Fundamentals

When you’re organizing your presentation, the Rule of Three is a good place to start. For example:

1. We’re going to do A.
2. We’re going to do B.
3. We’re going to do C.

The human brain loves things that are organized into threes. It tends to forget point #4, but it can always remember three things. Hit your three points, and only those three points, and then sit down.

But what’s another organizational technique you can use?

You can stick to the delta.

What does “stick to the delta” mean?

I don’t mean delta as in “the place where a river reaches an ocean.” I mean delta as in “change,” or “difference.”
When I say stick to the delta, I mean describe the change.

For example:

• This is how things were before, and this is how they are now, OR…
• This is how things are now, and this is how I want to change them.

Why does this work? Remember the earlier lesson, Lesson #3, about the Curse of Knowledge. Remember that the human brain thinks in patterns, and one of the best ways to hold an audience’s attention is to break the patterns, and then let the audience watch as you restore order to the world. Describe how things are, and then how they’ll change; then describe how things are, and then how they’ll change; etc etc.

If you combine these two organizational techniques (the Rule of Three and “stick to the delta”), you get the best of both worlds: a pattern of threes, which the human brain loves, and enough activity, motion, and change to keep it interested.

For example:

1. This is how A was, and this is what A’s future looks like.
2. This is how B was, and this is what B’s future looks like.
3. This is how C was, and this is what C’s future looks like.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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When you’re on stage, what do you do with your hands?

It’s one of the most common questions we get. Personally, I suspect you already know what to do with your hands, but the best answer is actually kind of zen, so we reserve it for more advanced courses. In the meantime, here are two quick tips to get you started…

First, hold them up to the sky and start praying.

Just kidding.

Seriously:

First, bend your elbows and hold your hands close together. Don’t raise your hands so high you touch your nose, just hold them a little higher than your elbows, kind of like you’re discreetly praying. Be careful about clasping your hands — once you get up on stage, you might get really nervous, and your hands will end up desperately holding onto each other, and that tightness will spread through your body.

Here’s the second tip:

Drop your hands to your sides. Touch your index fingers to your thumbs.

And here’s a third, bonus tip. Perhaps it’s the best tip of all, the start of all that is good:

Hold your hands in front of you, about belly height, and face your palms up. In almost all countries, this is a gesture of openness, of invitation. It invites your audience to participate in your speech, not just listen to it.

Combine that last gesture with some eye contact, and you’re golden. Your audience will be eating out of your palm (no pun intended).

Why is that the start of all that is good? Well, that’s a more complicated issue, and so we reserve it for more advanced courses.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Before your speech, meet some of the members of your audience. Talk to them, get to know them a little. It’ll make you a lot less nervous when you’re speaking, because you’ll be talking to friends, not a bunch of nameless, faceless strangers.

How can you do this?

At almost every conference, there’s a coffee break a couple times a day. At one of these coffee breaks, spend a few minutes chatting with some of the audience members.

Remember, your audience members are people, and they probably get nervous speaking in front of groups, just like you do. In fact, while you’re making small talk and thinking about how nervous you are, they’re probably thinking, “I wish I had courage like this guy, he’s going to get up on stage and give a speech, but here he is, coming up to me and saying hello.”

Get to know your audience members in the same way you would if you were at a party with them.

You wouldn’t say, “Hi, my name is John, what’s your company’s biggest pain point?”

You would say, “Hi, my name is John, where are you from?”

“What brings you here?”

“How has the conference been so far?”

“There’s a big dinner and dance tonight. Are you going?”

Make small talk like this with a few of the people before your presentation. You’ll be less nervous when the time comes for your speech. You’ll know some of the people in the audience already.

In fact, you can even reduce your nervousness by greeting your new friends when your speech starts. “Thank you for inviting me here today, I’m going to talk about XYZ. But first, let me say hi to a couple people. Bill, where are you? Hello Bill, welcome, good to see you again. And Susan, where are you? Oh, Susan’s not here, she probably had to step out to take a very important call from her boss. Anyway, we’re here today to talk about XYZ, so let’s get started…”

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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When professional actors prepare for a role, they usually rehearse for hours, or days or weeks, learning how to make a particular facial tick appear at just the right time. When she was preparing for the movie Gravity, Sandra Bullock practiced one of the moves for five months, in order to make it look natural and unrehearsed. One tiny move, over and over and over, for five… MONTHS!

Even improv comedy actors practice. They don’t practice their lines, of course, but they practice the skills of improv. Rest assured that behind every brilliant impromptu skit is hours, days, months, perhaps years of practice.

Trust me, for years I’ve heard people say, “I’m better when I don’t practice,” or “I sound more natural when I don’t practice,” or even the seemingly logical, “If I rehearse I won’t look spontaneous.”

And then they stand up to speak and they show themselves to be painfully awkward amateurs. The audience often responds by taking out their cell phones, at first pretending to respond to “urgent” text messages, but then moving on to simply refreshing their Facebook page. After all, they’re thinking, if the speaker didn’t respect us enough to prepare, why should we respect him or her enough to listen?

Practicing doesn’t mean practicing a little.

For a 10-minute speech, most people need to practice 10 times before their body develops “muscle memory” — the ability to physically deliver the speech even when distracted.

After those 10 practice runs however, they usually find that their spirit is gone. Their body remembers the words, but they feel like a piece of wood, a bag of boring flesh with no spirit, and they are usually quite correct.

It might sound strange, but the key to getting your spirit back is to keep practicing. Think of crossing a river. If you are going to cross a river, go all the way. Don’t go to the middle, say, “I don’t like being wet,” and then turn around and go back.

For most people, the spirit starts to come back in practice rounds 10-15. However, during those practice rounds (10-15), your brain and your spirit will fight for control. You might get tired during the speech. You might even feel like you are doing worse, and it might be true — you might actually start getting worse.

But keep going. Push through these practice rounds.

Usually, around practice round 16, your brain will start to relax and surrender. Your spirit will take over, and your natural body language will return. Now you’ll be even more relaxed though, because you don’t have to think about the words anymore. Your spirit can express itself freely.

Keep practicing, even though you’re feeling better. In practice rounds 16-25, you will be teaching your spirit how to fly around the room. You will be teaching it to look into people’s eyes, to watch their faces, to get into their heads and their hearts. You will be teaching it how to make them smile, or frown, or laugh, or cry. And then, around practice round 25, you will realize you have taught your body and spirit how to do something they didn’t know how to do 25 practice rounds ago.

The audience will watch your speech and marvel at how great it is, and they will wish they could stand up there and speak like you do. They’ll remark on how natural and spontaneous you are, and, unless you tell them, only you will know that the reason you look so spontaneous is because you practiced so much.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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