Transcripts
1. Intro Video - Public Speaking Presentation Skills Class: Do you like these
special effects? Do you like the splashy
graphics and the music. Isn't that great? Guess what? There's none of that
in this course. This is a course about
public speaking. Part of what makes speaking
scary to people is you can't hide behind music and special effects
and graphics. It's just you with
people looking at you. So I'm going to demonstrate best practices
throughout this course. What are you going to learn
here? I'm not that good. I only know one thing, how to teach people
how to speak. That's what I've been
doing my whole adult life. For more than 30 years, I've coached more than 10,000
people in real life face to face all over the globe on how to be better speakers
and communicators. I'm bringing here to
this course that wisdom, that experience. How
does that benefit you? It means I already have
dealt with people who have your exact issues and
I know how to help you get better at
your skill level, not at the skill level of a
professional or a natural, but at your skill level. I'm here for you.
This is what I do.
2. Quick Wins! The Secret to Using Speaker Notes Effectively: I want to dive right
in and give you a quick win because
your time is valuable. This is an advanced
tip that's going to dramatically help all of your presentations
and your speeches, and yet anyone can do it, even a basic beginner. So what I have here are notes. Now, the beauty of these notes, it's one page large font, so I don't have to
stop and put on my glasses when giving
a presentation. But here's the advanced part. It's not just that it's
one page large font. It's that I have not just
one page, not just two, but three identical sheets of notes that I place around the room when I'm
giving a presentation. What this means is I
don't have to stand wetted behind a lectern
or stand in one spot. I can walk around
the room and it appears as though I'm just speaking off the top of
my head for an hour. And yet, I have no idea
what I'm going to say next. I'm constantly
referring to notes. But by having three
sheets around the room, I make the whole thing look
professional, at ease, and the audience feels like
I'm just speaking to them. This is a simple tip. It cost the price of three
sheets of paper. Stay tuned. There are a lot more
advanced tips like this that anyone can do to
become a great speaker.
3. Avoiding The Initial Wrong Turn Most Speakers and Presenters Make: What do you want
your audience to do? Before you start with
the first slide, before you drink a whole bunch of coffee so you can stay up late typing away at
this 30 minute speech. Take a breath, calm down, sit back and just ask yourself, what is it I want
my audience to do? Now, if you're going on a
job interview and you're presenting to one
prospective employer, the one thing you want
that person to do is give you the job, hire you. If you are running for office, you want the audience to give you a vote or
give you money. If you're speaking to a
new business prospect, you want them to hire
you or sign a cont. What is it you want
your audience to do? Now, this sounds basic, and yet I see
countless times with people of all varying
degrees of success, skill, seniority within
the private sector, businesses, corporations, governments all making
the same mistake. Their first inclination is to just start
gathering information. They get this big wheelbarrow. They go around the office
gathering information. Smithers, give me all the files you have on the such
and such project. Jane, give me all
your slides that you did on this subject last
week. I want to build that. And they're going around the
room with this wheelbarrow. And the data is gathering, and it's stacking higher
and higher and higher. And before you know it,
you're just swimming in the sea of data. Time out. First thing you have to do is
figure out in one sentence, what is it you want
your audience to do? I want you to write it down. I want you to post it here
in the discussion section, the Q&A section of this course. You need clarity on
that because if you don't know what it is
you want them to do, there's no way you can
convince them of that. It's the old joke, if you don't care
where you're going, it doesn't matter
what road you take. Write down the exact
specific thing you want your audience to do. That's the starting
point for every speech. It's the starting point
for every presentation.
4. Developing Expert Judgment for Your Public Speaking and Presenting Opportuniti: Let me ask you. Think of the best speaker, the best presenter you've seen in the last year
in your business, your line of work, not
a professional comedian or politician, but someone in your industry. Now, tell me every message. Think of every message you remember from that speech,
that presentation. Go ahead, give it some thought. Maybe nothing comes up. Think of the last five
years, ten years. Maybe think of your entire life. Think of the best speaker
you've ever heard. Now, try to write down
on a sheet of paper or a computer screen every message you remember from
that presentation. I don't mean that you
like their style or that they were funny or
they're commanding. I don't care about
that right now. I just want to know what
messages do you remember? Look down at your sheet.
How full is that? Did you write down 15, 20, 30 messages? I doubt it. That's a question
I've been asking my clients all over the
world because for 30 years, I've trained presidents of
countries, prime ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners, lots of business executives
in every industry, athletes. I asked that question. And typically, quite often, people say, Teach, everyone's boring in my industry. I
don't remember anything. Or they'll say, Yeah, Teach, I remember this one speaker. I remember this one idea. Occasionally, it's two.
Sometimes it's three ideas, three messages from the
greatest speaker they've seen. Every three months or so, someone will
remember four ideas. And every six months, I'll have one of my clients from an in person
training tell me they remember five ideas from the best speaker
they've ever seen. And they may have been
in the audience with Steve Jobs unveiling an iPod
or something like that. In all the years I've
asked that question, guess how many times
someone has remembered more than five ideas from the best speaker they've ever
heard in their industry. That's right. Never. So my first really big
rule for you after you've narrowed down what you want your audience to do is
you've got to ask yourself, of all the messages you
could tell your audience, what are the five
most important? Five or fewer. You are not being
asked to speak to be the Wikipedia for your audience. They can just stay at home, go on their cell phone and go
to Wikipedia or use Google. So much of being a good
speaker, a good presenter, a good communicator
has to do with judgment and really figuring out out of everything you know, what does your audience need to know in order to
make the decision to do what you want them to do? So you have to have focus. So much of being
a great speaker, a great presenter has nothing to do with your hand gestures, your eye contact, your voice
or whether you say Rm. It's about judgment and
figuring out how to eliminate most of the garbage
that gets in most speeches. Most people, adults in
the business world, political world,
government world, make the fundamental blunder of simply trying to convey
way too many facts, way too many numbers, way too many data points. And it's boring. Your audience doesn't have to know everything about
what you do in your job. If they did, they'd
have your job. When you're giving
a presentation, it's your job to focus just on the ideas that
are most interesting, most relevant, most important and useful to your audience. So what you've got to
do is brainstorm on every possible idea message you could say in this presentation, in this speech, and then eliminate anything that doesn't
make it to the top five. If you have a message that's
just a boring fact and the audience isn't going
to find it interesting or useful, get rid of it. You can always give
that as a handout. It's not something you have to spend your time speaking about. More tips in a moment
on how to really figure out what the best
messages will be.
5. The Radical Yet Simple Solution To Finding Great Messages: How do you know
what messages will actually work on your audience? Well, here's a radical
idea for you. Ask people. Yeah, I love Google and
the Internet and all that, but sometimes just going
up to people and asking them what issues are of greatest interest to them
can be the most helpful. I remember many years ago, I was working with a
political candidate who was running for supervisor of elections in a
county in Florida. And this was after a whole situation where
voting machines didn't work. The current supervisor
of election was going to be
voted out of office. There was no doubt. And people were upset their
vote didn't count. So all of a sudden, there
were about ten candidates running for this supervisor
of elections position. My candidate had about the least money of any
of the candidates. All of the candidates
were running around town saying, Democracy is paramount. Your vote is essential, and I have a nice law degree, and they had nice and
suits and ties on. They looked
professional. They all sounded like statesmen. And they were all sounding
as if they were running for, you know, basically president
of the United States. My candidate had to figure
out a way of cutting through this. So I asked Ion. What have you done that's
different from other people? He said, Well, I actually went to the factory where they
make the voting machines, and I got certified to fix it. I said, Okay, that sounds in. It was a one day
certification process. So I just went around
and asked voters, What are you really looking for in a supervisor of elections? And everyone said
the same thing. Dai, I don't really
care about that. All I want is someone who
will make the machines work. Semi vote counts. Again
and again, I heard that. Now, this didn't cost any money. We didn't have money
for extensive polling. But what we did is we got rid of all the messages
about, you know, 15 years in the
Kawanas and, you know, the Boy Scout membership cup Masters, representation,
leadership position. Get rid of all that in
the candidates message. And instead, Ian focused on
a clear, simple message. I'm the only
candidate who's been certified to repair
these voting machines. You vote for me, I'll make sure the machines work
and your vote will count. Three simple messages. You had less money than anyone. He won the primary, he won the general election. And now, actually
many decades later, he's still in office because
of just asking people, What do they care about
and narrowing it down. In this case, it wasn't
even five messages. I was three messages. So whatever you do, it's not enough to just tell
people all your credentials, whether you're trying to get
a new piece of business, new consulting, investment
or being hired for a job. You've got to focus on what the person or people you're presenting to
actually care about.
6. Your Stories Will Make Your Ideas Unforgettable: Do you want to know what the
single biggest difference is between great communicators, people who are great
public speakers, presenters versus the average
ones, the boring ones. It's not about intelligence. It's not about looks. It's not this nebulous thing people like to call charisma. It's not the absence of ums, s s, you knows. It's not even about even having a sense of humor,
although humor helps. The single biggest difference between great speakers and
presenters and everybody else, great communicators use stories to illustrate all
their key points. When I ask people
all over the globe, whether I'm training
a financial executive or a prime minister, I get the same response. I ask them, What do you remember from the best
speakers you've seen? Beyond the fact that someone was comfortable or engaging
or walked around, the only thing anyone
remembers the stories. Now, they remember the messages associated with the stories. But they remember the stories. Now, you're probably
thinking, Well, that's great, TJ, but, you know, I'm not a natural storyteller, and my industry, we don't have it's all a
bunch of excuses. It doesn't happen to be
anything particularly fancy. For example, a few years ago, I was conducting kind of a run of the mill
presentation training. A major healthcare executive, a CEO had flown into New York City to work
with me for a day. And we were in my training
facility in midtown Manhattan, and his staff had
called me in advance. TJ, we've worked on this
speech for three months, whatever you do,
don't change it. It's been approved by all the different people, the
lawyers, investor. Everyone signed off on it. You know, let's try
not to change it. I said, Hey, we're
going to try to improve him the best we can in
every way possible. So Jim gets there
early in the morning. I started the presentation training as I do
with all of them. I just had him get up and speak. I recorded it on video. So he gives his presentation. It's about 15 minutes long. I record it. We play it back. And he asked me
what I think of it. And his speech consisted
of him sort of head down, going through a whole
bunch of bullet points, reading reading bullet points
on a slide and, you know, a totally normal presentation, no worse than any other
presentation I've seen. But he's basically
reading off of a script. He's reading off a bullet
points on a screen. And he wants to
know what I think. And I said, Jim, I'll
tell you what I think, but I want to know
what you think. And again, I made him really
watch his own presentation. When it was done, he turned
to me and said, Oh, my God. Teach, it's so boring. I wouldn't want to watch
me. What did you think? And I had to say, Well, Jim, you seem like a smart fellow. If you think it's incredibly
boring, guess what? It is. And we took his speech, and we just tore it up
into little pieces. We balled it up, and we
threw it in the trash can. It's okay, Jim, let's roll up our sleeves. Let's try again. We got a clean sheet of paper. We brainstormed on how
many? That's right. Just the top five ideas that we really wanted to convey to his audience for
this presentation. And then he came up with a
little story for each one, an example for each one. And he had a single
sheet of paper. We got rid of the slides
because they were worthless. And this time, he just spoke. Focused on a few ideas. We recorded it, looked at it. Then he didn't even
ask me what I thought. He's like, Oh, my God, it's 1,000 times better.
TJ, you're a genius. Well, I'm not a genius. I'm just getting people to stop boring their
audiences to death. Okay, so what did I do there?
I just told a little story. Happens to be a true story. There's nothing
particularly glamorous or exciting about it. It wasn't in an exotic locale. It's just in my office
in Midtown Manhattan. There wasn't any great
drama. Nobody cried. Nobody pulled a gun on me. That has happened before. A simple story, but
it had a character, had a problem, had a setting, had a little dialogue, had a challenge, had
some emotion involved, and it had a solution. That's all the story is. So if you really want to
convey your main messages, you need to package each
message with a store. And the story wasn't for me
just to be entertaining. It was to convey a
very important point that you don't want to
bore your audience. You don't want to just do
this boring data dump. You want to have narrowed
your message down to five. But if I just said
that in 10 seconds, it goes in one ear
and out the other. By telling a story, and it
only took a couple of minutes, it allows the audience
to visualize it. That's the real
power of story is it forces the audience
that you're speaking to that you're presenting
to to essentially run a little movie reel along
with what you're saying. That triggers the
memory process. That's why story
is so important. So it's not just about opening
your speech with a story or a funny story to
loosen people up. No, it's critical to the
whole communication process. You need an actual
relevant story, a real story not some generic motivational
star fish story, but a real story
about a real problem, a real conversation you
had with a real person, a client, a colleague,
a customer, a prospect, and how the
problem was resolved. If you do that, you're instantly going to be
one of the best speakers your audience has seen
today, possibly ever. So I need you to start thinking about your stories
you're going to use for your messages for the presentation you're
going to be delivering.
7. Your PowerPoint Will Create Engagement, Not Slumber: We've got to talk
about PowerPoint and visual aids during
presentations and speeches. Look, folks, I like PowerPoint. I use PowerPoint all the time. Some of my best friends
are PowerPoint. But let's get real here. Most PowerPoint presentations
are really dull. They're boring. They're excuses to put people to sleep or to encourage them to check their Facebook feed because
it's so darn boring. Now there are more than 6,000 books about
PowerPoint on Amazon. I've done entire
courses on PowerPoint. I'm going to tell you everything
you need to know about PowerPoint in just a
few minutes right here. For starters, if you're
thinking of giving a PowerPoint presentation,
time out right there. You're not giving a
PowerPoint presentation. You're giving your presentation, your ideas that you have to make come alive for your audience. The PowerPoint
slides are just an extra it's just an enhancement. The second you tell yourself, I'm giving a PowerPoint
presentation. For most people,
it flips a switch, and they become boring, robotic, incompetent
speakers and presenter. Don't let that happen. My advice don't create
the first slide until you've done some of the things we've already
talked about in this course. You've really identified in one sentence the one thing
you want your audience to do. You've identified
your five key ideas, messages to resonate
with the audience. You have a story for each
one of your message points. Then the only then, should you think about
having slides to back it up? Now, here are the rules
you need to follow if you really want to be successful
using PowerPoint. Rule number one,
one idea per slide. When you see three bullet
points or ten bullet points, it just doesn't work, folks. I understand that's how it's
done in your organization. You've seen other people do it, but there's no
evidence that that helps people
remember your ideas. If you want notes, remember, I gave you a solution
on notes already. Have a single sheet of paper. The PowerPoint slides
are not for your notes. The next big rule, use images, not text. Now, I love text. I've written half a dozen books.
I like to read. I don't have any evidence that putting text on slides that you are projecting actually
helps your audience. Remember, and guess what? You don't have any evidence
that that works either. It's just got it's just that's
how it's been done before. But you don't really have
evidence that putting text up on a slide while you
speak to the slide works. So if you want to be effective, put one image per slide. That doesn't have text on it. I know, I know.
This sounds crazy. This isn't how you
normally do it. If you want to
have lots of text, email that to people in advance, give it as a handout, but don't project it during
your presentation. Next, when you're speaking, let people look at you.
Don't have a slide up. You want people to
look at the slide, put the slide up, and close your mouth and
let them look at it. No one solution to
that is if you hit the letter B on your keyboard, it will black out the screen. If you want people
to listen to you, let them just look at you. Don't have anything
up there. Any key whatsoever brings back the
PowerPoint to wherever it was. So you can be in
complete control, even if it's someone's
bad PowerPoint. Your boss just gave you
a horrible PowerPoint, said, deliver this in 5 minutes. You can still control
what people look at and when they look
at it by using the letter B, hitting it once, blacks out the screen,
hit any key whatsoever, it goes back and you can
advance to the next screen. Here are the two rules you need to apply to
every Power Point. Slide. Two questions
you need to ask. Does this slide actually make my idea more understandable
than me just saying it? And does this slide make my idea more memorable
than me just saying it? If you can't say yes to
both of those things, it is a horrible slide. Do yourself a favor, do
your audience a favor, and throw it in the trash can. I know that sounds harsh, but you know what else is harsh. Being in the middle of
your presentation and you look around and everyone in
the audience is doing this. I'm trying to help you
avoid that harsh reality. Just because you can use
PowerPoint doesn't mean that's always the most
effective visual aid. Someone like Steve Jobs had unlimited budgets
for presentations, known as a great presenter. He used the Apple
version of PowerPoint, Keynote, but he didn't
rely on that exclusively. When he wanted to unveil a brand new laptop that
was extraordinarily thin, he didn't just put up a slide and put the statistics
of how wide it was. No, not what he did.
He walked over to a table, picked up an envelope. He said, How thin
is this new laptop? He picked up an envelope, reached in and pulled the
laptop out of the envelope. It was such a powerful message because it was a powerful image. Wow, this laptop is so thin, it goes right into an envelope. That's much more powerful than
just writing the facts and the specs on a slide and quickly going
through the numbers. So remember, you can use props what did this
cost Steve Jobs? $0.20. So look around
you and ask yourself, what tools do you have? What images do you have? What things in real life
do you have that will make your ideas come
alive for your audience. If you're just looking
for the poor man's, the poor woman's teleprompter, you are not looking
in the right place. There's nothing like a good
old fashioned piece of paper if you just need notes
for what you want to say.
8. Building an Ethical Cheat Sheet Just for You: Okay, I've been
easy on you so far. I haven't asked you to do a lot. Now it's time to put some
of these things together. It's time to create
your own cheat cheat for your speech, for
your presentation. I never speak off
the top of the head. Let me tell you a little secret. I have a horrible memory. I can never remember
what my next point is or what the next slide
is, but guess what? I don't have to. I cheat. Simple sheet of paper. You heard me talk about
this in the first video. Amazingly simple tool. It cost $0.05 or less, and yet most people don't do it. They feel this need to let me work hard and
try to remember and memorize or let me put all the notes on
the PowerPoint slide, which is the worst thing. No. Let me wing it.
No, don't wing it. Have a plan and stick to it. This is a plan. So what I want you to
do is to really isolate your five main ideas,
write them down, type them up, and then a word or two for
your main examples. A couple of words to remind
you for the stories. If you have a particular
statistic or fact or number, you're afraid you'll
forget, put that down, but it really should be
as tight and as focus. This is an hour long
keynote speech. These are all the
notes that I need. So that's what I
want you to do now. This is frankly 1,000 times easier than writing out
a speech word for word. For most people, in
most situations, you are far better
off having this as the starting point and
the final thing you do rather than writing
out the whole speech, trying to memorize it, trying to tweak
every little word. If you are a president of a country or a major
finance minister and any one wrong word can cause a scandal or destroy businesses or an
economy or start a war, well, yes, then it makes
sense to write out every single word and have
it vetted and looked at. But for most people,
99.99% of the world, the big problem is not that
we get one word wrong. The big problem for
most of us is that nobody remembers anything we
said because we were boring. And we didn't deliver
it in a compelling, captivating, interesting,
engaging way. Having notes on a
single sheet of paper will liberate you will make you feel so much
more comfortable, more relaxed when
you are speaking, and will create a better
experience for your audience. Now, I recommend you
make it in large font. This font is large
enough for me to read, so I don't have to sort of
fumble around in the middle of a presentation and put them on my glasses and do all this. Large font, bolded. And do not use the whole
Roman numeral one, little A. It's too hard when you're
standing up speaking to people to try to look at
different levels of indentation. I just have everything all far left indentation
and number it. That way, it's much easier
for the eye to look down, see where you were,
see where you are. You can have one that tells
you what every slide is. Now, if you find yourself needing more than a
single sheet of paper, the problem is not that you
need another sheet of paper. The problem is you haven't really narrowed your
messages down enough. So that's a good
check right there. If you can't narrow it down to a single sheet of
paper with large font. Don't narrow it down, but have four point font where you've got 10,000 words on a single
sheet, that's cheating. You've got to be able to
use this piece of paper and to use it in the way you can when you're
standing and speaking. You're standing and
speaking, you don't want to hold your notes. Because that takes you out of the moment of
speaking with people. If you have your notes down
on a table or a chair, sometimes even the floor, and you continue to move your hands, walk around, the audience won't even know
you're using notes, and they will perceive
you as smarter, more competent, more
intelligent, more capable. And it's right here for us, and most people never do it. So that is your
assignment right now. Come up with a one
page for notes. And please don't use your iPad. It looks ridiculous to hold a big piece of technology
when you're up speaking. I'm not trying to kill all
the trees in the world, but one sheet of
paper won't hurt. I'm not anti technology. But this little thing has never asked for
more battery power. It's never asked
for compatibility. It's never gone on the fritz. It's never needed another wire. Good old paper has
never let me down. This is also great
if you are using PowerPoint and all of a sudden the PowerPoint
doesn't work, you don't care because
you have your notes. So that's the assignment. Crit your one page notes for
your presentation right now.
9. This Is The Do Or Die Moment For Your Speaking Improvement: Okay, here's the
part of the course where big decisions
have to be made. You can sort of sit back and be theater critic and treat this like you're
watching Netflix, although, believe me,
there are better things on Netflix and say, Well, I didn't like the TJ didn't have more slides and
images and music, or you can actually learn
how to be a great presenter. It's not going to happen
unless you do the next thing. I need you to take
your one page of notes and practice speaking
on video and record it. I know you don't
like doing this. I know you don't enjoy it. I know you don't feel
comfortable with it. Guess what? Nobody in
your audience cares. Don't mean to sound
mean or cruel, but it's just a fact. Your audience wants your best. If you're not
willing to practice, then you don't really know
if you're any good or not. That's what causes people to get nervous or uncomfortable
or fearful or have sweat. The number one way to be confident when you
speak is not to visualize your
audience giving you a standing ovation or visualize the audience
in their underwear. Bad idea for a lot of reasons. The number one way to get
over fear, to be confident, to actually be a
great speaker is to practice speaking on
video until you love it. So the answer is not just
to practice on video. If you practice your speech
on video and don't look at it, not gonna help at all. If you practice your speech once on video and make detailed notes of all the things
you didn't like, guess what? That's
not gonna help. That's actually
gonna make you worse because you're gonna
be fixated on, Oh, my gosh, I said, I'm twice. That's the end of
the world. Don't say m. Don't say um, um, um. You're gonna trip yourself
up. That's not going to help. The solution to being
fully confident, to be fully prepared
for a presentation, is to practice on video as many times as it takes until
you can look at that video, whether it's on your
cell phone, your iPad, your laptop, and you like it and you think you're
coming across the best you can possibly
come across in terms of style and substance. My recommendation
don't wait anymore. Don't fast forward
to the next video. You're going to be tempted to. Do this right now, look at it, and then focus on what you like, not just your weaknesses, but also look at
what you don't like. When you record it, try to improve just
one area at a time. So if you notice, for example, that your head is frozen
and stiff the whole time, give your presentation again this time specifically
moving your head. Now, you can do this
with another colleague holding the camera and don't worry about what type of camera. It doesn't matter
what type of camera. A cellphone, any $10 webcam. You're not making a movie here. This is just a training
tool to help you figure out what are you
putting out to the world? Because if you think
your presentation, your speech is really boring, guess what? It is. If you think you're
coming across boring, monotone, guess what? You are. The answer is not to not look
at it or to wing it. The answer is keep practicing
until you love it. The greatest speakers in the world are often
the ones who spend the most time
practicing on video. The people you see on Ted Talks, quite often have given
their speech hundreds if not thousands of times before
you actually get to see it. And they practiced on video. Someone like a former President Ronald Reagan of
the United States would practice his speeches, major speeches like
the State of the Union for an hour reading it out
loud every night for a week, and then spend an entire day
doing videotaped rehearsal. Why did he do all that? He did it so that when he was
reading his teleprompter, it didn't sound like he was
reading the teleprompter. Of all the tips I'm going
to give you in this course, this is far and away
the most important. It's also the one people
are least likely to follow. So I'm begging you. Practice your speech
repeatedly on video until until it's perfect, but until you think
it's the best you can do with your current
skill level. It's going to make all the
difference in the world. Some of you are going to
want to say, Well, TJ, you didn't give us enough
practical tips in this course, or it's not long enough. You can spend 12 hours just
on this if you wanted to. You don't need more
tips on the angle for holding your hand or whether your hand should go on
your pockets or not. If you haven't done
this basic element of practicing your
presentation on video. So before you advance, before you rate the course
or do anything else, please practice your
presentation on video repeatedly until you
think you're great.
10. There Is a Perfect Test for Your Speech Or Presentation: Public speaking
presentation skills. These are soft skills, and sometimes you never really
know what's going to work. You're on one day, you're
off the next. Time out. I'm sure you've heard that.
I've heard those things. And let me tell you that is absolute garbage.
That is baloney. That is complete nonsense. There's nothing soft about public speaking or
presentation skills. It is every bit as
quantifiable as any aspect of physics,
mathematics or chemistry. You can, in fact,
test these things. If I'm an engineer and
I design some bridge, I'm gonna want to test
it before human beings are going over in their cars and collapses to their death. I can't just say, Well,
let me wing it that day. And I had an off day
building a bridge. No, you test your bridge
if you're an engineer. Guess what? You can test
your presentations. You can test your speeches.
Here's how to do it. Take the video that you just made that you're now confident. You look your best
and sound your best. Email that video to two
or three people who are similar in mindset to the audience you're
going to be speaking to. Send it to them, and then
call them up or text them. Here's the thing. Don't
ask them what they think. They're your friends,
they're your colleagues. They're going to say, Oh, you
were great, you were fine. Good job, very professional, completely worthless feedback. That's not what we're after. You want to ask them
what stands out? What do you remember?
How would you summarize this presentation to a colleague who didn't hear me? And here's what
you're listening for. Did they tell you the
five or fewer ideas, the messages you really cared about when you prepared
this presentation? Can they throw them
back in your face? Maybe a different
order, that's fine. Different wording, that's fine. But can they in fact, remember your messages and talk about them
and throw it back? If they can't remember your messages, guess
what? You failed. If you're using slides, ask them what slides they remember. If they say, Oh,
well, the slides were really professional,
guess what? Means your slides were useless. They can't remember your slides, throw them in the trash cans. You need to find out what
stories they remember, what messages they remember, what slides they remember. And do they feel compelled
to take the action you wanted them to take when you
started this whole process? So test this. Now, sometimes you could be in an
organization, an office. You could test with three or four colleagues at lunchtime. Or in the morning while
people are having coffee, test in front of live
people get feedback. Okay, we're not so much
concerned about them saying, Well, you touched your pinky
once or you said one um. People are going to give
you a lot of advice. I would disregard most of it, but what you do really
want to pay attention to is what do they remember? Remember, the biggest
problem most people have when they're giving
a speech or presentation. It's not that they freeze, have flop sweat
and are so scared. It's a disaster and they
made a horrible impression. The biggest problem most people have is they made no impression. They stood up, dressed
professionally. They went through
the presentation smoothly, professionally. 2 minutes later, no one remembers anything
of what they said. You don't want to do that.
So that's why it's critical to test in advance. When Ted picks great
speakers quite often, the speakers spoke at a TDX first and tested
out the material, showed there was demand, showed people like it, showed
the audience, resonated. Al Gore, before he gave his famous Ted Talk
on global warming, gave that speech
thousands of times for years before it attracted a huge audience on Ted and
then turned into a movie. So test your presentation
on your audience, a sampling or a subset of
your audience in advance, because when you see the speech you've prepared and delivered, two or three people who
didn't know what was in in advance can understand
it and remember it. Then when you're going in
to give the real speech, it's virtually impossible
to be nervous. You're gonna have confidence, but confidence based on reality, confidence based on
legitimate proof. That's what we're after.
11. I Will give You a Personalized Professional Presentation Critique Right Here: Let's recap. You've
identified in one sentence what it is you
want your audience to do. You've brainstormed on messages that might motivate
them to do that. You've narrowed it
down to your top five. You've come up with a
story for each one. You've come up with a
slide or an image or a prop to help each message
if you want to use visuals. You have a single sheet of
notes to help you remember. You've practiced
your speech on video numerous times until
you've liked it, you've then showed it
to other colleagues, and you've improved it
and refined it even more until your colleagues are not just liking
you as a speaker, but remembering the key messages and the ideas that are
really important to you. Now that you've done
that, now that you actually have a presentation
that you know works, I want to look at it and give you my professional critique, and others here in the class will give you their
feedback as well. So upload the video to YouTube or any other file
sharing site you want, post it in the
discussion section or the Q&A section
of this course. Anyway you can get it
to us to look at it, I will personally look at this video and give
you my critique, my feedback on
what you're doing, well, and where you
need to improve. I'll tell you, most people
don't take advantage of this. I don't get paid
any extra for it. This is something
people pay a lot of money for me to do in real life. And you can get
this right here now for the low cost of what you
paid to be in this course. So take advantage of it. Don't just watch videos and think you've become
a better speaker. That's not how people
become better speakers. You don't become
a better swimmer by reading books or watching
videos on swimming. You have to get in and swim. That's what I need
you to do. So to take it to the final level, I need you to post your speech, your presentation right here.
12. Continuing Your Path of Public Speaking and Presentation Skills Improvement: That's it, folks. That's
really all you need to know to be not just a
competent or beginner, but a great public speaker,
a great presenter. It doesn't take years
and years and years. But this course is
what you make of it. If you just sit back and watch, you probably didn't
get much out of it. If you actually
practiced on video, I'm convinced it will dramatically improve
your speaking skills, you're presenting
skills for life. Speaking is funny. If you
just do a few things well, narrow your messages down, have interesting stories,
you're going to be a standout. You're gonna be so much
better than other people. If you have the occasional, um, uh, make a mistake, people are not going to care, they're not gonna remember. I've made at least this many, half a dozen mistakes, stumbles in this course so far. And yet, I'm doubting it
bothered you too much. Part of it is I wanted
to prove to you. It's not about being perfect. It's not about having an absence of stumbles or never saying huh. But I made this whole
course for you in just a little more than an
hour. How did I do that? Well, I did everything
in one take. Because that's all you get when you're speaking
in front of people. There's just one take. And it's not hard, especially
if you practice in advance. This is easy for me
to do because I've made 10,000 other
training videos. For you, as you improve your speaking skills,
your presenting skills, it just gets easier and easier, the more you practice on video and the more
times you speak. If you follow the
basic principles we've talked about
in this course, I'm convinced that
every time you speak, you're going to come across
as comfortable, confident, relaxed because you're
going to have watched yourself and you're
going to notice if you seem stiff or scared, you don't like it,
you will have fixed. By watching yourself and
making small changes. You're going to be
understood by your audience because you'll have tested
it on audiences in advance. Your audiences will remember your ideas because you'll have
tested it and you'll know. And because of all those things, there's a much
greater likelihood your audience will take
the actions you want. They will buy from you, hire you, vote for you. Do do that consistently, and you will be a
great speaker and a fantastic presenter for
the rest of your life. Good luck.
TJ Walker, Public Speaking and Media Training Expert
