Engaging Presentations | Speak with Clarity and Confidences

1. Course Introduction: When you have to present something, whether it's for work or maybe a job interview. How do you feel? Do you feel confident and excited because you're great at presenting and you're not worried at all what people think? Or do you feel a little anxious? Do you feel that you're just not quite good enough at expressing what you want to say in the right way. That when you present things, it just doesn't really make an impact. You're not able to communicate effectively if that's how you feel, you're not alone. It is in fact, very common whether you feel nervous or not. Sometimes nerves play a part and we're just a little anxious to talk in front of others. Sometimes it's just a matter of not knowing how to express your ideas in the right way. Not having a voice or discovering what your voice is, not being able to organize your ideas so that when you express yourself, people understand you. People say, wow, I get it. And people remember what you said. If you feel that you have a lot to learn in this area, if you feel that you could be a much more impactful communicator and that that could help you in your life, in your career. This is the course for you. We're gonna be covering a lot of things, including how to present clearly, effectively, find your voice, build confidence, build slides, everything that you need to know. So if you're ready to take your presentation skills to the next level, sign up, and I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. Presenting Well is Modern-day Magic: What is a presentation? Basically, what is the core of a presentation? Is it the ideas that you share? Is it your outline? Is it your slides? Is it how you express yourself? What is it? Well, I'd like to spend a bit of time right at the start of the course exploring this. So that we can be on the same page. So that we can have a common foundation because we're going to be spending the rest of the course talking about presentations. Alright, so first, I'd like to share a little story. The story comes from a book I read quite a while ago by Joseph Campbell. The book is called primitive mythology. The story, the myth is called the legend of the destruction of cosh. In the story, there is a king and the king has around him an entourage, people who are around the king. And the king knows that he is going to die. That's the deal with the kings. The priests look at the stars and they determine when it is time for the king to be killed. The king is killed, and then a new king comes in, and that's just how it goes. So he sits in his palace and tries to enjoy himself trying not to think about this terrible thing that's going to happen. He is afraid to die. And in his entourage, there's a story-teller named Farley moss. And Farley moss is so good at telling stories. When he tells his story. All the people listening fall down on the ground. Like they're asleep. Listening to his stories. They're transported away by his stories. That's how powerful they are. One day, the priests, who are the ones, remember looking at the stars to determine when the king should be killed. The priests come down and listened to one of Farley mosses stories. And like everyone else, when he speaks, they fall down on the ground, transported by his stories. And they come back night after night to listen to them. They get so into his stories that they forget about looking at the stars. They forget about checking the sky. And so if no one is there to look at the sky, no one can say when the king should die. And so the king is not killed. And eventually the Qing makes Farley moss the king. And Varley Moss is a good king and everybody lives happily ever after. Not really, but I'll spare you the details. But what is the idea behind this story? What is the crux of it? Here you have someone who has mastered a craft so well that he is able to change the events around him. He is part of the king's entourage. He's going to be killed. But because he's so good at telling stories, he changes that. I don t think the point here is to say that stories are like drugs or storage should make people abandon their responsibilities. Or you should trick people with stories or anything like that. I think the point is that there is a craft to communicating and telling stories. I'm also not saying that presentations should be always stories. But whether you are doing a presentation for work to share a report, or maybe give a proposal, or you're making a video, or you're doing an interview, perhaps a job interview, or you're trying to convince someone of something in your daily life to make them see your point of view or you're describing something, you're giving a lecture, you want to make an idea crystal-clear, whatever you're trying to do. If you understand and have mastered the craft of giving presentations, then you will have an impact. You will achieve what you would like to achieve if you want to inform someone, inspire someone, convince someone, you're much more likely to do that if you're good at doing that. So first, you have to accept that. Giving a presentation is a skill. It is a craft, is a set of skills that you can learn. And if you learn them and get better at them, then you will be able to achieve more of what you want to achieve with your language. And a lot of people don't realize that Hi, I just say the stuff that I think and once I say it, I'm done. And then if I don't get what I want, well, too bad, no, no. Become better at communicating. Learn how to express yourself really well, how to organize your ideas. How to use language effectively. And you will be able to make the difference to not just say the ideas, but to say them in the right way at the right time. That is very powerful. So I would say that's the power of using language. Well, just a side point. But language used to be associated with magic. The word grammar, for example, is actually, it comes from a word associated with doing magic. And if you think about it, using language really well is kind of like doing magic because you can change someone's mind. That's like casting a magical spell on them. They suddenly see something in a different way. Yeah, good point. I agree with that. You might change their emotional state, maybe inspire them or terrify them. That's like casting a spell as well. They feel that because of the words you chose. So you're not just taking ideas from here and putting them out there. You're taking ideas from here, crafting them into language that then communicates exactly what you want to communicate with the effect that you want to have. If you're doing a presentation to convince a group of people to make a decision. Presenting that in the right way will increase the chance that they will make that decision as you would like them to make it, right? So again, I want you to, in this lesson right at the start of the course, just accept this idea. If you can use language well, you're powerful. If you think you're not good at it, you can learn. You can get better at it. And when you do, you're going to be able to achieve what you want with your presentations. But also, a presentation is not just giving a report. It's also convincing a potential employer in a job interview that you're the best candidate. It's also creating an image in someone's mind. That's a magical spell if you can make someone visualize something very clearly because of the words you used. That's like casting a spell, right? So think of your words. Think of your words and the language you use as a kind of magic because it is. And then allow that to motivate you to improve and get better so that you can achieve the outcomes you want with that language. So what is a presentation? A presentation is when you share ideas with other people, you share your thoughts with other people, but do it with Kraft. Do it with skill so that you can achieve what you want to achieve, okay? It's not just sharing ideas. It's sharing ideas with craft and with skills so that you can achieve what you want to achieve, whatever that is. And I'm not here to tell you what that is. Okay. The last thing I would like you to do before we move on to the next lesson is just think about someone who really captivates you. When they speak. You listen. You find their ideas compelling or convincing. You are moved when they speak. Think about someone who does that for you and it's different for everybody. And ask yourself, what are they doing? If I saw those same thoughts or ideas presented by someone else, it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be nearly as interesting or nearly as inspirational or nearly as convincing. Okay, so what is it about them and what they're doing that allows them to be so captivating. Alright, that's something that I want you to just start thinking about. Now we're going to get into the next lesson. Hopefully, I have convinced you that this is an important skill. I mean, I know you're here because you think it's an important skill. But sometimes we do things because other people tell us that we should have a skill, but we don't really think about why. Now, hopefully, you understand why it is so important to improve your presentation skills, not other people's reasons. Your reasons you have to understand it deeply and believe that. And I think if you do, you're going to get a lot from the course. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. The Secret Sauce of Excellent Presentations: Have you ever been to a street market? Probably, right? This is a common site, especially in the summer. In for example, New York City. You have local businesses opening a stand or a stall in a specific area along the street. And people can walk along and brows, look by, not by, right. This is usually a summer things something you see pretty often. They might sell handmade jewelry, local honey. They might sell cider. They might sell soap, all kinds of different things. Okay? So I want you to visualize yourself walking along the street at one of these street markets or street fairs. Now, what gets your attention? Well, part of it is you write, you might be very hungry right now. So you have no interest in jewelry. But the right food at the right time that could get you to open your wallet for sure, Right? So part of it depends on you, but part of it also depends on the vendors. They have to do something to get your attention. Because your attention is limited, right? Your attention is limited. So they need to get your attention so that you will go over there and maybe pay for something by something, in this case, by something to eat when they're competing with each other. Now, I want you to imagine two side-by-side. One is a creepy guy sitting in a chair beside a cooler with no branding, no sign, just sitting there. And the other one is more vibrant. They have a very clear branding and they have someone walking around in the front of the stand handing out free samples. And you see several people. They're very professionally dressed. They look like they're wearing gloves. Everything looks very clean. Which one are you more likely to approach? Which one is more likely to get your attention? Well, at first it might be the creepy guy in the chair because that's maybe a little scary. But in terms of you're spending money, it's probably going to be the other one, right? Yeah. So why am I talking about this? It's to highlight that when you are giving a presentation, you are vying. You are competing with other things. For your listeners, your viewers, your audience's attention. They could be checking their phone. They could be looking around. They could be thinking about something, they could be doing any number of things. How do you grab them? Right at the start so that they listened to you? If you grab them right at the beginning, you have the best chance of having them really listened to you throughout. That's the first key to a very strong presentation. No matter what kind of presentation it is, you want to keep in mind that you are competing for your listener's attention. Not among other speakers, perhaps not among other people who are presenting things, are talking about things necessarily, but you're competing for attention in every moment. But at the beginning it's most important, right? To engage your audience from the beginning. So, what are some of the other key things that make good presentations? Good? What is the secret sauce of a good presentation? Number one, your audience is engaged right at the start. How do you do that? We will talk about it. That is one of the things we're going to cover in this course. But that's not the only thing. You also have to know who your audience is, right? Are you going to have a seller selling jewelry, luxury jewelry to people on the street? Probably not. That's not the right. That's not the right thing for this audience. People walking along are not likely to spend $20,000 on a diamond ring. But they might buy a nice silver ring, that's a couple hundred dollars. That's very different, right? So know your audience. Who are you talking to, that is extremely important. And again, we're going to be talking about that later in the course. We're going to cover all this stuff. I just want to talk through some of the keys to a really strong presentation. It's also very important to have a clear reason for everything in your presentation. Hey, why? For everything, whether it's a point, you're making an example, you're sharing something in your outline, a visual on your slide. How you express something, everything needs to have a reason. If you don't know why it's there, it shouldn't be there. You worked hard for your audience's attention. So don't mess that up later by saying something that shouldn't be there, that causes confusion, that muddies the water. Don't do that. You need to have a why for everything that's there. For the sake of clarity, that your presentation is as clear and impactful as possible. A good presentation should build toward key moments. It shouldn't be flat. One thing and then another thing, and then another thing. You need to build up toward moments that are going to be very memorable throughout your presentation. And you don't want to have too many of them. If you have too many of them than it is again, just kind of flat. It feels the same throughout. But if you're building toward these key memorable moments, then your audience is going to have clear takeaways. What do you remember from that presentation you heard yesterday? Immediately. The things you want them to remember, the takeaways you want them to have are the ones they do have. So you have to keep that in mind. You're essentially building up toward these moments. And that is what's going to make your presentation memorable. Now there's something to actually believing what you say. There's something about that to believe what you're saying is actually valuable. Now I know that there are debates and situations where you would need to represent something or say something that you don't feel as true. Sometimes that's necessary. But generally if you're trying to persuade someone, convinced someone, make someone's see your point of view. Being authentic is very important. Be truthful with your presentations. Try not to hide from the truth. Try not to say things that you don't actually think. You might have this thought. Maybe if I say this, people will like it. But that's not really how I feel about it. But I think people will think that's more convincing. Don't do that. Why? Because people have an amazing radar for authenticity and in authenticity. So choose authenticity, choose to represent things that you actually believe because people can feel that they can tell and that's going to make your ideas resonate better. Keep in mind that your slides are not the presentation, they are visual support. Now there might be a few exceptions to this. When the slide is the main purpose and you're providing some commentary. But generally speaking, when you're building a presentation, think of your visuals, whether that's a slide, any kind of visual or a prop, or things you have to make a point more clear are just that. Things to make a point, more clear. Things to make people understand something more intuitively. For example, showing data. It's very difficult to say data and have people understand it. It really helps to have a visual, but you are the one explaining this stuff and your slides, are you a visual support? So don't let those get mixed up. Remember, the main thing is what you are saying, the story you are telling, the ideas you are explaining, and you have some support to help make those things more clear. Again, yes. There are exceptions. But if you see yourself as in a backseat to the slides, to the visuals, good luck holding the attention of your audience. Good luck with that. People do not connect with slides, they connect with other people. And that brings me to the final key that I want to share. The final key to a strong presentation. And that is the X-Factor, the unique thing that you bring that no one else can. I asked you to think before about someone who's really good at expressing themselves. Someone who you find very engaging. What is it about them? Sometimes it's hard to say. But you want to be like that in a way you want to develop your unique voice. Everybody has one. You have one. I have one. Everyone has a unique voice and style. Now you may not have developed yours yet. Maybe you're working on that. Maybe that's why you're taking this course. But you have to know that it's there somewhere and you have to carve away the stone so that you can find the statue that has been there the whole time. I think it was Michelangelo who said that when he sees a block of stone, a block of granite or marble, he sees the statue, the finished product. And he is just scraping away, chipping away the stone to reveal the true form of the marble in a way that is your unique voice. And I know that doesn't sound very clear, but just know that that's something that you have. And if you don't feel that you've found it, know that if you keep practicing, if you work hard, you will, you will find your style. You will find your x factor, the thing that makes you stand apart from others, the thing that makes you unique. So those are the keys to a strong presentation. I realized that they are not really fleshed out. I haven't given them a lot of detail, but I wanted to give you a high-level overview before we get into some of the specifics and we're going to be talking about a lot of this stuff coming up in the course. So let me know if you have any questions and I will see you in the next lesson. 4. Picasso's Dos and Don'ts: The Dos: Pablo Picasso said, learn the rules like a pro so that you can break them like an artist. So in this lesson, we're going to talk about the rules. We're going to talk about the do's and don'ts of presentations. Now again, the reason I give you a Pablo Picasso quote is that once you know them and once you use them and once you learn them, then you can start to make some decisions about how you are going to do presentations. There is no rule book that tells you you have to do anything. But there are some common best practices, some common do's and don'ts, that if you're not very experienced in making presentations, you're not very experienced in speaking in public, in expressing things along an outline. If you're not very experienced at these things, these will be a good guideline for you to have. Alright, so we're going to start with the do's and then go to the don'ts. We talked about attention. And how important attention is. You need to get your audience's attention right from the start. So you might use a personal anecdote. You might share something from your life. You might share a quote from Pablo Picasso to really get your audience thinking or to frame an idea in a simple way. They can reflect on that as they listened to the support you give later. You might ask a question, could be a direct question, it could be a rhetorical question. We'll talk about these specifically later. We're going to go through these. You might make a bold statement, a very bold statement that wakes everyone up. Whoever is listening. They're listening now because you said something very bold. These are hooks. You want to use a hook at the start to get attention, to get their attention. This is the person with the sample platter, the samples going around saying, Hey, try this on a toothpick, you grab it, you taste it. I can't think of anything else. I have to have this. Show me where the stand is. I'll buy $25 worth. Take me, right? That's the idea. That's how Hook's work. Make an outline with key moments. And we talked about the idea of building toward moments that are going to be memorable, that are going to stick in your audience's mind. But the only way to really make sure you're doing that is to have an outline. An outline is key. If you have no structure in place, then you're going to feel lost. You're going to lose confidence. You might cause a lot of confusion in yourself and in your audience. Have an outline. Now, an outline is not a script. An outline is like a skeleton for your presentation. It's like the bones of your presentation. And I promise you, if you have that and it's a good one, and you've done a good job structuring everything so that it's very clear you are going to thank yourself throughout because you're going to know where you're going, you're going to know where you are. And because of that, you're going to feel more confident. And because of that, everyone else is going to understand what you're talking about and they're going to sense your confidence. And that's going to make them even more interested in your presentation. So it really is a virtuous cycle of very powerful thing. We're going to talk more about outlines later on here at the start of the course. We're trying to set our foundation and then we're going to get into all of this stuff in detail. Stay on track. Now, that's not to say you cannot improvise. You can improvise, you can come up with a little side comment or jokes, or maybe someone interacts with you. You should be willing to do all of that stuff because that can make your presentation, your story, your job interview, whatever it is, feel more authentic. I'm not saying never stray from your outline, but generally stay on track. Because if you get lost somewhere and you start talking about something that has nothing to do with what you're supposed to be talking about. You're not the only one who's lost. Your audience is lost as well. So it's very important to stay on track. Because if you're not on track, nobody is on track. That's a bad situation. Be in, be yourself and relax if you're trying to copy someone else style that you like. Do you think you're going to succeed at that? Probably not. Because you're not them and they are not you. You are you. So be yourself. And the sooner that you accept that you can be yourself, the sooner you will gain confidence and find your voice. And the more you'll be able to relax. If you feel very tense. If you're not able to make a joke, if you're not able to breathe as you're explaining something, everyone's going to feel that and it's going to be a bad experience. People are not going to be able to focus on what you're saying. You're not going to be able to express what you need to express. Well, so just look out for your unique way of expressing yourself. Don't copy how other people do things, right, to be committed to finding your own voice and find ways to relax. And we're going to spend time in the course talking about all of that stuff. We're going to be talking about finding your voice up next. And then we're also going to be talking about gaining confidence and relaxing. If you feel nervous when you're speaking in front of people, use pauses and vary the intonation of your speech. They can make a big difference. If you don't seem rushed. If you're not trying to get to the next word and you're able to stop for a moment, reflect on something, and then say the next thing that's going to help you stay on track. It's going to make you feel more relaxed. And it can give what you say more impact if you know how to do it. But also, you want to think about intonation. That's when your voice goes up and down. That's how you use your voice to speak. If you're always talking like this and your voice is flat, that might remind you of your middle school history teacher. Just talk like this for 40 min and nobody paid attention. And that is not a good way to speak. You want to use your voice as a tool to keep people's attention, to keep people engaged, to keep people listening. That's what your voice can do. Pauses can do that. They can. I just did it right? But also making your voice go up and down can do that intonation. But you don't want to randomly do it, right? You have to know what's naturally. You have to find your own style, your own way of doing it. But generally, you may put more stress on some words because they're more important, less stress on others because they are not so important. You may gradually increase the pitch of your voice. For some reason. Maybe, maybe it depends on you, but you have to find a variety that works for you. You have to find that style that works for you. Just don't be the robot who has the flat pitch all the time and never uses any variation because that's boring. It takes practice to find that. I'm not telling you exactly specifically how you should do that, which words you should stress exactly, but you have to start listening for people who do it well, pay attention to how they do it, and start developing that. Your own speaking style. Again, it has to fit you has to fit your style. Practice, you have to practice. You can't build confidence. If you don't practice, you can't get better. If you don't practice. You can't find your voice. If you don't practice, you can't correct something that's a bad habit that you want to change if you don't practice, it's kind of obvious, right? If you don't practice, you can't get better at stuff. Everybody knows that. But I just want to say it because this course is more like a guide. It's not going to automatically make you better, right? You can use it as a guide, but you have to put in the work, you have to practice. That is essential. If you don't put in a lot of practice, you can't improve. It's that simple, right? You don't get better at things unless you do them regularly. It's so obvious, but worth saying. And then on that point, you need to get as much feedback as possible. Now this part can be painful. But if you're not able to take feedback, It's going to be very hard for you to improve. Now that's feedback from others, but also from yourself. We're going to be talking about how to get feedback from U2. But also we have to be able to take feedback from others. Again, if you can't take feedback, you're going to struggle to improve. You have to learn how to ask for feedback. How to get feedback, how to take what's useful and throw away what's not useful, and how to give your self feedback. This is the key to developing self-awareness. Self-awareness then allows you to change habits. You have one habit, you speak in a monotone. You notice that other people tell you that sometimes you start speaking so fast and it's kind of a monotone, I completely lose focus. I don't know what you're talking about anymore. Notice that then when you're practicing, deliberately start changing things and then get more feedback. And listen to yourself again. And this process continues and you get better. But you can't get better again unless there is feedback. Feedback, self-awareness, habits, habits, progress, feedback self-awareness habits, progress. That's just how it goes. 5. Picasso's Dos and Don'ts: The Don'ts: What about the don'ts? Alright, let's get into the don'ts. We've talked about the do's, let's talk about the don'ts. Don't use wordy slides. That means slides filled with text. Unless you have a very specific reason for doing so, you know why you're doing it and you have a reason clearly in mind, okay? But generally, don't use words with a lot of slides because your audience, whoever they are, maybe it's three people. Maybe it's a job interview, maybe it's a report you're giving, right? Whoever it is. They don't want to read slides. They're there to listen to you. And your slides are there to support what you're saying That is the role of slides. Okay? So remember that your slides are not meant to be a wall of words. Wall of words, bad, clear, interesting slides that support your point that our visual, we'll talk about slides more later. Good, Okay, Don't read from slides. That is the number one way to completely disconnect from your audience. You worked hard, you've got their attention. Then you turn around and start reading. What's that? What is that? Don't do that. That's terrible. This is the greatest crime of presentations is people who turn around facing away from the people they're talking to. Look at the screen if they're presenting with slides and read them. Yes, there are exceptions, of course, but in general, do not, do not, do not, do not read from slides. It is illegal in the presentation world. Don't memorize your presentation. Don't memorize it. Why? Because then it wouldn't be a presentation. It would be a thing called a speech. Now speeches a thing. What is the speech? That's where someone writes something and then you read it. And that's a skill to right, reading a speech. Well, famous speeches throughout history. Yeah, if you can read a speech well, that's definitely a skill and there is definitely some overlap between presentations and speeches, but not completely. Presentations are not meant to be red than it's, again, not a presentation. But if you memorize your presentation every word than it's also not a presentation. It's a speech. You want to, when you're giving a presentation, connect with people. If you're presenting an analysis that you did on something to three colleagues, maybe it's a very technical, you're showing a lot of graphs and charts to support your ideas, but you're nervous. You wrote it all down. Maybe it's a video call and now you're reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, reading. It's going to be tough for you to persuade anyone, convince anyone of anything. Because you're just reading. Why don't you just send them all an email and not do a presentation, period? No. You need to be responsive to questions. You need to be ready to adapt. You need to have a structure, of course, and outline, Yes, but you don't want to have it memorized because you need to be adaptable. You need to be responsive. You want to be a little bit flexible because you don't know exactly what's going to happen, right? And you want to be authentic. You want to get people's attention to do all of those things. You can't be reciting a memorized presentation, also known as a speech. Okay? So you can memorize the outline. That is, of course, fine. You should do that, but do not memorize the presentation itself. Now, when we were talking about the dues, I mentioned using variation in your voice, intonation, Stress, using pauses. These are tools. So don't use monotone. That's flat all the time. Instead, think of your voice as a magic wand and you're using it to make things happen in the world. You're doing stuff with your voice. When you speak, you can make things happen. But if you're extremely boring, things are not likely to happen. That's just the way it is. So don't be boring and don't have a boring voice. Don't say more than you need to say. Being redundant hurts your impact. If you feel like you need to say some 0.3 times because I'm not sure if I set it completely, then you need to rethink things. Maybe try something else, say it, and then stop. And if you find yourself saying it in a different way, repeating yourself, That's probably because it wasn't clear enough the first time. And that also makes the point more difficult for your audience to follow. The chance that they will get lost in a sea of redundancy is higher. If you're not very clear and say what you want to say and then stop. Now that we've gone through the do's and don'ts, it's time to get serious to get into the details. If you have any questions, let me know. In the next lesson, we're going to be talking about how to find, how to discover your voice. So I will see you in the next lesson. 6. Hatch Yourself and Find Your Voice: When I hear someone say, I can't bear to listen to my voice on a recording where I can't stand to see myself on video, I can't stand it. My first thought is, this chick has not yet hatched. Let me explain what I mean. In life. We have to go through difficult things. For example, getting your first job or maybe getting a driver's license, right? But we have to go through those things. And we feel scared at first. We don't like it at first. And then we adjust. We get used to it and then it that's fine. It's no big deal. I remember the day before my first day of work at my first job when I was 16 years old and a pizza place, I was terrified, but I got used to it and then it was no big deal. Okay. Well, why what's the connection here? What's the connection between recording yourself? Well, number one, I'm going to be asking you to record yourself because that is a very important part of giving yourself feedback. But if you feel very uncomfortable with this, I want to tell you that it is like those scary things that you have overcome. It's no different than the fear you feel before your first day of work or before you take your driver's license exam. It's that uncomfortable feeling of not being used to something, not doing something enough. So it's something I want you to push through because it is a very important part of getting better of developing self-awareness and finding your voice. If you're not able to look at yourself on video and give yourself realistic feedback, or hear yourself speaking and give yourself objective feedback. It's going to be very difficult for you to improve. Think of yourself. If this is you, maybe you're already comfortable with this great, fantastic. If this is you, think of yourself as a little chick in an egg that hasn't hatched yet. And hatching means finding your voice, improving, getting comfortable, gaining confidence, speaking, and expressing yourself and explaining things. So don't stay in your egg just like those other things that you had to go through that were scary at first, that made you better. This is another one of those things. This is something that can make you better and it is a necessary step to really improve your presentation skills. 7. How to Discover Your Voice: Now, what is the connection then to finding your voice, right? You hatch from your egg, you get over your fear. How does that connect to finding your individual unique voice? Finding out what kind of bird you are, perhaps, well, think of it this way. If you can look at yourself on video or listen to yourself, you're going to start to notice things that you naturally do that you like. And you're gonna start to notice things that you naturally do that you don't like. So you're still the judge. You say to yourself, okay. That actually, when I do that, my idea is more clear and I don't want to get too specific right now. And when I do that, I think my point is a little confusing or that might be kind of annoying. I don't really like when I do that, right? So some people would pick out a lot of thinking words and they didn't notice they did that before you notice it. And then gradually through practice and giving yourself feedback and that feedback loop, you can work toward getting rid of those, right? I used to do a lot of thinking words. I don't do a lot of thinking where it's anymore. That's one of the things that I didn't like that I saw in videos that I recorded in hearing myself speak. But then there are other things that you're going to say. Oh, that's interesting. The way that I use intonation, I think that's actually very effective. It helps me emphasize my point. Or maybe you liked the way that you give examples, natural examples that occur to you as you're speaking. Great. So make a note to yourself, maybe I should do more of that. This process of objectively looking at yourself as you speak is what allows you to find your voice. And of course, lots of practice. So this is what I would like you to do. You're going to do an objective presentation. Diagnosis. Diagnosis is something that we do often on a machine to diagnose an issue or something Medical, right? It's very objective. Alright, we want to be objective here. Make a list of natural things that you can emphasize that you do naturally, right? Maybe your sense of humor, maybe the way you give examples, may be that you're unnatural when it comes to storytelling, you're really good at finding the right moments to emphasize. You want to emphasize that more. Make a list of those things. Then make a list of things that get in the way of you being a good presenter. Again, according to you, according to you what you think you be the judge. Maybe that's thinking words as I said. Maybe that's feeling out of breath. Maybe that's being very stiff when you're speaking and sounding like this, right? Whatever it is, you have to find those things. In addition to thinking words, I always used to have this issue where I would eventually feel out of breath. I got to talking and I can't catch my breath. I would have this issue and I would listen back and think, okay, well, it's not because I'm nervous. What is going on here? And a couple of things helped me, but first I had to identify it. I did a diagnosis, I made a list. I've done it many, many times. And I found that one of the things I wasn't doing was breathing correctly. That if I slow down my breathing, that would help me to relax a little bit, particularly something called stomach breathing, which is a very good way to breathe if you're talking a lot. And I found that I was sometimes speaking too much without enough pauses. So if I just allowed myself to pause for a second, breathe through my nose, and then continue my point. I would be more relaxed. I would see more confident. I would never seem out of breath when I was speaking. So here is my challenge for you. I want you to record yourself speaking about a specific topic for 10 min. It doesn't matter so much what the topic is. You can choose a word, weddings, dinosaurs, something that you're able to talk about. Just give yourself a topic and open topic that you are able to speak about. Then after you've done that, if you want to have an outline, fine, if not fine, freestyle talking is okay. This is not the main point of this exercise. After you've done that, you've recorded it, ideally video, but if not audio is okay, watch it back or listen to it and do an objective presentation diagnosis. Then write down specifically what went well and what could have gone better. Make a list and then try it again. If you go through this, I think you're going to discover some things that you didn't realize before. And again, if it feels scary or you hate it or whatever, trust me. Trust me as someone who's had to watch themselves for hundreds of hours, videos and courses, hundreds, thousands of hours. It gets better, it gets easier when I see myself talking on video. It's like I'm looking at another person. It is no big deal. You get used to it. You just have to push yourself through that. You have to hatch yourself, Hats yourself. You're a little cheeky inside of an egg. Don't be in the egg anymore. Hatch out. See what kind of bird you are. Good luck. And I will see you in the next lesson. 8. Finding North Stars: Why it Matters and How to Do It: Before GPS, there were campuses to help us figure out which direction we should go. Before that, we used the stars, would look at the North Star and then figure out where we were and which direction to go. I don't know how to do that, but I'm pretty sure that's what people did. I think before there were stars, we just walked in circles. Maybe, I don't know. We're going to talk a little bit about having a North Star and why that's so important, and how to do that. And when I say a Northstar, what I'm really talking about is a role model. A role model is someone that you can look at who demonstrates something that you would like to strive toward. Not a hero, not an idle, not someone to worship, but someone who has something or is able to do something that you would like to do. Alright, that's a role model. So we have defined what a role model is, but what is the use? What is the utility of a role model when it comes to presenting ideas? Think about something that you're able to do. Well. How do you know you're able to do that? Well, let's take running for example. You might look at yourself now and your previous self a year ago. And you might say, alright, I can run farther now than I could a year ago. And I can run faster now than I could a year ago. So you're using yourself as a basis of comparison. But how do you know where you're going? Well, you can just create some goal. But how do you know that goal is possible? How do you know it's going to be successful? It can be helpful to have people out there who are better than you at something and you're on the same path as them, then you can take some of those things that they do and learn them to move closer to where they are. So you might take a world champion runner and maybe you don't expect yourself to be able to run as fast as they do. But you might learn something about how they run, about their training, about their diet. You might learn specific things from them because you know, it works for them. So this is the power of having a role model or a North star, someone we can move toward. It's not an emotional thing, we're not worshiping them. It's simply someone who has some skills that we don't have yet, but we're on the same path. And because of that, and because we can see that whatever they're doing works well for them because they're really good at that. We can learn some things. We can pick out some of the things that they are doing. Ah, I see I can make a couple of dietary changes that are going to allow me to maybe run more efficiently or have more energy when I'm running. Or maybe I should be doing some training at high altitudes to improve my ability to use oxygen. I don't know much about running. That's about the limit of what I know. But the idea is that you pick out people who have these things that you might learn. You might be able to learn from these people and incorporate those things in yourself. Now I am not saying you should copy them. There's a very big difference between directly copying and learning from someone. You should still make it your own, of course, right? But what can you do to model what they do or parts of what they do? Maybe they're a terrible person in general, it doesn't matter. Just they're good at this thing. How can I model that? How can I get something from what they're doing and use it for myself to become a better presenter. Okay, so here's what I would like you to do. I would like you to pick a few role models to three. For role models, people who you really enjoy listening to naturally, who you feel are good at expressing themselves, telling stories, making things clear. It might be a lecturer, it might be an influencer. It might be someone from YouTube, someone you really think expresses ideas. Well. Pick a few of those. Now. Broadly. What do you think they're really good at doing? Maybe if you pick a lecturer, are they good at explaining very abstract concepts with interesting examples that help the idea click in your mind. Maybe that's what it is. If it's an influencer, maybe they're really good at drawing you in engaging you to keep you focused on what they're saying. They're really good at that you're picking very broad things. You're trying to identify what it is that makes you like to listen to them, that make you like to watch them, alright? The next step, okay, Don't build a shrine to them. Human beings are fallible creatures. Nobody is perfect. We're not talking about heroes here. We're talking about a role model in a specific area, okay? Now, what are the specific things that they do which make them excellent in those areas? So you could try to break down that lecture you like to listen to. I really like a lecturer who talks about language. His name is John mic water. He's a teacher with The Great Courses. He's got some great courses by the way, that you should check out. But I love that he uses humor to talk about academic topics. And his humerus specifically is corny jokes that are not individually hahaha funny, but, but just sort of as a whole experience, make his lectures enjoyable to listen to. He will also use really interesting, silly examples to demonstrate a point he's trying to make. So I might go through and list out specifically some of the things that I think he's doing that make me really enjoy listening to him. So okay. I like this lecturer. He's really entertaining to listen to and learn a lot y then y, because I'm going to tear down my john mic order shrine. I'm not worshiping him, but because he uses corny jokes that fit his personality. He makes silly and memorable examples that help complicated ideas stick. And those are just two things, but I could go on and pick out specific things. So you start big and you then go small. Now once I've identified those specific things, what steps can I take to then model them? Alright, well, modeling, remember, is when we don't copy someone exactly, but we take that idea and make it our own. That's very important. A very important distinction between modeling and copying. Copying. You try to do what other people do exactly. That is not what I'm saying. Modelling, you take what they're doing and make it your own. You say, okay, he uses jokes, humor specifically to make the lecture feel kind of fun and interesting. And he uses short, silly examples, okay, well how can I make that my own? But his style of jokes maybe doesn't quite work for me, but I have my own sense of humor so I can make sure when I'm planning my outline to remind myself to make occasional funny comments and remarks that are my style, right? Instead of if I'm making some complicated point or I'm trying to explain something instead of making that just a statement, I might put a twist on it to make it odd or silly, to make it more memorable. So I might use those two ideas, incorporate them in my presentations to then continue to iterate and improve my presentation skills. So again, what is the value of having a North star or a role model as a presenter? The value is, you're able to see a little further down the road in specific areas. You're able to learn things from those role models, starting with the general and then going into the specific things they do. And then you're able to take some of those specific things and think about how to integrate them into your own presentation style. To now have a new tool in your tool belt. Something new you can use to improve. And this is how you get better, alright? And it's really that simple. Now, why don't I just give you a list of great speakers? Because that's not how it works. I'm giving you a guideline for how to do this, but I'm not telling you who's a great speaker because that is a subjective thing. You have to first ask yourself the question, who do I naturally love to listen to? Because if I say, here's five people you should learn from, That's my opinion. It's all opinion. Right. So what's your opinion? Pick a few people, not five, again, two to four people who you really like to listen to. You naturally want to listen to them. And then start your analysis. You analyze what they're doing from big to small. And then you try to model it and put it into the practice that you're doing. So that is my challenge for you. Identify two to four North Stars or presentation role models. I like to call them North Stars. And then build a specific action plan for yourself around how you can model them. And again, do not copy. Model. Modeling means making it your own, not forcing someone else's style into your style. That is not how you find your voice. Modeling, modeling, not copying. Good luck with that. Let me know if you have any questions and I will see you in the next lesson. 9. What is a good hook?: If you could snap your fingers and change one thing about your life as it is right now. What would it be? Now, think carefully about that, because you only have one chance. What are you going to choose? Wealth, freedom from pain, happiness. You can choose one thing. Now, whatever your answer is, ask yourself a second question. Why did I choose that? Why did I wish that? Okay, that's a hook. A hook is meant to grab your audience by the brain, like a fish hook and make them listen. We talked about attention earlier in the course. We talked about walking along a street fair or a street market, looking at all the vendors, What is the hook that gets you to pay attention to one and not all the others. A hook grabs your audience by the brain. And this is something that you do right at the start of your presentation. So that they're listening. If they're listening right at the beginning, this could be with one person. Maybe you're just having a conversation. Maybe you're just trying to explain something to somebody. Well, you use the hook to make them focus. And that makes them more likely to stay engaged on YouTube, for example, if you make YouTube videos, the most important two things that YouTube cares about is number one, while they care about a couple of things, but they care about number one, your, your click-through rate. And number two, they care about engagement. How much time people spend watching your video. The thing that makes you click is the thumbnail, the picture. So the thumbnail is the hook. And then once you've hooked someone, then you have to have an interesting video that keeps people watching and keeps them engaged. It's the same idea when to grab someone's attention and then hopefully keep them engaged. If you have a very bad hook, that means very low engagement throughout. Even though someone is sitting there listening to you, they have to be there. Their mind is not really tuned in to what you're saying. People will start to tune out. Now there are different types of hooks and that's what we're going to talk about. Pick one that fits what you're trying to achieve. And don't forget to consider the kind of thing that will get your audience's attention. It's very important to know who your audience is because everybody is different. And of course not everyone in the audience may be the same. But if you know generally the kind of person you're talking to, if you're able to generally identify your audience, then it's going to be easier to pick the right kind of hook, right? Right 10. Types of Hooks: Part 1: Let's now go through some hooks. We're going to be talking about common hooks that you can use at the beginning of your presentations. You can take them and adjust them and use them depending on the situation, of course. But at least this can get you thinking about how to make your own hooks, alright, and we're gonna be talking about it by type, and I'll be giving you a few examples. So here we go. A rhetorical question. This is a question that you ask that doesn't require an actual answer, right? For example, if I ask you, if you had one wish, what would you wish for? I'm not necessarily expecting everyone to answer me immediately or ever. Just think about that in your head. So it's a rhetorical question. Rhetorical questions might start with, wouldn't it be amazing if or do you think something like that? And we'll go through some examples. But the point is you're asking a question that gets your listener to start thinking about something. And you're using that to pull them in to grab their interest. That then you can explore whatever that is in your presentation and have their own answer to the question. Playing along as you go, right? They can be sort of bouncing their thoughts against your thoughts. As you're speaking in a way they're kind of now participating with you in your presentation, even if they're not saying anything. So some examples. Let's say you're doing a presentation. It's toward the end of the year. For some colleagues, you might say, Do we really have to spend the rest of Q4 sitting on our hands? Okay, that might get people to start thinking about why isn't there really a plan for what we do in Q4? And yeah, we should at least come up with something, because our whole strategy is based on what we're going to do at the beginning of next year. That's a whole wasted three months. What are we doing? Okay. So you've got the gears moving. The gears are turning and that's a good thing you want to turn people's gears. How about this? If a lack of data is our main issue, why aren't we building more feedback loops? Now no one has to specifically answer that maybe. But I want to talk about my idea, how we build more feedback loops. So I want to start with this question. If a lack of data is our main issue, why aren't we doing this? To get people to ask themselves, yeah, why? Yeah. Good point. And then as I start explaining, they're more likely to, number one, be engaged and to sort of be thinking along with me and they might have better questions at the end. How about wouldn't it be? And I I like questions that start with would or wouldn't because as hypotheticals they get people imagining and kind of daydreaming. Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to plug stuff in? Wouldn't it be nice? Oh, yeah, that would be nice. We've got wires and plugs everywhere. Now I didn't even know what that topic is about. Maybe it has something to do with wireless charging. I don't know, but I'm getting you to think about that at least so that now we're participating in my presentation. You are now part of it with me because I've made the gears start turning. Now a variation on the rhetorical question is a hypothetical question. This is just focusing on imaginary things where it, a rhetorical question is just something that someone is going to be thinking about to themselves. A hypothetical is focusing on the what if only if and would. If we had the right personas. How much different what are sales look? Now we don't, so we don't know, but you can start thinking about that. It's the same thing. Basically, it's just a specific way to ask the rhetorical question. What would you do? I love this one. What would you do if this is a great, great style for a question to use as a hook. Because hypotheticals get people to answer a question for themselves. Not just thinking about the question, but answer, what would you do if they start building worlds inside of their heads? It's really great. What would you do if there were no budget constraints? So far? We've only been talking about what we can do because of our budget. But if I want to change the picture, if I want people to see things from another point of view? What would you do if there were no budget constraints? Well, there aren't that we have budget constraints. No, no. What would you do if there weren't? Now we can maybe explore that question or I can explore it in my presentation, or maybe it's interactive. Maybe this is a conversation. Now we've thought different thoughts. We've considered what we might do if the budget weren't an issue, then we can take those new thoughts and see if they fit in the budget constraints, right? It opens up new possibilities. This sort of hypothetical is great for getting people to change their way of thinking, to unlock a new thought, to put them in an environment that they don't usually live in, in their minds, right? What if you were on Mars right now? That's not a good, necessarily a good hypothetical question. But what I did just now is make you picture yourself on a planet surrounded by reddish colored dirt. And now you have to think about what you would do. Well, what you would do if we didn't have a space suit as probably, you probably wouldn't make it very long. But the idea is to place people in a new frame of reference, right? How would you react if someone driving by in a car hit you with a raw egg? Now, maybe I want to say that that's what happened to me. And I wanted to tell you about a lesson I learned from that experience. It did happen to me. But you've never had that experience before. If I asked you to think about it, you might consider your reaction and then compare that to mind when I tell you what I did, right? How would you react if actually, I don't remember how I reacted. I think I just kept walking because I was scared that they were going to throw in another raw egg, but it happened to me and it was it was pretty scary. I'm not sure why they did it, but it was weird and I will always remember it. I don't have a presentation about it, but it is an unforgettable thing that happened. Making it personal. Isn't it weird that when you watch a new TV show at the beginning, you don't really care who these people are. Maybe you haven't seen these actors before, even it's a totally new show. You're not aware of the characters, you don't know anything about it. That feeling right at the beginning of my investors just to show, I don't know. But by the end of the show, you care about these people more than three foot in your real life. And this show matters to you. And you want to talk about it with your friends. But there's still just fictional people. What's going on there? We have this natural thing called empathy. And it can be triggered. But it has to be triggered from real people with real experiences. And if we never find out about someone, it's really hard to have our empathy trigger flipped. That the right thing to say, the empathy trigger pulled. The empathy switch, flipped the empathy trigger poll. Yeah. It's hard to have that happen. If we don't know something, we need some information in order to start to care about other people. That's just how human beings are. So by making it personal, at the beginning of your presentation, you are drawing your audience in. And you're making them feel invested in what you're going to say. Because they might not necessarily care. They might not necessarily be interested in your topic. But now they are because you've made them interested in you a little bit. You have flipped that empathy switch, right? Just like the TV show, that's what you're doing. So maybe I'm an HR manager and I'm doing an overview of some of the things that we've done throughout the year, some of our newer policies. One of the things is showing our staff that we really care about their lives. We don't just care about their productivity, right? And so right at the beginning, I tell a little story. Instead of just saying, this year we did three things. Number one, number two, right? Maybe I start my presentation by saying last week, one of our engineers, Samantha, came into my office with tears in her eyes. She was smiling ear to ear. And she said the care package that we've put together for her return to work made her feel like returning to work after her maternity leave was like returning to her family. And that story might make you start to feel something about the policy rather than just hearing about what we did and the new rule and the new policy we put in place. I tell you a little story. You visualize that That's kinda like me broadcasting a little TV show into your mind, right? But it might be a personal story about you, the presenter. When I was growing up, school was so competitive. Getting high scores was the top priority, which meant basically constant study. I was working day and night doing homework, exercises. It was the only thing that mattered. But my grandma who lived with us when I was little, I had the bigger view in mind. She would close my books without asking me, no matter what I was doing, no matter what I was working on. Sometimes I would look up in shock and she would say, okay, let's take a break and paint something. I think without her influence, I never would have found my interest in design. So instead of just telling you I'm interested in design, or telling you about being a designer or what it takes to do design well or whatever. When my presentation, I start with that little personal story that makes you visualize something in my childhood that now makes you care about me a little bit. Rather than just hearing my ideas. That is a great hook. Doing a show of hands or a pole right at the start of your presentation. This is a way to directly get participation, to directly involve people in your presentation or whatever you want to talk about. If you ask the hypothetical question, they are participating mentally, right? But if you actually ask people to put their hands up to participate, they are actually part of the overall experience. And that can be a very powerful way to get people to care about what you're going to say. Because now it's not just you presenting to them. Now, it's kind of everybody here in an experience, everyone here kind of together, creating something. Yeah, of course you're probably saying the most, you're probably doing all of the work, but at least now they're a little bit part of it. So this can be done with a show of hands. This can be done by asking people to raise their hands or sometimes to get verbal feedback. This depends very much on the venue. It depends on if you're talking to five people or two people or 100 people, right? You might use a pole. If you have a way to do a poll, maybe before you get people to vote on something, you can get people to put their hands up. If it's three people, it probably doesn't make sense to have everyone put their hands up. And it might be better to directly just ask, what do you think? Yes or no, do you yes or no, right. It might be better to do that. So that's where it's really important to know your audience and also understand what works in different kinds of settings by a show of hands. Who here thinks the original Star Wars films are the best ones. Okay, Then you see probably most people raise their hand. And then you report the results. If you're up higher than everyone else and you can see everyone else, then you're in a position to see. And so you can say, okay, almost everybody. If you're in a smaller setting or online, maybe in a video call, you might have people voting and you can announce the results there. If you're in a smaller setting with maybe five or ten people, then maybe you do the show of hands and say, because you can see everybody or you have a couple of people give, give verbal feedback. Again, all of those are okay, but you have to kinda understand the setting and what's appropriate. How about this? Raise your hand if you think the current bonus structure is flawed, okay? I want to explain why this could be good or not so good. So we're sitting around a table, conference room table, 12 people here. Raise your hand if you think the current bonus structure is flawed. So we have a structure for our bonuses. And many people think it's an issue and I'm trying to get down to the real data right. Now in this sort of situation, if people feel that they are risking something like other people's favor, or they might be judged by voting one way or the other. Then you might want to do something anonymous. You might have people write down on a piece of paper what they think without writing their name and then read the results were read through those right at the beginning. So just be aware of that. How many of you have student loans hands up, how many of you have student loans? And again, if that's a video call, you might have a voting function or you might have people type things in the chat. Type? Yes. If you have student loans and no, if you don't, something like that. But whatever works in this situation, the main point is you're getting people to do something, to participate right at the beginning, to pull them into your presentation. How about a prop or a visual? A prop as a physical thing that you have with you. A visual is something that everyone can look at right at the beginning. Now if it's something that's boring or not very memorable, there's probably no point in having that. But if it's impactful, if it really gets people's attention, it can certainly be worth doing. Of course, it is. It depends on the situation, but I can think of a few examples where this really did make an impact. There's a TED talk from quite a few years ago where Bill Gates is talking about the possibility of a pandemic. And he rolls out right at the beginning, a barrel of food that is rations for people to eat if there's some sort of nuclear disaster. And that image gets people in a certain frame of mind. You wouldn't be thinking about that sort of food unless there were a serious emergency and things had gone very wrong. He's just getting people's attention there. And Bill Gates tends to do that kind of thing. Now if it's a work-related presentation, this may be less effective unless it's something that really grabs everyone's attention and, you know, it's going to do that maybe because you know, the people here and you know what's going to get them to focus on what you're about to say. Maybe it's a handwritten letter. You're in a business of producing or manufacturing something. And it's easy to lose track of the end result. You know, how the product really matters to people. But I bring a handwritten letter from a six-year-old about how much this means to them. This thing that we make by reading this letter, not just reading it in an e-mail, but having the physical letter in my hand and showing it to you and reading from it and seeing the little handwriting, the terrible handwriting that's very messy. That might have an impact on people. Get people to really pay attention and maybe empathize with what you're about to say or see something in a different way. So a prop or visual can also be very impactful as a hook. Alright, so let's take a break. I want you to start thinking about these if you like, right a few ideas down for hooks that would work for you in your presentations. Now we're going to go on and talk about some more different types of hooks. 11. Types of Hooks: Part 2: Now, one that's risky or could be risky is a joke. Because jokes are not always funny. Sometimes not funny. Jokes are funny. Dad jokes, which are not funny, can actually be funny, but also humor tastes change over time. Still, jokes can be a really great way to start a presentation. If you're prepared to risk it. And you think what you're going to say is funny. If you go to the TED website at the time of me speaking and for the last, I don't know how many years one video has been right at the top by an educator named Ken Robinson. And the thing that makes his talk quite special is that he's very funny. He uses a lot of humor. At the beginning of the presentation, he walks out on stage and talks about how great the conference has been. He says This has been so great. In fact, I'm leaving that comment which is not hilarious, but it's, it's, I think pretty funny, at least gets people to relax and chuckle a little bit, which then makes the ideas that he talks about stick more. Humor is not just good for a hook, not just good at the beginning of a presentation, but also to use throughout if you know how to do it, if you can, to really make an impact and make your ideas stick. This is where you need to be aware of your voice, your unique style. Because hey, listen, not everyone can use humor and that's okay if you're naturally not funny or don't think in that sort of way than maybe don't force it, find other things to get people's attention and get them to be engaged. And if you're naturally funny, use that in your style. You can be funny even in very serious presentations if you know how to do it. Well, a bold statement, saying something that's really going to make people wake up. Think of it as splashing your listener in the face with a glass of cold water. They're looking at their phone, they're thinking about other things. You want to splash them in the face, make them wake up, and pay attention. So this is the power of a bold statement as a hook. And it depends on the situation. You have to know what a bold statement will be. But for example, maybe I'm the founder of a small startup company. And this has been a rough year for us. And I want to make sure that people are laser-focused on changing things so that we have a better year next year. So I say right at the start, if we don't make big changes, now, we won't be here next year. The company won't even exist. I didn't know it was that serious. Okay. I'm listening. Let's rally the troops. Let's work together. And so whatever you are about to say, I'm going to listen very carefully. By the year 2060, people will be able to decide how long they want to live. To decide how long they want to live. That's a groundbreaking thought. People don't usually think about their lifespan in terms of a choice. Oh, I wanna be five-hundred, I wanna be 1,000. Okay. So that's a bold statement that's going to get people to pay attention perhaps to my talk about longevity. Believe it or not, I've never eaten pizza in my entire life, not even one byte. What? Sorry. One of the most popular foods on the planet you've never eaten in your entire life? I don't know what you're going to talk about, but whatever it is, I cannot wait to hear more. Because what kind of person has never even tasted a single byte of pizza? This, this is going to be interesting. So that can be a great hook to use right at the start. Again, to just wake people up and get them to focus on what you're saying. A quotation. This is something someone famous once said, or maybe an excerpt from a book. People like to quote Shakespeare, people like to quote picasso. Oops, that's me. So having a quotation might set the stage for or set the tone for what you're going to talk about. It's usually Compact. Hopefully if it's a good one, It's dense enough to contain some really interesting ideas. Otherwise it probably wouldn't be a quotation that people talk about, right? There's some interesting things that Einstein said. There are some interesting things that Maya Angelou said. So fine ones that resonate with you and fit what you're about to talk about as a way to set that tone and get people sort of In the mood for the topic of your presentation and hopefully paying attention from the start. Vince Lombardi said, practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect. That's one of my favorites. That is a great quote. The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute. The man who does not ask is a fool for life. That Confucius quote, has always stuck with me. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is infinite. That's William Blake. So again, the idea here is just to find something that you feel encapsulates your primary idea or ideas. Something that is usually succinct, that is going to grab people's attention. That then they can refer back to as you're talking. They might not do it consciously but unconsciously. And that can be a great way to sort of tie up your presentation with a little bow and also have that hook to grab your listener's attention from the start. And I watering fact or statistic. This is something that people probably don't know, that it's going to kind of blow their minds. They didn't know it was that much. They didn't know. Was that bad? They didn't know it was this crazy. Did you know that more than 30 million adults can't read above a third grade level? What? I had no idea it was that high. This year. We lost members at a rate of 250 every five-minutes. Now sometimes this is a matter of if you want to get people to have some perspective and see something in a different way. Selectively choosing what's going to have impact. Because if, if I am responsible for presenting this information, it sounds more shocking to say 250 every 5 min than to say however many that is every month, right? It may have more impact if I put it in five-minute chunks as opposed to one month chunks. If I say the number over one month, people might say, Oh yeah, well that's normal. But if I say 250 every five-minutes, that's going to hopefully make people wake up and pay attention. Over 30% of adults sleep with a stuffed animal at night. That's not what you would expect, right? 30% of adults, we don't usually think of that. That means maybe me, who knows? Who people start looking around and wondering well with whom or is it a her? It's taught me, I don't sleep with a stuffed animal at night. So this way of putting things in terms of numbers, That's going to grab someone's attention because it might not be what you expect or it sounds very impressive or very shocking, an eye watering fact or statistic. This is also a good way to get someone's attention. Finally, an analogy or metaphor. This is connecting things together, connecting ideas together in a fresh way that maybe people haven't thought of before. And that when people hear it makes them think a little more and makes them again, like asking a question, kind of mentally participate in the presentation. So we might say something like hoping to get word of mouth without a referral program is like wishing on a star. It's magical thinking. So if we just want word of mouth, we don't have a way to get it, a plan for getting it. Essentially, we're just saying Please, please. I want to have word of mouth on a star. So yeah, that's true. We should at least have a mechanism. Maybe I'm trying to convince my team to build a referral program that's going to actually help us get word of mouth, make it easier to get word of mouth. Advertising, explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it, but the frog dies in the process. I like that one. That one is not mine. But it is making a comparison between things that makes you realize that yeah, maybe jokes shouldn't be explained because then they're not funny anymore. So if you don't get it, you don't get it. I'm so sorry. Don't ask me to explain myself. I like that one. Maybe we make a simple comparison. A good bonus program is like a boost button for employees. So if we haven't really analyzed or thought about the bonus program that we have for our company, for our employees. Maybe we should start thinking about it. Because if you really think about what a good bonus program is, if it's done well, it's like hitting a boost button to make them work harder, to make them more productive, to make them work more efficiently, right? Oh, yeah, that is kind of what it is. It's like having a a boost button like in a video game. I never thought about it that way. Idea unlocked. Now. Now I've got you listening. So let me talk about my idea for a new bonus program for our company. So those are just some ideas for hooks that you can use at the beginning of your presentations. Of course, not the specific ones that I gave, but the different types of hooks you might use. I want to emphasize that you have to make these unique for what you're talking about, for your presentation style and for your audience. Think deeply about your audience. Who are you talking to? What kind of person? What are they thinking? What is their purpose in being here to listen to you? How many people are you speaking to? Is it three? Is it ten? Is it 500? Is it Who knows? Because you're making a YouTube video and you don't know how many people that's going to reach. At least. Think deeply about this and then think about hooks that you can use to grab that audience's attention and keep them engaged throughout your presentation, it is essential to get them to start listening, paying attention from the very beginning, right? And also these hooks I will reiterate, should fit your individual voice, right? You're starting to break free from your egg shell to hatch yourself. They should fit you. Everyone's different, right? You don't have to use all of them. Find ones that work for you that fit your style. You're developing voice, and that's going to help you also build confidence. If you have any questions about this, let me know and I will see you in the next lesson. 12. Five Steps for Building Impactful Presentations: Overview: So far in this course, we've been working to create a foundation that we're now going to start building upon. First, we're going to go through the actual process of building a presentation. Now we didn't do that at the start because we need the foundation first. But now we're ready to get into it. This is going to be a five-step process and we're going to go through each step in detail. Then we're going to get into some higher-level strategies, best practices, methods that are going to take you from where you are to being the presenter that you really want to be, to gain in skill, to be able to craft your ideas and present them clearly and effectively. To fully hatch, find your voice, find your confidence, and be able to do a presentation like it's no big deal to really have an impact when you speak. So that's all coming up. I hope you're ready. I hope you're excited. I certainly am. Let's get into it. 13. Step 1: Define Your Audience: Way back in 2019/100 years ago, a trailer was released for a Sonic the Hedgehog movie. There had been buzz and rumors about a movie based on this classic video game character that's been around forever, right? Apparently a kids movie. So people were excited and finally the trailer was released and the Internet nearly lost its mind. You may remember this. It was not a good reaction. People did not like it. They were very uncomfortable. But why why did they get so upset? Well, you can go look it up yourself. It's really interesting to see. But the character design made people feel uncomfortable because it was too realistic. It had animal hands and very small eyes and looked a little bit too much like a real hedgehog. Instead of a cartoonish hedgehog like in the video game, like you would expect to see in a kid's movie, in an animated movie for kids, usually the characters have exaggerated features. They're kind of cartoonish. And so that's what people were reacting to. It didn't meet their expectations. It offended people somehow. It didn't feel right. So they had to go back to the drawing board, redesign the character, and then they released the movie. I think it did pretty well in the box office after that. But the updated character had big white gloves and much bigger eyes and different for they completely redesigned the main character. Why did this happen? Why did they have to redesign the character? Why am I sharing this example? Well, it really highlights the importance of defining your audience before you do anything. If you don't define your audience, if you don't know who you're talking to, then whatever you make, whatever you do, whatever you present, could come across as a kind of mushy nothing. But if you know who you're talking to, if you define your audience than what you create, is going to have a better chance of meeting the expectations of that audience, of being useful to them, of being interesting to them. So when it comes to planning your presentation, making the content of your presentation, choosing your presentation style. You need to know who's going to be listening. You need to know who's going to be watching. You need to know who your presentation is four, and that is your audience. So treat your presentation kind of like a movie in that way. You're making a little movie for a certain type of person to watch and they might interact with it a little bit more. But that's the basic idea. So that brings us to Step one of our process of building a presentation from beginning to end, define your audience. There are a few different ways to approach defining your audience and we're going to focus on the question and answer approach. But I wanted to just make you aware of another way that you might do it. This is called building a persona. A lot of companies, when they're selling a product, they may do this. They may build a specific persona of a person with a name like Carol, with a specific set of traits, things about Carol, things about her life. This is a fictional person. And then everything that company does to market its products or even improve its products will be kind of centered around this fictional persona. You can find plenty of guides online about how to build a persona if that's something you're interested in. But we're not going to focus on that method. As I said, we're going to focus on questions and answers to get at the audience. Simply answer a few key questions and get a sense for the kind of person or people that you are going to be talking to. And again, that's going to help you structure, build, plan, create, and make your presentation. So let's get into our questions. Does your audience have a common background or a shared context? Now this could be a number of different things. So you want to think about it generally. But if it's a job interview, for example, the people interviewing you, whether it's one person at a time or several. These people have something in common They all work at this company. Okay? Alright, well that's one thing you might think about that they are all considering whether or not you're qualified for the job. So they're going to be trying to evaluate you and they're all looking at you as a potential colleague. Because if you make it through the process, they're going to be working with you. And there may be more things as well. But that's something they all have in common and it is specific to this company. You may handle interviews for different companies in different ways. Maybe you do research about the culture of this company. You know something about how they work and how people communicate. So you might adapt your presentation about your work history to what you know about the company that's a shared thing. But it could be cultural. Maybe, you know, you're speaking to people from your country, right? So they might know some cultural references. They might know some idioms that you'll be able to use so that people can understand you, but maybe not. And if not, that's another kind of thing that they share and we'll get into that in a moment. How much expertise or industry knowledge do they have about what I'm going to share? If they have a high level of expertise, you may choose to use more specific jargon, more specific language, because you don't need to cover the basics, because you're speaking to experts in something that you're also an expert in. So you know that they know that stuff. You can be more specific. You can use more jargon. But if not, then you need to consider that and perhaps speak more broadly. Maybe use more analogies. What are the overall demographics of your audience? Do you know if you're speaking to younger people, people in your generation, people who are older than you, you know, generally which part of the world they're from. Do you know if it's a 50, 50 gender split? Do you know if you're speaking to more men than women? This is something to think about when you're building your presentation, when you're planning your presentation, and the style and the references that you may use. Does everyone speak your native language fluently or not? This is true, particularly if you have a broader audience. If you're speaking to a few people and you know what they know, then you may not have to think about this, but as your audience gets broader, you really need to think about the language thing. So let's take, for example, a native English speaker. If you think that there's a pretty good chance that people in your audience don't speak English natively, then you may consider slowing down a little bit. You might consider enunciating more clearly. You may think about making fewer cultural references that are very specific, maybe using fewer idioms. Why? Because that makes what you're saying more accessible. And the same goes for if your native language is something else, it's true for every native language. If you ask yourself this question and the answer is, yeah, they're probably not all native in my native language. Then you may want to make some presentation style decisions that will make what you say more accessible and easier to understand. Are there any built-in assumptions or expectations? Now this one is a little bit tricky. But the sonic example that I gave at the start highlights this very well. People expect that a CGI character in a movie based on a video game character that's for kids is going to look fun and silly and have big white gloves and giant eyes. That's the expectation. So it's not that you can't go against expectations. It's that you have to know what your audience's expectations might be. Because if you're not aware of those, you could be facing an uphill battle to get your ideas across. Sometimes it's not worth fighting that battle unless you really know what you're doing and you really know why you're doing it. Sometimes meeting the audiences, basic expectations in style, in format will allow them to more easily accept your ideas. And I'm not telling you that you have to fit all of your audience's expectations. I'm not telling you that you have to squeeze yourself into a mold or you can't be experimental or try crazy stuff you should, but just be aware of what your audience's built-in assumptions or expectations might be. So that then you can make informed decisions about how to say, what you're going to say, about how to structure, for example, your presentation. A simple example of that might be a quick five-minute update that every team in the company does. Once a week, a weekly update. And maybe in your team, you take turns to see who's going to do it, right? Our people expecting some elaborate crazy against the grain thing. Know they're kind of expecting a simple, brief, easy to understand, five-minute update about what's going on, what went well, what didn't go well? So do you really want to reinvent the wheel there, or do you want to fit into what people are expecting and deliver a very clear, well-organized update. I think it's generally a good idea to go with that unless you have a very specific reason not to and you know why you're doing it. Remember, if you're going to do something, you have to know why you're doing it. The why is very important. So I won't tell you what you have to do. I'm just saying, be aware of those expectations. Now. What if the thing that your audience has in common is that they don't really have much in common. It's a very broad audience. What do you do? Then? My suggestion would be, I think It's probably in the minority of cases. My suggestion would be to focus on making your presentation as interesting as possible. You don't know exactly who's listening. You don't know exactly who's in the audience. So focus on making it really engaging, really interesting. Use anecdotes, use humor. And okay, I'm not exactly sure who I'm talking to here, but whoever is listening, I hope they're laughing. I hope they're really paying attention because what I'm saying and how I'm saying it is very interesting, at least, at least you can do that. So get started with this. My challenge to you is to think about a topic that you might like to talk about. You don't have to actually make a presentation for this. Then identify your audience. Go through these questions and see if you can narrow down the type of people that you're talking to. If you want to try the persona method, that's fine as well. If you have any questions about this, let me know, let me know how it goes and I will see you in the next lesson. We're gonna be talking about the next step in the process 14. Step 2: Set Objectives: Have you ever achieved something completely by accident? You had no idea what you were doing, no plan. You were just flailing around and something great happen. It happens, right? It's called a fluke. But usually when you achieve something, it's because you had a thing in mind that you are moving toward. You made a plan and you were taking deliberate steps toward it. That's usually how it goes. You don't get a gold medal in the Olympics without trying, without having the idea that you might get a gold metal first and then working hard toward that. Well, we need to do that also. With presentations. You shouldn't leave the impact that you have on your audience up to chance. You shouldn't just make a presentation, I don't know. And then hope it goes well. Hope it makes sense. I hope it convinces them, hope it changes their mind. Hope it inspires them. That's why we have objectives. Objectives give you a fixed point to move toward. So that brings us to step two of our process of building a presentation. From beginning to end, we have defined the audience. Now, we must set an objective. So let's talk about objectives and how to set a good one. A good objective should be clear, concise, and achievable. For example, I want you to leave this course with a clear roadmap for how to be an effective, impactful presenter. That's my objective. That is what I want to achieve with the long presentation. That is this course. Now, don't get mixed up here. There's your personal goals as a presenter and there's what you're trying to achieve your objective with a specific presentation. Now we're talking about how to make a presentation from beginning to end. So here we're talking about the objectives that you want to achieve for a given presentation, okay? For example. And it could be something very measurable, very quantifiable, or less not very measurable. I'll give you an example of a quantifiable objective. I would like to get a yes on my proposal. That's something we can measure. It's either yes or a no. Or I would like to get $3 million in funding from the investors that I'm pitching to. Maybe you're talking to a few different investors. You get $3 million. You have achieved what you wanted with your pitch deck, for example, or with your proposal presentation, for example. But it could be less quantifiable. Maybe you want your audience to feel inspired to take a smart risk. Now that's not something that you go around and ask them afterward, Hey, do you feel inspired to take a smart risk? Was my presentation about that topic good? Did I achieve what I was trying to achieve? No. There you can answer that question for yourself. There you might judge the audience's reaction. There you might listen to feedback. It's more subjective, but it is still an objective. So whether it's very quantifiable or not quantifiable, more subjective. It's okay, just make sure that it is clear, concise, and achievable 15. Step 3: Overview of Outlines: I have a vivid memory from high school. There was one day in history class when everyone was supposed to present on a specific topic. We all had our own topic. We had those cardboard things with pictures about the topic. And we would stand up in front of the class and talk about the topic. Now there was one kid who had completely forgotten about the project. He hadn't worked on it. He had procrastinated and on the day of he had completely forgotten that the presentations were that day. And he found out in the morning History class was later on, and he decided he was going to put the whole thing together that day before history class, I had spent weeks on mine, weeks researching, printing out pictures, working on my script. I think I had a script at the time, not an outline or a script. And so he was in not panic mode but you know, in a big hurry. He had a few books. He was sitting at the lunch table eating some fries. And I was there kind of helping. It was my friend. And one thing we did was instead of work on a script, we said, listen, There's no time for you to plan everything. You're going to say, Why don't you just decide a few key points that you're going to talk about one to three, and then just share one detail for each one. The time came, it was time to present. Everyone went up and did theirs. And then he went to the front of the class. Everyone was watching. Everyone knew that he hadn't prepared. The crazy thing was, it was one of the best presentations. Why? I think one reason is that it was fresh. He had yet come up with everything that day that morning. But the other thing was he knew where he was going. He had only three points to hit 123 with three specific things, little stories that would support the points that he was going to talk about. And that made it really clear, really easy to follow. And he seemed relaxed. He seemed like he was in a good mood because he was kind of surprised that he had anything. Instead of getting an F, he might get a C or even a b. So he was really happy and really sort of relaxed about the topic. And because he knew where he was going, it made sense and it was actually a pretty good presentation. So the takeaway here is not necessarily do everything at the last minute. Although sometimes that can work. I think the takeaway here is the outline is powerful. If you have a very good outline, if it's clear, if it's well-structured, you don't have anything to worry about. So now we come to step three of our process of building a presentation. From beginning to end. Step three, the outline, build a clear outline 16. Step 3: How to Build a Clear Outline: Outlines are made of waypoints along a path, not a script, not every word. These are specific places that you need to reach. And once you get to that place, you move toward the next place, toward meaning in that direction, without too many specifics about exactly how to get there. Now, we'll get into specifics about how to do this. But that's the general idea. I'm following an outline right now. So writing a speech, that's one skill. Giving a speech that's a specific skill, right? But impromptu speech is something else. If there's a bit of improvisation, then you're going to connect better with the audience. You don't want to be randomly talking about nothing. You're not quite sure what you're saying. So you want to know where you're going. But you want to use impromptu speech because that can be a big part of keeping your audience engaged. That is built-in engagement. I don't know if you've ever listened to a speech, but it can be hard to pay attention. Have you ever heard of political speech that's 20 min long. It hits rough it unless it's really, really well-written. But if someone is talking to you and it feels like you're participating a little bit. And you can see that they're thinking through how they're going to say, what they're saying as they're talking. There's something about that, that creates a connection and you want to use that, don't hide from that. That is something if you figure out how to do that, That's like a superpower. Write using improvisational impromptu speech, following an outline. That combination is the secret sauce of engagement. Alright, so let's talk about how to make the outline itself. When you are outlining, you want to keep each bullet point very short. It is there to remind you of what you want to say. It is not there to tell you how to say what you want to say. If it's really long and you're trying to read through it, then you might easily get lost. And you might not find the key point that you're trying to talk about. If it's very short, a couple of words, three or four words to just remind you, oh yes, that idea IS that example. Oh yes, this story, that is a much better way to stay on track to not get lost. And if it's too long, you get into that script territory where it starts to feel like a script. You're trying to tell yourself exactly how to say it. You want to stay away from that as well. Again, it's a presentation, not a speech. Use a structure that makes sense to you. This is where you want to really think about the best way to organize your outline so that it fits the way you think and the way you naturally go through things. Personally. I like to start with a main idea. And then under that, I will have a specific support or example. And then under that, I might have another point I want to make. That's generally how I do it. But sometimes if it's a larger topic, I might just do simple bullet points with each idea that I want to talk about doesn't work for everybody. You might build a mind map. Maybe that helps you. Maybe that's a good way for you to structure your ideas. Some people like to draw a circle with the main ideas and then other things connected to the circle. If that works for you, use that. Remember to leave room for improvisation, right? You're in charge. The outline is just the tool. It is not there to tell you exactly what to do at all times. It is your little path with waypoints and things to talk about. But if you think of a joke or something interesting to say or there's a way to interact. Something occurs to you spontaneously. It's okay to follow that. Don't let your outline force you to stay within very strict lines. Don't prevent yourself or don't let your outline prevent you from improvising a little bit. That improvisation can be good. It can be a great way to connect with your audience and to seem a little bit more loose and confident so that, you know, you're comfortable speaking rather than just following my outline like a robot, right? Let yourself improvise a bit, make revisions and changes as you get feedback. So if it's a very big presentation, maybe you're doing a proposal. Maybe it's for a job interview. You might be asking your friends for feedback. You might have early versions that you try out, talking through your work experience, talking through your proposal, how you structure it, right, get feedback and then make revisions. The first outline might not be the best one. Maybe there's another structure that will work. Maybe you can change the order of your points. There are a lot of things that you can do. So be open to making revisions, whether you're getting feedback from others or giving yourself feedback, iterate your outline until you feel like it flows really well, until you feel really confident to talk through it. That one idea flows naturally into the next. That the things that you have in the order that you have them in all clicks together perfectly and it makes sense in your head. Don't assume that the first one is the best one. And then finally, learn it like the back of your hand. Memorize the outline once you're really comfortable with the flow and you feel like you've got it right. Memorize it, and practice talking through it until it feels comfortable. Practice is key. Memorizing your outline will take a lot of stress away from you when you're trying to think about what to say next. It's just there. Again, I'm not saying memorize every word. Of course. You're just memorizing those waypoints because doing that keeps the structure in your head and then you always know where you're going. And because you know where you're going and you're very comfortable with your outline. Your audience is going to be able to follow along easily. And when you give an example that follows one point, it's going to make sense to them because it makes sense to you. And on top of that, because you're comfortable, you will come across as confident and relaxed. And if you come across as confident and relaxed, your audience is more likely to enjoy the presentation. They're more likely to understand clearly what you're saying. They're more likely to get more out of it. So memorize your outline, but don't memorize every word. So just to look at one possible outline structure, specifically, we might start the presentation with a hook. That's, that's a good one to start with. Then we talk about the first main idea. This is a key moment in the presentation. Maybe we'll mark that key moment or maybe we develop a little symbol to draw next to it to say, I want to make sure that people get this. I want to make sure they know what I'm talking about. That key idea, that main thing I'm talking about, I want it to be clear in their minds, okay? Then I want to explain that concept a little bit more, right? I'm not being specific about the content here. This is just the basic structure. Think of this as a template, okay, then after I've said the main idea, after I've explained the concept a little, I'm going to give an anecdote or an example. This is going to be another key moment. I want to make sure that the example really sticks in the minds of the audience. I want them to really get it. So main idea than the concept explanation. Then the example that really drives it home, that really makes it memorable. Alright, then I might give a few more details and specifics. I want to just make sure I clear up anything that could be confusing. So some specific points. And then one final thought. And this final thought is the thing that I want people to take home with them. This one final thought, not necessarily a summary of my presentation, but is a thing that I want to build toward throughout the presentation. And when people are driving home, they might be thinking about that one final thought. And then there may or may not be a call to action. This is when you actually give your audience something to do or something to think about, to take away from the presentation. That could be to make a decision, to vote for something, to give you $3 million. Whatever that call to action is. Of course, you don't have to have one, but it can be an interesting way to end a presentation. So my call to action for you is to choose a topic that you're interested in, that you care about. Maybe it's the same one that you chose when you were identifying your audience. You can choose a different one if you like. Then I want you to imagine that you're going to present on this topic. And I want you to write a simple outline. Find a structure that works for you. Go through a few iterations. If you can get some feedback, I would love to take a look at your outline. If you have any questions, let me know. And again, I would love to take a look. In the next lesson, we're going to be going on to step four of building a presentation. From beginning to end. We're gonna be talking about building your presentation deck. So I'll see you in the next one. 17. Step 4: Impactful Slides: Perhaps one of the most famous iconic presentations of all time is the announcement for the original iPhone. Whatever you may think of Apple, if you haven't seen that presentation, I strongly suggest checking it out. So Steve Jobs is up on stage talking through some new devices, some things that are going to be released, right? And he's talking about three new devices. One is a phone, one is an Internet communications device, and the other is a music or a media player. But then he says that again. And they're up on screen. There are three things up on screen, three things. The phone, Internet communications device, music player, or it might be a media, media player. Again, he says it again three times, four times, he keeps saying it. Then as he says that he increases the speed and says, Are you getting it? People are starting to get it in the audience. Then the slide changes. One slide drops down from the top with a boom effect. I know a little bit cheesy, but it's 2007. And there's one device there. And that's the key moment. The key moment is when these three things become one. We're talking about one device. And this is the original iPhone, right? So again, if you haven't seen that, check it out because it really highlights the importance of the visual support to add impact, to make things more clear in that case, to make a key moment in the presentation very impactful, to make it really hit home, to make it memorable. I still remember that. And that was way back in 2007. I think I was in high school at the time. Now, admittedly, I have seen it a couple of times since, but I remember that moment from the original the original presentation the first time that I saw it. And I think again, it highlights the importance of your deck, of your slides, of the visuals you choose. So let's talk about step four of building your presentation from beginning to end. Building impactful slides 18. Step 4: Key Elements for Slides: Before we get into methods and best practices, what are some of the elements that you might include in your presentation deck? Now I might say dec, sometimes I might say slides, sometimes, I mean those interchangeably. You might include clearly visualized data. Lots of data hard to describe. You might visualize that very clearly. You might include eye-catching or interesting graphics, things that are going to grab people's attention or anchor ideas that you're talking about. Maybe a few words on a slide to keep people following along with your points. They get distracted for a moment. They can return and know what you're talking about because they know what point you're on. They won't get lost. Visuals that add important context. Now that's pretty general, but something that you can show, perhaps because it's difficult to say or maybe not worth saying. And in the same way, diagrams, not really worth describing, or maybe very difficult to describe. Some things are really hard to describe if you try and if you do, people still don't really know what you're talking about because we can't always make a visual in our heads based on a description. But you might have a visual that shows that and it's suddenly becomes easy to understand and more intuitive. Okay? So those are some of the elements that you may include on your slides to make them clear and impactful 19. Step 4: Best Practices for Impactful Slides: Now that we've talked about the elements you may include on your slides, Let's get into some best practices and methods for how to build your slides. But first, a quick example. There is a TED talk that I really like. If you go to Ted and you search by popular, I think it's one of the top, the top ones. It's a TED Talk by Tim Urban and it's about procrastination. And in that presentation, he has these stupid drawings, hand-drawn characters. That at first you think, why are these here? Then as the presentation goes along, you realize how impactful those are, how much they add to the presentation itself. I encourage you to go and watch it. Tim Urban stock on procrastination. One of them is a little monkey. It's a hand-drawn monkey, and it's called the procrastination monkey. So what does that do? That silly little hand-drawn monkey, that procrastination monkey grabs your attention and allows you to connect the things that are being said about procrastination to that monkey. That monkey, when you think about it, then unlocks the ideas. And so it's a very powerful thing. It's kind of like an anchor for the ideas. If you're just talking, thoughts float away. You don't have something to grab onto. Having that clear visual, no matter how silly it is, having that clear visual can be a powerful way to get people to remember what you said, to get them to really connect with what you're saying. And even have empathy for what you're saying. If the visuals that you choose represent you, represent your style and how you think about things. So some of the best practices, things to keep in mind when you're building your deck. Visuals are able to emphasize fields, personality, uniqueness. Not that every presentation should, but that's something that visuals can do a lot better than an explanation, right? So if you want to emphasize a specific feeling, generate empathy, or gain empathy, get people to have an emotional response to what you're saying. You might choose visuals that do that, which is going to increase the impact of whatever you're talking about. Hopefully if you choose the right ones, you want to make sure that you're choosing visuals and building slides so that they reinforce what you are saying and not saying it for you. That's a key thing. Sometimes once we build the deck, we think, okay, well the deck is the thing. I'm just here to present it. That's flipping things around. That's like I'm the Assistant and the deck is the main thing. I'm just here as a mouthpiece. Again, you're not a mouth you are an agent. The deck is there to support you and what you want to say, not the other way around. And when you're building your slides, remember that the presentation is you and what you're saying, what you're talking about. And the slides are there to help make things more clear, make things more visual, impact, that stuff, right? To help you. They are your assistant, you are not their assistant. Your slides can make impactful moments more impactful. Think back to the Steve Jobs original iPhone announcement. When you watch that, if you watch it, if you haven't already seen it, you'll see what I'm talking about. That impactful moment is made more impactful by the slides. So perhaps you are doing a pitch for a job interview. And you want to build up to this key moment of showing a final design that you worked on for a long period of time. So for each slide you showed elements, you explain those. And then after talking about maybe how hard it was working with the team, it was so interesting to get to know everybody. Then you show the final product. And just talking about the final product is not going to be as impactful as Boom, showing it in that very important key slide. It's emphasizing the key moment. It's generally a good idea to have a consistent design language that includes colors, fonts, composition, the placement of the elements on the slides, all of that stuff. If it's random for every slide, if it's different in every slide. If one slide is everything to the left and the other slide is a different font with crazy colors. People may be judging you on that. Now, not everyone is a visual person, yes. But you might be talking to people who are visual people. I'm one of them. And a visual person is going to be distracted by ten different random fonts and colors that are all different on every slide. And crazy composition. And this is not hard stuff. You can download a template and use that. You can build your own template and use that. But just be consistent and consider your audience too. Probably don't want to use Comic Sans font on a presentation deck that's going to be presented to serious people. Think about that sort of thing, right? And I would recommend to just play it safe and find some templates out there that you like, and then stick with those. Be consistent. Don't try to get to creative if you're not too creative, because if you don't have that natural design sense, that aesthetic sense, It's hard to develop it. And that's the great thing about using a template because someone else has done that work for you. All you have to do is put in the interesting stuff, the content, the actual images, or if you're using any icons or diagrams or things like that, you add the content, you're following. A design aesthetic that maybe someone else who knows what they're doing has created. You want to communicate visually what is not easy to say? Think about that. Some things take a long time to explain. And after explaining everything, people are still trying to just figure out what you were talking about. Some things are not worth explaining. But if you see it, it's clear, intuitive. Immediately people will understand. Diagrams are a good example. Maybe that's a chart that shows all the employees in a company and who they report to. Law, if you try to describe that, that's gonna be an absolute disaster. But if you just show it, boom, there it is. Diagram. Oh wow. People will intuitively understand that. They will immediately get that right. Or maybe you want to show the diagrams of how data moves around in the back-end. And you're trying to communicate this to non-technical people. So to try to explain all of this requires you to use extra language because you're talking to people who, first of all might not know some of the jargon that you naturally use when you're talking to other people who are very technical. So you might instead just say, here's a diagram. This thing goes, the data goes from this database over here and that's what you're seeing. You show it, right? That's it. People can kind of intuitively get that. So always think about that. If, if something is very hard to describe, it may be better to just show and then talk about the simpler things you can express that you can say. Or you can give the basic idea, the rough picture and then your visual, your diagram can support that. And as I said, with text elements, using text on your slides is great. You should use text on your slides, but don't use too much. So what is the value? Imagine you're talking about three key things when you're on this slide. Okay? You're talking about those things and your audience. Some of them may not be paying attention to 100%, okay? But if you have those three key points on the slide, the text of those simple, just a few words. They're going to be able to grab on to that. If they lost focus for a second, they can look at your slides and realize where you are as you're talking. And then now they're back, right? You lost them for a second, now they're back. And your text, the text on the slide helps them stay focused. So those are some of the key things to make sure you do when you're building your slides. I'm not going to tell you exactly how to design them. Design trends change over time. Again, that's the power of using a template and I would encourage you to do that, but start thinking about how to use these elements to clarify things that are hard to describe, to anchor ideas that may not be easy to remember and to have more impact when you say things, those impactful moments can be more impactful if you choose the right visuals 20. Step 4: Personal Advice for Building Your Slide Deck: Now I'd like to just give you a few bits of advice that's more personal advice. So that's why it's separate from the best practices. If it works for you, that's fine. This is stuff that works for me. Okay, so just for your consideration, build your outline first. And then if you've done that well, all you're doing is translating your outline into slides. It's a lot easier to plan, structure, flow, and change things around with an outline than slides because you're on one slide and then another. It's kinda hard to feel the flow with the slides. I recommend going through the outline, making it clear, getting feedback on that, and then translating that to slides as the last step. I always build my slides as the last step. If you need to present, often, it may be worth signing up for a paid icon library or maybe even a stock image library, or maybe one of those platforms that have really good slide templates. There are a lot of them out there. I'm not going to name names because well, there are a lot of them out there. I'm not sponsored by any of them, but it's worth looking into. I have personally found it very useful to have a few memberships that I've signed up for whenever I need to build a deck, it's much easier, it's much faster. I don't have to do a lot of stuff from scratch. And especially when it comes to using icons, little graphics, it is very, very helpful to have get feedback on slides from someone who doesn't just tell you what you want to hear. We have to have people around you who are going to tell you the truth, right? People who are going to level with you and be totally honest. I have a few of those people when I have a high pressure situation or a deck that I need to work on. And I want to make sure it's really good. I will send it around and just ask people to give me some feedback. Now I'm a little extreme. I say only negative feedback. I don't want anything positive. That's just me. I like to find where the issues are rather than just knowing what's working well. But you don't have to do it that way. The key thing is get feedback, get input from others. Ask your friends their opinion about the style, about the visuals, whether it has impact. If you want, you could even record yourself doing the presentation and get feedback on the whole thing. Generally, clutter is a bad thing. This is my experience. If you have very cluttered slides than people are not going to be paying attention to the key thing that they're supposed to be paying attention to, right? So err on the side of simpler, again, my opinion, but we talked about that street market where everyone is trying to get your attention. If you have a bunch of things on a slide that's asking for your attention and you're looking around, are you paying attention to the key thing? If not, maybe you need to strip it down a little bit, make it a little simpler. I always try to go on the side of minimal simple. The key thing is there and nothing else is. And sometimes we want to decorate more, we want to add little elements. But remember the rule. If you do anything, ask yourself, why. Why did I do that? Why did I add that little random frill there? Is that really impactful that doing anything? Well, maybe, if not, get rid of it. My opinion, you are not a native English speaker. Also true if you are a native English speaker, make sure you're using perfect grammar, spelling, and punctuation on your slides. This one is my personal biggest pet peeve. If you're making slides and you're a serious person, and you don't know how to do correct punctuation, or you don't know how to spell a word correctly. Or there's a weird space in front of a period or something like that. What are you doing? When I see that? I think you're not a serious person, okay. You must not be serious. Otherwise, you would have spelled that word correctly, right? So it's not that hard to do. Every word should be spelled correctly. The grammar should be perfect. And you should have perfect punctuation. Just do that, right? It's not that hard, especially if your slides are not too busy. It's pretty minimal, right? Just do it. And sometimes you may not need a deck. That's something that we assume, Oh, I have to have slides. Do you always need slides? Sometimes you're presenting, it may be more impactful for you to have no slides, to just be talking. Is that more impactful? Ask yourself that. If no one is asking you to have a slide deck, would it be more or less impactful if you were just talking? If it's a story, if it emphasizes bringing people in, getting them to empathize, use their imaginations. Maybe it won't help you to have a slide deck. It's worth asking that question. Maybe it's something else. There's another, another TED talk with Simon Sinek, I believe is his name. And it's about asking the question Why I don't remember the exact name of the talk, but it's a really memorable talk, but maybe not that memorable. If I can't remember the name of the talk, I know what it's about. And instead of using a deck or slides, he has a little, well, it's not literal. It's a large Notepad and he's drawing on it with a marker drawing circles. And that sticks out in my memory. So in that case, that was a better tool probably than having slides prepared. Probably better than having nothing as well. So choose what's going to add to your presentation. And don't assume that it always has to be a slide deck. That's the go-to. That's kind of the standard, but it doesn't have to be that sometimes nothing is better. Sometimes a notepad is better, or sometimes prompts are better, or just pictures. Think about that as well. So my challenge for you is to build a simple slide deck for yourself. You can choose the topic that you chose earlier when you were choosing your personas. Build a little deck to talk about this, you built an outline already. You should have a structure. Now, choose the style, the aesthetic, which visuals you're going to use. Keep it simple, nothing too long. Build it, then get some feedback on it. Ask someone else what they think about it. And I would love to take a look. Alright, now we're going to go on to our last step of building your presentation from beginning to end. Step five, finding the flow 21. Step 5: Finding the Flow: Quite some time ago, I had a scheduled live stream that I was supposed to host and I was busy before, so I didn't really prepare. And in my head I said, it'll be fine. I've done these before. I'll come up with some stuff to say in the moment, people will ask questions, I'll answer questions. It'll be great. It was not great. It was a disaster. It was a disaster. Once it started, I didn't know what I was saying. I couldn't find my train of thought. I was wandering around, getting lost in my ideas. I was confused. The audience was confused. They weren't asking questions probably because they were confused, right? So it was a total disaster and I was so embarrassed that I deleted the episode. So I learned a couple of things from this experience. I learned. Number one, confidence does not solve all problems. You have to, if you're going to do something well, generally, actually be prepared unless you're experienced at doing improvisation. That is a skill. Some people do it really, really well. And sometimes I can do it well if I have some things to go on. But in that sort of situation, apparently not. Right. So you have to be prepared, you have to be mentally ready. And once you're doing something, you only have limited bandwidth. That's limited focus things. A lot of things you have to think about come up and you can't concentrate on all of them at the same time. This is what I call the bandwidth problem. The bandwidth problem is simply, you have a limit to how much you can pay attention to at any one time. If you're trying to pay attention to everything, what am I supposed to say? How am I presenting myself? What examples should I give? How should I respond to the audience, responding to me? All of those things that you might be thinking about as you give a presentation. If you have too many, then you're going to immediately lose confidence. You're going to potentially have a bad experience like I did, and likely that's going to have a negative impact on the quality of your presentation. Another reason, of course, that the outline is very important, but even more than that, you have to be fluent in your outline. I'll explain what I mean by that. If you just make an outline and you don't know really what's in it, and then you finished it, It's perfect. And two weeks later you have to present it, but you never practiced it before. You might forget what's actually there. And that can cause you to get lost, to not be able to flow from one idea to the next, right? So it is essential to be mentally ready to present your ideas, to be mentally ready to go through your outline naturally. In the key to that, honestly, pretty simple is practice. So in order to become fluent in your outline, you need to be practicing, especially recorded so that you can build comfort and build confidence in your outline, in what you're going to talk about as you gain in confidence. Because you're getting really fluent in talking through your outline. You know what ideas lead to the next thing. You know which examples support what, you know what slides are going to be there once you start to get the feel for it and you go through it a few times, your bandwidth increases. As your bandwidth increases and you're thinking less about what's coming up next. On this example. If you're thinking less about that stuff now you have more bandwidth to then be spontaneous, to be interesting in the moment, to connect with the audience. To look at somebody and ask them a question that you didn't plan to do. But it just seems right. You'll have more bandwidth to be a good presenter because you're not struggling with the basics of what you're talking about because you're just trying to remember the next thing because you didn't practice your outline enough. So confidence comes with practice. And with confidence comes a sense of being relaxed and being loose on the day. And if you're loose and relaxed, that comes through to your audience, they will feel that if they can feel that they're going to enjoy the experience more and you're going to have more impact. Practices, key confidence grows with practice and getting feedback from people you trust is essential. So as you're going, as you're practicing, you might get feedback from people you trust who can tell you that joke is not really working. That example, there is a little confusing. Maybe change that one. Or maybe you're being a little bit too urgent with your speaking style. Maybe you need to slow down and relax a bit. All of that stuff you can get from feedback, either from others or from yourself. And that is why it is so important to record yourself when you're practicing your outline, when you're talking through it, it is really important to record 22. Step 5: Hands-on Techniques for Mastering Your Flow: Let's now talk through a few key techniques for finding the flow of your presentation, for getting the float down so that it's natural and effortless. First, we want to find a way to remember your outline without reading it, right? If you're always glancing down, I had a piece of paper that's not so good, right? You want to be able to remember it. Now people remember things in different ways. Sometimes repetition, repetition, you practice it 20 times. You eventually remember it. One possible danger there is that you practice it so many times that you get in a rut and you say it the same way every time. And then you find yourself trying to remember what you said as though it's some kind of remembered script, a speech. Remember we stay away from speeches that can lead to issues, right? So actually you want to avoid practicing it so many times that it is that it becomes a kind of speech. But practice it enough so that you're able to deliver it effortlessly. And hopefully each time you do it, It's slightly different, right? If I were to do this course again, the course would be different. If I were to do it a third time, it would be different again. Hopefully, each time it would be different because I'm not following a script. When I am doing is following an outline and there's a key difference there. But you'd have to know your points. You have to know what you're talking about. So I suggest finding a technique that works for you. One personal favorite is what's called the memory palace. A memory palace is a place in your memory that you build and you associate ideas with some kind of visual or imagination. And then you put those in your palace. Maybe you choose your home. You imagine yourself walking through your home, right? As you walk through your home, then you follow a path through your home. You place idea objects. So maybe the first point of your presentation is about your team, right? Maybe you want to talk about your team. So you imagine each person on your team, Let's say it's for people. There are very little and they're sitting on your coffee table and they're waving at you like this. And maybe they're wearing the same color of sweater and maybe the colors remind you of something that you want it to say. That little thing that's there as easy to remember. And when you're speaking as you walk through that path, all you have to do in your imagination is looked down. In your imagination. C or team, they're wearing their little sweaters waving at you like this. And you remember, my first point is to talk about the team then, because they're wearing the different colored sweaters, that reminds me of something. I don't know what it would be. But the idea again is you're creating little memory objects in your imagination and placing them along a path, you can look up this method. It is a very popular method that has been around for a long time to remember very long speeches, to remember the order of playing cards, to remember pi to the 10000th decimal or whatever it is. It's very useful. I use it all the time. In fact, I'm using it right now. I'm not going to tell you what my mind palace objects are. It's a personal thing. Everyone has their own, their own things that are memorable to them. That's not for you to know, right? It's for me, but that's one way to do it. Maybe you have another way to do it, like creating a mnemonic. Mnemonic is a sound associated with something that helps you remember a point. So maybe an idea is associated with a sound, or sometimes people create a kind of acronym. Write the acronym maybe the first, the first letter of each, or the first. Each letter of the acronym is a point in your outline and you have an acronym like alarmed bus, and then b and L and a and R and M. Each one of those means something. Each one of those is a thing which tells you what you're supposed to talk about next, Barnabas, barnabas. And you make up that word that's very memorable. All you have to do is recite, be alarmist. And once you get through each letter of blah rhombus, you're through your presentation, you remembered every point. So that might be another way, find a way that works for you that helps you remember the points of your outlines and you will be a long way toward feeling more comfortable because you'll always have a little place you can go to, stay on track to not get lost on some point because you forgot what you were going to say next. Now if you're using slides, make sure when you're practicing, you're actually somehow with your slides, you can record yourself. I would suggest doing a video recording with your slides behind you or around you somewhere. Because if you're using slides, when you do the real presentation, There is an interaction right there designed to support what you're saying. We've talked about building slides. So it's good to practice with them. Because if you don't, and the first time you actually talk through your presentation with slides is the day of your big presentation. It's not going to be as natural as if you had practiced with your slides because again, they're with you and you are with them. You're connected together, creating one experience, right? Just like how when fighters are practicing, getting ready for a fight, they'll do some actual, real fighting because that helps them get used to that feeling. Because if they just practice punching a bag or something, it's not going to it's not going to help them get ready mentally for being punched in the face or seeing a moving target, right? It's that idea. We have to practice the real thing. So make sure you practice with your slides and by the way, recording it as great because that's a way to put yourself under some pressure. If you're recording something on video, there's a kind of pressure there. Someone's going to watch that, even if it's just you. And that's good, you want to get used to that feeling of pressure, of being watched, of being looked at. Because if you're experiencing it for the first time, when you're doing the presentation, then you might get nerves and that could cause problems and people sense someone who's very nervous and that might make them feel uncomfortable. So you want to be confident and comfortable. Get used to recording yourself with your slides. Now we've talked about the feedback part of this, but then watch the recording and give yourself objective notes, objective feedback. You're giving yourself a presentation, diagnosis. Which things are, okay? Which things are not good? Which things need to be improved? Maybe you change something in the outline. Maybe it's something in your presentation style. Maybe one of your slides is not working. Give yourself objective feedback and then send it to someone else, someone you trust, who can give you also honest feedback. There are limits to what you can see because it is, again, you, so you can try to be objective, but it really does help to have an outside perspective. And on that point, you need to develop a really tough skin. If you get really upset when someone gives you honest feedback, what do you mean? That's not true? You react like that. You create a new environment where they're no longer incentivized to give you good feedback. Think about that. If you have a friend you trust, your friend gives you really good feedback, but it's a little brutal. Listen. There are too many, ums and, uhs in your presentation. It's tough to listen to. What do you mean, ums and uhs, a lot of people do that. What are you talking about? Now? What you're doing is punishing them for giving you honest feedback. And the next time you ask for feedback, they're more likely to say, Yeah, it's fine. You create the environment based on how you react to things. So if you can just say, thank you very much, I appreciate that. Can you tell me a little bit more about the ums and the US? Do I do it too loudly or too frequently? What's the issue? If you can focus on just being a sponge for feedback and not react emotionally, you are going to continue to get good feedback. But if you're a very reactive, if you get emotional, then you're not going to get good feedback. And people are going to be, they're going to feel like they're walking on eggshells around you and that's not good, especially when it comes to getting feedback. All of this practice, yes, it is. Leading up to the actual presentation. Maybe that's a big pitch to an investor. Maybe that's for the job interview. Maybe that's a big proposal to your boss or maybe a big report at the end of the year or something, a big talk that you're giving on a topic you're excited about, alright, a YouTube video. It's a little different for YouTube videos, but it's the same concept, right? I would recommend, especially if you're using slides and you have an outline that you work toward a final draft. If you're getting feedback from people, if you're getting feedback from yourself, from watching the recordings and from people around you. You need to be working toward a final draft. That is not the actual thing, that is the one before the actual thing. You feel proud of. You want to have a little when, before you actually do it, right? A little wind is achieving something that when you look at it, you think I really did it, that feels good. I like this. I'm proud of this. Because if you have that little, when, if you have achieved something with your final draft, you've been working toward it, you've been practicing it, you've been tweaking things. You've been changing the outline, you've been adjusting the examples. If you're working toward that end, you come up with finally, if a recording that you're proud of and you show it to a friend and they say, Wow, that's really good. And you look at it yourself That's a lot better than my first try. Then you're going to feel confident going in. It's a way to give yourself a little confidence booster and don't downplay confidence. Confidence is essential if you're not confident going into your presentation, there's a good chance that it's not going to go well. You need to build up your confidence by increasing your skill and your comfort level with your outline, with presenting your outline. And if you have that going in, the chances that you're going to do well when you do the real thing are much higher. So work toward a final draft, something that you're going to be proud of. But, but, and this is a big but don't become obsessive when you feel pretty good about it. Stop, you're done now. Don't become so obsessive that you're obsessing or focused, hyper-focused on some little muscle movement in your face or some little thing that no one else would notice that only, you know, if you become too obsessive, too much of a perfectionist, you could actually crush your confidence. You could have a meltdown situation where the day before you feel like you're the biggest loser in the world and you can't present anything well, so find that balance between working toward a final draft, but then know when to stop, when you feel good. The good feeling is important, right? That's the confidence part. And don't go too far with it. Don't go overboard with the self critique and the self-feedback. So that's it for step five, finding the flow. And that is it for our process of building a presentation. From beginning to end. Our five steps, we talked about step one, identifying your audience. Who are you going to be talking to? Step two, setting objectives. What are you trying to achieve with this presentation? Step three, building your outline, making sure your ideas are clear and flow from one to the next in a natural way. Step four, we talked about building slides. Slides that support your presentation, that make things more clear, that make your presentation have impact, especially at key moments. And make things that are kind of complicated, easy to understand, or those visual anchors that people can grab onto. Finally, step five, finding the flow. How do you gain confidence? Of course, through practice and feedback? Now, this is what I would like you to do. This is your challenge. I would like you to go through all five steps. First, choose a topic. It could be the same topic you chose when we talked about identifying your audience. If you want to start over and do something else, that's totally fine. Go through each step from beginning to end. By the end, you should have a clear presentation that is recorded that you're proud of with slides or some kind of visual that makes your points have more impact or makes your ideas more clear, directed at a specific audience you know who you're talking to, and something that achieves an objective, that does something, that makes something happen, that changes someone's mind, that inspires someone. I want you to come up with something that you're proud of, work hard at it. Next, we're going to get into some advanced principles that can take you from where you are to the next level to truly become a great presenter. So that's what we're gonna be focusing on next. I will see you in the next lesson 23. Advanced Principles for Great Presentations: Overview: Can you tell me why your favorite song is your favorite song? Go ahead, explain it to me in vivid detail. Tell me exactly why. Okay. How about this? If you've never listened to that song again, ever for the rest of your life? I will give you $100. No. I will give you $500. Are you going to take the deal, deal or not? I think many people would not take that deal. By the way, it is a hypothetical. Please don't hold me to that. It's an example. I'm trying to make a point. A lot of people would not make that deal. Why not? If you can't even explain it? If you can't even say why it's valuable to you, why you wouldn't not want to listen to it again? Then why not just take the money? Because it has real value. It makes your life better. It makes you feel better throughout the day that has real value. So first I think we have to acknowledge that that the way that we feel, although it may not be perfectly rational all the time, is important. And in fact, we spend a lot of our day up there in emotion land. A lot of our actions are driven by emotions, driven by intuitions, driven by things that we can't completely explained. I know, I know some of you out there, probably perfectly rational, reasonable creatures, but probably not. Most of us make many of our decisions based on how we feel. We live in an emotional landscape. In a way, rationality doesn't drive a lot of our actions. Maybe some of them, but a lot of them. No. So we need to understand this as we get into some of the higher-level concepts and principles for doing great presentations. Why? Because if you understand that, then you can start speaking to how people feel rather than speaking only logically. People don't only make decisions on reason and logic, they often make decisions on emotions. So if you're talking to people's emotions, you might have more of an impact. Your ideas may resonate more than if you're just said something that made perfect logical sense. Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't build a logical argument. That doesn't mean there's no place for speaking to the intellect. But it does mean that if you want to make powerful presentations, you have to know how to speak to that emotional self in your audience. It's really important in this first lesson of this section. That's what we're going to be talking about. Now, when I say emotions, I mean that pretty broadly, I'm not talking about knowing how to make people cry, right? I'm not talking about evoking a specific emotion, although that might be part of it. It really means focusing on how you want your audience to feel broadly, rather than specifically what things you are trying to share. You are sharing specific things, but underneath there is an emotional message, something speaking to that emotional side. And you have to be thinking about that if you want to really make that impact. So really what we're talking about is building presentations that have two levels. On one level, you're speaking to the intellectual side. On the other level, you're speaking to the emotional side. And if you really want your ideas to resonate, It's important to have both, to be thinking about both. And this is true for all sorts of presentations. If you're doing a pitch to an investor, the really great ones don't just say, here are our projections for the next three years. Here's what we've done so far. Here are all the numbers. No, they build a vision, a vision for the future that is exciting. The excitement, that's the emotional part, that's the emotional level. And then the projections and what we've done for the last three years, the numbers, right, which all have to make sense. Of course, if people are doing their due diligence, it has to make sense. But you have these two things together and that might make the pitch really compelling to an investor. They don't just say, Oh yeah, I guess you will be there and maybe two years. Okay. No, they want to be excited by an idea. They want to feel, if I invested $50,000 in this, I could actually make this thing happen in the world. I could be a part of that. That's very exciting. I would love to see this in the world. The people who do pitches that connect on that level are usually the ones who finds success, usually the ones who get excitement about their ideas. And if you forget that part, It's gonna be really difficult to get your message out there and to get it to resonate with anybody. And even if your presentation is just a dry analysis, you're analyzing a bunch of data and you're presenting the results of your analysis for some people, whoever those people may be. Well, okay, there it all is, there's the information you're speaking to, the intellect. But underneath that, if you do it correctly, you may be inspiring action. You may be creating a sense of urgency if you choose the right key moments and you highlight the right points and what those, those things on the graph actually mean. For us, for your team, for the company, for the future. You might make people feel a little nervous, okay, if we don't take action now something bad's going to happen, or maybe have a sense of excitement and enthusiasm about continuing to do the same thing that we've been doing. Because hey, look, it's working in the graph. You can see what we're doing is making an impact. So you're creating that emotional layer. That is maybe fear, anxiety, passion, excitement, a little bit of nervousness, whatever it is that you're trying to get across. And hopefully, hopefully it is what you intend and it is not accidental. That's why you have to know that this is there. Because if you don't realize that when you make a presentation, you are presenting on these sort of two layers. Then you might accidentally be speaking to the emotional layer in not the way that you want to be, right? But if you're aware of this, you can structure it so that what you want to happen, the reaction that you want is what you get, is how your audience feels 24. Storytelling Principles to Persuade, Inform, Inspire, Delight: So how do you actually create a presentation that connects with that emotional level in your audience? How do we actually do this? We're going to spend a little time talking about how we can use storytelling principles to accomplish this. And there are a few different things that all connect to what a good story is. A good story is a way to transport people in their imagination, is a way to carry someone along on an emotional journey. If you watch a TV show and you start to care about the characters. Well, what's going on there? Why do you care about those characters? Those are just actors. Those are just people being paid to say things and you care about them. What's wrong with you? Are you, are you an idiot? No, you're not an idiot. That is the writer and the director and the actor and actress working together to create something that is resonating with your emotional level. I've been saying level and layer interchangeably, but I think, you know, you know what I mean when I say that. So how do we use these story elements to accomplish this? First, I want to introduce you to a concept called the hero's journey. There was a philosopher, writer, author named Joseph Campbell, have actually referenced him earlier. Joseph Campbell wrote books about mythology and he wrote a book called The Hero with 1,000 Faces. And this book is about how all of the many, most of the myths in human history, all of those ancient stories, they have some features in common. And this has also been called the monomyth. You should look into it. It's actually really, really interesting that if you hit these certain points along this hero's journey, that is going to connect with people's natural intuition for what a story is. To naturally want to root for something or feel something, feel empathy, feel excitement. It's a way to get people to resonate with a character, right? So it's there in stories, but how do we use this for a presentation? How do we get the audience to empathize with the idea that we're selling, the idea we're talking about the ideas we want to communicate with our audience. Let's start with the concept of a vision. What is a vision? A vision is something that doesn't even exist, right? It's not actually there. It's an idea that could exist. If you think about it in that way, something that could exist, we can imagine that the future is this scary landscape, right? And it's exciting to venture out into a scary landscape, into the unknown, Into the Wild, into a forest where no one has ever been. This is a part of the hero's journey to venture out into the unknown. And presenting a vision really is that you have this idea and you make a statement. You say, We are team. We want to build this thing, okay? Oh, well, this thing doesn't exist. Maybe there are similar things but this one doesn't exist. So what you're doing is you're saying out there in the wilderness, in that mysterious unknown place. In the future. It is there. And we have to go out, we have to venture out and find it, right? So what you're doing is saying, we are the hero who's going to go out and make this happen against all odds, we could fail, we could encounter monsters. And I'm not saying that you should say we could encounter monsters. But that's the thing that you're tapping into when you present a vision. And that's why visions excite people. They excite people because they're not certainties, because their possibilities, because people like to think about the future. People get excited about something that could be in the future that might make their lives better, might make the world better, might make things more interesting. And the fact that it could fail adds to the excitement. Now, let's talk about that idea of empathizing with characters in a TV show. Now if you watch a lot of TV shows and movies, you might start to notice a few, a few patterns. The pattern is that the main characters or the protagonist of the story. It could be a novel, it could be a movie, it could be a video game. They're not perfect. They have flaws. They are vulnerable. They have issues. They are up against difficulties, right? Things are tough for them or things are fine. And then something really bad happens. And it's at that moment when the bad thing happens that you start rooting for them, you start empathizing for them. People have this natural switch inside of them where they start to see themselves in other people, right? So in your presentation, if you're able to show your personal side, if you're able to share an anecdote, a thing that you went through to get to where you are. It's a job interview and all you went through to gain the experience that you've gained something personal, right? To gain that empathy. Or maybe you say that you stayed up all night working on the demo that you're now going to show everyone who were eating Tacos until 04:00 A.M. pulling out your hair, trying to make sure it works. And it's really cool to show everybody, right, adding that personal anecdote, that little bit of backstory is going to get people to start rooting for you because you're showing vulnerability. Showing vulnerability. And using those personal anecdotes, you have to know when to do it and how. It can be a very powerful way to get people to root for you because they start to see themselves in you, right? They start to feel empathy for you. They start to feel like they understand you. They start to care about you a little bit. And if you're sharing a topic you're excited about, then you could talk about how you got excited about this. How did you get into this field? What made you first interested in that? Was it when you were a child or someone introduced it to you or you had a a major trauma in your life and you discovered it that way. What was it? Having that backstory is another way to get people to feel something and then they're connected. They are listening, they're paying attention. They want to hear what you have to say. They didn't care about dinosaur bones 10 min ago. Now they care about dinosaur bones because you care about dinosaur bones. You know, another thing that those myths have in common in the hero's journey is something fantastic. It's usually not about a hero who goes to the edge of the village and pick something up and then goes back and then throws it away and then goes to sleep, right? Usually there's a, there's a monster. There's something exotic, there's magic, there is life and death struggle, maybe the end of the world. This is also why superhero movies are so popular, right? The world is in the balance. The whole planet could be destroyed. Those sorts of huge consequences that we don't often encounter in everyday life. Those can be really useful to reference. Your topic is not that exciting. Well, you might use language. That is, you might use language that evokes those things that are beyond the norm. Those huge world ending possibilities, right? You might say, this is the end of the world. If you want to really hammer home a point that things are changing fast and a new paradigm is about to begin. And we need to be ready for this change because it's happening now. Here's how we can make sure that we're ready. I might say, Listen, This is the end of the world. Now that's exaggerating things a bit. But am I lying? Well, I mean, it's the end of the world in a sense that it's the end of the Old World. And the New World is about to begin. Maybe just in our industry, right? But using that kind of language, probably not too often, but using it sometimes to evoke something beyond the ordinary can get people's attention, can really get them to focus on what you're saying. And can tap into that old hero's journey that people have deep inside of them. It's something that's buried way down in the unconscious. That's why it resonates with people, right? You might say something like, This is the next Amazon. This is the next Amazon. So that's this huge company that's the most, one of the most successful companies to ever exist, right? And it grew from a tiny little company to this gigantic behemoth. This is the next Amazon. Well, that is still evoking this sort of, Hey, we're not talking about something ordinary. This is special, this is different Pay attention, right? This is where you might make references that people will know. This is where you might make analogies that your audience is going to be familiar with. You might say, this is like the apple falling on Newton's head. Or this is, this is the apple falling on Newton's head. That is a moment when we wake up and realize something, right? No matter what you're talking about, there might be a way to use a reference that can get people to think about something beyond just what you're talking about, right? And there's a lot of power in that. There's a lot of power to invoking these outside references, right? And it could be more modern if you wanted to use Star Wars or Thanos or something we're up against Thanos here, right? But you have to be careful about that because if it's too local than what if someone in your audience doesn't know the reference, right? If you know who you're speaking to, then you might choose ones that you know, everybody knows. But if you're talking to a group of people who are both younger and older than they might not know the 70-year-old guy. He doesn't know the Thanos reference. So you just said we're up against Thanos here. And he's thinking, okay, I'm going to pretend like I know what you're saying, but maybe he doesn't. So you have to be aware of that. But you can use those to bring people into that sort of larger and possibly more exciting world. To use your language to make your ideas a bit more vivid. It's kind of like borrowing those things, right? You're borrowing memes and pulling them down into your presentation to make it pop. It's almost like adding stuff to your slides in a way except you're doing it with your words. You are invoking concepts, references, things outside of your presentation from the culture that people know. That is going to make them a little bit more interested, maybe a little bit more invested in what you're saying. Getting back to the Hero's Journey, after the hero faces some difficulties, usually fails. He or she will get some thing that's going to help them try again. So they fight the monster again. They fight the dragon again, they do that thing again and succeed. And then returned to the village and have something new. They bring something new back to the village. This is the end of the Hero's Journey and they might talk about their deeds which may inspire the people in the village when they hear the story of what happened of slaying, slaying the dragon. Well, this is something that you can also use to make your presentation more vivid and to make ideas resonate and also to gain credibility. This is where you might want to use case studies. I know that's not a perfect that's not a perfect one-to-one connection with the hero's journey. But I think it really is the same. You have done something, you've been doing this for awhile. And here's a story of something you've gone through, or here's a story from one of our customers, or here's something that one of my friends went through that I want to share with you that I, that I want to relate to you that emphasizes my point. That then might inspire you, that might make you think about something in a different way. So you're bringing back from your life, from things that you've heard, from people you know, from customers who have good experiences with your service. Whatever it may be, you're bringing these things into the presentation to say, look, look at what I've got. Look at what I've accumulated, right? Look at what I can do. But you want to be careful with that because if you talk about case studies too much, if you share too many anecdotes than it could be all that. And sometimes people see too many of those has a bit spammy. So you have to just be aware of that. And you want to use them responsibly. Use case studies, use exciting stories, use things that you've been through. Use those sort of personal experiences, but don't overuse them because then the point could kind of get lost in all of that. And people might start to develop a different feeling about what you're trying to sell them, about what you're trying to explain, about what you're trying to convince people of. Now, finally, you may or may not want to use a call to action. A call to action is when you try to inspire whoever is listening to you to do something, or you tell people that they should do something. Or you give people a challenge, right? This is your challenge. I often do that, right? I've been doing that throughout the course. You want to, at the end of what you're saying, give people a task in a way. This is a call to action. And that call to action could simply be to think about something, to reflect on something. But it could be more specific to go out and do something. This you may or may not use depending on what you're talking about. So just consider it and know that if you do it is one way to get people to reflect back on your presentation, because now they have to actually put a piece of it into practice. They have to do something with it. And in the Hero's Journey, This part is actually called the call to adventure. So it's very close. The call to adventure is the thing that makes you go out of the village. The thing that pushes you out or draws you out of the village. Or the fresh hero. So this might be the hero returning to the village and then challenging the youngsters to go out and slay their own dragons or something like that, right? If it's useful, if you think it would give people the motivation to start using what was in your presentation. I think it's a good idea. The reason I like to do it in courses is pretty obvious, right? You're learning something, you're taking in concepts. Those are easy to forget. The best thing to do is to do something using those concepts so that they really stick so that you can get in the habit of using them and they don't sort of fade away. And the ironic thing is, I don't have a call to action for this lesson. This is one of the few where I don't, we're going to be going on and talking about analogies. How to find good analogies. How to make sure you're using analogies that really resonate with people. So I will see you in the next lesson. 25. What do analogies do?: A bad analogy is like putting a pair of glasses on a potato. Nothing is clarified, nothing happens. But a well-chosen analogy is like putting a pair of glasses on someone who really needs glasses. Everything comes into focus. Everything becomes clear. Now, I think the first analogy is actually a bad analogy. Potato glasses. What? I'm more confused. But the second one, if you think about it, that's kind of what an analogy is doing. You are connecting things together. You are taking an idea that might be fuzzy or unclear and making it easier to understand and making it clearer. Hopefully bringing it into focus by giving somebody, your audience something right. Here you go. This might help. Oh, now it's clear that is what analogies do. That is how analogies are usually used. Analogies connect things or ideas in order to clarify both. Sometimes both are being made more clear or one of those things, right? Often they're used to make something complex or maybe nuanced or unfamiliar, easy to understand by comparing it to something familiar. This thing that you're talking about, quantum physics, something, something, I don't know. It's very confusing, okay, but it's like this thing that I know, ah, okay, at least I can understand the analogy. Now I have some idea of what you're talking about. You use something familiar and usually simpler than the thing you're trying to clarify, then the thing you're trying to explain. Again, it could be due to complexity or to help your audience appreciate something. Sometimes it's not just for clarification. Sometimes maybe they just haven't thought about something this way before and you want to bring a new way of thinking to their mind. Analogies can help you do that. Oh, I've never made a connection between those things before. Very interesting. That's a new thought. Okay, So whether to appreciate something, to clarify, something, to make something complex, easier to understand. All of those are a great reason to use an analogy. 26. Methods for Finding Analogies that Resonate: Now let's get into how you actually do this. How do you find good analogies? What's the difference between a good analogy and a bad analogy? What are the best practices? What are the methods we can use to find the right ones? Alright, well, think about this. Okay, here we go. A great presentation is like a powerful magic spell. Is that a good analogy or not? Well, if you remember earlier in the course I was talking about how being a good presenter is like doing magic. You're taking ideas from your brain and putting them in other people's brains. And if you do that really well with the right words used in the right way at the right time. They might change their mind. They might be inspired. They might experience a new emotion that they haven't experienced before. Something will happen, right? You're making things happen with your words. So, yeah, I think a great presentation is like a powerful magic spell. I think that's a really good analogy. I think that helps to make me think about analogies in a different way. Now, does that clarify what a presentation is because you were confused about presentations? No. That one makes you think about what a presentation is in a different way. Maybe you didn't think about it that way before, but now you might be thinking about it that way. Yeah, interesting. When you think about it that way. You might then approach your presentations differently. So if it's like a magic spell, if it's actually a kind of magic, then I need to be really good at doing magic in order to make really cool things happen in the world, right? Yeah. Oh, okay, I didn't think about it that way. Good analogy, right? So use clear analogies like that, but avoid muddled analogies that makes something even more complicated or need a lot of explanation. If you choose an analogy that you have to explain a lot. And I know I explain the magic spell, but I think I could have just said it and you could have thought about that and it would have made sense on its own. I'm doing a course here. I want to make sure things are clear so I'm explaining everything. But if you choose an analogy that requires tons of explanation, then it's probably a bad one. I was once asked to be sort of a panelist judge for a presentation event. There were people doing presentations on specific topics and one person speaking used the analogy of a dream catcher. Okay? Now not everyone knows exactly what a dream catcher is four, and the presenter knew that. So she spent about 3 min of her 10-minute presentation explaining a dream catcher. But the dream catcher was really just an analogy for what she was actually trying to talk about for her actual topic. But the only thing I remember about that presentation is that she used the dream catcher analogy and tried to explain what that was for a long time. I don't remember what she was talking about. So that's a bad analogy. And it's bad because it requires a lot of explanation, right? So keep it simple and avoid those muddled concepts that aren't immediately clear as soon as you say them. Also use audience specific analogies that are going to resonate with your audience. Again, you might consider the demographics. You have people of a wide age range, right? You might have some younger people, middle aged people, some older people choose wisely. Do not choose specific things that are only relevant to one generation. Or if your audience is multicultural, multilingual, be aware of that. Choose things that are pretty universal that everyone is going to know. Because if you choose something that's very culture-specific, then you're leaving out a large section of your audience and they don't know what you're talking about. They can't appreciate your point, right? So be aware of your audience. Maybe everybody knows what you're talking about because you know, you're talking to these people and they will know the references, great, but that's just one more reason to really know who you're talking to when it comes to choosing an analogy. Use your intuition. Use what immediately make sense to you. Because if it immediately makes sense to you, Probably it's going to immediately make sense to other people. Again, considering the cultural differences and the age gaps and things like that, right? But for those universal things, if you immediately think of that, that might be a good one. Use that as a filter, right? Have, you have to think for 3 h and you go through 100 different ones. And finally, you think of one. And you know, it makes sense, but only after 3 h of thinking and ten cups of coffee. Maybe it's not the right choice. It has to be kind of intuitive in that way. Because again, if it's intuitive for you, it's probably intuitive for other people. The magic example that I gave that immediately occurred to me. What is a presentation really? You're talking to people. There. They are using words. We are changing the way they feel. You're making things happen inside of their minds. Magic, spell, immediate, intuitive. Those are the good ones. Again, those are probably the ones you want to go with. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be a decision-making process, right? You might think of a few. But if you've thought of one right away and it's really clear to you and you're excited about it. It might be the right one. Be a little bit cautious of over-used analogies. This happens particularly in pitches for startups. If you're pitching your idea and you say something like, this is the Uber of something, this is the Amazon of something. It's tired, right? If something is overused, people get it. They understand it, but it's not going to be very exciting. It's not going to grab anyone's attention, right? So you want to have something that's pretty fresh that you have thought of, that's interesting to you, rather than thinking the other way around. What is it that people all know? And then am I able to talk about it? No. First, think about what you're interested in, what immediately comes to you intuitively and then ask yourself, will people understand that clearly? Will people get that immediately? And if so, again, it's probably a good choice. I've heard the Uber of something 10 million times. It's so tired. So just be aware of those very tired, very overused analogies. So it's a good exercise to think about concepts and then try to make analogies that explain those concepts. Or make you think about those concepts in a new way or help clarify those concepts. So for example, running a startup, there's an activity. There's a fairly well-known quote from, I think from Elon Musk about running a startup. He said running a startup is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. People can understand that. I think that's an interesting one, but maybe try a few more. Okay. Running a startup is like climbing a mountain in a snowstorm. Maybe I add a little bit of detail to that. You can't see the top. And it's hard to know if you're going in circles, right? Okay, that might be a good one. Running a startup is like driving a car that you have to build as you're driving down the freeway? I think I've heard that one somewhere before. I'm not I'm not sure about that one, but okay, try a few more of these. Think of activities, concepts. At the beginning I used a presentation. A presentation is like a magic spell. Think of concepts, think of activities, and then make a few analogies that would fit for those and choose the ones that you think are best. The ones that really pop, the ones that really grab your attention and get feedback on those, right? Tried to make analogies for things that might be difficult for people to understand immediately, or maybe something that people won't immediately appreciate. The startup one. Maybe people don't appreciate how difficult and scary it can be for presentation. Yes, people know what that is, but maybe you haven't thought about it in this way. So your challenge, think of a few things, a few difficult things that people don't immediately appreciate or don't immediately understand. And then find a few analogies that you think help clarify those things, will help people appreciate those things. Alright. Let me know how it goes. If you have any questions, let me know and I will see you in the next lesson. We're going to be talking about examples 27. The Power of Examples: The 80 20 rule or Pareto principle, is the idea that for a given system, a small percentage of the input yields a vast majority of the output. Okay, So how about an example? A friend of mine a few years ago, started a business. And at the beginning he was putting a lot of time and money into marketing, making videos, paid ads, referral program, all kinds of stuff. And in the first year, it was going okay. He wasn't seeing much growth. But one day on a whim, he decided to reach out to a podcast in his industry just to let them know about his business. I don't even know what the email said. And they got back to him and invited him on the podcast, which ended up being a two-hour conversation. And from that single podcast, he got more business, more sales than any of the other marketing activities combined. And it gave his business a massive boost and it's doing really great now, all because of that one little thing that he did on a whim. Okay. So why am I telling you this? Well, I think you can probably tell from what this lesson is called. But examples help make things more clear because they give us something concrete to look at. We can see an example rather than trying to think about a concept. So what did I do? I told you what the 80 20 rule is. Maybe intellectually, you heard that and you say, okay, I understand that. But is there a depth of appreciation? Some people may not really get it right. With the example. You are able to get your hands on it. You're able to sort of see it in a way that you don't or may not see it when it's being explained as a concept. So examples could be a kind of anecdote, but they might also be case studies. They might be a specific thing that happened. They might be a story, but all of these things somehow represent a concept. So that's how you use them, right? You want to take a concept or an idea, and you want to make it more concrete. You want to make it real in some way. You want to make it more tangible. That's what examples are for 28. How to Create Great Examples that Make Ideas Stick: So how do we make good examples? How do we make impactful examples that make things more tangible, easier to understand? Just like anecdotes, we want to use something that's going to be relatable and audience specific. Now a case study might be very relatable and audience specific, but it does depend on the audience. I gave a case study of the 80, 20 rule, my friend who was starting a business. But what if I'm talking to a group of 15-year-old high-school students. Is that the best example to use? Maybe not. Why not? Because they don't have a lot of life experience that's associated with marketing and starting businesses. That's something that they might be a little bit familiar with. But they have to now be thinking about both things. And so it doesn't help that much. So I might choose something related to school, related to high school, something that's going to connect with their life experience that they have a bit of a background with. So think about that when you're building examples, choose things that your audience is pretty familiar with, that they've had some experience with. And then it's going to resonate better. And you might be thinking, Okay, yes, but my explanation of the concepts are clear as day, I'm really good at explaining concepts, but you still may want to have examples. And even the best writers and speakers know this. It doesn't matter how good you are at explaining the concept. Examples are useful in and of themselves. Case studies are useful in and of themselves because they make concepts which can be very slippery, which can be easy to forget. They make them stick like Velcro in your brain. Think of the example as the Velcro around the ball. The ball is, is the idea, the concept. You wrap it in Velcro and you make it stick in someone's brain, assuming brains are made of Velcro, It's not the best analogy I've ever made. But the idea, the concept that you have something that makes concept stick is very important to keep in mind. Very important to remember when you're building your presentations. And you want to think about whether to start with the concept or start with the example. Now I think it's generally better to start with the concept. This is a kind of natural structure. Here's the thing I want to tell you. Here's the thing that's going to make it stick. That's going to make you remember it. A specific instance of that, a case study about that, a story about that. First I tell you the thing, then I make it stick. If you say the example first and then you say, now, here's what it means and then the concept follows it. Yeah, that could work, right? That could be okay. So think about that. But generally, generally I think it's better to start with a concept and follow with the example. If you're trying to get something across, look at books like The Blue Ocean Strategy. If you've never read that book, it's really good. I'm not sure if it's the blue ocean strategy or just blue ocean strategy. That's it. It's a classic book about entering a market, right? About how to make a product unique or presented in a unique way. It's a really good book, so it follows the same structure the concept is presented, and then the specific example is given. The case study that represents the concept is given and it really makes it stick. I still remember, oh yeah, there's that one idea and that's the Cirque du Soleil example. Yeah, that's right. That example sticks with me and when I think of the example, the concept comes into my mind. So now I have a challenge for you. What I'd like you to do is choose an important or interesting concept from your life, from your work. Then I want you to think of a few examples. Maybe choose a case study. May be a story, something that really illustrates it, something that makes it easy to grab onto, more memorable and actually write those examples down. Then I want you to ask yourself which ones are best, which examples that you chose are the best ones, which one is the best? Going through this exercise is really powerful because it forces you to think about impact in the choices you make. The analogy is you choose which ones you choose can have more or less impact. The examples you choose, which ones you choose can have more or less impact. And you should be able to ask yourself and be honest with yourself which ones are best. So get started with those. In the next lesson, we're going to spend some time talking about memorable language and speech. So I will see you in the next lesson. 29. Tips for Engaging Speech: Hello everyone. My name is Luke, and today I'm going to be speaking with you about the importance of memorable language and speech. Considering everything we've talked about so far in this course, you may be wondering, what else is there to learn. Well, let me tell you. Why was that so boring? What was so boring about that? If you fell asleep just now, I don't blame you. I probably would have to. But what's going on there? Well, for one thing, my intonation is not interesting. It's totally flat. Number two, I'm not using any pauses to emphasize what I'm saying. Number three, my word choice, my language is very generic. It's like one of those paint by numbers, right? It's just not interesting. So that's what we're going to be talking about in this lesson. How we can make our language really pop, really be memorable. How we can speak in a way that's going to stick in people's brains. Alright, so let's get started. Now, this is a little bit of review, but it's important to remember, and it's important to pay attention to. You want to vary your intonation without forcing it. That means allowing your voice to rise and fall to keep things interesting. And this is something that you get a feel for by watching others, by listening to others, by paying attention, and then putting it into practice. And of course, making it your own, not just copying if it's forced. I think that if we than it sounds really, really strange. So you do not want to force it. It's one of those things that just comes naturally over time. But you have to deliberately be listening for it and deliberately trying to put it into practice. Listening to your recordings and seeing if it's improving, if it sounds more natural, what is working and what isn't. I know that's kind of review. We've talked about that a bit before, but I think it bears repeating. And that is also true for pauses. Do not fear pauses. Pauses can allow you to collect your thoughts, emphasize a point, and avoid thinking words. Thinking words like, we don't want to have too many of those pauses are a great replacement for thinking words in presentations, people don't mind pauses, but some people get a little annoyed or perhaps distracted if there are too many thinking words in a presentation. And hopefully that's highlighted by the difference between that opening part when I was talking like this and when I stopped doing that, hopefully that was a stark contrast. That's what you have to pay attention to and try to see it in yourself as well. 30. Memorable Language: Part 1: So we've talked a bit about speaking style, but we're going to spend the rest of this lesson talking about language. The language you choose, the words you choose. It is essential to choose the right language to use words that people are going to remember, that is going to keep people engaged. If you choose very generic, boring language that is not very vivid, the chance that people will lose focus and lose interest is high or at least higher, right? So a few things right at the start. Then I'm going to give you some specific recommendations for how you can use more interesting, vivid, memorable language. And then we're going to look at an example. So first, a few things that you may want to avoid that your audience may find distracting, maybe a little bit annoying. We talked about thinking words. If you have too many of those, your audience may judge you. They might think this person they don't know what they want to talk about. They don't know what they're going to say next. Or it shows a lack of confidence, or maybe they just find those thinking words a little bit annoying, especially if there are too many of them for a number of different reasons. It's a good idea to try your best to avoid them. Everybody uses them sometimes, absolutely. But try not to use them too much. And if you find yourself using them a lot, if you're listening to your recordings and you hear many ums and uhs and is, then you work on slowing down a bit. Try to pause more, use pauses more and deliberately tell yourself, okay, just take a break. Don't use a thinking word, then go on to your next thing. Similarly, be aware of common pet peeves that people have. I'm not telling you to fit into a mold and meet everyone's expectations all the time. But for example, the use of the word like this is a word that's used all the time in modern day spoken English. And we were like, and it was like, and I was like and like, right. You hear it a lot. Well, do you want to speak in the same way that you would in a casual conversation with a friend when you're doing a presentation? Maybe not. It's not very precise language, it's not very articulate. Also, it's a common pet peeve that some people have. I happen to be one of those people. Hello, if I hear a presentation and there are 1,000 likes, I'm immediately just my brain turns off completely. It bothers me a little bit. It irritates me. So just know that some people out there in your audience may have that pet peeve. They may have other pet peeves. It's good to be aware of what those are, to look out for those, and to at least consider, consider avoiding some of that language or at least too much of that language, such as the word like to often when you're doing a presentation, don't force language, that isn't you. Now there will be some words that you need to use, a specific word in an industry that you have to use because everyone knows that. But in general, don't force yourself to use specific words or language that don't feel right when you use them. Pay attention to how you feel when you're using language, when you're choosing phrases, when you are choosing words for your presentation, that you want to have impact. Because if it doesn't feel right, your audience is going to feel that. And if it does feel right, That's gonna be an important part of that developing voice, right? You're a bird that is hatching from its egg. You're developing your voice and so your style of speech, your choice of words, they have to be unique to you. They have to feel right to you. And if they do, that is going to resonate with your audience. They're going to feel that you are authentic because each of us are unique, because each of us is developing our own voice. I'm not here to tell you what you should say, what words you should use that would be irresponsible of me. I want you to discover that for yourself. But what I can do is give you some broad recommendations for the kind of things that you can say. The kind of language that you can use that is going to be more impactful and memorable. So I want to go over a few general things, a few general approaches that you can use. And then we're going to look at a specific example. 31. Memorable Language: Part 2: Broadly used language that evokes rather than describes what is the difference between those two. If language describes, it simply says what is there. It's like adding parts together on a machine and then giving those parts some details, right? It's a house. It's a blue house. It's a big blue house, right? That's a bit of an oversimplification, but that's a description language that evokes, activates the imagination rather than simply saying what's there. So, for example, I have a headache, okay. I have a bad headache. I have a terrible headache. Okay. I have a really terrible headache. Okay. These are descriptions, just basic descriptions. Now how about this? My headache is so bad. I feel like I have 30 dictionaries stacked on top of it. Now, have I added anything in description to the severity of the headache? It's hard for me to compare 30 dictionaries to, let's say, a very bad headache. That's not really what I'm accomplishing. What I'm doing by making a picture with my words. More than just saying, I have a headache, is I'm turning on your imagination and somehow I'm making it more vivid. I'm making it stickier. And you're likely to hold that visual in your mind for longer than if I just say, I have a very bad headache. Then to build on that, you might use active language that causes imaginations to move. So simply, language that evokes this is making the other person imagine something in hopefully a vivid way. And then active language is making a movie inside of someone's head, right? The dictionaries, that's just me with a bunch of dictionaries and you can picture that. It's like a picture, it's an interesting picture. But it's a picture. But if I have language that moves active language, now, it starts to get a little bit more interesting. So I feel like you've ripped my brain out from my ear and stomped on it. Okay. Now, that's not really a possible thing. But that sounds horrifying. Right? So I don't know really any more about the headache. I know it's just still a bad headache. But you're creating a little movie in my head because now I'm picturing a brain being removed through an ear and someone jumping up and down on it, right? That's pretty horrifying, but it's, it's action. And I know that's sort of an exaggerated example. We're going to look at an example in a moment, a specific example that's a little bit more ordinary, that still uses this active language. The point there is that you're taking that evocative language and then turning it into a little movie to make something happen in the other person's imagination. Use more specific words that can make ideas pop. Maybe you have two words that you could use for an explanation or a description. And one is more specific. It could only be used in a few different examples, or it could only be used in a few different explanations. And one word is very general, right? Let's say, for example, Great and juicy. Well, if we're talking about a deal, we can say a great deal or a juicy deal. But we can use great in so many different places. We could say a great haircut doesn't really make sense to say a juicy haircut does it. But it works for deal, because we do say that. So I think it's better to use a juicy deal instead of a great deal. Or at least consider using that because it is more specific to that situation. It's not as general. So sometimes you want to use these more narrow words because they might catch people's attention. They might be a bit more vivid. And personally, I think juicy as a fantastic word. I always use juicy to describe really good parking spots. By z, a parking spot in front of my building. I won't say great parking spot. I'll say, ooh, that's a juicy parking spot. Isn't that just so much more interesting to say? A juicy parking spot? There's something really vivid about that. I really like it. Use phrases and descriptions that make the audience feel like they're along for the ride. Now this could be Actions that you want the audience to feel like they're somehow part of. That could start with, let's, for example, let's zoom out for a second. Let's zoom out for a second. Well, that means we're going to step back and look at the bigger picture. But are we really doing anything? You're not really with me. Actually, we're not really zooming out of what is this, but that language, Let's invites the audience to join me in language. It invites them to be part of what I'm about to do, which is zoom out. Which doesn't literally mean zoom out of course, but means step back and look at the bigger picture. But that, that phrasing in a way creates a sense of participation. And I'm not saying you should use that too much, but you can use that. Now let's, let's do this, that sort of thing to give this feeling of, hey, we're all in this together. We're somehow doing this together. Embellish occasionally, but know why you're doing it. If you want to exaggerate something, if you want to say something that's not actually what happened, not really true, but it adds a bit of emphasis and people know that probably didn't really happen. That can be a great way to make an impact with the language you use. So you could say, Hey, that's a lie. Yes, it could be, it could be an exaggeration. But you have to think about the total experience, right? If someone says they had a heart attack when they heard the news, we know that that's not literally true in most cases. But we accept that saying, I had a heart attack is part of the emphasis, right? So embellishing in that way, adding elements that are exaggerations or things you just make up on the spot, could be a good way to inject humor, right? When you told me milk came flying out of my nose like white laser beams, that didn't happen. Maybe a little bubble, but it certainly wasn't white laser beams. But when you visualize that, that might be a little bit funny. That kind of embellishment might, might get a laugh and laugh is worth it for the exaggeration, right? So know when to use that and be okay to use it. Think of funny examples, funny exaggerations. This is a great place to find points in your presentation to make the audience laugh, to bring in something absurd, to say something crazy, to just mix it up a little bit to make it kind of fun. Because again, a presentation is allowed to be fun. It's supposed to be interesting, it's supposed to be engaging, so feel free to embellish. But again, always ask yourself, why am I doing this? And if you know the answer, because I need a laugh here, for example, then go ahead 32. Memorable Language and Speech Example: Okay, so let's look at a specific example that ties all of these ideas about memorable language together. I've actually written this example because I want to contrast it to another example that does not illustrate the ideas we've been talking about. I'm going to read the, not one first and then read what I think is the much better way of speaking. Kind of ironic because it's reading, but I want to make sure it's really accurate. I want you to really get the idea. So I'm looking down here because I need to read. That's what I'm doing. I'm looking down. There are some words there. I'm going to be reading those words. Alright, here we go. As you can see, downloads increase here and then go back down again a few months later. Okay, this is where it gets interesting. And it really surprised me when I saw it. To understand what is happening here, we have to step back and see the five-year chart. Let's take a look. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward. Let's look at the example that I think is better. Alright, here we see downloads shoot up for a few months and then crash back down again. Now, this is the juicy bit. Despite all this mayhem, user retention remains rock solid, steady throughout. When I saw that, I spit my coffee out all over my screen. That is not what we expect to see. Okay? To get our minds around what's going on here, we have to zoom out and look at the five-year picture. Let's go. Alright, so what makes this one better? Why is it better? Well, it's what we talked about. We have more specific language. Instead of go up and go down, we have shoot up and crashed down. Not only are those more specific words, but also they evoke images and they're very active. Something that shoots up, makes me think of a rocket shooting up into the sky. He evokes fire and flames coming out of the rocket and going out into space and then crashing down. That sounds like a disaster, but it's also very vivid and crashing is an action that I can kind of picture very well. Here we have the word juicy. I love that. This is a way to set up the next thing. This is the impactful thing I want you to pay attention to. So get ready. This is the juicy bit instead of the good bit. Juicy. That's such a, well, it's such a juicy, juicy word. Despite all this mayhem. Mayhem as sort of craziness, chaos, it is a very vivid word. It is, it evokes sort of madness and chaos. I think that's a really interesting word to use. User retention remains rock solid, steady throughout. So rock solid steady isn't that kind of saying the same thing twice a bit redundant? Yes, it is, but it's a creative choice. It is the choice of a person who knows their voice, they have found their voice, they might choose to say it like that just because maybe that has more impact. We're just because it feels right. I think it sounds right in this situation to say it twice, kind of redundantly, rock solid, steady, gives it a bit more punch in my, in my humble opinion. Okay. Then I spit my coffee out all over my screen. Did that actually happen? Probably not. I would say probably not. It probably did not actually happen. It's an exaggeration. It's an outright lie. But in this case, it emphasizes how crazy this is. You know, it makes me pay attention. It makes me Listen if I wasn't listening before, Wait, What made you what? I really like that moment if someone says that it grabs you, right? That is not what we expect to see. That, okay, Question mark is one of those little things getting you to answer a little rhetorical question in your head. No one has to say, Okay. But what it does is gets someone at least thinking about it a little bit more, answering something in their minds or at least clocking that there's a question there. Yeah. Okay. Right in their minds at least saying that that can be a good way to just grab people a little bit. Then to get our minds around what's going on here, we have to zoom out and look at the five-year picture. So now we're participating. That is bringing people into the action to get our minds around it, we have to zoom out. I'm not doing it by myself. We're doing it. I'm telling you to do it right now with me. We're doing it together. And then let's go. I think this one has much more impact. It is way more memorable obviously, and it's because of all the things we just talked about. So I want you to practice this. Take a chunk of text and see if you can make it more interesting. Yeah, write it down, see if you can make it more vivid by adding language that evokes that is more active. See if you can make it more vivid by bringing people in using phrases that allow people to participate in a way. See if you can maybe add something to make your ideas pop something very specific. Maybe there's a general word. You can make it a bit more specific and add an embellishment. Make something up, add something crazy. See if that will get people's attention. Again, you're just doing this as an activity, but it can be a really useful way to play with language, which is a very important part of improving the language that you use when you're making presentations. So I hope this was helpful if you have any questions about this. I know it's kind of a tough subject. It's kinda vague and abstract language that we choose, right? It's very personal, but hopefully this gives you a starting point on your journey to find your voice, which is what it is all about when it comes to making presentations. Finding your voice, gaining confidence, and becoming a better presenter. Okay, that is it for this section of the course. In the next section, we're going to be covering practice. Now I know I've talked about practice a bit, but we're going to go into a bit more depth. So we're gonna be starting with feedback loops and specific practice techniques. I will see you in the next lesson. 33. How to Practice for Continuous Progress: I could end this lesson in thirty-seconds by saying this. If you don't practice presenting, you won't get better. If you practice without feedback of some kind. It's going to be a constant uphill battle. And you may never really improve. That was about 30 s, right? Alright, lesson over. Bye-bye. Now, I want to spend a little bit of time toward the end of the course talking about exactly how to practice, giving you an official guide, a framework for practice. Now, bear with me some of the stuff we're going to cover. We have talked about throughout the course. Here in there, I've given you challenges, right? I've told you how to record yourself and watch that recording back to give yourself feedback. We've covered some of this stuff, but I want to put it all in one place as a continuous process. Because I want you to have a structure, a framework that you can use to continue improving your presentation skills indefinitely, well, beyond this course, and this is, this is how you do it. So that's what we're going to cover. Now hopefully, you're starting to feel pretty comfortable with the concepts with what goes into a very good presentation. And you're really starting to think about how to put this stuff into practice, how to use it yourself. That's what I hope you're really starting to get excited about at this point in the course. Alright, so that brings us to practice. Let's get into it, the guideline for how to practice your presentation skills so that you can keep improving no matter where you start. So if the project is to improve your presentation skills, that's the general project to improve. As a presenter, it's important to define what that means based on where you are, right? Everyone is at a different place. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. The best presenters do, I do, everybody does, right? I struggle with certain things that I'm continuing to work on. Continuing to try to improve as a presenter, as someone who teaches people, as someone who explains stuff for a living, right? I'm always trying to work on this. So no matter where you are, no matter what your strengths and weaknesses are to start, it's important to, if the project is to improve, that's pretty general to define what that means, right? So this is where you need to set a clear goal, set a very clear goal of something you're trying to work toward. It's okay if that goal is subjective. Now, we're not talking about here the objective of the presentation, right? Remember when we were going through the step-by-step process, building a presentation from beginning to end. The second one was to define the objective. That is the objective or the goal for the presentation. What are you trying to achieve with this presentation? But when we're talking about practice, improving your presentation skills, we want to define a goal for you, for your skills. Just like if you were working on fitness goals Right? Right now I'm able to bench press X amount. I don't even know how much its starting point. That's how little I know about bench pressing. And within three months I want to be able to bench press that amount or running or whatever it is, right? You set goals. But some of these things are measurable and objective, and some of them are not measurable and objective. Those are kind of subjective goals the way you feel. For example, I want to be able to present to my peers at work and feel confident, not constantly second-guessing myself when I'm speaking. Not stopping to pause are using a lot of thinking words. And when I finished those presentations, I want to feel good about what I talked about, about my presentation. Well, that's a subjective goal, but I think that's okay. That is a perfectly valid goal. Okay? So set a goal, choose goals could be one goal could be five goals that are achievable. Choose goals that you can work toward. Choose goals that you can at least defined, right? Feeling more confident is defined. You can define that. That's, that's fine. Getting better is not very well-defined unless you're going to say exactly what that means, right? So choose goals and then the next step is to make a plan to achieve those goals. So yes, just like having the Northstar you choose the Northstar, you find what things does my role model do that I can that I can model. And then what steps can I take to get closer to those things, right? Well, this might be part of that as well. So you make your goal and then you make a plan that's going to get you closer to that That could be as simple as record two videos per week and do a feedback session, one with just me and then one with my friend who's working on his or her presentation skills to that could be a plan and we'll get into the specifics of the plan in just a minute, okay. Then it's very important to stick to the plan and be consistent. Well, that sounds pretty obvious, right? Yeah. If you make a plan, you have to stick to it. This is where you maybe want to choose things that you can do long term. Sometimes we get excited about stuff and then we do it for a week. I'm gonna do it every day and we got a little too excited and we can't maintain it. But if you're able to choose things that you can maintain over the long term, then you can stick with those activities. And those things are going to actually help you improve your presentation skills rather than again, giving up after a week. And I'm sure you have an experience somewhere in your past about maybe over committing to something or thinking, thinking you're going to be able to stick with something that you can't actually stick with. Alright? So we have a plan, right? We are working towards some specific goals. We're going to stick to that plan no matter what, these are things that we can do, right? As you go along, always be referring back to the do's and don'ts, the secret sauce of making a great presentation. What are the elements that go into a good presentation? That's what we've covered in this course. If you've been taking notes throughout, remember some of those key important things that make up a really good presentation. And that's not to say that you can't be Picasso and break the rules because you've mastered them. That's to say, you don't want to forget something really important early on in the process, right? So just be referring back to some of the really useful stuff. Not only in this course, but if you see others out there giving advice about presentations, about doing pitches, about speaking on camera, about talking through ideas. Anytime you get useful insights, remember those, and see if those will work for you. Never get stuck in this. This is just how I do it. Always try to be open to learning something new, modeling, something, paying attention to what's going on, what works, and what's going to make you a better communicator. And remember, of course, that recording is your friend. So record yourself. And if you're not comfortable with that, I'm afraid it's not an excuse. All that means is you haven't overcome that yet. That's like telling me you haven't hatched from your egg yet. You've got to hatch that egg. You have to get used to it. Because once you do, you're going to now have this thing which is invaluable, which is the ability to look at and listen to yourself. And in a sense, see yourself objectively so that you can give yourself feedback. That's going to then feed back into your presentations. And you're going to be sort of reinforcing better habits. Reinforcing things that you would like to do more of getting rid of, things that you would like to get rid of. Maybe those ums and uhs, or maybe using confusing examples, whatever it is that you want to get rid of. But again, you have to commit to being able to record yourself. And trust me, if you hate doing it, if it's horrible for you to watch yourself, you just have to get over it, right? People who have anxiety around something, agoraphobia, some people, for example, are afraid to leave their homes. These sorts of things, right? Uh, well proven a well proven treatment for these is what's called exposure therapy, where you just do more of that. And then it gets better over time. You're terrified of spiders or going out. Well, okay. You need to spend more time with spiders and force yourself to go out or have someone else force you to go out and you will eventually get used to it. 34. Finding the Right Incline: There's also this concept of pushing yourself. And this is always very subjective. But you know what's difficult for you, right? Imagine, imagine recording a whole course from beginning to end where you are on camera for the whole thing. We have to be on for the whole course. And you can't have any issues with how you're presenting, right? You have to be totally paying attention to everything you're doing and thinking about how you could make it better. That that would be maybe for a lot of people pretty difficult. Well, guess what? It's difficult for me. And I have made a lot of courses and a lot of videos, but I'm always forcing myself to do something new. I'm always forcing myself to try something that I think will make me better. That is hard. And if you're doing that, the stuff that you go through gets easier. You look back after going through all of these difficulties, after, after challenging yourself. And you think to yourself, Oh, that was easy. It's like the exercise thing, right? You first you try to run for 10 min. So exhausting if you run every day after a month, the idea of running for 10 min, there's no big deal, easy, no problem, right? That's the same, the same concept. The thing is, it is deeply subjective only you know what is difficult for you. So you can't cheat yourself. You have to hold yourself accountable. Alright, if you're always sort of just doing what's comfortable and easy, you're going to eventually reach a plateau. When you reach a plateau, it's going to be difficult for you to make progress. Why is that? Because you're not challenging yourself. What would challenge you? That is where you have to think about what frightens you. You have to think about what makes you cower in fear or what makes you think, no way, right? That is what you have to go into. Now, find a version of that that is doable, right? If you're afraid of speaking in a video, meeting with your colleagues and you're always the one maybe typing messages or you're the one working on the deck and other people present, write, volunteer to present once, push yourself, okay, maybe that's your challenge. For someone else that's no problem. Super easy. I do it all the time, right? Alright, well, what does that for you then? Maybe that is signing up for something like, well, there are a lot of events out there for, for public speaking and presenting, maybe signing up for something like Toastmasters, right? Something like that. To present something, to present an idea in front of your peers. Does that scare you? Does that terrify you? A little bit? If so, maybe that's what you should do. You find your next challenge in the things that part of your brain is saying. No way. However, however, you don't want it to be impossible. You don't want to choose something that's overwhelming. Think about walking uphill. You want it to be difficult, challenging, but possible. And if it's impossible, if it's something that you can't even imagine doing, maybe it's too soon to consider doing that. So that's, that's critical, right? Always be pushing yourself, alright? Then you have to make sure you get feedback. Now, we're going to talk about specifically how you organized feedback. How you give feedback. I want to give you a clear guideline on that, but make sure that something is coming back to you when you present either from yourself or from others or ideally both. Okay. So if you did that, that meeting, you did volunteer to present the slides this week. Ask your colleagues who were there, ask them how they felt about it. Ask them if they have any feedback for how you could improve, how you could make it more clear. If ideas could have been maybe rearranged or you could have used a different example, or maybe different, different visuals, whatever it may be, right? But also be giving yourself feedback as we've talked about using your recordings, okay? So this is generally, this is generally how you should approach practice. You've got to go, okay? You have a plan for moving toward that goal or those goals, right? You're going to stick with that plan no matter what you're going to be referring back to do's and don'ts and the best practices just to keep those in mind and looking out for new ideas, new insights, new best practices, new things that might help you improve, right? You're going to learn to record yourself. You're going to record yourself regularly and you're going to stick with it. You're not going to give up. You're going to push through that fear. If you haven't, you're going to be challenging yourself constantly. You're going to find difficult things to tackle and you're going to tackle those things. And you're going to get feedback. You're going to give yourself feedback and you're gonna get feedback from others. And if you're always doing these things, if you're going through this step-by-step process, it's not exactly a process, but this step-by-step approach to improving in any area, honestly, but particularly for presentations, you are going to make progress. You are going to improve a lot. That is pretty much guaranteed. Okay? So now we're going to go on and talk a little bit about how to find people to work with, how to find people who can give you feedback. And we're going to specifically talk about how to format feedback so that it's actually useful 35. Working with Others and Creating Accountability: You're probably familiar with the concept of the gym buddy. This maybe someone who's not necessarily your best friend. Someone who lives nearby, who goes to the same gym as you write, has some fitness goals, wants to get better, right? So you have this thing in common. And what you do is you make an agreement that you're going to be at the gym at a specific time, a certain number of days a week. People do this for running, people do this for fitness, right? But this is a very powerful thing because what it does is creates accountability. Number one, it creates accountability. And number two, it provides the possibility for support and feedback if you, if you really structure it properly. So let's go to the gym buddy example. If you have no one to answer to, you wake up one morning and think, I don't know. Maybe not. You go back to bed. Has five in the morning. What am I going to the gym at five in the morning for? No one is telling you you can't go back to bed and so you do. But if you have a bit of social pressure, if you know that your gym buddy will probably be there. Then it gives you a bit of a push. It creates this sort of slight discomfort about the idea of being judged. Hey, I showed up, I was there at 05:30. Where were you? Right? Or maybe you're running buddy, you'd go on a run on every weekday and you're running buddy, just picturing them running by themselves without you makes you feel so guilty that you get out of bed and you just go do it. Accountability is critical. And you can create this same thing with presentations and feedback, right? If you have someone around you who has similar goals, a colleague would be a great choice by the way, because especially colleague who's doing something similar to you, because you interact with each other really often and you're probably used to just being direct and honest with each other. Often colleagues have to just communicate directly and those personal relationships and feelings don't as easily get in the way. So it doesn't have to be a colleague, but I think that's a great choice. It also doesn't have to be a really close friend, your best buddy or anything like that. You might propose this. I know that Sheila, I know you you have to do a lot of presentations. I've been, I've been taking this course about presentations and I really want to improve my communication skills. I'm looking over there. She lives over there. I mean, she's right over there. Hello Sheila. And I was thinking one thing that the guy in the course talks about is having a presentation buddy. And I was thinking, if you're also working on your presentation skills, we might set up a feedback arrangement not to say anything about your presentation skills. Sheila, they're great. But, but I just thought it would be really helpful. We might be able to help each other, to give each other feedback and also have some accountability when it comes to improving our skills. I know, for example, I really need to work on My pauses. I need to work on my outline structure. I know I've been talking a lot, Sheila, but let me know. Tell me what you think. I want to hear your thoughts. Oh, yeah. I've been working on that too. I've been trying to okay. So this conversation could go on. It's getting a little too real for me. I'd better stop. Sheila. You can go now. Thank you very much. It's it's the idea of finding someone around you whose interests are aligned with yours. Oh, you want to get stronger at the gym or soda. Why? You want to run five days a week? Well, so to why you want to improve your presentation skills will so DY, with mutually aligned interests, It's very easy to set up that kind of arrangement. And then you can create accountability by giving yourselves specific due dates, challenges, things you're supposed to do. So maybe you choose something work-related or maybe not. Again, this is just an example. There are all sorts of ways to set this up. And the nice thing is, this is not your best friend. This is a thing you're doing almost as a professional courtesy and they're doing the same for you. And maybe your roommates, maybe your classmates, maybe it is a good friend as long as they can be honest with you. So you say, okay, every Tuesday we have a topic and we're going to put together a presentation. Each of us is going to put together a presentation on an outline with some very simple slides. We're going to record that and it is due Wednesday afternoon. We send it to each other. You send yours to me, I send mine to you. And then the feedback is due on Thursday, by the end of the day on Thursday, and then on Friday we can chat about the feedback if we have any questions. And we're gonna do this every week, that's your gym buddy. You've got one now. Fantastic. Okay. So I just gave an example. Think about people maybe in your own life, people around you who might have a similar interest, who you can work on this project of improving as a communicator with someone who will be honest with you. Someone who can give good feedback and feedback, by the way, it can improve over time to write F, to kinda build up a bit of, a bit of trust. Now, on the point of feedback, we talked about not overreacting. We talked about not getting too emotional, not getting upset when someone gives you feedback. But you also want to structure things really well, okay? So in order for feedback to be objective and actually useful, actionable, it may be a good idea to have a set structure that the feedback has to be given in. You have to use a specific structure to give the feedback to your, to your practice buddy. Okay, so let's just quickly talk about how we might structure the feedback with our buddies so that it can be useful, so that it can be objective and so that no feelings are getting in the way 36. Sustainable Feedback Loops: Alright, so you have your gym buddy, maybe not yet, but you're at least starting to think about this. Now. How do you structure the feedback? Well, my favorite structure is to put it in two parts. Okay? What went well? That's the first part. And then what could be better? You could say what could have been better, however you want to phrase it. It doesn't really matter. Now, essentially, you have to number this 123123. I recommend three you could do to don't do more than three in my opinion. The reason that you want to put these in two sections is that you want to force both the good and the bad. That way you're not putting the pressure on the other person, right? To mention something maybe that you might not want to hear or to say too much good stuff. Oh, I love this, I love that, I love that. And then the feedback is totally useless because you only hear about what you love. You force negative feedback and positive comments as well. So the structure is really critical here. Again, I recommend three. So what went really well? The structure of your presentation was very, maybe flowed very well from point to point. And then they might cite a specific example of something that you said. So this structure takes the burden off of some of those issues that can come up around feedback which may cause problems in the long run. I know, for example, I would not want to work with someone who couldn't give me improvement, who couldn't tell me what I could do better? Who couldn't tell me what was not good? I'm not interested. Alright, When I asked for feedback, I often say, don't tell me anything good, I only want to hear the bad stuff. I can take it. And I can take it. Okay? So think about a structure that works for you. This is my recommendation and you might make some other rules too. For example, you might say, each point of feedback must cite a specific part of the presentation. So when you said this, right, I thought you could have to mention something that might be better. And this is something that will evolve over time as the relationship between you and your buddy evolves over time. So something to work on. But this basic structure, what went well, what could be better is a good starting point, one-two-three, one-two-three, and then you can go from there. Now, another way to do this might be something like a call or a face-to-face conversation to just talk through stuff. Well, this is okay. Sometimes we feel a little nervous to mention some people are not so bold with their views, right? We feel a little nervous to mention something that might be critical. I was really distracted by the analogy that you chose In your hook and that kind of threw me off. I couldn't understand the rest of the presentation. I spent three days thinking about that. That's probably the issue. You have to spend three days thinking of an analogy. You probably need to go back to the drawing board and choose something simpler. Okay? Well, some people might be able to sort of be that direct. Some people may struggle with that. So if it works, that's great. Have a conversation about it, have a call about it. But because that can sometimes be difficult, you want to talk about it, of course, maybe going with the what went well, what could be better is still the best choice. It's time to put all of this into practice. It's time to make a commitment to yourself about what you're going to accomplish. So I want you to go through this. I want you to start. I want you to set some goals. I want you to make a plan for how you're going to achieve those goals. For example, how often are you going to practice? What specifically will you do to get there? I want you to stick with it. I want you to do all of that. And I want you to find hopefully someone who can help you to improve, who is also interested in improving so that you have that mutual interest. And I want you to push yourself, to record yourself, to give yourself that same feedback. It's like getting feedback from two people. Feedback. Good feedback on what you're currently doing leads to self-awareness. When you're then presenting, you're able to in real time realize what you used to do. A lot of that you don't want to do anymore. You're able to notice those things in real time. Make a change, Pause, think, and continue, and fix that. Over time. That becomes a habit, a new habit. So you're getting rid of your uprooting old habits, habits which held you back, which made you an unclear communicator, which cause you problems before, which made you feel self-conscious right? Now, you know what you need to work on, you know what the issues are. You're able to notice these things in real time. You're able to start changing habits, getting rid of the bad habits, building good habits, and that is what leads to progress. So my challenge to you now is to go through this entire process. I want you to, again, choose a topic, pick something new this time, pick something you're excited about. Go through the process, including the process we talked about from beginning to end, building a presentation from beginning to end. The five steps. If you want to skip the slides in the interest of time and effort. Okay, maybe that's, that's alright, That's up to you. After doing the presentation, review the recording, make notes, use that structure. What went well, what could have been better, right? And then try incorporating that feedback. See if you can do the same presentation. Again. If you can do it again, hopefully it'll be better the second time, maybe one more time, try to get to a clear final draft. And by that time, if you have found a practice buddy, send that to your practice buddy and get feedback from them as well. Alright, so this is the beginning of, this is the beginning of the journey. This is what you're going to be using now indefinitely to continue getting better. But it all starts with commitment. Alright? If you have any questions about this, please let me know. In the next lesson, we're going to be getting very close to the end of the course. We're going to be talking about creation and accountability. We talked about accountability in terms of your buddy, but we're gonna be talking about a different type and how this can be a very powerful force in taking your presentation skills to the next level. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 37. The Power of Creation and Accountability: I did not know where I was going when I started making videos seriously, about ten years ago. I had made some movies in high school just for fun. But about ten years ago I started seriously making videos. And my first videos were bad. In my opinion. When I, when I go back and watch them, I cringe a little bit because I think I've improved a lot in the last ten years and now making courses, making videos, that is my job. That's how I make a living. And this journey for me has been an incredible process of forcing me to continually challenge myself, right? But also realizing that putting stuff out there is a great way to have accountability. A great way to push yourself in new areas to improve things that you know our weaknesses. And also a great way to potentially build a community to find new possibilities. For example, I didn't know I was going to be making videos as a career ten years ago. So my challenge to you, this is a challenge to you. If you're ready to get crazy. If you feel like you really want to push yourself and get better at high-speed, at high velocity. Then I challenge you to start a channel on a topic that you're interested in. People say, Oh, I can't make videos, I don't know anything about it. Start very simple. Okay. I'm not telling you you have to do this. I'm just saying if you are if you're in the minority of people who are ready to do something crazy and take your skills to the next level and really put yourself out there. I want you to start a channel wherever it is, YouTube or Facebook or whoever channels are these days. I don't know. I don't know where channels are, all kinds of channels. So pick something you're interested in. And I want you to start regularly posting videos. Again, it should be something that doesn't take you too much time, that's not overwhelming. Something that you're interested in, that you enjoy talking about. For each one of those videos, you're putting together a presentation. Now, you may or may not be using slides for a video, right? I mean, a lot of, for example, YouTube videos don't have slides and that's probably a good thing. So okay. Maybe cut that part out depending on what you're talking about. But there might be some visual elements that are going to help you express yourself. You might learn how to add elements to the screen or animate things or have some text or some visuals are some image overlays that are going to help you express yourself. Again, a presentation doesn't have to have slides. We've talked about that several times. That's sort of the, the standard thing people do. But in the case of videos, they're probably better ways to, better ways to communicate or support what you're talking about. Now as you go through this journey, if you're willing to take on the challenge, you're going to be reading comments. People will be watching what you post, right? They're going to be watching your videos and they're going to be giving you feedback. Take that feedback, take those comments. And if it makes sense, see where you can improve. Now you have to also realize where you can ignore stuff. People say a lot of mean things in comments. You are stupid or something like that. So you have to know what to just pay no attention to for the sake of your sanity. But also you're going to find some comments that are going to be really insightful, that are going to help you get better. And you're going to see impact. Which topics to people like more or less, which things resonate with people? How can I speak so that people stay engaged? Which may be elements can I add to my videos to maybe make my ideas more clear? Okay, so you're going to come up with a lot of ideas that will continue to improve your abilities as a communicator. And the editing process I find to be also very powerful. There are a lot of free editing tools out there. If you've never made a video before, don't it's not that hard, right? Don't be scared. You just have your video there and you're watching it and you're making sure that you cut things where they need to be cut. And you might add some texts and overlays and different things. But that process of going back, watching it, improving the video visually is also a great way to sort of get over that natural feeling of disgust when you listen to your voice or see yourself on camera. And a way to see stuff that you might not see if you're just watching a recording back one time, right? I always do this. Why do I do this? Why am I stuck to my sides and not moving at all? That's not very expressive. Why am I so monotone? I need to, I need to improve my intonation a little bit. I need to vary my intonation and the pace of my speech. Maybe use a few more pauses. My face is not expressive at all. And that might not be interesting, right? And when you make those changes and you make the next video, you're going to see the impact that it has, right? And that's going to push you to find new ideas. It's such a cool process. Again, I'm not telling you you have to do this, but if you're willing to give it a try, I think you're going to get a lot out of it. I cannot express how much I have got out of this process. It has been for me the main driver to continually push myself, to continue to try to improve as a communicator, as someone who speaks on camera, as someone who expresses ideas, as someone who makes presentations. It has probably been the most critical part of my own journey to become a better presenter. I'm always thinking about this. I'm always working on this. And I'm, I'm very hard on myself. I'm very critical, but I also have a tough skin so I can, I can still be confident, even though I can be very critical of myself. As your followers grow. If they grow, you're gonna get more feedback and they will hold you accountable. And that's good pressure. So if you say I'm going to post every Wednesday, now, you have 400 people who follow you, who will make sure you do. And if you don't, they will let you know, hey, where's the video? So you have a bit of pressure. That's a way to sort of outsource the gym buddy accountability to a bunch of people. And that might be a little scary, but it's not, it's not that bad. I find it to be really great motivation. Along the way this whole time, you're honing your skills. You're learning new things, you're taking ideas from others, modeling them, making them your own. You're finding your voice which is essential and also very important. Gaining confidence. I dare you to do this. I dare you to do this. No one's making you do anything. But I dare you to do it 38. Overcoming Nerves: There was a study done in, I believe, 1973, that reported people feared public speaking more than death. Now, that study may have been overhyped and overemphasized because it's a sort of shocking statistic. But it does highlight that people don't like to, some people, many people don't like to speak in public. Don't like to express themselves in front of others. So what is going on there? We're going to spend a little time in this lesson talking about confidence and nerves. If you struggle with this fear, then listen up. If you don't, congratulations. I'm going to talk through just a few ideas that I think can help overcome that kind of fear. And you may use this approach for other things that you're afraid of, that you fear as well. So stick around for that. And also I want to talk a bit about bespoke practice. This is really just to tie up a few loose ends here at the end of the course, we're getting very close to the end. A few things I want to cover to make sure we've got everything covered when it comes to presentations. So first, let's get into confidence and overcoming nerves. Why is it that we sometimes feel nervous or afraid to speak in front of others? What is that? Nervousness? Why do we fear? Saying what we think if there are ten people around and looking at us, what's going on there? Well, I think the main reason is judgment, but in a kind of strange way. So we're concerned that people are judging us, right? And we'll be in their minds criticizing us. And thinking that we're not good enough for we're boring or were not interesting. And that makes us tense up before we speak, right? And some people have this to varying degrees. Some people are so confident that they've never experienced this in their lives. That's fantastic, right? But why though? Why, why do we feel that they're judging us? I think What's really going on is we are projecting perfect knowledge of everything about ourselves onto the people who are listening to us speaking. And because we have perfect knowledge of ourselves, we know both our strengths or weaknesses, right? I live inside of my head. I know what I'm good at, I know what my weaknesses are. I know what makes me scared, right? I know my vulnerabilities. And I naturally assume that other people who are listening to me, looking at me, watching me know all of those things too. And they really care about all of them. And they're laughing to themselves when they hear me speak because they're aware of all of them. Aha, there's that one. What an idiot. Oh, oh, I can't believe he just said that. Right. But the thing is that's not the case in almost every situation where you're communicating in front of others, whether it's a job interview or something at work, a report or a weekly update, or it's a talk about a topic you're presenting to your class in school, whatever it may be. Most of the time. Nobody cares. Nobody. Nobody is prioritizing, being critical of you. Nobody is spending all of their time thinking about how dumb you are or how silly you look. The person who cares most about that probably is you. So if you've experienced this, just keep that in mind, right? Most people don't really care. And learning that over time has really helped me overcome some of those nerves, some of that self-consciousness When it comes to talking in front of others, knowing that actually they're probably thinking about their own issues. They're probably thinking about how they're being judged. Probably checking their phone, they've got other stuff to worry about. It's very unlikely that they're actually laser-focused on being judgmental of me, right? And they don't have perfect knowledge of me. They don't know all of my vulnerabilities. They only know what they're seeing right now, what they're hearing right now. So that's actually to my advantage. So my suggestion there would be to just move into it, just get used to that. And over time, if this is something you struggle with, over time, you're going to naturally, slowly overcome it. It's going to get easier And just remind yourself all the time, nobody really cares. This is where it can help to have a little mantra. I used to, I used to really struggle with this talking in front of people speaking on camera. It used to be a big issue for me. I still get nervous and breathe very quickly and I would feel out of breath. Right. But after a while, I just got used to it because I kept doing it. And it was less terrifying each time. And I had a little mantra, come up with your own. It helped me. My mantra was, nobody cares, nobody cares, nobody cares, nobody cares, nobody cares. Nobody cares. In my high-school graduating class, I haven't had to give a speech at graduation. It was just to read a speech. I didn't have to do a presentation. I was just reading a speech in front of, I don't know, a few thousand people. And I was nervous. And before I went on stage, I just said to myself, nobody cares, nobody cares, nobody cares. That really helped me. I was able to use humor. I was able to relax a bit and it went much better than I had expected. I was I was terrified that everyone would be judging me and it went pretty well. The other thing that can really help is to slow down and breathe. If you find yourself getting really nervous. If you find yourself having that out of breath feeling. If you find yourself almost panicking. Just breathe through your nose. If you can do belly breathing where you actually breathe with your diaphragm, that's something you can learn to do. I've found that to be very useful. So slow down. Don't rush. Don't force yourself to speak quickly. It's okay to pause for a minute, to look around, to make a joke, and then take a deep breath through your nose. Doing that is very powerful. That also helped me a lot. So these are all things that helped me having a little mantra to remind me that people are not actually sitting around judging me. Probably, yeah, maybe they are, but probably not having that little mantra. Slowing down, breathing, right? Going into fear. Knowing that fear is the next challenge, not a wall, it's a wall I can't get over. It's a challenge that I can overcome. And the more I do it, the easier it's going to get. And then the last thing is to be well-prepared. If you're ready. If you've memorized your outline, if you know what you're talking about, because your outline is really good, really well-structured, really smooth. You've practiced it. You've got your slides ready to go. They're clean, they pop, their vivid. You feel confident and relaxed, knowing everything is in place. All you have to do is show up and talk through it, right? What's the worst that could happen? If everything's ready, if you have your outline ready to go and you actually follow it, maybe you have a few blunders. He might say something in a silly way, or maybe your eyes starts twitching. But it can't be that bad because you're at least well-prepared. And that is a big part of feeling relaxed and feeling confident when you're about to present something. So those are my personal tips for getting over nerves and feeling a little bit more comfortable speaking in front of others. The key again is to just push through your fear and you will eventually get used to it. It will, it will get better. We're going to talk quickly about bespoke practice. We're getting very close to the end of our course. We're going to spend a little time on practice before we get into our throw away the ladder concept 39. Bespoke Practice: I've spoken quite a bit in this course about how to practice. We went over the methods and steps for practicing so that you can improve quickly so that you can reach your goals. I even gave you one crazy challenge, a dare to start making videos, whether or not you take it. But I want to bring up something that I think is really worth mentioning about practice. Not everything works for everybody. Some things just don't help, right? It happens, we're all very different. Everybody is different. We have our own inclinations, our own way of thinking. Some people learn by listening better. Some people learn visually. Some people who are tactile learners. Some people improve when they're being pushed by others. Some people improve when they have very harsh direct feedback. Some people improve when they are only given encouragement, right? We're all very different. And I want to be sensitive to that. And I want to just remind you that you should, when you're thinking about your plan to reach your goals. So in our, in our practice lesson, we talked about setting the goal and then making a plan that has steps to get closer to your goals and sticking with that, right, I want to make sure that the practice that is part of your plan works individually for you, right? So I want you to feel free to develop ideas, develop exercises, and things that actually help you get better, that help you improve in specific ways. So build exercises, you have permission to do that. You should do that. After all, you are responsible for your progress. It's up to you to get better. If something that we talked about that I recommended isn't working for you, you have to find something that does, right? What is it? Don't just give up. What is it? Maybe you find that one of your issues is when you talk through your outline, it starts to sound robotic. And the more you practice it, the more robotic it gets, it starts to sound very formulaic. And you notice you're getting stuck in speech patterns. I said it like that before, and now I'm kinda locked into that. And it starts to sound less and less natural over time. Alright, well, what can you do about that? Maybe you need to practice improvisation. Practice the art of saying things differently in different ways each time. Improvisation. So there you might give yourself a single word. The word might be something like nature or weddings or potatoes, just something very simple. Then your challenge is to start talking about it with no preparation, no outline, nothing, you have nothing. So just start talking about weddings. Well, in generally speaking, in my country, there are a few different wedding traditions that I think are unique that might surprise people if they were to visit from another country and hadn't been to an American wedding before. Then I might go into that. I didn't plan to say that. That's improvisation. What I'm practicing there is the ability to think in the moment, to speak freestyle, right? To be able to, I think on my feet. And that's a critical skill. And that might help you to get out of that habit of getting stuck in speech patterns. So that might be an exercise you would build for yourself, a kind of bespoke exercise that you can do. Maybe you're struggling with how to simplify concepts, right? You tend to over-complicate ideas rather than making them simpler. You tend to, when you're talking about something, just explain it very well in a lot of detail. But at the end, people just feel the feedback you get from your buddy is, Wow, that was a lot. Do you understand it? I don't know. What can you do there There's a technique that's actually a memory technique called, it's either called the Feynman Technique, F and M a N, the Feynman Technique or the fineman method. And essentially you take something complex, it's a complex idea or concept or topic that maybe you know about and you explain it to a kid, explain it to me like I'm five. There's a subreddit about this actually, right? Well, you would explain it to maybe a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old? If you have to explain it to a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old so that they understand. It has to be simplified. Because if you give all of those complicated explanations and descriptions, they won't understand. So you're kind of forcing yourself into a context that's getting you used to breaking ideas down using analogies that are simple, easy to understand, and intuitive. So maybe try that one again. I'm not telling you which exercises to use. I'm saying Be prepared to find ones and develop ones that will help you in specific areas that you have identified that you need to improve. That the sort of broad approach that I outlined in the practice lesson maybe doesn't cover, maybe you struggle with speaking speed. You get started talking about a topic and then you get really into it and you forget that you're supposed to be slowing down so that everyone can understand you when you get really, really excited. So it gets faster and faster and faster and then no one can understand you. Well, that's a problem right? There. You might do a half speed exercise. You have to speak at half speed the whole time. You are forcing yourself into a sort of format or pattern that is going to break your habit. A lot of people struggle with that speaking speed thing where they start speaking really fast and they don't even know it. So you say, okay, I'm going to speak half speed this time. I'm going to force myself to do that and watch my recording back to make sure I did. And I'm going to do a long pause in between ideas. Okay, great. That's actually a great way to separate ideas and organize your thoughts in-between. So you force yourself to talk like this for about 10 min about the topic that you want to focus on or explain. And you don't allow yourself to increase the speed no matter what. And sometimes it's very frustrating to do. That almost hurts me to do, but it's a great way to rewrite your habit patterns. So I'm not telling you that you should do these specifically. I'm telling you you have permission to start building your own exercises, finding ones that help you with your problem, areas, developing new ones that hopefully you can share with others if you develop one that really works for you. I would like to hear about it. I love learning about new practice techniques. Tell me about it. Alright, so we've talked about overcoming nerves, gaining confidence, and bespoke practice. Now we're going to go on to talk about throwing away the ladder. What the heck does that even mean? Well, there's only one way to find out. I will see you in the next lesson. 40. Throw Away the Ladder: At the end of the truck, Tatas, one of the most famous philosophical works in modern philosophy, Ludvig Vichtenstein says, now that you understand, you can throw away the ladder. Essentially, once you have used the ladder to climb up, you can get rid of it. So in this course, what have we done? In a way we've drawn a circle around the idea of presentations. We do that as a way to really focus on something. Here we're gonna be learning the principles, the methods for making a great presentation. We're going to be focused on that. Now that you have the keys and the core principles of strong presentations, of giving a very clear and impactful presentation. And the methods, the tools for continuing to improve indefinitely. Kick away the ladder, throw it away. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't necessarily go back and review the course. That can be a very useful thing to do. You may want to go back and review the five steps for building a presentation from beginning to end, you may want to revisit the do's and don'ts and the secret sauce of a Great presentation. You might want to review the hooks you can use to get your audience's attention. You might want to review some of the high-level concepts and principles we talked about, like choosing language that evokes, that is active. How to find, how to discover interesting analogies, how to use examples, how to practice, and the guidelines for doing that. We talked about a lot of stuff in this course, right? So I'm not saying don't review. What I am saying is I like you to now start thinking more broadly as you go through the process of working on your presentation skills. As you find your voice, you hatch yourself and see what kind of unique bird you are. As you gain confidence and become a better communicator, you're going to start seeing ways to apply what you've learned elsewhere. Perhaps the final goal should be platform, agnostic communication skills. Meaning, maybe we're not just talking about presentations. What about negotiations? What about conversations? Just regular conversations with your family and friends, the people you know, your colleagues. What about a debate? What if you need to tell a story? You'll start to find these situations where the things that we talked about in this course can easily apply. And I don't think you should shy away from that. In fact, that means that you're starting to develop a broader skill set. And that skill set might be generally described as very good communication skills. Have you can become a great communicator, a great storyteller in general, then you really have a superpower and that really is like magic. So that brings us back to the concept we were talking about at the beginning of the course. Really were doing a kind of magic here. And if you're able to do magic really well, you can accomplish a lot of things. You can build connections with people. You can inspire them, you can convince them. You can persuade them of something. You can make them imagine something. You can be more memorable. You can do a lot of things. So I just want you to start thinking about applying these principles a little more broadly in other areas of your life. And work. In addition to, of course, putting in the hard work of practicing, of improving your presentations, of building better slides, of improving your outlining skills, of getting feedback. All of the stuff that we have talked about up to this point. And personally it helps me to see myself as a storyteller. I see myself as a storyteller and a magician of words. At least I tried to be, I strive for that. I'm not making any claims necessarily, but I strive to find new spells I can use to make people think in new ways. And I strive to find new tools that will help me tell better stories, that can help people in some way. That is kind of my whole thing. That's, that's my mission in life. And personally, looking at things this way makes communicating a joy. It makes it a fascinating process. Doing a presentation, doing a course, making a video. It is so interesting. It is an exciting and fun process. And I think if you start looking at things in this way, in your own way, of course, it's going to make you powerful. Whether it's for conversations, negotiations, stories, presentations, whatever, start thinking about that. Never stop improving. Never stop pushing yourself. Always get feedback no matter where it comes from. Never let yourself become generic and uninteresting. Always, always put in the work. Do it the right way. Find your voice, hone your skills, master the craft. And those skills are going to make things happen. Those skills are not just things that you learn and then they sit in a closet somewhere. Those skills are going to give you abilities in your life, which are going to make a big difference. Thank you so much for taking the course, for joining me on this journey. I really hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got a lot out of it. I've certainly really enjoyed the process. If you'd like, you can leave a review on the course to let me know how you felt about it. I would really love to get your feedback and feel free to check out my other courses as well. I have a lot of courses on a lot of different topics, so check those out. Let me know if you have any questions. And I hope we can continue part of your journey together. If you check out some of my other courses, we may be able to do that. So, good luck. And I hope to see you in the next one.