Giving Presentations

"Make the title the takeaway of the slide so that the person looking at it has to do zero work to take away. So example, you'll sometimes see, 'The problem,' or, 'The team.' Replace, 'The team,' with, 'Our team is veterans of whatever industry,' or every single slide it's a takeaway, not a label."

"You want to de-risk that meeting not make it a big success or fail moment... I try to run through it with the team, pretending to be the other members of the audience that are going to be there... The other thing that I push a lot of my team to do is have pre-meetings with some of those key individuals, so that they're going to be less surprised in the meeting."

"If you haven't thought through all the questions that might be asked from the document that you're sharing or the presentation you're about to present, you're not prepared enough, right. You need to know the entire universe of how that meeting can go."

"I have custom software that I've written that will say, 'Okay, here are the points at which the audience laughed.' Actually audibly laughed. That's the only way it counts. And this actually... and it comes down to this metric that standup comedians use called LPM laughs per minute."

"when you're telling the story, whatever the funny bit is, those have to literally be the last words of that particular segment. So once you deliver it, then you have to stop talking. And the reason you have to stop talking is the audience needs about a half a second to react, and then they want the permission to laugh."

"One idea at a time, this notion of you give them one egg, someone can catch it, give them too many eggs, they're going to drop it. So don't try to throw too many concepts all at once. Keep it simple. People will appreciate it. And so with every sort of presentation, break it down into the core concepts, try to make sure you're covering one at a time."

"One of the things that Mind the Product has been able to provide to speakers is a speaker coach... She helped with posture. She helped with delivery. She helped with even just phrasing of words. Just making sure that everything landed in particular ways. And one of the things she did was make me listen to it and play it back."

"One of the things that I've stopped doing is I used to sit down with a PowerPoint and start writing my deck in PowerPoint or Slides, now. What I now do is I start with my story points. I start with my narratives. I try to figure out what I'm actually trying to say, and then I fit it into the deck."

"One of the other things that actually really does work is the power pose, standing with your hands on your hips and it really does... help boost your confidence and make you feel better as you're getting ready to stand on stage."

"Steve Jobs couldn't convince you to buy water if you were dying of thirst. He could not give a presentation to save his life. And Regis McKenna and his team took Steve Jobs under their wing and created Steve Jobs, a man who could sell anything to anybody. These are skills. This is not about personality."

"I never appeared before Congress with notes. I wanted them to believe, which was by the way, true, that I was in complete control and complete mastery of the material, and that I did not need notes or a bunch of assistants around me to help me."

"I gave a TEDx talk a few years ago and I was like my entire body, I was just terrified. And I did in 15 minutes of this breathing practice before and walked on stage almost cool as a cucumber. It's very effective."

"I love her book Resonate... she said what all these things do is they alternate tension between the world as it is and the world as it might be. And it's like, here's that beautiful future of transportation, San Francisco, blah, blah, blah, but here's why it sucks today, all these problems and this and that, but here's how it could look in a few years. And then you're creating that tension and the audience at the end is like sweaty palms."

"I start with an outline on paper and then I draw little boxes for the slides and I write out the headline of the slides. And then once I have a tight outline... then I sketch out how I want the slides to go."

"Visualization is a really useful technique and you see yourself not just in the moment of speaking, but getting up to the stage, seeing it being well received, thinking about how you step off the stage. We see athletes do this kind of thing all the time, and there's good research to say that this desensitizes people."

"Strive for connection over perfection by daring to be dull. Just answer the question. Just give the feedback. Just be engaged in the small talk. By doing that, you dial down the volume of self-evaluation, freeing up resources that can be used to really help you succeed."

"When you feel those symptoms of anxiety, rather than seeing it as negative, say, 'This is exciting. I get to share my point of view. I get to demonstrate my value.' And in so doing by seeing it as more positive, it causes us by definition to relax."

"I have a rule of thumb, I jokingly call it a rule of lung. You want your exhale to be twice as long as your inhale. So if you take a three count in, even if you sneak in a little extra air as we were talking about, take a six count out."

"I have an acronym. It works. It's called WHAT. W-H-A-T. The W stands for why are we here? ... The H is how are you connected to the event? ... The A stands for anecdote. Tell a story or a quick example that is relevant and accessible to everybody. ... And then ultimately the last part is the gratitude, the thank you."

"I have yet another structure... It's called ADD for adding value. You answer the question cleanly and concisely. You then give an example to reinforce the answer, and then you explain the relevance or significance of the answer so people know it."

"98% of your nervousness is actually before you begin speaking. Once you begin speaking, almost all of your nervousness falls away... preparation is going to reduce your level of nervousness. One of the best ways to prepare for it is to record it and listen to it."

"I say it stakes, it's surprise, it's suspense, and it's humor. Those are the ways that you're going to hold people and keep them listening. And if you're not engaged in one of those four things while you're speaking, people are not listening to you anymore."

"Reframing that anxiety to understand that the thing your body is doing is surging you with adrenaline to help you. And so letting that feeling wash over you instead of fighting it, I think has been so effective for me... I rehearse probably at least 10 times all the way through once the speaker notes are final."

"I love product ops because when we prepare for board meetings, I know there's a certain set of information that I'm going to have to put together for this board meeting, and then when we go do it manually, it becomes obsolete by the time the board meeting's over."

"Slide one, you say what you do as if I literally know nothing... the second thing that I say to people is, I think your second slide ought to be, here's the thing we know that's not obvious... then slide three is what, if any, proof points do we have?"

"The ability to just have that contrast as a framework in your brain during a meeting, on a phone call, any moment of influence, like literally it works. It works in any format."

"Your audience is the hero. That was in my TED talk from 2011. I would say it's infuse your talk with story. And I would say it is asking yourself, can they see what I'm saying?"

"In myths and movies, the mentor comes alongside the hero. In other words, the presenter should come alongside the audience and help them get unstuck or bring a magical tool."

"This motion of traversing between what is, what could be, what's is, what could be, what is, what could be, that sense of longing for the future, it makes people leave their current state or the status quo or our current reality and makes them long for this future state by using contrast."

"The concept that each slide should make one point... your whole presentation should be grounded in what we call the audience journey, which is the big idea where you're trying to move them from where you're trying to move them to."

"I take a deep, deep breath and then I take that one while my lungs are full, I take another gulp of breath and I have to let it out real slow."

"I just froze. I couldn't remember what I was supposed to say. It was the first ever time in my life I'd rehearsed the talk word for word. Usually, I have talking points, and things get mixed around, and it's informal. This was media trained, "Do not say the wrong thing." Kind of talk."

"The easiest way is to get in front of really small and super friendly audiences. So that is, I think, the first starting point. And I don't know where that is. That could be your team, that's a super small audience, usually five to 10 people, or maybe you pine with your company of 80 people or 120 people, maybe the company all-hands is already something where you could actually speak."

"I think the two things that work well, it's either the Superman pose, so that is one thing. If you're standing like this looking straightly up, that is one thing that helps many people. It's not my preferred one. And then the other one is a bit of the gorilla thing, just like tapping here... that bumps your energy level, so to say."

"When I am trying to gather my thoughts or think, people tend to look down. And if you're looking down on Zoom, it's three times as bad because it looks like you're looking at your phone or looking at notes if you had any, but even when you're in person, it doesn't look very confident. If instead you switch that up and you start thinking up. I think up into the right, but you can think in any direction you want, but as long as you're looking up, you actually look thoughtful by default."

"Anticipate that as you get to the end of anything you're saying, you're going to naturally start regaining consciousness and you're going to start being a little bit more self-aware, and some of those uncertainties are going to pop up. Know that it's coming and make sure you land the plane. So what that looks like is, either you just make your ending sound like an ending and then leave it at that, or you can prompt your brain. You can use summary prompts, this is incredibly powerful."

"The solution is just, don't share your insecurities. Put your best foot forward and stay in it the whole time. Stay in character from beginning all the way through past the ending, because you go all the way through your speech, then you got to end strong, which is a form of staying in character, and then let it be. And that's so important, just let it be and you're going to notice something incredible. If you're the type of person who would break character a lot, start staying in character, and the cue use for myself is, stay in it."

"The Accordion Method is saying... I'm going to take everything out of my living room except the most essential pieces that make my living room... And as I look at that, I'm going to have clarity on the vision I want for my living room. And then very slowly, very intentionally, I'm going to go take certain elements that were already there that I might want to bring back in, and I'm going to bring new elements that now I see make sense."

"The bow and arrow starts with a... mindset shift that most of us are in the weeds... we tend to focus more on what we want to say than what we want our audience to remember. The mindset shift here is stop focusing as much on what you want to say and focus more on what you want your audience to remember. We call it the bow and arrow technique because we think you can only remember one thing out of a talk... The one thing is your arrow."

"anytime he does a presentation now, every three to five slides, he'll put in a state change. So the idea of every three to five minutes, every three to five slides, go ahead and put in a stage change. We really want to turn this from an art into a science, as much as possible, audience engagement."