Fearless Presentations

Audience Participation is one of the most effective ways to make a good presentation into a stellar presentation. However, it also has a lot of danger. A good, thought provoking, open-ended question to the audience can help you persuade even the toughest audience. However, if the audience believes that your question is being used to manipulate them they may respond negatively or shut down entirely.

The word complacent may just be the biggest enemy of success. In fact, I’ve noticed that, if you look at history as well as the current business climate, you’ll find that past successes almost always limit future successes. That is, unless you are constantly looking for new ways to improve yourself and your organization. I have to admit, I have been both the beneficiary of capitalizing on others complacency as well as being the dupe who became complacent and missed out on opportunities. Perhaps you’ll be able to learn from both my successes and failures so that you can identify the opportunities in your own industry. COMPLACENT (definition): marked by self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies (Merriam-Webster). Complacent: 7 Surprising Ways that Your Past Success May Limit Your Future Success Stagnation in the Marketplace is Often Caused by Complacency. Hunger for Success Causes Us to Look for Opportunities. The Bigger the Ship the More Time It Takes to Steer Away from Danger. The Skills and Knowledge that We Acquire to become Successful Creates a Perception of Loss If We Change. The Devil You Know is Better than the Devil You Don’t. The “Avis: We Try Harder” Effect. The Complacency of Others that Allows Us to Succeed Sometimes Envelops Us as Well. Podcast notes at https://www.leadersinstitute.com/complacent-7-surprising-ways-your-past-successes-limit-future-success/

The Importance of Self-Confidence People will judge our COMPETENCE by the CONFIDENCE that we show. For example, let’s say that you are going in for surgery, and just before you go under, the surgeon walks into your room. His posture is slouching, as he speaks, he stumbles over his words somewhat, and when you look at his hands, they are trembling a little. Now, it doesn’t matter how good of a surgeon he is, you’ll probably want a second opinion (maybe even a third opinion) — Fast! Well, it’s the same in just about any industry. People judge how good we are at what we do by how confident we are when we communicate with them. If we speak with poise and confidence, they will automatically make the assumption that we are competent at what we do until we prove ourselves otherwise. The opposite is true as well. When we speak with nervousness or fear, the audience will automatically assume that we don’t know what we are doing until we prove ourselves otherwise.

We’ve all been there as a speaker. You walk out onto a stage or into the front of the room, and the audience is staring at you with skepticism written all over their faces. This stoic crown has no patience for speakers who waste their time, and their demeanor is showing that fact right now. You need a foolproof way to start your presentation so that you win over this audience. I’ve been there myself. Below are a few of my favorite ways to start a speech that will help you capture positive attention from your audience and get even the most stoic crowd to want more from you. Podcast Notes at https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/how-to-start-a-presentation/

This is part 2 of a 2 part inspirational story about Doug Staneart — President and CEO of The Leader’s Institute ® and Creator of the Fearless Presentations ® Public Speaking Training Programs. This is my inspirational story of triumph over public speaking fear that allowed me to create one of the most successful training companies in the world!

Doug Staneart — President and CEO of The Leader’s Institute ® and Creator of the Fearless Presentations ® Public Speaking Training Programs. This is my inspirational story of triumph over public speaking fear that allowed me to create one of the most successful training companies in the world! I overcame being an incredibly shy kid who got beat up and bullied in grade school to become an NCAA football player. My first formal presentation in the business world was such a failure that it cost me my first career, but that failure allowed me to help over 100,000 people conquer the same challenge. In fact, each of these obstacles taught me truths about life that have allowed me to create one of the most successful training companies in the world.

Want to actually make money from speaking? Doug Staneart shares some incites from his 20+ years as a professional speaker and trainer about how you can make a fortune as a professional speaker. Show notes at How to Make a Fortune Speaking for a Living

Use This Step-by-Step Process to Create Content (Blog posts, motivational speeches, keynotes, etc.) Start by determining what your audience wants and needs by using five simple techniques from the podcast. Next, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, do some research and determine what other experts are saying. Add in some examples and stories to give the content flavor, and then use the secret sauce developed by great speakers like Les Brown and Paul Harvey.

It's time to set the record straight. ANYONE can be a fantastic, world-class speaker with a little bit of training, a little bit of coaching, and a little bit of practice. It doesn't take years of study and practice, and it doesn't take thousands of dollars of investment. One of the hardest things to get across to new presenters is the immutable fact that just about everything that you have ever learned about public speaking and creating good business presentations is flat out WRONG! The following are some of the biggest myths about stage fright and public speaking training. For Podcast notes, visit https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/30

Are you a nervous public speaker? A majority of the population has some type of fear of public speaking. Ironically, a great deal of this nervousness or anxiety comes from well-meaning friends or coworkers who are just trying to help. When we see a friend struggling, we naturally want to help. So, we might offer a little constructive criticism as a way to help a new presenter improve his/her public speaking. However, these "helpful" pieces of advice can actually have an extreme negative effect. This session shows how constructive criticism can actually cause public speaking fear. We'll also cover a few ways to reduce this nervousness when we coach or mentor a nervous speaker.

Podcast 28 The Secret to Great Presentations: ENTHUSIASM If you take only one piece of advice about public speaking, make sure that it is this pearl of wisdom. If you focus on this one simple thing, the number of times you say “uhm” won’t matter. If you focus on this one thing, your gestures and not knowing what to do with your hands won’t matter. If you focus on this one thing, then the occasional loss of train of thought won’t matter. In fact, if you focus on this one simple thing, you can break just about every rule that public speakers are supposed to abide by, and you will still win over your audience. TechFind: Add Short Funny Anecdotes to Your Presentations I have been plugging the virtues of Readers Digest as a source for funny anecdotes for presentations for years (really decades). However, their website at https://www.rd.com, has hundreds of funny anecdotes sorted by topic. So if you are stuck for a way to add some humor into your presentation, start there. Just so you know, I typically don’t use the stories themselves in my presentations, but every once in a while, I find a gem that I can’t resist. I find that reading the stories,though, help me remember funny incidents from my own life. Self-deprecating humor typically works better than trying to tell someone else’s story or joke. Enthusiasm and Energy is the Secret of Great Presenters This one simple rule has transformed countless mediocre speakers into good speakers, scores of good speakers into great speakers, and numerous great speakers into world-class speakers. This simple rule that can make or break a speaker is… ENTHUSIASM. That’s right, if you have a little excitement in your talk and a spring in your step, people pay attention. Your audience will have just about as much excitement about your talk as you do, and no more. So, if you want to win over your audience, add a sparkle of enthusiasm. One of my mentors told me that there are two rules to live by in the world of professional speakers. She said, “Rule number one is to never speak on a topic that you yourself are not enthusiastic about, and rule number two is that if you ever violate rule number one, fake it ’til you make it.” Frank Bettger in his book How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling said it a different way. He said, “If you act enthusiastic, then you’ll be enthusiastic.” For those of us who get nervous in front of groups, it’s even easier. In the previous chapter I pointed out that 90% of our nervousness doesn’t even show. Let’s look at the other 10%. When we are nervous, we often cut out preambles and get right to the point, our rate of speech typically speeds up, we tend to move around a lot more, and we may move our hands around more than normal. Well, when we are excited about something, we do the exact same things. Years ago, when I was a sales manager, I was often amazed at the number of times that a brand new sales person without a lot of product knowledge and absolutely no experience, could close sale after sale while my more seasoned people were struggling. The more times I went on sales calls with these new people, the more I started to notice a pattern. New salespeople are often nervous, so when they walk into an office on a sales call, they tend to cut right to the chase. They also generally talk faster because they are afraid they’ll forget something. They have a tough time sitting still because of the nervousness, so they move around a lot. I noticed that these symptoms of nervousness worked to the advantage of these new salespeople, because their prospects looked across the table at salespeople who appeared to be extremely enthusiastic about what they were selling. I would imagine that these potential buyers were saying things to themselves like, “if this person believes so much in this product, it must be good.” We as speakers can also use our nervousness to our advantage. When we turn that pent up nervousness into energy and enthusiasm, our audience can’t help but be energized as well.

A few days ago, I started watching a Netflix documentary on how fractal mathematics helped start Pixar. (Yes, I watch really boring stuff on Netflix, but in my defense, I was watching it in bed, at night, trying to go to sleep. It worked.) We have always had a fantastic success teaching people how to design presentations that are based on just a few (three to five) main points. However, the documentary explained how the structure of this type of presentation works and why it works so well. So, in this episode, we’ll show how the techniques that we cover in our classes work… mathematically. We also have a Techfind that will help you add local humor to your presentations. TechFind: Use Google to Add Humor to Any Presentation When I first started speaking and writing, I was always looking for ways to add humor to my presentations. At the time, Dr. Phil was a regular on the Prah Winfrey show, and eventually, he got his own daytime TV show. Whenever he made an appearance on Oprah, he always got a lot of laughs because he added a lot of Texas idioms to his speech. (In fact, Dr. Phil was the first person to ever use the phrase “Open up a can of whoop-ass” on national television.) So, I figured that since I am also from Texas, if I added some uniquely Texas sayings into my presentations, my speeches might get even funnier. It worked. The great news, now, is that Google (or any other search engine) can makes finding the perfect idiom for your speech pretty easy. Just type your region into the search engine and add the word Idiom. When I typed up Texas Idiom, I got a bunch of funny saying such as… If you cut your own firewood, it’ll warm you twice. He can strut sitting down. She’d charge hell with a bucket of ice water. Busy as a stump-tailed bull in fly season. Okay, this technique doesn’t work for every state or region, but you’d be surprised by how funny regional humor can be. For instance, when I typed in “Alaskan Idioms”, I got… You know you’re in Alaska when your snowblower gets stuck on the roof. You know you’re in Alaska when you know that bear insurance is being with someone that you know you can outrun. You know you’re in Alaska when you have more miles on your snowblower than you do your car. Just for fun, let’s try Midwest Idioms. That makes as much sense as government cheese. Slow as molasses in January. He’s got a hollow tail. (Is angry.) The point is that these are a fun way to add just a spark of humor to your presentation. A Great Presentation has a Fractal Structure As I mentioned in the introduction above, I came across the term Fractal Mathematics from a Netflix documentary. (Which documentary doesn’t really matter.) The more that the host explained about this division of math, though, the more sense the three-point talk makes. Without going into all of the boring explanations Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. An example of a natural fractal is a mountain range. When you look at a mountain from a distance, it is very difficult to judge how far away from the mountain you are. In fact, if you take a close up photograph of a bolder, it will be very difficult to judge whether the bolder is one foot tall or thousands of feet tall. Another example of a fractal is a triangle. Try this. Draw a triangle. Then put a dot in the exact middle of each side of the triangle. Now connect the three dots. You will create four new triangles that all look exactly like the first one, but on a smaller scale. You can do the process again and again, and you will always end up with smaller versions of the original shape. Pixar Realized that this Mathematical Theory had Other Applications In 1980, Loren Carpenter was working for Boeing in their computer graphics department. The executives at Boeing wanted their marketing posters to have realistic mountains in the background, so Carpenter wanted to try to make the mountain ranges using computer graphics. The problem was, though, that each iteration of the graphic looked pretty fake. The mountains were square and boxy. Since Carpenter also had a mathematics degree, he had had come across a paper written a decade or so earlier that talked about how fractal mathematics was the backbone of natural shapes in the world. He wondered if he could use the concept to create more realistic computer images. What he figured out was that if he created the same shape (a triangle) and created an infinite number of the same shape, he could create a more realistic mountain (also a triangle). The smaller that the images got, the more that the sharp and straight lines of the shapes began to appear curved. This technology became the basis for the graphics created by the Pixar movie company. So, when you look at Buzz Lightyear’s curved nose, the image is actually a series of infinitely smaller straight-lined shapes. Use the Same Technique to Create a Great Presentation So, if you think about the technique that we covered in Podcast #3 How to Design a Great Presentation, the technique follows the same formula. First, you start with the original topic. For example, “I want to create a mountain that is triangle shaped.” Then, break the original topic into four (plus or minus one) equal parts. If you stop there, you will have a good outline, but the information won’t be very practical. (You’ll have a boxy looking mountain.) However, if you break each of those new triangles into four (plus or minus one) equal parts, the shapes become smoother. Do this process again and again, and your content becomes smoother and less jagged. For a presentation, start with a topic. Break the big topic into four component bullets. Then make each of the bullets into its own separate presentation and do the same thing. Create four (plus or minus one) bullets for each original bullet. Then repeat the process. Example Presentation: World History Let’s do a quick example. Let’s say that our topic is “World History”. If we wanted to create an hour long presentation about World History, we could add a bunch of stories and examples and maybe some analogies and showmanship. We might make the presentation entertaining. However, the content wouldn’t be very practical. But if we create a separate presentations out of (1) the Pre-Written History Era, (2) the BC Era, (3) the early AD Era, and the (4) Post-Industrial Revolution era, the content will be a little more useful. If we took the BC Era and divided it into sections based on the civilizations that ruled including (1) Egypt, (2) Babylon, (3) Assyria, (4) Greece, and (5) Rome, the content gets even more practical. As a final example, let’s take Rome and break into components as well. We might end up with (1) The Republic, (2) Hannibal’s Invasion, (3) Julius Caesar, (4) Augustus, and (5) Constantine. The more that we continue to break up the content into smaller components, the more practical the information that we can cover. So, when you design your presentations, think about the “fractal approach.”

In the podcast this week, I interview Cody Smith who is the author of the book Stage Fight — How to Punch Public Speaking Fears in the Face. It is a hilarious interview where Cody tells about all of the trials and tribulations that he experienced trying to overcome public speaking fear. Have fun listening to and learning from Cody Smith. Cody Smith is a young entrepreneur who realized very early in his academic career that public speaking fear has the ability to hold people back. His new book, Stage Fight, How to Punch Public Speaking Fears in the Face is a very funny and informative outline of all of the steps that Cody took to eliminate his nervousness. Early in the conversation, I asked Cody about his background, and he surprisingly told me that he didn’t write the book to become a professional speaker. Instead, he wrote it because he noticed that a number of his colleagues, who were technically exceptional in their jobs, were getting passed over for promotion by less technical people who could present well. He wrote the book as a way to pass along the tips that he uncovered in his journey to confidence so that other people his age could benefit as well. Public Speaking Failure is Just an Opportunity to Grow and Learn Cody spent a lot of time telling us how when he was a nervous speaker, he saw himself as a victim. It wasn’t his fault he was nervous. The fault was someone else’s. So the first step that he had to take in eliminating the nervousness was to stop hiding behind the “victim shield”. He started to look back on those “failures” to see what he could of done to eliminate the bad results. Once he started to see his past failures as opportunities for improvement, he grew much more quickly. How Long Does It Take to Eliminate Public Speaking Fear? After Cody changed his mental state, he needed practice. So, he set out to speak at least one time per week for 90 days. He said that it worked like a charm. By the end of his 90th day, his confidence was soaring. However, he mentioned that if you follow the step-by-step plan in his book, you can cut that time to just 30 days. He mentioned that unlike what he did, when he coaches people now, he has them practice that presentation each week with a couple of peers. In addition, he also has them go speak on an impromptu basis at least once per week. This increased practice speeds up the process dramatically. To download Cody’s book on Kindle, just click this link: Stage Fight Kindle Version.

Last week, I got invited to deliver a presentation for a convention in Orlando, Florida. The session that they had me design was about how to help their attendees communicate in a more persuasive way when making recommendations to patients and customers. I decided to recap the content of that presentation in this podcast.

Last month, I helped a client re-design their medical training sessions so that they were more interesting and more interactive. As with many training sessions in medicine, it was important for the presenters to cover all of the steps because the safety of the patient was involved. However, when we deliver many, many steps in a single class, participants are likely to forget important parts or become confused. So, we helped this client develop training sessions that increased attendee retention and made it easier for the presenter to deliver as well. So, this podcast covers what we did. In addition, we have a new Techfind that is a great playlist of TedTalks that can help you design and deliver better presentations as well.