How To ACTUALLY Deliver A Great Presentation

At some point in your life, you are going to be called upon to give a speech. Now, this might be at work, this might be a best man speech at a wedding. Doesn't matter where. Because if you can't do this without constantly looking down or looking at the PowerPoint to reference your notes, you're at a huge disadvantage. Not only does it come across as inauthentic when you're not communicating to people eye to eye, but as a PowerPoint breaks, which I've had happen, you're gonna find yourself standing in front of a room full of people who are waiting for you to speak and you have nothing to say. So we want to avoid that. And today I'm going to teach you how. The first thing you need to do is to create an outline of your speech that is memory friendly. Now, what does this mean? The first thing is that it's chunked in a way that you can remember in your short term memory chunks. Think of it like this. If I were to tell you a phone number that's 10 digits, you probably find that whenever you hear a phone number, you've got to write it down or you've got to remember the first half and ask your friend to remember the second half and then you type it into the phone. That's because there's 10 chunks. That's too many for most people. Most people can handle anywhere from five to nine chunks. I play it safe. Most of my videos I have anywhere from three to five chunks that I have. So your first piece is get an outline, three to five bullet points. But these points need to, in your head, feel like they flow clearly from one to another. This piece is very important. This is how you avoid memorization. It just kind of flows out of you. So if I'm doing a piece on conversations, I'm going to do it in chronological order. That makes sense to me. Right. So the first thing is that you're going to approach someone. The second thing is what do you say to start the conversation? The third thing is what do you do when you run out of things to say? And finally, how do you say goodbye? Right, that makes sense to me. If you're giving a pitch and you're at a meeting, right? And you're trying to figure out how to structure things. Maybe you think about it from the customer's perspective. First they're going to hit the marketing team, then they're going to first finally meet the sales team. And once they get sold, they're going to go to the deliverables team, whatever it is. The pieces should flow naturally in your head. That will save you so much memorization work down the line. That's how I avoid memorizing. The second piece is that once you have these bullets, you flesh them out. I will actually go in and I type everything that I can think of underneath each bullet. That includes stories, things that I want to get details that I might not have thought of. That's going to help me communicate my main point. But more importantly, they. This gives me a chance to edit the ones that I don't spend time on. You have seen these before. This is when I ramble. This is when you ramble. So the really key point is to find your details and then to cut the ones that don't support your purpose. It's not to memorize all of this, by the way. We just want to get it out on paper. So that's the second piece. The third piece is now you've got a speech written for you, right? It's got these chunks, it's got the details. The third thing is to go through it and sub vocalize the entire thing, right? Referencing your high level bullet points, but without visual cues. I realize that last sentence had a lot of weird words in it. Let's break it down. So first off, you want to. You've got your main bullet points, but you're not memorizing this. You're going through the speech and it's going to change a little bit every time. Critically important people who try to memorize word for word, they blow it because they get off one word and they can't get back on the next sentence. We only want to have like these main points that we're memorizing. When I say sub vocalize, though, that means that you go through it and you just kind of, you know, whisper to yourself. Okay, first thing I'm going to cover is I'm going to say this. Second thing I'm going to cover you go through the whole speech like that. Again, not going through a word for word for what you have on there, but just hitting those main points. But most importantly, you do this without visual cues. I can't tell you how many people I've seen think that they're preparing for their speech by reading through it 20 times. And then they get up there, there's nothing they can do but read this speech. Or more common in the corporate world, people don't even realize they're doing it as they click through a PowerPoint and they don't realize that they're taking cues from this PowerPoint as they go, they haven't memorized anything. So if the PowerPoint goes down, they have never had the exercise of actually connecting those pieces in their brain. You need to go through it, shut your laptop, whatever, and just kind of talk through it to yourself in your own words. The only things that you need to worry about are, are those main points that should be memorized and should already connect. If they don't connect, rewrite the speech so that it makes sense and put them in an order that sequences well and just clicks for you. You don't want to be memorizing here, but there are things that you have to memorize. And that brings me to the fourth point. The two things that I will memorize in just about any video that I do are the first sentence and the last sentence. You gotta nail the first sentence. It's gotta have a hook. You want it to be interesting, don't riff it. So get your first sentence down. Word, word for word. And sometimes I'll even get the first two or three sentences down, because my intros tend to be something that I stick onto these videos after I come up with the concept. And of course, the last sentence, we've all been part of a speech where the person did a good job, but at the end, they just kind of stood there and like. And that's the end of my speech. Thank you. Right. That'll blow it. You don't want to have to say thank you, or that's the end of my speech to cue the applause. You want to have something that has a tone finality. And if you've watched this channel, you know that I do this all the time. This is not a special one. It's just I'm used to it. I say, okay, so I hope that you guys have enjoyed this video and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next one. That is how I know that I'm done. It's how you know that I'm done. And then, of course, YouTube tells you that I'm done when the video stops. But memorize word for word, first sentence, last sentence, that's going to give you the sort of bumpers on either end. And that's how you can speak for 10, 20 minutes at a time without actually having to memorize that much. I do it all the time. I've just done it right here, and I hope that you've seen the examples in it as I've gone through it. So if you guys have liked this video, go ahead now. And you've not done. So subscribe to the channel. It's going to get more tips like this. We can do public speaking, we do conversation, how to be your most charismatic self, how to be more confident in situations where you're not feeling it. Basically everything that falls under the realm of socializing, personal development. That's stuff that I'm interested in and want to help you with. So go ahead and subscribe. You're going to get our newest videos including Charisma Breakdowns and again, these Talk Talking Head style videos. A question for you guys and a request is that you write in the comments things that you'd like to see me do. And this video was one that I got a lot of questions about how do I do these videos without cutting. This is how. But it also is related to another group of questions I got which I'm not sure that I want to cover but I'm going to throw it back to you guys. People are asking about their questions about YouTube, like, you know, how have you set up the channel, what makes a good video, what goes into it. And I've learned a little bit about not only, you know, the psychology behind it, which is my bag, but also how to do it at a technical level. So if you're interested in either of those, right, the psychological pieces that might go into making a video that gets shared virally or if you're interested in the technical aspects of it, let me know. I don't want to change the main thrust of this channel, but maybe we could have some sort of Wednesday video that is related to YouTube. Not forcing it down your throats though. I only want this channel to be something that helps the most number of people. So you let me know in the comments with upvotes and comments what you want to see. If it's something else, go ahead and write that too. So thank you guys for that. That's going to help me direct the channel and of course I hope that you've enjoyed this video and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next one.