How To STAND OUT When Speaking On Stage

Typically, we get really nervous when speaking when we're all focused on ourselves. How am I going to look? How am I going to be perceived? How will people think about me? When you reverse that and say, how can I serve this audience? Number one, the nerves go away. A lot of us spend time in functions or going to meetings. If you want to become a good speaker, take notes on why was this a terrible meeting. Welcome to Bullish, where we talk about the journey and process to build ourselves and companies into multi-billion-dollar people and brands. Currently, my business and investment funds have done tens of millions in revenue. And this is the documentation of the journey to scale to the billion-dollar realm, all while we give back and do good in the world. My name is Bridger Pennington, and welcome to Boldish. At the last 2 events I spoke at, I was rated the number 1 speaker at those events. I want to share with you 4 tips on what I use to prepare and make award-winning or number 1 speaker-winning performances in front of a live audience and live stages. And in the next few minutes, I want to share a few things that I think will make you stand out incredibly well if you get the chance to speak in front of just a small group or 5,000+ people, you can stand out and be a way different speaker than other people have seen in the past. There's a few easy tricks that you can do this with. What I'm gonna share today is what I've learned from speaking in front of now 3 Funnel Launch Lives that had over 1,000 people each that were events that I threw. I spoke at those events 5 to 8 times during the 3 days. I was on stage roughly 8 to 12 hours of those 3 days. I've now spoken at other events, a 5,000-person event at Funnel Hacking Live and multiple 1,000-person events or 300-person events or down to 5-person events. And I want to share a few things that I've pulled together that really helped me do this. So the first one category I'm going to give you is what I call the presence. This could be with stage presence, how you approach, how you talk to an audience, the eye contact you have, how you move on a stage that'll make you stand out like crazy. The first thing I'm going to give you that you should do if you're ever asked to speak is when you go on stage, Walk into the audience. If you wanna be above 85% of speakers out there, literally if your content sucks, if you're terrible, if you're ugly, if you're whatever, but you walk into the audience, it's a thing called breaking the fourth wall. Okay, so in movies or TV sets, there's 3 different walls. You have the back wall and the right side wall and the left side wall. And usually when you watch TV or watch a play, everything happens within those 3 walls. But then sometimes an actor or a presenter breaks what they call the 4th wall where they actually turn to the audience and they're no longer there talking to each other. They turn to the audience and they step out of the TV screen or they step out of the stage. You know, most people envision like a little almost like a screen or there's like a bubble on the stage when you're watching. If you can step and break through that, it jolts an audience. And wow, holy crap, this is different than other presenters. You'd be surprised how few presenters do this. If you do nothing else from this, first thing I give you on presence, go into the audience, okay? Walk out, high-five people, rub people's bald head, like have some fun with the audience. It just makes you stand out like crazy. So that's the first thing on presence. Second thing on presence, so when someone brings you to the stage, okay, there's a thing called the power of the MC. Typically at an event, There's an MC that's gonna announce or invite you to stage, okay? So at ours we have Devon Brown, world-class, the guy's incredible. So he'll spend up there, he'll get the crowd, his goal and job is get the crowd energy high and that you come out in a peak state. And so I'll see people backstage, like I've been with Ed Mylett, he was at our event and he spoke, we were on stage together. Ed Mylett, he's hitting his chest backstage, he's trying to come out on a peak. As he walks out, it's like bam, it's like fireworks go off, boom. He comes out, Devon Brown, the MC, the person introducing Ed Mylett, he holds the power. And what happens is Ed Mylett will walk out and go hug Devon Brown or dap him up or whatever it is, and what happens is a transfer of power. Devon Brown, the MC, holds the room, and then you come out, you hug or you have some kind of transaction, Where now the audience visually sees, okay, Devon has approved this person coming on stage. You'll see if I do this live for people, I've done this at one of our events, I'm like, I have somebody introduce me and then I walk out and totally ignore the introducer person and you just wave the audience to do something else. It's really awkward. Anyways, little thing on presence there. So number 1 on presence, break the fourth wall. Number 2, hug and dap of the MC. Number 3 though overall, Having a lot of confidence on stage is massive. The way you walk, the way you communicate, if you can communicate with confidence, it is massive. I'll tell you a quick story. So, there is a— I went through a speaker training. I've only gone through really one speaker training. It was World's Greatest Speaker by Brendon Burchard. And one of the guys up there, he was talking about this same concept of stage presence. He told a story in Africa. There was a tribe in Africa and they lived amongst all these, in the jungle, these panthers and big cats that would kill people. Like they were, and any outsider that would come in would, I mean, it was a very high probability you'd get attacked by these large cats. I think they were panthers. I can't remember. I think it was panthers, but you could say lions or tigers. But it was, I think it was panthers in this certain area that they were in. They would come out of the trees, out of the jungle and literally kill people. And so reporters and people couldn't come. However, there were 2 tribes that lived nearby and the panthers would never attack the other tribe people. And this was very curious to researchers. And so researchers were trying to figure out like, why— how did these tribes— like, what kind of settlement did they have with the panthers to make sure that they weren't getting attacked? And so finally, a researcher went in and started— and knew their language— started asking them like, well, has a panther ever attacked your people? Because evidently what we've seen is nothing has ever happened as an attack from a panther. And the tribespeople said, well, it has happened before. When the men or the women get drunk, they'll get attacked by panthers. And the researchers thought it was pretty interesting. He said, well, what do you mean? He says, well, when we walk around as tribespeople, they walk around like predators. They move quickly. They're running through the jungle. They move. And typically predators don't attack other predators in nature. It's very rare to see predators really attack each other. Typically predators attack other things for food. Dovetailing on a very this all together. Another research study that was done on crime, convicted felons that were for like crime, assault and battery types things in jail. They went to— these researchers went to this prison cell and they interviewed all these inmates on why they attack people and what they did actually, they showed camera footage of people walking on the street and they would say just I want you to watch this for 15, 20, 30 minutes of just people walking down a busy street And I want you to pick out people that you would attack. That, you know, these are convicted rapists and assault and battery and other things. Who would you attack? And it was interesting, was the inmates with a huge degree of confidence all pointed out the exact same people. And they did a huge case study of all these people and they kept pointing to the same. Oh yeah, that person right there. Yep, I'd attack them. And I'd attack that person over there and this person. And what they found was the body language. So then the researchers say, well, why? And the inmates didn't have a great answer. Well, that person just looks like they'd be good, ripe for attacking. And they then analyzed the body language of people walking by, and they usually walked with low degree of confidence, with on their heels. It didn't matter the size of the person. You'd assume, oh, like a small woman with a big handbag, like a really expensive handbag, that's who we attack. It wasn't the case. If a small woman with an expensive handbag was walking with confidence and pace forward, They didn't want to touch her. But if there was a man, but he was walking kind of like he was drunk a little bit on his heels, whatever, those are the people that were targeted. Like 9 times out of 10, all the inmates were like, oh yeah, we'd go after that guy for sure. Back to the tribe in Africa, they said the same thing. When the men were drunk, panthers would attack them. But if they walked with like a predator and walked with surety and confidence on their toes, In the history of their tribe, they've never had someone attacked by a panther. That story has resonated with me deeply when being on stage, 'cause when you're on stage, you need to have a confidence like you're a predator. Be on your toes, stomp around. I've had one friend of mine, Steve Larsen, before he goes on stage, he told himself in his brain, I do this now, he's like, Steve Larsen breaks stages. I stomp, I move around. And he does that just to drive in his brain to be on your toes, act like an athlete or a predator on the stage. So when you come out, to come together on presence, coming out, dapping up or hugging the emcee, having a transfer of power, go out in the audience and be on your toes. Literally have the agility of being on your toes. Think like you're a predator. Your presence level— Will increase drastically. Now, I'm giving you a lot here but why not? We're having fun. These are things that I use, that I like to use inside of a thing. Okay, that's number 1. Let's move on to number 2. Number 2, a lot of people try to define this differently. I'm gonna put it into one simple sentence for us. It's called roller coaster. If you can take your audience on a roller coaster where you're talking super fast, you're like okay, this thing is crazy, it's awesome and then you slow things down. And you have a really heartfelt story on how something impacted you or how this number makes you feel on the screen and then you move fast again. It's like, dude, this is crazy. We're taking over the world. That's awesome. Then you can go slow again and you can change your tone, your pace, your body language. If you can just have a roller coaster a couple times, some ups, some downs and back and forth, makes you a much more dynamic speaker. So, the same thing with roller coaster on stories to content. If you noticed just before, I did content and then I told a story. Then I went back to content and then I told the story again, right? Moving from fast to slow in your cadence, just some type of a roller coaster. Doesn't need to be, some people get way granular on this. I'm just gonna call it a roller coaster, makes it really, really good there. What I'm gonna share, I'm gonna share a quick story with you if that's alright, okay? So, a few years ago, so I've now spoken, one of my dreams in life was to speak on stage. I thought speaking was so cool. And I got opportunities to speak and I've done good speeches and bad speeches. I've been promoted as a— the last few speeches I've done have been literally the number 1 speaker of the entire conference. And they've had some really big speakers come. And that was a huge honor. Like, hey, you were voted by the audience the best speaker. And I think I've applied some of these things. But if I come back, I remember a few years ago, I was invited to speak in front of a youth group at a church function. So, I'm religious and this church function invited me to come speak. And I was like, oh, that sounds cool. They wanted me to speak about my Well, they kind of just left it open-ended, to be honest, and I was like, okay, and so I have a few things that I like to share. Like, my brother passed away of suicide. I'll talk about that a little bit. I talk about a story of sometimes our business or trials or other things, and I was like, oh, I'm gonna crush this, and I showed up and I started to speak to this group, and to be frank, I completely bombed. It was terrible, and why it was terrible, mid- Like, I had this plan of stuff. We were sharing the story from back when I was in middle school and a story that I was in high school and a story in college I was sharing. And I realized that the whole time, number one, I was like, I'm just talking about me. And like, I'm middle— I'm up there live and I'm like, this is— and I'm looking at the audience and I'm like, this is not resonating with anybody. And it was funny. I was this, you know, white dude from the other side of town coming to speak to them. And they were kind of on a different side of town. And nothing I was saying was resonating with them. Like, I'm pretty sure I came off as just this prick dude that just showed up to speak to their— and it was a church group. Usually church groups are pretty nice. And still though, I was sitting there like, man, I'm bombing. Like, this is not resonating. Any story I tell, it just is not clicking with these people. And I realized, number one, I was so focused on myself. And that's actually going to number 3. Is— and so I'm going to dovetail the story into our— so first one was presence, number 2 was roller coaster, number 3 is how can I help them? Typically, we get really nervous when speaking when we're all focused on ourselves. How am I going to look? How am I going to be perceived? How will people think about me? When you reverse that and say, how can I serve this audience? Is there a younger version of Bridger out there that could benefit from a few things I'm going to share? How can I actually move and shake their life? Am I up here to just tell my cool story going from rags to riches? Doesn't help anybody. How can I actually serve somebody in this audience? When you do that, number one, the nerves go away. It's funny. It makes you just focus on them and you start to forget about all the insecurities yourself. You go, I'm just gonna— I'm here to serve somebody in that audience. And in that That talk I was giving at church group, I totally bombed. I tried at the end, I tried to switch it up and I shared a different story and it just went bad. It was bad news. But number 3, I'd give you how can I serve and I'm gonna dovetail into number 4 now. So, number 1 was presence, 2 roller coaster, number 3 how can I serve the audience and number 4, the final one. What I've realized and I have studied, I like studying speakers. I go to events a lot and I like to— I actually take notes at events on the speaker. I take notes on the content but I also go how did they speak? How did they present? What did they do good? What did they do bad? If you want to become a good speaker, Just a lot of us spend time in functions or going to meetings. Take notes on why was this a terrible meeting? Why was this an awful presentation? And I don't share that. I just keep it private. Like, man, if— and I— what I've found, like, I went to church growing up and I— our church— I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And in our church, we rotate speakers. We don't have a pastor that speaks every Sunday. We rotate. Actually, members of the audience get asked to go give a 15 or 10-minute sermon or talk up in front of everybody. And so some people are nervous, some people are terrible at it, some people were good at it. And so my whole life, I went to church and there were some people up there that were awful. It was terrible. It was like this waste of like 20 minutes of like listening. But it was good for the person. It's a good experience for everybody. And I think it's actually overall a really good thing to do because it gets people to work and give a chance to share their thoughts. But there's some people frankly that get up there that are just awful. They're terrible. And so what I started to do, I was like, okay, I got to sit in church anyways. So I'm going to just start taking notes on how I would rewrite their talk for them. I did this at 12 years old, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. I do it till today and I go, man, I would have opened with that story or I would have moved. They could have said this or the way they're talking. Why do I— and then I look around, why is half the audience on their phones right now? And then I'll notice like they tell a joke or something and everyone looks up and then like 2 minutes later because of their cadence, the way they're talking, everyone kind of looks down again. And so I start taking lots of notes on how this person presents. So a quick trick is just listen to a lot. You might right now be listening to this podcast like, Bridger, this is terrible. Okay, I would have— if I was doing this podcast, I would have done open with this joke. I would have said this. I think that's a very healthy thing to do and it'll make you a much better speaker going forward. So critique me all you want. That's totally healthy. But down to the final 4 thing I would say. So I've studied speakers for years. What I have found, the speakers that I listen to, the speakers that are compelling to me, the speakers that get me off my phone and I'm like locked in and glued on. Yes, they do all these things. They have presence. They take me on a roller coaster. They tell good stories. But a few things that I figured out was they have very intriguing information that I want to know about and hear. What I've realized is the stronger the content, the weaker the presenter can be. I listened to a talk on YouTube, like a TEDx talk or something from a guy. He's a researcher out of Washington and they did 7 years research on the body and the mitochondria and the blood cells and the lymphatic system. And he is a terrible presenter. But he's got this really interesting study. About something that I think is interesting, like how the body functions and how longevity works, and I'm glued to the screen. And then I'll listen to another speaker who's very polished, has these really intricate stories from their childhood and stuff, and I'm not as intrigued. Even though they're a better quote-unquote speaker, their speech was worse because the content lacked substance. This is the number 4, I think the biggest one you can do. All these things are great. They are tweaks to making you a better speaker. But overall, if the content sucks, get off the stage. Like, I don't care. I don't care about your rags to riches little story. Like, how is this going to move and shake my life? How is this going to make me a better human being? What can I glean? What information can you transfer to me? And information can be literally facts about the human body. It could be a story on how maybe you overcame a challenge that maybe I'm going through that challenge that can move and shake me. But it's back to number 3 is how can I serve the audience? Make sure your stories, your information, your content drives and actually moves your audience forward. I have found I've done a lot of speeches now over the last few years. I've been— it's been very great. I love speaking events. I just got invited to speak to another group just very, very recently. What I have found, the speeches where I crush it versus I don't crush it. I used to spend a lot more time telling stories about my startup and how hard the startup was and stuff. What I found was those didn't resonate with the audience as well. What I found was more compelling, and I do a lot of speeches now of, let's talk about the here and now. Let's talk about how this affects your— and I'll tell them, oh, my opening is like, Hey, I'm here for you guys. I'm here to share something that will move and shake your life that I think will be very compelling going forward. Now I'm in the financial space, so I study this like crazy. Right now I want to talk about what's happening in macroeconomics. Let's talk about a war in Russia and Ukraine. I'm going to talk about the war in Israel. I want to talk about Greenland and Canada and how the US might take them over. I'm going to talk about the Panama Canal. I'm going to talk about how crypto and blockchain are changing the future going forward. I want to talk about how BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard are collectively managing about 20% of the S&P 500. They manage $20 trillion right now. And how these 3 companies are taking over the world. And if we don't do anything about it right now, we're going to be slaves to a handful of companies that own everything. And let me show you some charts. There are 5 food companies that control all the food me and you consume. There are 4 media giants that control pretty much every piece of content media that we see. That's my opening. People don't want to hear, and I have, I think, some pretty cool stories about starting up my first fund or launching Fund Launch, getting it to $40 million, $30 million in revenue in 4 and a half years. And they could tell some stories. What I found though, when I dive into content about the here and now and it pertains to their life, this is going to affect you. Because guess what? Last year, 35% of homes purchased in the United States were purchased by big institutions. One-third. 2 years ago, it was about one-fourth. 3 years ago, it was one-fifth. Big institutions are buying up homes at mass. And if we don't do anything about it, we're going to be slaves and a renter nation to big institutions that own these homes. Do you want to learn more about that? And people are like, Yes. Do you want to hear about a central bank digital currency and what potentially is happening at the government and what— What I found is when I open with those things, it shakes and moves people way faster. Or if I open with fun content. Hey, I want to show you how if you're a house flipper, this is how Brent in our group, he went from flipping 4 houses a year to 72 houses 1 year later. I want to share how somebody was a small restaurant owner and how they went and They bought out 7 of their competitors and scaled up their portfolio in 18 months. Do you guys want to hear how that worked? People are like, huh? Yeah, I do, because I run a business and I want to learn about that. So content trumps everything. Okay, so number 1, I mentioned presence. Have confidence, hug the emcee, go in the audience, break the fourth wall. If you do that, you're already a top 80% speaker. If you take people on a roller coaster, talk really fast and then go really slow. And be heartfelt and share something and drive the point home, that puts you in like the 90th percentile. Number 3, if you focus on how you can serve the audience, what's in it for them, and I hope from this talk you can see what's in it for you, which brings you to number 4, content trumps all, and focus on content that is relevant to them and will help their life today, the here and now, right now. Why is it relevant? Why is it present? and what makes sense to them. People will ask me, Bridger, don't you need a lot of credibility to be on stage? Yeah, credibility helps a lot. If there's a billionaire up there that tells you, hey, you should hire better people, you're like, okay, he's a billionaire. Yeah, that works. Or it's some broke homeless guy, it's like, yeah, you should hire good people. You're like, ah, that— the message responds differently. Credibility is huge. I get that reciprocity. There's a lot of mental triggers, but overall what I've seen, even if your credibility, you can have low, lower credibility. But if your research is high, your preparation is high on the here and now, people will even overlook your credibility or give you grace on your credibility because you're talking about Trump wants to acquire Greenland and Canada and the Panama Canal right now and how the war in Ukraine and Russia is affecting fertilizer plants and oil transports back in the United States and why that's going to affect gas prices in the next 3 quarters. And how that affects Amazon. You know, there's a lot of ties you can draw together. Why, you know, there's a submarine and they're launching drones off of the northern United States and these drones are going over New Jersey and what's happening with the drone stuff? Because I've went and researched it. OK? Stuff like that, people kind of perk up and they go, huh? What is that again? What happened there? You can gain a lot of audience rapport quickly. You share things that are prevalent to their life, that's why they're there. Move and shake them. With that, go be an incredible speaker. Speaking is phenomenal. A great practice, start a podcast, start practicing on your phone, pull out your iPhone and start just practicing speaking to something, whether it's a camera or microphone, and then if you do enough practice in private, you will eventually have the chance to perform in public. And when you get that chance to perform in public on stage, you'll maybe hit hopefully a double or a triple or maybe even a home run. But you can start hitting the ball and start moving. And for me, it's been awesome. And I'm grateful for people that invited me to speak at their events. It's been awesome. And I've been voted, thankfully, these— I've been the best speaker of like incredible speakers, 20, 30 speakers. And I'm like, wow. And what happens is when you do a good speech, people are usually in the audience, hey, do you want to come to my event? I've got an event in 2 months. Great, and I come to their event and they're like, hey, we got another event in 6 months, you wanna come? I'm like, sure. And so, and then you can start charging speaker fees or whatever and go from there. But I have a lot of fun with speaking. I think speaking is my sport. I like it, I like training for it, I like preparing for it. I just think it makes me feel alive, it's fun. I've been moved by previous speakers in my life. Speakers have changed my life, listening to speakers when I was a young kid, listening to Tony Robbins or Dean Graziosi or Russell Brunson or, you know, different people on YouTube I listened to, whatever it was, really shaped and moved my life a lot. And I'm grateful for good speakers that I've listened to, and I hope to be one of those great speakers in the future. I'm still on the journey, I'm still on the path, I'm still working on stuff, but those are a few things that have helped me. You guys are awesome. See you next episode. Bye-bye.