that’s foreign policy. As a matter of fact, we came here on a foreign policy [Matt: he’s probably referring to Airbus].”

2. At 4:48, he discusses election campaign tactics, and he starts mentioning numbers.

It’s easy for people to get lost with numbers — a number that is significant to the speaker might not be significant to the audience, and vice versa.

But Jesse Jackson punctuates the numbers with a simple image between each number:

“…[state, numbers, blah blah]…rocks, just layin’ around. [State, numbers, blah blah]…rocks, just layin’ around. [State, numbers, blah blah]…rocks, just layin’ around. [State, numbers, blah blah]…rocks, just layin’ around.”

What does this mean for the rest of us, those of us who are not running for US President?

Examine your words closely. Use the simplest, clearest imagery you can.

Think about how you would express your theory in pictures, and then describe those pictures.

When you are talking about numbers, make those numbers real — give them an image, and, if you can, repeat that image often. Most of your audience will forget the numbers, but they’ll remember the image.

By the way, in this speech Jesse Jackson speaks very quickly, but don’t worry: even though I am a native speaker there were words I could not understand, or had to listen to multiple times before I could understand.

Have a friend video you while you’re speaking. And yes, watch it!

I’ve never met a person who liked to watch himself speaking. Not once. But there’s something magic about it. Every person who ever watches himself on video decides to become a better speaker. It’s like it lights some huge fire inside of people. It’s amazing.

How do they become better?

First, they become more aware of themselves.

You see, beginners tend to think they’re a lot better than they really are. They don’t realize what nervous habits they have. For example, they don’t realize that when they get on stage they pace back and forth like a caged animal. Or they don’t realize they stand ramrod straight, like an old tree.

When you’re speaking, time goes all weird too. For example, you might be thinking, I held my hand up forever. When you watch the video, however, you see you only held your hand up for a fraction of a second. Or you might be thinking, I stood still the whole time. In the video you’ll see that you were practically running in circles on the stage.

Watch yourself on video. You’ll become aware of what your body does, how your arms move, how your voice sounds, what your feet do. You’ll become aware of embarrassing quirks, weird little tics, like that weird thing you do with your hair for example. You’ll learn stuff about yourself that you would never, never, never learn if you just asked yourself, and others, afterwards, “How did I do?”

The second, and perhaps more important, benefit of watching yourself on video: You’ll start to learn one of the most useful, yet most difficult, lessons of public speaking: The audience is almost never thinking the same thing as you.

We see it happen again and again: Clients watch themselves on video and realize how radical is the difference between what’s going on in their heads and what’s going on outside their heads.

And that’s just one step away from realizing that what’s going on inside your head is radically different than what’s going on inside your audience’s heads, and that’s just one step away from stopping listening to your own fear and nervousness, and listening to your audience’s desires instead.

President John F. Kennedy once said, “The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.”

When I first heard that quote, I thought, “Wow, that’s a high bar to set.” People who change the world are people like Winston Churchill, or Nelson Mandela, or Mahatma Gandhi. Not me.

The thing is, “changing the world” doesn’t have to mean changing it in some big, profound way. Sometimes it just means, “changing the world immediately around you.”

Here’s what I mean:

I have a friend. Let’s call him “Murat.” Murat is almost the head of a big department at a big company here in Istanbul. I’m sure you’ve heard of the company. Anyway, Murat has been working in his profession for 20 years, and he’s been working at this particular company for more than 10 of those years. He knows his subject better than just about anyone else, and he knows this particular company better than most of the other people who work there.

If anyone is qualified to be the head of the department, it would be Murat. And yet, he got passed over for promotion, not once, but twice. His new boss is younger than him. Less experienced than him. What does she have that he doesn’t?

She knows how to present to the Board.

You see, this isn’t just any department at the company. It’s a high-profile department. It’s a department the Board depends on to keep things on track when they’re not around. The Board wants to know someone with experience is leading that department, but experience alone is not enough. It’s just the basic price of admission. The Board doesn’t meet every day, and when they do meet, they want to hear from someone who knows how to communicate clearly and confidently.

And so they promoted someone, but it wasn’t Murat.

What would Murat’s life look like if he had gotten that job? For one, he’d be making a lot more money. He wouldn’t be reporting to a boss with half his experience. A driver would show up at his door each morning to take him to work, and he could sit in the back seat reading a newspaper instead of fighting the traffic.

Murat would know that his career was still going strong, and that 5 years from now, he would be even better able to provide for his family than he can now. He would wake up in the mornings more intellectually excited by the challenges of the day before him. He wouldn’t have that nagging feeling that maybe there’s more to life, that maybe his talents are being wasted.

He would be a happier man, and because he would be a happier man, his relationship with his wife would be happier, too. His children would be happier, because Murat would be happier around them. And the positive effects would ripple out from there.

The company might even be better off, because key decisions would be made by Murat, not someone 10 years his junior, not by someone with half of his experience.

“Changing the world” doesn’t have to mean changing the world on a grand scale, like Winston Churchill, or Nelson Mandela, or Mahatma Gandhi. “Changing the world” can just as well mean changing the world immediately around you. That’s how John F. Kennedy’s quote applies to the rest of us.

People are like dogs. If you stare at one long enough, he’ll attack.

When you are giving a presentation, if an audience member gets aggressive and starts challenging you, resist the urge to spend too much time looking at that one person. Address his questions, but look at the other audience members, too, while you’re doing it.

When you keep the larger group involved, most individual attackers calm down. Their challenging questions might not end, but their hostility often will. They will relax, and you’ll keep a stimulating discussion from turning into a knife fight.

One of our clients asked what he called a “million-dollar question”…

He asked, “I feel very shy in front of a camera. How can I improve? Any tips?”

Here was my response:

“Here’s what I do, try this…

“Humans naturally relax and light up when they talk to other humans they know. So before you sit down in front of the camera, visualize the face of someone who relaxes you. Imagine them standing next to you. Talk to them (silently of course — otherwise other people in the room will think you’re crazy).

“Then sit down in front of the camera, and pause for a moment to make sure their image is still in your head. Imagine them sitting on the other side of the camera, right above the camera lens. Then talk to them, not the camera lens.

“Whatever is going on in your head will drive your facial expressions more than the outside environment. So your inner mental game and visualization skills are where to look for answers to the “camera shy” question.”

Related to inner mental game and visualization: https://recipientlabs.com/feel-sense-describe-dont-just-tell/.

You know the saying, “You never cross the same river twice”? That applies to speeches too.

The other day I was speaking about my walk across Turkey. Because of a timing mixup, I ended up giving the same speech to two different audiences.

To my surprise, the two speeches were completely different.

The first speech tended towards self-reflection — the audience was asking questions like, for example, “What did you learn,” “How are you different now,” etc.

The second audience was interested mostly in food, so we talked mostly about food.

Someone from the first audience would probably barely recognize the second speech, and someone from the second audience would probably barely recognize the first speech.

My particular speech is heavy on questions and answers (Q&A), so of course it changes each time. But even if your speech doesn’t include a Q&A session, it will change every time. Your audience will be a little different every time. Even if the people are the same, they will have grown and changed since the last time you saw them, or at least some of them will have.

If you find yourself thinking, “I know this speech, I’ve given it before,” be careful, because you might be getting lazy. You might be about to bore your audience.

There are many ways of dealing with fear. Here are two of them:

1. Conquer your fear

Try to wrestle your fear to the ground. Try to beat it. Try to control it.

2. Look at something else

Your job is not to conquer fear, your job is to do something else. Don’t look at your fear. Look at that something else.

Fear is a great indicator that you have been called to do something important, so welcome the appearance of fear and walk towards it. However, energy spent fighting fear is energy wasted. Walk towards fear, but then step to the side and go about your business.

Personally, I find the idea of conquering fear exhausting. So much energy is spent fighting and struggling. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.

So when Fear comes for me, I smile at it. I say, “Hello Fear, welcome. Please have a seat. I’ll be with you in a moment.” And then I go about my work. When I am done, I turn to Fear, ready to ask it how I can help, but, more often than not, it got bored and left.

Like I said, these are just two of the many ways of dealing with fear. One is not better than the other. Whatever works for you.

There are different ways to see the world. One of them is “What can I do on the edge?” Another is “How do I get to the middle?”

Before you ever open your mouth, before you even start thinking about a problem, you will, consciously or unconsciously, pick one of these, and your choice will largely determine how you handle a given situation, and therefore where you end up.

As presentation trainers we tell our clients over and over, “More eye contact, more eye contact.” But sometimes you’ve got other stuff to do, and it’s okay to look away. Not to read your slides or look at your shoes, no. But to visualize something you’re talking about.

Like when you’re telling a story. Sometimes in order to tell a story really well you’ve got to look into the distance and visualize it. See the people. Run your hands across the fabric on the furniture, or feel the grass. Remember what people said, hear their voices, see the dirt in the corner. Feel how you felt. And when you do these things, your audience will realize there is a reason you are not looking in their eyes. They will know it is because you have transported yourself to another time and place, and they will come with you.

Remember that the point of making eye contact is not just to make eye contact for eye contact’s sake. The point of making eye contact is to connect with your audience, to bring them into your head, into your heart. And if your head and heart are busy telling a story so vivid that your audience has decided to come with you, you don’t need to make eye contact. Look at your audience every once in a while to make sure they are as interested in your story as you are. But don’t feel the need to make eye contact just because experts told you to make eye contact.

When you are visualizing your story, it is highly likely that you are serving eye contact’s purpose better than eye contact would.

The other day I was working with a client on her PowerPoint slides. We looked at the first slide, then the second slide, then the third slide. She asked me what I thought. “Should we add this?” “Should we take that out?”

The thing is, she had an even more basic problem: her slides were interfering with the story she was telling. The slides had all the graphs and data and charts you “should” put in a business presentation, but all that average, “should be there” data was drowning the story coming out of her mouth. It was a fascinating story, a story the audience would love to hear. It was a story of brilliance and creativity and hard work, but the slides were saying, “Oh, by the way, there’s nothing special here. I am giving you exactly what everyone else does.”

In a presentation, you have a huge opportunity. A bunch of people are sitting in front of you, waiting to hear what you have to say. If you are about to rock their world with a brilliant story, do not sabotage your story by wrapping it in a soggy noodle of an average slide deck.

Some years ago I heard a story about Google. I forget the details, but the gist of the story sticks with me, and I think of it often…

In Google’s early days, before “google” became a verb, when the founders of Google were still just grad students at Stanford, they would periodically get an email. The email would simply say, “53,” or “56,” or something like that. The email was anonymous, so they had no idea who was sending it.

This went on for a couple years, and then one day the founders hit reply and asked the sender who he was, and what he meant.

The sender was counting the words on Google’s homepage, and when the homepage got too wordy, he’d send Google an email with the word count. Basically he was saying, “Cut it back, boys.”

If you really want to get creative with a project, place constraints on it. Learn how to operate without the resource you want most. Usually that means either limit your access to money, or limit your access to time. Often, the limits will be placed on you by external forces. If they aren’t, consider placing them on you yourself.

People make a big deal out of being afraid of public speaking.

When somebody tells me that they’re afraid of public speaking, I just want to tell them, “You know, you’re never going to get over it.”

I’ve been going to Toastmasters meetings for 5 years or more, and I still am nervous as hell every time I get up there and speak.

You will never get over your nervousness of speaking.

The reason for coming to a Toastmasters meeting, or the reason for coming to a public speaking practice club, at all, isn’t to get over your fear of public speaking. It’s not to stop feeling the fear. It’s to train yourself to speak anyway. That’s why we come to Toastmasters.

Don’t wait for some magic day to come, when all of a sudden you’re not afraid of speaking anymore. Get up there while you’re afraid and speak. Then, get up there tomorrow and speak. Then, get up there the next day and speak.

Five years later, it’s okay if you’re still afraid of speaking, because you probably will be.

The thing that you want to accomplish is not eliminating that fear. It’s just training yourself to get up there and say what you have to say anyway. Because people want to hear what you have to say. You owe it to them.

Ken Robinson is one of the most popular speakers in the TED community.

But it’s not because he’s doing most of the things speech trainers tell us we should do. He doesn’t move around on the stage much. Usually he just stands in one place. His hands hang at his side. Sometimes he even puts them in his pockets. He doesn’t use much vocal variety.

Look at the audience though. They are sitting on the edges of their seats. They are smiling. They are laughing. They interrupt him with applause.

They are fascinated. Ken Robinson has them eating out of his hand.

Notice that he does not use any statistics. He does not use any data. He is not using any slides or visual aids.

What he IS doing is calling his audience to a higher world. People love to be called to a higher world. People WANT to be called to a higher world. They know getting there will not be easy, but they WANT TO BE CALLED THERE.

If there are five other presentations at the meeting, and yours is the one that calls people to a higher world, yours is the one people will remember.

Want to be more engaging?  Want people to think you are more interesting?

Remember this old saying:

“God gave us two ears, but only one mouth.”

Use them in that order.

Listen twice as much as you speak.  And when you do open your mouth, use it to ask a question.

People like to talk about themselves.  Use this to your advantage.

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Sometimes when I am coaching someone, we reach a very stubborn obstacle.  The obstacle holds my client back, unable to move, unable to advance.  This is what the client usually says:

“I want to do XYZ, but I am so nervous.”

I’m sorry, but being nervous is not a good excuse.

You can either love your desire (“I want to do XYZ…”), or you can love your fear (“…but I am so nervous.”).

But you have to choose.  Which one are you going to love more?

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It’s a popular phrase: “Perception is reality”.

However, it is completely untrue.

Perception is how you see things, how you feel about things.  It is your opinion about things.

Reality is how things really exist, outside of your head.

Sure, perception influences reality.  Perception often becomes reality.  But perception is not reality.

If you understand perception, you have one powerful tool.  

If you understand reality, you have another powerful tool.

If you understand both perception, and reality, you have two powerful tools, and you can work more creatively than someone who only has access to one tool.

If you say “perception is reality”, you are being intellectually lazy.  You are telling the world, “I only want to understand one thing, my brain is not strong enough to manipulate two separate ideas at the same time”.

Why would you handicap yourself like that?

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