Do You Find Seminars & Workshops Boring? Redesign it NOW!

Do you struggle with fear, doubt, and worry in your public speaking? Do you find it difficult to connect with your audience and deliver presentations that leave a lasting, positive, unforgettable impact? If yes, then let's dive in the world of public speaking and presentation skills with your host, Eric Edmies. Welcome to the Unforgettable podcast.

People are very jaded about workshops. I think workshop is probably the wrong word even because it creates this, like, work. You know, it's like almost a negative energy. And I think one of the reasons that they're jaded about them is that the vast majority of them, if you were like an alien from another planet and you were to examine workshops and try to figure out what you think the purpose of workshops is, you might arrive at the conclusion that workshops are designed either to put people asleep or to torture them slowly. And so I think what makes a good workshop is, you know, like, not doing that to people. And what I mean by that is I always know that a workshop's gone really well when at the end, you ask people, how long did that feel? And you get one of two answers. You went, it went by in, like, minutes, even though it was three days or it felt like a lifetime because so much information was landed. And so I developed a system for designing experience. We can call it experience design, but it's for designing seminars, workshops, retreats, even the structure of a book. And it's called Behavioral Change Dynamics. And. And. And so when you construct a workshop with behavioral change dynamics, what happens is that you give information to people at the speed and in the structure that is really perfect for where they are in that moment. And the best way to measure it, of course, is do they take action? Are they actually transformed? When I first wanted to become a speaker, and I'm so grateful I didn't do it when I first wanted to do it, because the truth is, when I first wanted to do it, I was 18 years old, and I was listening to Tony Robbins on cassette tapes in my van, you know, And I was like, if you want to take action, you gotta decision. And I, like, I could do it all. I was like, I could be this little mini me, Tony Robbins if I wanted to. Luckily, I was terrified of public speaking, so I didn't do it. But when I finally decided I really did want to do it, I'd already been in business. I'd owned a variety of businesses in tons of different industries in different countries. I had a lot of experience already. And so I approached speaking like a business. I said, if I'm going to get into this, I need to know some things about it. So in the same way that if you're going to get into the business of selling chainsaws, you're going to want to know everything you can to know about the forestry industry or the furniture, you know, you're going to want to know those things. And so I did the same thing and I dug into the speaking industry and I found out something that stopped me in my tracks and basically almost stopped me from getting into this industry. And that was that roughly 6% of people that go to a workshop integrate anything. To me, that just was unacceptable. I was like, I would not. If I was in Hollywood making movies and I was going to get a 6% rating on rotten Tomatoes, I'd quit. Like, I don't want. If it's going to be that ineffective, I don't want to do it. And so, and I heard that that was the industry average across. And so for a while I thought, I'm not going to do it. But then I got invited to do some talks and I thought, well, I don't mind doing a little keynote speaking here and there. And as I was doing those talks, I found ways of delivering information to people that made it sticky, that made it stick with them. And then they would come up to me like six months later or a year later and go, oh, that thing you did? I did it. And I used that hiring practice you taught me. And I've hired the best people ever, you know, whatever the case might be. And I realized that there were some mechanisms I was using that were making things sticky. And so I was getting much higher than 6% of the audience. So that's when I decided to really do a deep dive into what it would take to really create transformation. And when I say deep dive, I examined everything from my grade three teacher, Mr. Kulchinsky, who I can still word for word, repeat some of his stories. He was so good to the advanced psychology. I just, I looked at everything I could to figure that out. And so when we construct a workshop, we construct a workshop to actually transform. In the case of the one talk workshop, it's designed so that the finished product for somebody is basically two things. There's a lot more. But there's two core things that it kind of distills down to. One is they leave the workshop with a well constructed talk, a talk that they could deliver in time, flexible formats. If somebody said, can you deliver it in 18 minutes? No problem. Can you do an hour and a half keynote version of it? No problem. The talk structure is flexible in that way. So they have this keynote that they can deliver in just about any environment, and they can deliver it in any timeframe, and they can do it flexibly and they can do without notes or any kind of thing. But even more than that, they learn how to do it so that they're not dependent upon it. The truth is, you know, a lot of clients will come back and do it the second time when they want help writing another speech, but they don't need to. They might want the help, but they know the structure. Those are the core things that people come away from. Of course, they learn a lot of other things about story selection, process and how to tell a great story and so on. But at the end, they walk away. If they have a TED Talk lined up, if they've got a keynote presentation, if they've got funds they want to go raise from some VCs, they've got a structured, well structured talk that they can present easily.

So that's it for today's episode of Unforgettable. Head on over to itunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on itunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a private $25,000 VIP day. Eric Ed needs himself. Be sure to head on over to Unforgettable show and pick up a free copy of Eric's gift and join us on the next episode.