Growing up as a kid I never had a chance to speak in public. That was OK with me because I couldn’t imagine anything worse.
The rest of America agrees with me. Public speaking is the #1 fear, ahead of a fear of heights and a fear of bugs or snakes.
What’s strange is I don’t feel this way anymore. Sometime in the last 40 years I went from fear to love.
I love telling stories. I love the challenge of getting others to see my perspective. I love teaching and sharing what I know. I love the creative process of pulling together a talk. I love the challenge of trying to get others to understand.
Don’t get me wrong, I still get nervous. This feels like the little sibling of fear. But, I am no longer afraid.
The beginning
It all started back in 1999. I took my first job as a sales engineer. All this means is that I was the one doing the technical part of the sales presentation.
Not having any experience, and being scared out of my mind, I signed up for Toastmasters. I learned a lot from those meetings, but most important, I got to practice.
The first thing I presented was a product demo. This gave way to technical presentations and bigger roles in meetings. It was energizing and scary at the same time.
Lucky for me, I was able to get more professional help. My company hired a presentation coach. I remember giving pitches and having them recorded. The instructor would play back the film and critique us in front of the group.
This was both painful and invaluable. I was able to focus 100% on practicing vs. getting a sale. In other words, I had a safe environment to make mistakes where the stakes were low.
These early days taught me one important lesson. There is no shortcut to becoming a better speaker. The best thing to do, is do it. Every time I presented I got more comfortable. With comfort came confidence and with confidence came better talks.
Bigger talks
I always had a safety net with these early presentations. I was in the room with a group of people and I knew someone would jump in if I screwed up.
A few years later, I had my first talk with no safety net. I would be on stage, by myself, in front of 300 people. To make matters worse, I only had five minutes to complete my talk. If I went over, they shut off the mic.
My talk was in the afternoon. Since I had about 6 hours and felt like the butterflies were going to explode out of my stomach, I practiced. I must have given that talk to myself 100 times.
When my time came, I delivered every point. My nerves vanished 30 seconds into the talk. I stood with confidence on stage and tried to deliver the message as naturally as possible.
Looking back, I would give myself a B+ on technical delivery, but an F on having the message stick.
Telling stories
It wasn’t until I took a sales role that I realized my errors. I wasn’t delivering information, I was trying to get customers to see my point of view. They had to embrace it and want to pay money to make it a reality
This experience taught me the power of stories. I found that stories stick.
I was selling a product that let customers ask questions and get answers from the community.
It’s been 10 years and I still remember the story I told.
“I have two young kids at home and need to buy a DVD player for the car. I found what I thought was a great one on your site, but I have all sorts of questions. How does it get power? How loud are the headphones? Are they safe for kids? Since I couldn’t answer any of these questions, I didn’t buy.”
Everyone could feel what I was going through. There was an emotional hook. Whether that story applied to every product didn’t matter. People understood what the product did, felt my pain and wanted to solve it.
I sold a lot of software with that story. Heck, it worked so well, one of the sales reps that worked for me started using it, even though he didn’t have any kids!
Don’t just speak, entertain
I was making 3-5 presentations every week. After 4 years, I thought I was getting pretty good. Then I learned another valuable lesson.
There was a big financial conference in New York and I was going to be on a panel discussion. There would be about 1,000 people in the audience, easily the largest group I’ve been in front of.
What was unique about this talk, was the moderator. It was Jim Cramer from Mad Money. He puts on an entertaining TV show about investing. He’s flamboyant, always screaming into the TV and even has sound effects. It is, without question, entertaining.
To get ready for the talk, the entire group had a prep call with Mr. Cramer. He got on and was pretty different from what I saw on TV. He was normal.
After about 10 minutes of walking through all our material he stopped us. He said “You all obviously know your stuff, but I have one question. How are we going to entertain the audience?”
It was like a light bulb going off. How could I miss this. I’ve been in presentations and whenever I get bored I tuned out. If I want people to listen to me, I have to engage them and a little entertainment will definitely do the trick.
Presentation support
In my career I have created over 50,000 slides. For the longest time, I believed these were the presentations. But, over time, I figured it out. The slides are presentation support. I am the presentation.
Slides should stir something in the audience to help them engage and remember. Slides full of text never do this.
Images are powerful. The brain loves images. It can process them easily. Throw a bunch of text up and the brain starts to slow down. It has to work much harder to read than to process an image.
Here’s the problem. If the brain is working to read, it isn’t listening to you.
The best I’ve seen at this was Steve Jobs. He combines it all, stories, powerful imagery, body language and simple slides. He’s gone now, but you can still see some of his famous talks on YouTube. I love watching them to see what else I can pick up.
At work, there is no place I’d rather be than in front of an audience. It is energizing and fun, but it sure didn’t start that way. Lucky for me, I got lots of practice and overcame my fears. I hope you can do the same.
This post is part of a series of letters to my kids. My goal is to reflect on and capture as many life lessons as possible. Here is the current list I am working from.
