I can almost guarantee that at some point in your life, you’ll need or want to speak persuasively to a group of people.
Perhaps you’re pitching investors for more money, asking supervisors for a raise, presenting at a national conference or coaxing your kids to bed.
Regardless of the situation, your ability to refine a message, understand your audience and deliver information in a way that will not only captivate but move them to action is one of the most important skills you can have in your toolbox.
On today’s episode, Brett and Ali will share their best strategies for finding your voice, understanding your audience and clarifying that message so that you can confidently make the impact you seek.
You’ll learn:
- The 6 questions you need to ask yourself about before you deliver any talk
- The 3 tips to grabbing your audience’s attention and holding it throughout
- The 1 thing easily forgotten in a talk that will limit the impact you desire
Speaking of speaking… We have some EXCITING NEWS!
If you’d like help with any of the things mentioned in this episode including but not limited to refining your message, building your speaking skill or gaining confidence… We’d like to introduce you to our brand new SPEAKING SCHOOL.
Go to artofcoaching.com/speaker for information and to sign up for our FIRST event!
We’d also like to formally introduce our newest podcast partner- Dynamic Fitness and Strength!
Dynamic is Brett’s go-to strength equipment manufacturer. Dynamic’s equipment is fully customizable, designed just for you and your team, and made in the heartland of America. If you are looking to outfit your home gym or weight room visit mydynamicfitness.com to get started. Tell them Brett and the Art of Coaching Team sent you.
TRANSCRIPT
Brett Bartholomew 00:06
Welcome to the Art of Coaching podcast, a show aimed at getting to the core of what it takes to change attitudes, behaviors and outcomes in the weight room, boardroom classroom, and everywhere in between. I’m your host, Brett Bartholomew, I’m a performance coach, keynote speaker, and the author of the book conscious coaching. But most importantly, I’m a lifelong student interested in all aspects of human behavior and communication. I want to thank you for joining me. And now let’s dive into today’s episode.
Brett Bartholomew 00:39
Alright, guys diving straight in want to give you maximum impact with this one, and this is going to be a tight episode. This is all about tips and tricks to become a better presenter. Now we’re going to do a lot of these throughout the year. This is one that I want to kick off, I’d love to get your feedback with we did an episode in the past how to start a speaking business. And people really liked that one, we got a ton of feedback, a ton of emails. So we wanted to do a couple little things here and there. And I’m going to give you value right off the start. And then I’m going to turn it over to my colleague, Ali Kirschner, who is fresh off of a massive presentation she just did of her own. And she’s going to talk about some things that she realized she could improve in herself, things that she saw on other presenters, and we’re gonna give you tips and tricks. So whether it’s a goal of yours to become a presenter, whether you do a little bit of presenting right now, and you’re trying to sharpen the saw, if you’ve never even thought about it, but maybe it’s intriguing to you or you want to just be more competent and finding your voice in general, this will help you. So one thing I want to start with and surprise surprise, I’m going to start with a little bit of a pet peeve here is I don’t know when it seemingly like being genuine just went out of style. Sometimes when it comes to opening statements by presenters, this is something I noticed, right off the bat, those first 1020 Guys, even the first three minutes is so critical. And I think it’s unnatural, like people overthink, they try to do too much. Sometimes they let their insecurities get the best of them. But the goal is to keep it short and simple, right? Like thank the host and the audience for their time, and then provide value. If I’m getting into that a little bit more. I just want you to think about this.
Brett Bartholomew 02:12
When you’re beginning your presentation for a live audience. Sure, it’s noble to thank your mentors, I understand that it’s it’s also noble to thank those who have made a difference in your life. But I’ve seen some people take 10 to 20 to sometimes almost 25 minutes going through it all. It’s also understandable, I want to show some compassion, that you might feel anxious if you haven’t spoken much before or if you find yourself overwhelmed by that moment. That is totally understandable. And it is of course even forgivable, even though I think a lot of speaker education stuff out there will make you think it’s not the case. If you occasionally stumble over your words, so many speaker education clinics and things like that will tell you Oh, it’s always just you have to be so clear, you can have no disfluencies people will actually forgive that you’ll you’ll come off as more human to a degree. But at some point when it comes to that intro and nailing that you have got to just launch into what you were paid to do provide value to your audience.
Brett Bartholomew 03:10
Now I’ve heard people in the past say, Yeah, well, you know, it’s just humility. And I think it’s respectful. Guys, self deprecation and humility are nice seasoning, but they should never constitute the entire meal. Your audience has spent hard earned money, they’ve sacrificed their time. And they’re gifting you with one of the most valuable commodities of all their attention. So you need to honor that get on stage, get into the core of your presentation, and deliver applicable hands on strategies that give them maximum return on investment. Now, like I said before, nobody is a perfect presenter, at least of all me. So this isn’t me trying to shout from a mountain as to how I have it all figured out. It is just me trying to get you out of your own way because I want you to be successful. And I’m trying to do it in a respectful but convicting manner, because sometimes we all need that kick in the pants. Now all this said, this is time for me to balance being humble with also just taking a stance and knowing that I I take tremendous pride in what I do and try to commit to the craft.
Brett Bartholomew 04:13
Each of the last six years alone, I have flown over 100,000 miles. And I’ve given talks across 15 countries. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve taken notes, I’m definitely still refining my approach and learning. But I am opening that playbook to any and all coaches who want to learn from those mistakes and some of those successes. So I want to launch into this episode by letting you guys know that if you’re looking for mentoring, specifically geared towards creating a speaking career, becoming a better presenter or simply improving your communication in general so you can be more competent. Reach out to us at artofcoaching.com/mentoring. We are also creating and we have created a speaker school and we’re continuing to evolve this. Now this is something we’re only going to run about six times a year. And we are not flying all over the world doing this. We do that for so many of our other things like our Apprenticeship, our one off presentations, but the art of coaching speaking school, and our mentoring will either be done at my hometown in Atlanta, Georgia, of which there’s more direct flights in and out of than anywhere in the world. Look it up world’s busiest and easiest airport to get direct flights. And we do do some aspects of our speaker training, virtually. So there are two distinct experiences. There’s a live speaker training that’s very bespoke, it’s very tight. We don’t accept more than 10 people at a time if that. And then there’s virtual presenting that will help you triage some things there. Again, go to artofcoaching.com/mentoring. For more on that.
Brett Bartholomew 05:45
Also, thank you to our friend and our new sponsor Dynamic fitness and strength. Anytime I have somebody who reaches out to me who needs a rack, or strength training equipment that is highly adaptable, highly customizable, very durable, and most importantly, affordable. I recommend my friends that Dynamic This holds true if those friends are strength coaches, it also holds true to friends of mine that are firefighters are in the corporate world, because we’re seeing due to COVID. More and more people create and invest in home gyms and not the home gyms where they go buy the racquet shields, and it breaks down or on the other end somebody that wants to charge them like 10k for a rack. And that’s absolutely ridiculous. So make sure to go to mydynamicfitness.com. Mydynamicfitness.com Reach out to them. Let them know the Art of Coaching sent you. And I think you will absolutely know I know you will absolutely love what you find. And you’ll love the people you speak with.
Brett Bartholomew 06:45
Okay. Now, getting into the episode with my friend Ali Kirschner, you guys have already heard me rant a little bit about something I think you can do right off the bat to improve your speaking. Ali, you just came off a tremendous presentation of your own. You’re very insightful. You’re very introspective. You pick yourself apart. And you’re respectful on how you coach other people tell me something you think our audience can do to become more effective as a presenter?
Ali Kershner 07:11
Well, you know, it’s interesting, you mentioned attention, and we’re in an attention economy. And I think one of the things that we miss the most as speakers, and I’m equally as guilty is not only getting the attention at the beginning, but holding the attention throughout. I mean, I’ve seen so many times. And I know I’ve done this myself. So again, I’m not just preaching from the pulpit here. But you get into it, and you get on a roll again on a diatribe. And you’re just going and you’re energetic, but you’re not involving the audience. And so I think one simple trick that everybody can do is pause every once in a while and literally just ask people to raise their hand, ask a simple question, get them up, get them to talk to their neighbor, get them to write something down. It doesn’t have to be, you know, role playing, which I know we would love to do with our audience. But I mean, the the research shows, I was just listening to something talked about how, in a presentation, they recommend every eight to 10 minutes, changing something about how you’re presenting. So whether you stand somewhere differently, whether you ask people to raise their hand, you asked me to do something that alone maintains attention throughout a long presentation. So that’s something that I can think of. And then, you know, in terms of other strategies for attention. I think it’s really helpful when you kind of give people a simple roadmap in the beginning. So maybe you have a quick 123 Hey, guys, we’re going to cover this and then that way people know, okay, we’re on point number two of three, I only have to keep attention for one more point. It kinds of gives them an idea people love structure. So I think anytime I’ve heard a presentation where you were like, This is what we’re going to be covering by the end. And this is what you’re going to take home. I’m like, Yes, I got my notebook out, I can write notes, I have it already outlined before we even get started. So those are two things that I can think of right off the bat that make a presentation that much stronger and more applicable.
Brett Bartholomew 09:03
That’s super helpful. And with that, when you’re an audience member, because obviously in this situation, you spoke you were one of the premier presenters there. But you also then are part of the audience, which is so critical. This is more of a bonus tip. I think one big mistake people make when they go speak is they’re so focused on their own presentation. They don’t watch any of the other presenters, right. So there’s a question baked in here. But first, I just want to make a statement to the audience. Guys, one thing that you cannot buy in life is class and courtesy. And I know you can’t watch every presenter, right? We all have time constraints. I have a presentation. I gotta go fly out for in February. And I’m not able to make one of the days but you know, I am going to make it for two of them is something that differentiates you is when you watch the person before you or several people before you it always pays to build off their points. Right and don’t do it obsequiously. It’s not about like, oh, Dave did such a phenomenal job. How am I ever gonna follow Dave? Right like people read through that, but it’s more Like, let’s say you made a key point. And I’m going to make this up just for the sake of discussion, right? Let’s say we were talking about the science beyond behind attention. And you could say, if you noticed, Ali before me did an incredible job in her talk, by the way that she commanded presence and the way that she referenced this study. So I hope you caught that if you didn’t absolutely catch up with Ali. Back to the main point. However, there is such a huge like, you have to treat this kind of like, and it’s really isn’t sex or gender dependent, but like a fraternity, show class, show appreciation, show respect for the other people and build off that. And that’s a guiding tentative improv as well. Right, build off the other people. And improv is life. It’s coaching, it’s business, it’s relationships. So the thing that I was going to ask you aside from that is, when you’re in the audience, what is another thing that’s like guaranteed to kind of either put you off a little bit, maybe make you fall asleep, maybe make you get distracted? Just another tendency that you see.
Ali Kershner 10:58
I think, when a when a presentation lacks personal stories. For me, it falls flat. And I think that, you know, sometimes, you know, when you’re talking about something super technical or research heavy, or you’re trying to make it tactical, you kind of forget about the importance of story. But in reality story can be woven through any presentation. And that’s the emotional resonance piece that makes it stick and story. I mean, think about it’s their oldest form of communication, we’ve told we’ve had episodes about how to be a better storyteller. So I think it really kind of bugs me when somebody takes a great topic. And they just, it’s not sticking, because they’ve forgotten that they are human, and that they’re talking to humans, and that people want to hear their experience using that tool, or how they got to the place where they discovered this thing worked for them. Like even those are ways to integrate story into something that is very technical and, and nuanced in terms of a topic.
Brett Bartholomew 11:59
Yeah, having a central narrative is definitely something that I think a lot of people tend to get lost on. And it’s natural, that’s gonna lead into another tip that I’ll give later. But one I want to get, I want to piggyback off yours is all about eye contact. We hear about it all the time. And we generally hear about it in a very general way. I know that sounded poor, we’re talking about presentation skills. And I said, we generally hear about it in a general way. But people just say have had better eye contact. Well, what does that mean, right. And so I’m reading off some statistics here. And the source here is from quantified impressions, and they talk about adults only make eye contact currently, between about 30 and 60% of the time we interact. Now, that’s a pretty wide range. Of course, that changes depending on the culture and anything like that. But they do say that people generally need between 60 and 70%, eye contact to feel like you’re actually making a human connection. So generally, we’re glancing down on our phones too much, or somebody might be glancing down at their slides too much. Or they might just be ambiguously looking around the room, when they’re presenting.
Brett Bartholomew 13:01
Now, there were more statistics that said, in a conversation, a general conversation, which of course is different than a presentation to a degree, eye contact tends to work best in intervals of about seven to 10 seconds at a time, then if you think about it, 10 seconds is quite a long time to keep eye contact. I think that this is something that I didn’t always think about until I had gotten some feedback in general conversation that somebody thought I was staring them down, or trying to intimidate them when in reality, I was trying to convey respect. But I had to take in account for my own presence, the way I might look and all the other things that we talked about, at our communication workshops, right, related to proxemics, or other forms of kinetics and things like that, that that really impacted that in a presentation or group setting. They generally say you should make eye contact with each person you look at in the audience, so to speak, for three to five seconds at a time. And I like that, because that allows us or those listening to, to kind of use this heuristic. Whenever you’re trying to make a point or whenever you’re sharing a thought and your presentation. Also pair that up with a glance. So let’s say there’s a woman in the front row, and I’m making a point about archetypes and how they’re fluid and nobody’s ever one archetype just like nobody’s ever one drive, I might make that point and look at that woman. Now I might talk about supporting evidence or research and I might look at another gentleman, then I might launch into a story about where I either did something effectively, or in a very embarrassing way and I failed to highlight that point and gain emotional resonance from the audience and look at somebody else. So it can guide people not that we want them to be this cyclops eye that’s always going over the room. But if you’re just working at it, try to give yourself a scorecard of five and say, Okay, there’s five thoughts on this slide or five thoughts in this section? I’m gonna look at five different people. And the first time you speak that might be the barometer that you measure yourself up against, right so you You shouldn’t worry about every single thought you’re looking at somebody different. But hopefully that gives people some insight. I want to hand this back to you now and see if you have another tip you want to share?
Ali Kershner 15:10
Well, I really liked actually what you said about eye contact. You know, we were talking about this yesterday on our staff meeting, admittedly, and I think it’s so on under appreciated, but when it’s bad, it’s so noticeable, right? It’s one of those things where it’s like, you wouldn’t ever think to practice it until it’s not there. It’s like, when you you have a voice, and then you suddenly have laryngitis. And you never realized how important your voice was, is same thing when eye contact fails, it can be like the most disconcerting characteristic of a speaker. So, you know, kind of switching gears a little bit, I think, I think having when people are thinking about creating a presentation, maybe it would be my next tip, it’s not so much the technicality of delivering it, it’s really important to keep coming back to simplicity. And myself included, I tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. But if you kind of use these two frameworks, which have been really useful to me, I think you can create a much stronger structure. So the first one, and one that you’ve told me, is really great for the beginning phases of brainstorm, which is what do you want your audience to think, feel and do after listening to you speak about this topic? And it’s very simple. So after after listening to this, you know, what are the emotional feelings? You want somebody to have felt? What? Sorry? What do you want them to have thought? Right? And then what do you want them to have felt? And then the most important part is what what do you want them to go do with that information? Because I, and I’ll say this guys did say this in my last presentation, but I get to a certain point in presentation that I’m listening to, and I’m like, okay, so what? So what what do I do with this information that you’ve just given this to me, you’ve just given to me? How can I make this applicable in my life? So if you don’t like think feel, do another way to think about this? Is there should be a what? A so what and a now what part of your presentation you deliver? You give them a so what why this is important, and why they should care about it. And now, uh, now what? So how can you now use this information to make you a better leader and better coach, a better teacher, etc. And, you know, if you can’t answer those questions about your presentation, I think it’s gonna waffle, you’re gonna waffle, you’re gonna go a lot of places, but it’s not gonna, it’s not gonna be as effective as it necessarily necessarily could be.
Brett Bartholomew 17:29
Yeah, and I think, you know, I really hope that everybody listening paid attention to that. One main point I really want you guys to take from Ali there is, and this feeds into the next tip I’ll give you is you do have to think so what we often think about, oh, this is what I want to say, this is what I want to present on. And that’s fine. But then you’ll end up going down this rabbit hole of adding more info, more info, because you’re letting passion lead you, as opposed to an actual authentic and strategic pre assessment. And that is part of what Ali’s talking about. So what I mean by pre assessment, and it complements Ali here is before let’s say today, you got contracted to speak, somebody reached out, they want you to speak about something, or maybe you’re even just trying to sharpen the saw, you’ve never been asked to speak. But you’re volunteering to speak somewhere because it’s a goal to start speaking. Either way, it doesn’t matter whether you’re paid or not. This is where you need to start. Well, before you even have a topic, or at the very least, if you’ve just picked a topic, you need to ask yourself, What do others need to know? Like, what do they really need to know? So if you’re going to talk about and again, I’m making this up, if you’re in meteorology, and you’re going to talk about different kinds of clouds, what it means, right? You have to think what do people actually need to know they don’t need to know every little bit of the atomic structure of these clouds? Right? They need some simple take home strategic like Ali said, What do you want them to think, feel? And do what’s this? So what what do they need to know, I’ve given a talk on plyometrics to more of a strength and conditioning crowd, they need to know a little bit of a refresher on anatomy and physiology. They need to know sample exercises and what classifications they might fit into. So they have an order and structure. And then they need to know what not to do so they can help people avoid injury. Those are some examples of what they might need to know.
Brett Bartholomew 19:19
When I speak on behavior change or communication. Let’s say I’ll think about a topic I have a talk called the impact of influence. The whole goal of the talk is the fact that we think we’re rational creatures, but in reality, there’s a wide range of subconscious things that influence our behavior. It’s what makes us wonky. It’s what makes us do things that are completely irrational. And these things are embedded into environment, different design elements and music. And all these things and marketers know this. So what I need the audience to know is that there are multimodal factors that make us behave in irrational ways that we often don’t even recognize and then I need them to know not just what’s the cool science behind that, but what they can do about it, or how they can leverage the good aspects of that, right? Those are examples of what they need to know, I also need to think about what they might already know, you need to give your audience credit, you need to give your audience credit and make sure you are never talking down to them. Now, that’s very difficult at times, because you also don’t want to assume too much knowledge, because then that’s a delicate balance. And that’s why there is an art to this, and why it takes skill and training and refinement. Because you need to know if you are coming off a certain way. That’s why a big part of great communication is understanding human perception, which we’ve talked about on our online courses. And at our apprenticeship. If you don’t understand why people perceive certain things the way they do, then you’re more likely to have your message or your key points misinterpreted. But for now, just think about what might they already know what is obvious, and even acknowledge that you can still include what they might already know, if I talk about Plyometrics, I understand people are going to know that tendons are involved in muscles that are involved, I get that. So I might say hey, you guys know this or just a brief refresher not to insult your intelligence. But let’s go back to basics for a moment because it highlights key points, right. So you can acknowledge that to more things, you have to assess what you think their ability to make sense of what they’re about to hear is, there are a lot of times that I read new, interesting research, and it’s fascinating to me. But for somebody that might not be as into that subject, it might be way too much. So you have to think, okay, that is full on. This might be inappropriate to some that is full on intercourse. If I go all in there, maybe I need to start with a little bit of seduction, and things like that first and some simple conversation. And I’m not going to apologize for what I said there it is what it is, and everybody gets the point.
Brett Bartholomew 21:54
The point is, is you want to give everybody all the information, all this. But you have to think can they make sense of it. That’s why you need to utilize and we grade people on this with our evaluation, right Ali, their use of analogies, their use of metaphors, to your point, the use of story, talking in color, right? That those are huge literary devices and rhetorical devices that they need to use. And then finally, and you mentioned this, what do you want to feel the potential emotional impact of the material, you gave a talk recently that some might view is controversial in the strength and conditioning field. And it is, it’s controversial, because it’s common sense. And it’s Oh, it’s a, it’s kind of this wake up point that the field needed to hear about what the definition of being a coach really is about, and how to not singularly identify themselves, and how to not be scared to take a leap. We have people right now in this episode, that are in 20 different professions and all identify as a coach a leader or teacher in some capacity. So you want them to feel conflicted. You want them to feel that way. So just talking about my point there that complements Ali’s is do a pre assessment and think about all those things about the audience first, before you think about what you want to say, all right, Ali, you have one more go ahead.
Ali Kershner 23:09
You know, you said to speaking in color, and you know, this, this might sound super obvious, but it’s, I hardly see it done. And so I would assume that it’s maybe not as obvious as we assume. And I think this will be a really key part. And not an overlooked part of our speaker School, which is crazy creating slides and an actual presentation that represent what you’re saying, but they don’t tell what you’re saying, right. So I’ve seen so many times, and I’ll call out anybody with the white slides, with the black writing, you know, size 12 font, you’ve got 17 bullet points, just have that information come out organically. In fact, it’s more pressure on you as a presenter, if you have all that information up on the screen, because then the the audience is expecting you to touch on every single one of those points, especially if you’re not as confident with the material material you are delivering have less on the slide. In fact, with the Apprenticeship and with the presentation I just gave sometimes they were just pictures. And the purpose of that is just to remind me of where I’m going. It’s sort of a roadmap. And it has a double purpose of not distracting the listener. Right. So they are now fully engaged on you because they have no idea what that picture of a wolf on the screen means. But guess what, when they look at the picture of the wolf later, they will have encoded what you were saying at the time that you’re talking about the wolf, it actually is a much stronger way to get people to remember what you’re talking about, than having 15 letters or lines on a slide. Because then they’re trying to write those down because we’re all obsessed with with copying and pasting what’s on the slide. So that’s that’s from more of a good visual standpoint, but I think it’s understated and so powerful that again, it’s one of those things when you see a bad presentation In terms of its visual appeal, no matter how good the presenter is, they lost me because there’s a mismatch now between their professionalism as a speaker and as a designer of a PowerPoint.
Brett Bartholomew 25:11
Yeah, well, and I remember that was something that when when we had a gentleman that came through our speaker school recently, you wowed me with that, that was a big issue for them is the visuals. And I remember watching you just keep out on the interactive whiteboard we have out here and show them hey, here are some words, here’s how your audience might associate those words, here are visuals that you can utilize, and going through just option after option and him really understanding like he knew it, he was intelligent. Here’s like, yeah, I understand that a picture’s worth 1000 words. Sometimes I just don’t, I know the word. But I don’t know the picture. And that’s such a tremendous strength of yours, that you’re able to do and help them find that in their mind’s eye. And if you recall, it was so much stress taken away from him because he felt like now he wasn’t at his desk stewing about about what the image is, he was able to look at that. I mean, do you remember seeing the look on his face of saying like, wow, you’ve cut like 30 slides out of my talk. Now I made it simpler.
Ali Kershner 26:09
Yeah, because that’s the thing is, when you have to put information on all of your slides, then you need seven slides to describe everything. Or you feel like you’re missing part of the information when you just have one slide that can take you on to seven slides worth of information. But that is something you get to decide as a speaker. And by the way, a really advanced speaker will react to the audience, they might even ask a question at the beginning of the presentation, and use that information to guide where they go. Now, I’m not recommending that for everybody, but certainly a style that you can adopt as you go. And that is only possible if you haven’t locked yourself in with the type of slides you’ve created.
Brett Bartholomew 26:49
Yeah, yeah. And if you guys an example of talking in color, think of an ally is definitely the Jarvis to my I am not Tony Stark. But if you just want to use a comedic kind of comic irrelevant Braille, like, I will say, hey, Jarvis, do this. And Ali’s, like, You mean this, I’ll make it better for you, and she models it up. So that is something you definitely if you’re a part of our speaker school, you’ve got to seek Ali’s help on, she absolutely crushes it. All right, one more for me. And we could go super deep in this one, but I’m gonna keep it tight. This is about when one of our evaluations that we use for the apprenticeship, excuse me, and speaker school is all about proxemics. Now proxemics it’s about your, how you utilize space. So if I’m we all know the Seinfeld example of the close talker, or we know the person that just stands on stage rigidly, or the person that paces constantly, how are you using space? Don’t overthink this one, it will vary. I’m just gonna give you guys one example.
Brett Bartholomew 27:45
I was in the UK last year, it’s 2022 as we record this, so I’m speaking to 2021. And I remember I was one of the last speakers to go and I went up to the host. And I said, What is something the other speakers haven’t done yet that you think would be really helpful. And that wasn’t about me wanting to one up the other speakers, that was me saying Is there anything I can do to kind of keep the audience awake, because I know they had been in a hot conference room, a massive conference room a long time. And I want to shake them up a little bit and also just show the host that I wanted to go the extra mile for them. And they said, you know, nobody’s really interacted with the crowd much. They’ve all kind of stayed on one spot on stage. And that was problematic, because they had a lot of people streaming in. And you know how it is, if you’re streaming, you want to feel like you’re there, you’re interacting. And so I go, Okay, can you show me where the streaming cameras are? Can you show me you know what you mean? And they said, Sure. So I went on stage. And after about 30 minutes in, I hopped off stage and this was appropriate for this setting, it’s not going to be appropriate at every setting. And I would walk down and I asked a member of the audience their name, and I’d shake their hand and I’d ask them a question and I’d set them up for success. The goal is not to make anybody feel stupid, or to make yourself look better. The goal is just actually include them. So set them up for success, and I included them. Then I also took about three minutes. And I know this is a big faux pas in some circles. But I actually looked away from the live audience and looked at the lens of the audience for the streaming audience at home of which there were about 350. And for about three minutes, I addressed them specifically because I wanted to make them feel like a part of the experience because they were so I want you guys to assess when you’re speaking if you’re speaking, what is appropriate movement. If you don’t know, ask the hosts, look for other norms and see what other speakers or presenters are doing. Keep in mind, they may not always know, right, that everybody’s just going to be doing the best they can. But this is something we also help you evaluate what is appropriate use of proxemics. There might be times and there certainly have been in my career where I’ve given a presentation and I am actually expected to stay in one spot for the sake of where the cameras were. And that is what it is. So that’s why all of this stuff is is somewhat relative and it is why we help you guys with our speakers. Go on our mentoring, create a bespoke plan. that’s right for you, your event and most importantly, your presentation style. Because the last thing we want you to do, and the tip you should absolutely follow is you should not try to speak like someone else, you should try to be yourself, find your voice, find your style, there’s so many different permutations of that. So I’m gonna give Ali the last word. Before I do, I just want to remind you guys, if this is something you like, let us know if this is something you want to work on. Again, artofcoaching.com/mentoring, you will see a speaking option under the availability there in the future, we will be creating a whole homepage for Speaker school all these pieces. And I want you to know this is absolutely not just for extroverts, or people that are already strong speakers, if you are so inside your own head, if you are absolutely fearful of speaking, this could not be more for you. This is very inclusive, we will take you through from the root to the fruit from the soup to the nuts, whatever it is, and we want to help everybody. We’ve even had folks that have chronic stuttering issues that to us guys fires us up, it inspires us. We want to help you overcome that Ali? The sign off, and any final points are yours.
Ali Kershner 31:16
Yeah, and you know, we obviously talked a lot about formal presentations. But this the speaker, the speaking school that we’re talking about, and honestly preparing for presentations that extend so far beyond speaking at a conference or standing up on stage that can be you pitching to your team that can be you asking for a raise that can be you having to explain why you should be hired for a new position in an interview, right? The the idea of being a better speaker applies to everything. And so if you’re a coach, if you’re a leader, if you’re a firefighter, if you’re a parent, you need this. I mean, I think not a single one of us is a fantastic speaker, we could all be better so I have nothing else to add. I think this was super helpful even for me just to hear your points again. And I hope we can I hope we can do a part two.
Brett Bartholomew 32:05
All right, let’s see if we can get this sign off. Right. I’m gonna say my name you say your name and then we’ll, we’ll end it i guys. This has been the art of coaching podcast, please please please share it with a friend or five or 12 for the art of coaching. I’m Brett Bartholomew. And I’m Ali Kershner, we’ll talk to you next time.
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