Purposeful and Persuasive Presentations: Part 1 - P3

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us today at JLC Media. This is a follow up podcast and it will be a set or series of podcasts to support our recent webinar which was all about how to effectively present and the context of that was to present in a way to persuade or stir up some emotion in someone about change. Most presentations are about change. So today we're going to do one of a series of podcasts that support the webinar that some of you may have seen and heard. If you haven't, feel free to go to the website, it'll be on there and then you can do these follow up, listen to the follow up podcast, but the podcast standalone. They're just fine like they are. So if this is all you get to do, perfect. We understand time is a big, a big issue and it is the currency of this century. And we're going to do our best to keep the time tight and useful. So with that said, let me introduce my three compadres to you. This is Colleen Sullivan. She is a JLC associate and also the chief Operating officer. So she kind of directs me and my two colleagues on here about where we're going next and who's looking for us and all that kind of thing. Joe Marshall, JLC Associate, tremendous background, leadership background in Navy medicine. Vince Starks has a terrific experience in leadership also. And all three of these people are every day working with clients in executive coaching and supporting them wherever they are in their career development, in their journey, their leadership journey. So with that said, this is a for sure part of anyone's leadership journey. It might not be anyone that's in a quote leadership, end quote position, but something very useful for us to do moving forward, learn how to present effectively. So today, each of you at the end of this particular podcast will have one or two things you might be able to take with you. And we hope you understand the three key big picture components of an effective presentation. And that's probably it. And the reason why we're doing this. And all three of my colleagues will confirm and affirm the fact that clients ask us about this all the time. Teach us how to do a better presentation. How do we speak publicly with impact? How do we make sure the audience is with us? We hear those questions all the time. So with that said, Joe, what did you hear me say so far and what did that mean to you?

So communication, communicating in groups is always very important. It's typically how we like to get our ideas at one time across to a large number of people. And so the method and the techniques for doing that. People who do this a lot are always seeking for better methods and techniques. So what we intend to offer here are some better methods and techniques that will help you get your message across effectively.

That's beautifully said. Yeah, we were already doing it. And I think one of the great things to think about is how do I stop being anxious and nervous, because that's how I was when I first stepped out on the road. Of course, I had a lot of experience. I had lots of opportunity to talk to kids and teachers in the high school where I was, quote the principal. So I already had some cachet. Either they loved me or hated me, so they knew who I was. I didn't have to go back through a whole thing about learning who I am. But we'll go through that, that whole piece also. Joe, that was great. Vince, hear anything more different?

Yeah, well, you actually touched on it in your comments you just made. So I think that a lot of leaders and people are not very comfortable understanding how to formally communicate. So people are good leaders and they know what they think and what they want. They know what they want to say. But it's a different dynamic when you have to formally present that information. And so I heard you just articulate that even if you're uncomfortable. We're going to take the people on the journey and take the team on the journey on how we may think about doing this differently in a more structured fashion to improve more that formal communication.

That's outstanding. Yeah. And believe it or not, you can do this with a thousand people or 10 or 1. It can be a one on one conversation. You could have a board conversation. You could have a little cabinet conversation. This is these capabilities and we're going to share with you. And again, to Joe's point, you probably already have a lot of them. This will give you a way of kind of putting them in a backyard with some fences to help you stay inside the backyard so people stay with you. So nicely stated, Vince. Thank you, Colleen. Anything more different?

Yeah, just one more thing that I heard you say that really resonated was the sense of change. Many times anytime I'm doing a presentation, whether it is just if I'm talking to my compadre Vince, or if I'm talking to a board or if I've been asked to speak in front of a school or a community event, generally speaking, we are looking to change. We are looking to shift a behavior, develop a common understanding of something or asking them to do something at the end So I just wanted to reiterate that we worked with clients oh my goodness. Across the country, and this is part of a leader's arsenal of things as they're speaking, especially when things are changing and shifting. We've worked with companies going through transformational change. How can you truly articulate those messages in a way that enroll people into this shift in change? So at the end of it, they're clear on what it is, the key messages, and what it is you are asking them to do differently.

You just teed up another really important piece. How do we enroll somebody in an idea, not capture them or sell them the idea. How do we enroll them in the idea? That is very different than saying we got good buy in. Well, we've all bought things right. And sometimes the salesperson is not exactly who we want to be. So more to come on that as we go forward into the subsets. Excellent. Any final comments before I push forward? So the structure is. I'm going to talk about three. It's actually in. We're using a book by a gentleman named Gar Reynolds. We all love the. Well, we haven't all read it. Those of us that have read it love the book. And inside of it it's called Presentation Zen. Presentation Zen. And there are pieces of this about how do I become quiet enough, tranquil enough, that the richness of my ideas can come forward? That's a big piece in the book, and that's probably the Zen side of it. If you haven't read it or seen the Cliff Notes on it, I urge you to take a look at it. Inside of it, he talks about something called a P cubed conversation. So I'm do the three P's and then I'm going to tell a story. So the first P is that you actually construct a story that illustrates the big message that you want to bring forward. So anytime you want to communicate something, there's a message, there's an idea. So how do you construct a story? Stories can start with statistics. They have lots of possibilities. But it's important in P1 that you actually construct develop a story that matches your message. P2, what is the media that I will use that helps illustrate the story? And I will say this many times through these podcasts and certainly on the webinar. Stop putting bullet points up on a slide and then reading them to people. It's like the most deadly thing you can do and it confuses the audience when you do that. It's like, should I be listening to you, presenter, or should I Be reading your slide. Okay, well, I think you can answer that question without any help from us. So the first one is to really P1, right? Construct a story that matches the intended message or idea you're trying to deliver or get somebody to enroll within that idea. The second, what actually is the necessary media that will help the story become brighter, more engaging, more connected to the audience. And then the third one, which is really pretty straightforward. Deliver your message with passion. Deliver your message with passion. When people can see your personal commitment, your commitment to your story that you're telling, all of a sudden your love of the story, your passion comes out. That makes an incredible connection because people hear you in so many different ways. So let me stop there. What really resonated with you guys as we went forward with that particular opening piece on the three Ps? And I'm a math guy, so P times P times P is P cubed. And that's why they call it the P cubed presentation method. Who'd like to go first? Who'd like to add what resonated with you as you listened to me do that setup?

I'll start because I picked P1. They were all good, but I think that give us some thought and giving yourself a chance to reflect about what you want to talk about. And I have found that making a connection with a story is a very powerful way to engage people because people can kind of see themselves in that scenario, that situation, or they can see that outcome in their mind. So I think that being able to really, really think of something to make that connection of your point is probably one of the strongest things that you can do. And it's the first thing that people are going to hear about. So when you talked about went through all three Ps, number one really rose to the top. You don't get started well, then you can't connect it anywhere.

Notice something else that Vince just gave you, listeners, when you're really making this design happen, and we all talk about the important capability that leaders need to develop and refine, how well can I reflect? If I have time to be still and to reflect on what is my fundamental message I want to bring forward, I then can generate the necessary stories. So reflection and generation is a feedback loop that go hand in hand. That was magnificent. Who else would like to add something to the opening three Ps?

So I'll pile in with. I think there have been a couple of Nobel Prizes won in the last decade by people who say that decisions are not made logically. Essentially, this is our message, but emotionally. And so I think it's important.

As.

You think about how you're going to project a message that you think about the emotional understanding and the emotional appeal. Because if you don't think about that and build that into your story and build that into your case, frankly, you're not going to get off ground zero. You'll get polite applause and head nodding, but your ideas will go nowher.

Okay? So that's absolutely critical for our listeners to remember. If I cannot help my audience understand my big why, this is why I'm telling you this story. That's where the emotional connection is. And the three of us work with sales companies, and I've worked with sales companies now for almost 30 years, and they go through all the sales training, what we do, how we do it, and blah, blah, blah. The person wanting to purchase this particular product does it because they believe the person selling it is clear about their big why, why this product matters so much. And if I'm not clear about that and I can, I'm really good at the what, I'm really good at the how, but I don't connect them to the passionate why they will not buy. They will not buy. Joe, that was magnificent. Thank you, Colleen.

Yeah. I think what resonated with me is also preparation, because to your point, we work, each one of us works with executives, high level executives, and many times they just roll in and it's like, hey, will you go and make a presentation and give this award? And they're like, sure, no worries. And they just walk in, go off the cuff and perhaps it lands well, and perhaps not so much. And to Joe's point, a little bit of polite applause because you're the boss and then off you go. And so that preparation piece, even though, yep, I've been in front of, you know, how many stages have I personally been on? Over 3,000. I have been in front of a lot of people. And yet that preparation piece is key. So my invitation is, even though you're like, I got this. I go up and present to people. I speak all the time. I'm in the speaker's bureau, I do these things on the weekend. My invitation is, and I believe it is in the presentations end book, the number seven, the studies and research support, seven times practicing something. That preparation piece, as you mentioned before, we are so busy, how can we just recognize, all right, I'm in this new leadership role. I might be called upon to be in front of 50, 150, 200 people and speaking in a large Group is very, very different than speaking in front of just my immediate team that I coach. So that preparation piece is so critically important.

So Colleen is, she probably knows I'm going to do this, so she has set the stage for me to remind you of the dangerous six P's. You gotta be careful of the six P's. We're gonna do P cubed here. But the six P's are the following piss poor planning produces paramount problems. Don't go there. If you don't plan, you don't get ready to go, we're in trouble, truly, even today. I have spent hours and hours getting ready to be with you today on this particular podcast. And it's not because I didn't have a sense of the stuff or I hadn't read the book. I wanted this to be useful to the listener and useful to us because we are all learners. We are all, we are all in learning all the time. So with that said, listeners, team, I'm going to tell you a story. At the end of the story, I'm going to ask you if you can figure out why I told the story, what was the big intent, And I think it'll be in there. And maybe you'll find something that I didn't even think of when I crafted this story and did that took the time to build this particular story. So here's the story. I want you to visualize a little girl, six or seven years of age, maybe eight, braided hair, and it's the first time she's going to ride her bike without the training wheels. An adult is with her. Could be mom, could be dad, could be an aunt, an uncle, who knows? But there's an adult with her. So they take the training wheels off, they set it up. The adult gets behind this beautiful little girl and says, okay, get ready to pedal. And she pedals fast and she pedals, pedals, and she's going and she's smiling and all of a sudden she crashes and cuts her knee and starts to cry. The adult rushes up and says, stop it. Riding bicycles is not for babies. Stop it. Get up, get back on the bike, get going. Well, of course this adult is a big loud voice and a who said of the greatest magnitude. So she'll get back up and she'll pedal again and pedal again and they'll do it over and over with the same kind of responses from the adult until this cute little girl now can ride her bike without the training wheels. This is all good. Until about six months later, her adult friend who was taking care of her comes and says, come here. We're going to go learn how to play tennis. So they got two tennis rackets. We're going to go learn to play tennis. And the little girl looks at her adult caregiver and says, I'll wait till I already know how before I try. So how did that story land on you guys? Who'd like to go first?

Okay, so I need a moment just to take that in, of course, put some thoughts together. But the story number one, you took me to a place that I didn't see that coming. I didn't know that we were going to that place. So that was a great job, it was a great story. But the big message and the connection that I took away was the importance of being very careful at your influence. Whether you're in a leadership role as an adult and whether you're a boss talking to subordinates or you're a parent talking to a child, you, in that role have a lot of influence, a lot of power, and you can really drive outcomes with your people. And you really want to be careful at what you do with that authority. Because your voice, your actions can have secondary, tertiary, and unintended consequences on the people that you care about. In this case, it was a parent. I assume they love this child. But this could be a boss in a place of caring about the men and women under his or her charge. So that was the connection in very layman's. Just my brain. Be very careful and be very intentional in your actions because they can have significant impact on those around you.

Thank you. Who'd like to add on to what you heard from Vince? That was really good, Vince. Thank you.

I will. I really appreciate that, Vince, because words matter. And what I'm hearing you say is it's about influence. And I think the other piece that resonated to me was the feedback that was given reinforced a certain behavior which was, you know what? When you know how to do something, that's when you start to do it. Right. So that little girl walked away, and what did she walk away with? Those words that were chosen, that behavior that was reinforced. Get back up, loud voice. Her learning is evidenced in her. Right in her. In her statement when she was going to learn something new is I'll wait because I only do things that I do well. So that really reinforced her thinking and what she learned from the words her father chose to use with her when she was learning to ride her bike.

Yeah, that's really good, Joe.

You're muted, Joe.

I think both of My colleagues have really hit it on the head. I do think when you again, the example you gave was a child learning. But I think in the larger messages is that we're all learning in some role and we're learning perhaps good lessons or bad lessons. And when the lesson is less positive about how to try new things or how to present information, then many times we pull back from the essential elements of how to do something. I think that was your point about the tennis game. So I think this is a good story for us, talking about how to present information in a thorough and effective way.

That's really beautiful. So let me kind of tie the ribbon on all three of the comments, which were magnificent. You guys got it. And if you all listening, you notice the silence. Silence is useful and it allows people to lean into what they're thinking as. And it's also very affirming. And as you know, all the big leadership gurus these days are saying empathy matters. Silence is empathy. I didn't need to fix that. They're brilliant people. They'll fix this. They'll figure out how that what it meant to them and just give them space. So this is all about learning. And we have learned those of us that live in this kind of psychological sociology world over the last four decades. Most people have that kind of experience at some point in their life where somebody really powerful could have been their little league coach, could have been their first teacher, could have been the first time they went to boot camp as a young sailor or a young Marine. Everybody runs into this particular type of behavior and if we're not careful, it will hold me back. I won't be able to get past it because I'm not sure I want to do this next thing because it could really hurt psychologically, even physically. So this is about and the intention was to recognize all leaders need to speak to people adult to adult, not parent to child. That was one of the big messages to bring forward as a result of this story. The second most of us have been through interesting experiences and we need support from our adult leaders to help us live in an adult psychologically safe space. So the story was all about how can I behave as a leader? To make sure that given the experiences that help create the human being in front of me are fine. I need to behave in ways that give them more and more safe space so they can embrace the changes that are unfolding. Because changes unfold all the time. It just doesn't. It's not going to stop. Change is part of our world. How do I learn to embrace that change going forward. That story set the stage for that kind of conversation. Gang, everybody gets one opportunity to say to the person listening that you said, this is one of my buddies online listening to us. What's one thing you'd like them to take from this conversation? And I, you know, I didn't prepare them for this other than a little typical overview. They didn't know the story, and look at how they responded to it. That was. They were like, unbelievably on the money, enrolled in the story, and I attempted to be as passionate as I could be when I delivered it. So what's one thing you would say to your friend who's listening right now? One of the things that you hope that man or woman got out of this presentation. Who'd like to go.

Okay, so I'll go again, since I'm the youngest in the. The most handsome guy in the telephone call today. Hey, listen. What I would say to my friend is what my friend Colleen laid on the table. Words matter. That really resonated with me. And so just understand your audience, understand how you want to connect to tell your story, and then pick the appropriate methodology in which you're going to do that. It will be different from depending on who you're talking to, but the words that you use have impact. And so give yourself time to reflect and use your words very carefully.

I love it.

Yeah.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you, Vince.

I'll go ahead and add on because I think just recognizing that after you told the story, there was silence. And then Vince said, boy, that created a picture in my mind. That's money. That's where you want to begin your presentation. Every time he's creating that vivid picture, everyone's going to have a different picture because we have different life experiences. But by creating that emotion, now I'm engaged. Now I'm in a space of learning and curiosity, and I'm leaning in, and I'm just waiting to hear the end of the story. And then what are Ray's key points? Because he could have started by saying, okay, you guys, I'm going to teach you the top five things you need to know about leadership. Number one. And many times, that's how people start, right? And people lean back and they check out. So once again, I encourage you just to really. If I was going to say, my one little thing would be, people say they don't have a story. You do. Pause, think about it. Find your story. Practice telling your story in a succinct way, delivering it with passion and you will get people engaged quickly.

Beautiful. Thank you. Ciao.

So I would say that the point we're talking about a story, and so people may be thinking, oh, well, I have to construct some kind of a story for every presentation. The point of the story is to demonstrate relevancy. And I think people who are engaged in giving presentations a lot, many times they make it look very easy because they do it a lot. And many times our senior leaders are people who do it a lot. And our senior leaders also have many sources of information and are forced to do the integration and the preparation work constantly in many different ways. So many times when we look at our senior leaders, when they stand up and they talk seemingly spontaneous, simultaneously when they tell good stories, meaning they connect to the audience right away. You know, why do you think training is important? Anybody here, tell me, please, why do you think training is important? Why do you think readiness is important? What do you think readiness is? You pose some of those questions in the room and let the room come aboard and help you and help you tell the story, help you establish the relevance. Then I think it tees up the subject in a way that allows you, the speaker, to focus on your preparation, to focus on the things you know and relate that in a meaningful way to your audience.

Are we out?

And I'm out.

So Joe just summarized beautifully much of the intent. Colleen and Vincent added exceedingly powerful coloration about. Here's how this could land on you. So I'm going to leave you with this, listeners. Words create pictures in our minds, and if the picture has enough emotional pop, you will connect to that particular picture going forward. Notice I didn't put a picture out of anybody on a bicycle. I told you a story.

Story.

Each of you will choose your own picture. It's almost like I don't necessarily want to see the movie after I read the book because I got my own picture of what the book's about and I see the characters in my mind. Somebody fixes that for me in a movie. And it's not the same. Words create pictures. And if it's the. If they're used, if the words are really well done, that particular picture creates emotion in another human being. That's how you connect to an audience and continue to sustain engagement. Thank you so much for listening to us. Of course. You can find us@gojlc.com love to see you anytime you get a chance. Hop on the site. Lots of stuff on it for you to enjoy as leaders. Lots of for you to enjoy as aspiring leaders. And by the way everybody plays that leadership role from time to time. Thank you for being with us. Good day. Sincerest thanks for listening to this episode of the Everyday Leadership Conversations podcast. The Jorgensen Learning center offers a variety of programs for individuals and organizations to enhance their communication and leadership skills. To find out more about programs and upcoming webinars, check out our events page@gojlc.com.