Prepare Your Slides, Your Timing But Do Not Forget Your Mastery!

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.

There are a number of things I think that, like, hell no, you know, that just should not happen. When somebody goes on stage, I think one of them is requiring slides. And I want to be clear. I'm not against slides. I think slides can add value to a presentation. But the moment the speaker needs the slides and is using them as a crutch, it completely breaks the authentic connection with the audience. And I've seen it many times where somebody's speaking about something and they get into a flow because the slide prompted them, but then they don't know where they're going next until they hit next, and then they see the next slide and they go, oh, and now I know where I'm going again. And so what it does is it creates these moments of actually quite good presentation that are punctuated by this break. So I think needing your slides. And by the way, there's another huge reason you should never need your slides, and that is Murphy's Law. If you have 10 speakers lined up to do a conference and one of them needs their slides, the other nine don't, you can guess for which speaker the slide projector is going to break. So needing slides is just a bad idea. So that's one. The other one is acknowledging time warnings. I'm at a conference right now. I'm amazed because, you know, many of the people that are speaking here are like, you know, high level, top notch, best selling, all that sort of stuff. But I'm amazed how many of them have. When they. When they've seen that their time's getting low that they mention, oh, I've only got 12 minutes left, or, oh, I've got five minutes left, or something like that. And I happen to believe that as a presenter, my job really is to create a bubble around the audience and to create an experience inside that bubble that will have them suspend concern about the external world. It'll have them not need to look at their phone and have them not even worry about their bladder. They suspend any attachment to the outside world because they're so involved and so in. And so that bubble is fragile. And there are a lot of things that could break that bubble. And one of them is that you're zooming along and doing really well. And you go, oh, I've got five minutes left. And immediately, first of all, you pop the bubble. But secondly, you take everybody's attention and you have them recognize time again. Not the time, you know, when you're telling stories, you're creating a version of time, but now they recognize real time again. And all of a sudden, they notice that their bladder is full. They notice that the seat is uncomfortable. They notice that, you know, oh, my God, I had a meeting coming up. I need to think about. And now they're out. And that's a really dangerous thing because, of course, the majority of audiences, even if you're giving a truly compelling talk, they will largely remember how you started and how you finished. It's a big job to get them to remember that middle part. But if you think about how important the end is, you definitely don't want to pop the bubble as you're heading into that. Then the third thing, and this is a really important one, and that is never, ever, ever, ever go overtime. Like, just never go over time. And never is a tough word, because of course, there's always exceptions. And I would say that there are only two exceptions to that. Never. The one is if the producer specifically and outright asks you to go over time, requests you to go over time, then you can go over time. And if it's your own event and you've sold the tickets and the people are your clients, then go over time. Like, that's not a problem, because it's your event. You're taking the risk. Going overtime might earn you extra credit with those people, or it might not. So that's for you. The consequences are yours. But when you go over time and you weren't asked to do it and it isn't your event, then the consequences to the producer are untold. They're disruptive for the other speakers. They're disruptive for everything. Plus, it might involve them having to cut the event short for other people or extra venue rental time. Like, you have no idea the consequences of going overtime. And so it's not worth doing. Oh, and on that, and I saw this just the other day at an event I was at where the speaker turns to the producer during the event and goes, can I have five more minutes? Never, ever do that. And the reason you can never, ever do that is the producer has no choice but to say yes, else the producer look like the jerk the whole audience is. Of course you can have five more minutes. You never ask the audience. You never ask the, can I have five more minutes, because that forces the producer to either give you that five minutes and disrupt their whole event, or it forces the producer to say no and become the bad guy. So, yeah, those are. Those are three things not to do.

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