Ep. 114 Out-Caring The Competition With Douglas Kruger

Hey Darren, how are you doing, my buddy?

I'm doing great. That's my line.

I know once in a while I get to take the lead because, you know, today I am really, really excited we get to meet an individual I've known for 18 years. I consider him a friend and a brother and he is literally a phenom in Southern Africa. What, you've met him too? Yes, yes sir. One of the. Where I know South Africa, right. I died in a really, really bad Afrikaner accent. But this gentleman is a five time winner of the southern African speaking. His clients include BMW, Revlon, been on CNBC Africa, in Forbes magazine. He's a 12 time author, a talk show host, he even appeared on Ford television commercials in Africa. But I won't go any further. I'll let you lead us in to meet our guest.

Let's do this.

Anyone can give a presentation. Few deliver unforgettable presentations. What's the difference? You're about to find out. Welcome to the Unforgettable presentations podcast with your hosts, world champion speakers and coaches, Mark Brown.

Mark Brown, your life tells a story and there's someone out there who needs to hear it.

And Darren Lacroix. And Darren Lacroix.

Stage time, Stage time. Stage time.

Ready for some powerful presentation? Ahas. Let's dive right in.

Hey Darren. I had the pleasure of visiting South Africa in 2007 and again in 2013. And both times I got to spend time with one of the most well known celebrated stellar speakers, CSP in South Africa. My friend, my brother, Douglas Krueger. Welcome, Douglas.

Mark, thank you so much. You make me look over my shoulder to see who it is you're referring to in such glowing terms. But thank you. And gents, I mean, you know, to have the chance to chat with two of my speakers speaking heroes, it really does mean a great deal to me. Thank you so much for having me on.

Well, you earned it. And I feel like the outcast with you two and your voices. I was like, man, I'm like vanilla boy.

Darren, beyond a certain age your voice will break and then you too shall have resonance.

I'm just 12, so I'm waiting to hit 13.

Once you hit puberty, you'll be good to go.

You'll be good to go.

And by the way, speaking of puberty, I, you know, I know that Douglas is a stellar presenter. What is little known certainly here in North America is that between the ages of 10 and 12 he was a three time winner of the South African Skateboarding Championship.

Goodness, Mark, you've done your research. And Mark, I was one of the tiniest guys in the skate park and they used to call me Mighty Mouse, which. Which I think was a compliment. I'm not entirely sure.

Well, now we can call you Mighty Mouse because you have been speaking in so many ve under so many circumstances, including hosting a radio program. Again, our North Americans don't even know that about you. So your world as a presenter has been truly diverse. 19 years in the business, 12 books, over 500 articles and videos, you have done the whole thing. But I met you 18 years ago through Toastmasters. And tell us a little bit how you began your speaking journey. Douglas.

A couple of decades. Isn't that amazing? And Mark, you actually feature into that speaking journey. When I was doing my final couple of years, years in high school, we had a Toastmasters group come around and do a youth leadership course. I went quite by chance and I discovered something that I found utterly addictive about it, which was the sort of backstage, on stage dynamic. I was painfully shy. I mean, extremely introverted. I struggled to speak to people in any kind of interpersonal sense. And I loved my writing for that reason. And I discovered there was a similar dynamic at play with speaking, where you could go backstage and prepare the best version of your thoughts, the best version of yourself, then step onto the stage and deliver it out loud. There was a gentleman running the Florida Toastmasters Club. Now, when I say Florida, that's a confusing term. Florida is also a small town in South Africa, and that happened to pop up in our newspapers. And I discovered that once you turned 18, you could become a Toastmaster. And the second I turned 18, I did, because I had such good memories of it and it had meant so much to me at the time. Tim Knights, who a lot of international people know through the Toastmasters Network, loaned me a VHS cassette.

This is how.

And it had Mark Brown on it. And I actually got to watch your winning speech. And that was what started me off in what I do now. So the first time I ever had that jaw dropping moment when you observe what can be done, how far it can be taken, was in fact you, Mark. And I mean, just a few years later, you dropped by the country and that just blew my tiny mind.

Douglas, it's the first time I've heard that story. I did not know that. And I am honored to have played a part in your journey and Darren's journey as well. And you know, he won the contest. Darren did in 2001, just a couple of years before your finals appearance. So you joined in 2000. You've entered the first contest. I met in 07. But you began your contest journey at what point after joining Toastmasters?

You know, if I. If memory serves, I've been a ToastMaster now for 20, perhaps 21 years. As far as I recall, I entered in the second year and didn't get terribly far and sort of got progressively further each passing year. I've lost track of where I got to in each year. Becomes a bit of a blur if you try too many times, unlike you gentlemen. But in 2004, I placed second to Randy Harvey. So that was my. My finals. Yeah, I made it through the. The South, Southern African. The several nations that make up Southern Africa, our. Our championships on five occasions, through the semifinals, then on three occasions, and my highest placing was 2004.

Hmm. Mark, I just want to jump in for a quick second here. I want to make sure, if you're listening to this, this stands out. Douglas isn't just a great speaker. He is consistently great, consistently unforgettable. So, Mark, I'm not sure where you want to go with this, but one of the things I do want to do is ask you about, like, your preparation. Where do you get ideas from? What's the Douglas Krueger process?

Okay, we can answer that in so many exciting, different ways. Let's start with this one. Just this afternoon, I. I walk to Jim at the moment, because right at the moment, you don't catch me in South Africa. I'm on the small Channel island of Jersey in the English Channel. When it. When it used to rain in South Africa, I'd get into my car and turn the seat warmers on. Here, I just walk through the rain. My. My car is now a bus pass. And I happen to be listening to an audiobook by C.S. lewis this afternoon. And he was talking about the sort of condescending idea of writing kids books as though you were writing for a kid. He makes the point that the legendary books, the Tolkien classics, are the ones in which the reader himself or herself feels that this is something they wanted, something that moves them. And I think there's an element. There's a spark of magic in that, in the sense that we don't want to pander to audiences. We don't want to write for an audience. The most memorable presenting is that thing that would make you go, wow. So as. As an opener to answer it in a large, abstract sense. It's like the author who writes the book that he wanted to read. I think there's something honest in that, and I think there's. There's something that compels you to a higher level in that if it's exciting you, if it's lighting up neurons in your mind, you're probably doing something right.

Well said.

Wow.

You're saying, write the speech you want to hear.

There's always something that moves you. If you've ever had a go at writing fiction, writing a short story or a novel, you may have had experience where a scene, an emotion pops into your mind almost unbidden, and you have that moment where you think, man, that's cool. Someone should do that. Well, that someone should be you. And I think those are the best novels, speeches, poems, any form of communication that. That. That lights something up and makes you think, I wish someone would do that for me. And then you. Then you go write the book, you write the presentation, you deliver it. And let's start looking at then how that practically translates into. Into the world of speaking dynamics. In 2018, I went to Global Speakers Federation conferences in New Zealand, and a wonderful experience. The one that really drove home for me, probably the best presentation I saw there was by a National Geographic photographer, of all people, and he had scripted notes and he read the entire thing, and he showed his visuals, and it was mesmerizing. He happened to be speaking about Australian soldiers underground in bunkers in France during World War I. Of all the strange things, the worst one for me was the guy who told us all to turn to the person on our left and tell him, you are powerful, and turn to the person on your right and tell her, you have already made it. I got up and walked out, and I think to myself, if I don't want that done to me, I'm not going to do that to an audience. And I think that plays on that dynamic of the author who thinks he's writing for children or the speaker who thinks that he or she has to go through certain motions. You don't. You can treat your audiences as intelligent, and I suspect that when you do, they get more out of it.

And, Mark, that also reminds me of something Craig Valentine had shared with us, too, that sometimes he was asked why he doesn't give his world Championship speech anymore, that story. And he says, I don't live there anymore. So I think it's also that indication of when it's time to, like, move on to another. If there's another topic that excites you, that's the one that you should move to and stop doing that one. That, yeah, maybe it works. And yes, maybe it helps people. But if your heart isn't in it, you're missing out on this opportunity to share something you're excited, excited about. The world doesn't need another speaker. We need more excited, unforgettable speakers. Douglas.

Yeah, that's a good point.

And also, every time you deliver a presentation, you yourself, firstly, you receive feedback from the audience, secondly, you think about and you meditate on the topic and your own thinking grows. So if you are delivering the presentation that you did a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, you are not bringing the developed, the furtherance of that thinking to your audience. And I think there's a great deal that we can learn from, for example, radio presenters, and particularly the ones who spend their entire time having to deliver points orally and come up with new topic matter, new content every day, and find ways to make that compelling. You find that if you do it for a while, it's not as hard as you might imagine. The points come by, but your thinking continues along certain themes and you find the rhythms of storytelling easier by the day. And I think that the more often you do that, the more you get into the sort of habit of developing new content all the time. Now I think the, the dynamic gets even more interesting in that the same theme or the same topic can change over time, yet remain essentially the same keynote. So if you're speaking on something like, say, innovation, your innovation talk in this year should be nothing like your innovation talk from three years ago.

Yep.

Or you're out of integrity right there.

But the interesting thing is I don't think it takes that much effort if you're doing it often. You are continually thinking about the theme, you're getting feedback from audiences, you're reading on it. And with, without even trying, your stories are going further, new examples are arising, you're dropping things that are, that are not relevant anymore. And it just, it remains alive and it remains vital. And there's something immensely exciting about that. One of my best experiences in life is sitting at an airport all by myself, exhausted, but in a good way, and thinking about that new story that I tried out for the first time and how it connected with an audience or a new thing that I tried on the spur of the moment. And thinking it just keeps it fresh. There's something very exciting about that.

That's so cool because as I hear you say that, I recall all the years I've given talks to young people ages 12 through 18, mostly 12 through 14. And when I began doing this back in the 1990s, I would mention Barney the Purple Dinosaur and Teletubbies. And if I tried to do that now they'd be like, what's he talking about? I certainly had to change. The foundation may be the same innovation youth programs, but as your content develops and part of what you said actually goes back to Darren's mantra by doing over and over again Darren mantra being stage time, stage time, stage time. But let me dig a little bit deeper into that process. Douglas, you've determined I am passionate about the subject. I've learned, I've researched. I need to share this for the audience who needs to get this. Is there a part of your process that says I must invest X number of time in research so much in writing? Do I test my stories on different audiences? What does Douglas Krueger do to become the CSP you've become, the hall of fame speaker and essay that you've become? What is your practical process like?

Well, Mark, I'd love to give you a ten step process, but instead what I'm going to say is when I was about nine years old, my parents made the phenomenal error in judgment of allowing me to read my buy and read my first novel, which happened to be Stephen King's Misery. And my wife says that probably explains a lot about why I am the way I am today. But the thing that my parents did at the time, and I think this, this possibly may have had an element of good judgment, is that they allowed me to pursue any thinking that I was interested in at the time. And when I picked up and read that novel, I did something similar back then to what I would do a decade later with you, Mark, which was to go, how was that done? I'm so interested in how that effect is achieved, how the sort of the mechanics underlying something that you look at and say that's masterful. How was that accomplished? And. And I think more than having a process for doing that, I just have my sort of mental feelers switched on all the time. And I'm mentally shopping for the ideas that make that happen. I think one of the most practical answers I've ever found to that compulsion, that urge to find that input, came from a book that I would strongly recommend to anyone who writes, speaks, sells, communicates in any way by a cognitive psychologist named Steven Pinker. And the title of the book is the Sense of Style, which is he's looking at it from the perspective of how the brain works, basically saying, why does style make sense? Or how do you make sense of mastery and style? And he makes some very Obvious points. But he goes into great depth on how your brain works processing this stuff. We as speakers know that we think in stories. Well, he, he takes that to incredible depth where he, he shows what happens in the mind when you start listing and, and doing dots and dashes of data and how the brain switches off effectively and what happens neurologically when someone then says, the other day I walked into a. And the brain switches on again and starts paying attention. We think we live in story mode now. Once you really take that to heart, you start asking interesting questions about the mechanics. How do you take that further? And I would recommend just the first 50 pages of that book as life changing for speakers and writers. But essentially what he says is if you can get people to think in moving imagery, you will make your message come alive. So take a static idea and turn it into moving pictures in the theater of the imagination. And there is so much more you can do once you've taken that to heart. But that's the launch pad. I mean that's the launchpad into so many cool toys that you can play with as a communicator. But taking that one to heart leads you to learning about speaking in metaphors, analogies, speaking in characters, making your audience the main character, which is one of my favorite little tricks half the time when tell stories on stages these days, they're not even true stories or stories about me. They are hypothetical stories about the audience going something down the lines of picture yourself in this scenario. Now that's unignorable. You can't look away when someone tells you to picture yourself living through something. And the more you do that, the more you get them emotionally involved and viscerally involved. They see, feel and live through what you're speaking about. And I think, think if there is a set of mechanics underpinning unforgettable speaking, that has to be it.

Wow, that was deep. That really was. I can see Darren stroking his chin. Before I forget, please repeat the name of the book and the author for our listeners to hear it.

Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist and quite an entertaining writer. Generally good, good speaker as well. He looks a bit like a sort of a crazy Einstein scientist with hair. And the book is called the Sense of Style. I recommend if get the chance, maybe even download the audiobook. I'm a, I'm a huge audiobook fan. I listen to audiobooks whenever I've got time to kill. Gym, walking in the bath, particularly uninteresting lovemaking sessions, you name it, you can learn something.

I Will not tell Vanessa you said that.

Oh, I don't mean me. I'm talking about hypothetical.

Hypothetical picture yourself, of course. But no, thank you. I really appreciate that because the idea of you said, keep your mental feelers switched on and turn the static ideas into moving pictures. And it's so interesting. I have a program called speaking in 3D, how to take a one dimensional concept and make it a three dimensional experience for audiences. And I can really appreciate what you're saying. So at a young age, you began to think along those lines, how can I create the picture and then put the audience in it? And Darren, you've often talked about tapping and transporting to put the audience into the story as well. That's really, really powerful and has worked for you in so different ways, which I find really, really interesting. Now, you began doing this at a very young age, but at some point you decided, I want to speak not just at Toastmasters, but beyond. Did you turn professional before you were in the finals or were you afterwards? What was your journey like in terms of deciding to go forward with this?

Yeah, it was. It was a strange sort of overlap of both. And there was no, no one point at which I said, all right, I am now officially a professional speaker. I got myself a small job at a community RA station when I was just starting out with Toastmasters. And I think that that helped a great deal. The pressure of presenting every day, that and the speaking and the writing led to very small, very humble instances of people saying, why don't you come and deliver that talk for our team, or come and, you know, speak at our event? And exactly like many of the Toastmasters whose stories you've heard, you're surprised to learn that people actually get paid for this sort of thing. And somewhere down the line, you bump into other characters who are doing it for a living. And I found that we are a uniquely generous industry in the sense that I think very few speakers perceive this as a zero sum game, in the sense that it's, if you succeed, there's less. For me, they're very much. And it's heartfelt. There seems to be the sense in this industry that the higher the standard of professionalism in general, the better for everyone. So perhaps we're just uniquely lucky in this industry that people are willing to share ideas, insights and so forth. But, you know, when you think about it at the most cynical level, at the level of commercial marketability, it really does make sense. If you help another speaker to do better, the whole industry is perceived as being more valuable. Everybody Wins.

If you help a young Douglas Krueger, he'll come on your podcast years later.

He'll have your podcast now.

Looking at it from you as an audience member, Douglas, listening to other speakers, what do you. So, two questions. First, I'll do one at a time. But what do you. You believe is an unforgettable presentation? So for you as a listener, what do you think is an essential to being unforgettable?

I suspect my answer on this one may be different to what many other people would say. And it really is based on my personality as something of an introvert who was then brought out of his shell with the world of speaking. I like to be able to suspend my disbelief and go into a different world while I'm observing a speake. And therefore I don't want to be told to turn to the person on my left.

Introverts unite. Introverts unite.

Something British in the depths of my soul that just doesn't respond to that sort of thing. But it's maybe. It's maybe not even so much a shyness or an introversion thing. I want to get lost in a little world of thought, and I don't do that when I'm participating. That, to me, is a whole different universe, and that's not what I'm there for. So my style of speaking, I think, tends to go toward attempting to get an audience to go into a different mental space, to be to some extent mesmerized and caught up in what it is that they're hearing, listening to, living and experiencing. Rather than trying to think of myself as a sort of a bandstand entertainer at an event. My event is happening in your mind. It is not happening in an auditorium. And I think that distinction, for me, is what I prefer. And that makes a. A big difference to me.

Brilliant. Brilliant. And my second part of the question. I know you probably haven't watched Mark Brown's speech in many years. What do you remember?

Less. Less than four months ago.

All right, you're a sick man. But besides that.

Thank you, Darren.

Besides that.

She gets to see the muscles. Come on. What's wrong with that? Nothing.

Nothing. What do you remember about Mark? So what was unforgettable about Mark speaking speech to Douglas?

The vocal range was astonishing to me. And the use of. Of pauses directly following the thunder of the vocal range, I found that magnificent. You talk about this idea of mastery over something. I. I think the. I have a theory I've been sort of playing about with, and I'll see if I can express it to you here when you want to get really crazy artistic with anything. The further you wish to go with a thing thing, the more grounded you have to be. And I think of this as something like a flag. If you have a solid mast, your flag can. Can go quite far. It can flutter out in the breeze. Without that solid mast, it just becomes chaos. It's not art anymore. You're not in control. But I think Mark's sense of mastery showed this incredible range, incredible reach that was so well grounded that it was goosebump inducing. And that's what I've been trying to sort of figure out. How do you do that as a writer, as a speaker? How do you do things that. That extreme? This incredible thunder going down to total silence. And I think that mastery really does depend on those dual dynamics of how well grounded you are, which is your skill, your discipline, your learning, how many years practice you've had combined with the willingness to do something bold, artistic, creative, risky. And that's what I deeply admire.

Wow.

Thunder.

Thank you.

Thunder followed by silence. You have no idea. You just created a movie. Now it's gonna be. He's got a new middle name. Mark Thunder Brown.

You mean people weren't calling him that?

Well, it's funny. And this morning I was thinking that one of our fellow world champions, Jim Key, had once posted on Facebook during one of our conventions, he said, mark Brown has a ridiculous set of pipes. He was commenting on my being the vog, the voice of God, which I've done for the last 12 years and honored to do so. But speaking of Contests back in 2004, please help me to. To dispel what may be a fantasy in my mind regarding the speech you gave in the finals that placed you second. How long did it take you to write that speech for the finals in 2004?

Mark was a blank page after the semifinals, which was what, two days, three days prior.

Exactly. So it wasn't the final.

With the perhaps delusion that if I got through the semifinals, I would be riding on a sufficient adrenaline and creativity high that I would be able to put it together in the next couple of days. So, yes. And, you know, the weird thing is, and I'll sound like such a hypocrite here, I wouldn't recommend it. I mean, to my own ear, that sounds like madness now, but yes, that was. That was what I did. And that's the highest I've ever ranked.

So I know because I didn't think Darren even knew this, but I knew you did come prepared and we tell our. Our friends, our listeners in our community who are competing in Toastmasters, you do want to be prepared. Darren believes in a mantra that my coach, David Brooks, taught, never let anyone out. Prepare you. And to hear you came second to an amazing Randy Harvey, of course, you were magnificent. Also, with two days, what was the pressure like on yourself when you realized, oh, my goodness, I have nothing and I'm going to be on the main stage, I want to represent my country, you know, what was that like for the pressure? And how did you handle it?

Well, you know, you just. For a couple of days, you give up personal hygiene. I mean, you have irritable bowel syndrome, erectile dysfunction, you name it.

Just a couple days.

The pressure was outstanding. But I think. I think what had happened in that particular instance is that it wasn't the first year that I competed, and I had been doing a lot of speaking in South Africa as well as a lot of radio broadcasting. So perhaps the fallacy there is in. Is in saying that it was unprepared. The rhythms of preparation, the rhythms of storytelling and so on, I was doing that all the time. And so I think I was able to go on faith that I. That I would be able to do it again. But if it's not something you do all the time, then. Then I certainly wouldn't recommend that approach. And I still believe in outworking the competition. And in fact, in one of my keynote presentations for corporate audiences, I speak about out caring the competition. And that is. It's about a work ethos. It's about saying, how seriously do you take this and does it mean something to you? And I suspect what happened in 2004 was not that I didn't work at it, but that it meant a great deal to me and therefore I did the work when I had to. But, yeah, I locked myself in a room for a couple of days and people sort of stuffed food at me every now and then. It was actually a great experience, quite an exciting one.

That's for a creative type, myself included. I'm like, I'm envious. That's awesome.

Yeah, it makes a good memory.

You did shower that morning, though, right?

Next question, next question.

And you did this all by yourself, all solo?

No, in the sense that I had people coming into the room and very generously watching the presentation, giving me feedback and so forth. So it was like two days of live delivery and scripting, script, speak, deliver, feedback, script some more and so forth.

Was it the hotel staff delivering room service? You do deliver room service.

Hey, hey.

Hey, come in for a second. I'll give you a tip. Just sit down and listen.

Given how much coffee I consumed, I mean, it could have been the voices in my head.

Hey, it worked.

I don't know.

It worked.

Now, quickly, before Darren's question, real quickly, last question on that thing. In retrospect, do you wish you had someone chronicle that on video?

Oh, wow. Yes. Simple but heartfelt answer. Yes, absolutely.

Well, you can still tell the story, though. Is a wonderful story. And congrats on finishing number two in the world again to Randy Harvey, who was just magnificent that day. And you, of course, were also very, very good, Darren.

Oh, thank you. And also just a wonderful human being as well.

Yeah.

This is a question that we need you to answer because we can't. And we get this all the time. And we have CSPs who listen. CPAEs. Yeah, CPAE hall of Fame speakers who listen to this podcast as well. Emerging speakers. We also have some people who are toastmasters who are. Let's say they go. The trophy is their main focus. And Mark and I try to tell them, like, look beyond the trophy. There's a TED platforms is professional speakers and keynoters. So you never actually won, yet you get to do this for a living. You've got 32 books. Okay, that was an exaggeration, but 12, 12, 12 is amazing. You do this. Mark gave your list of clients, like, please, what advice would you give someone who's so focused on the trophy they're missing out on the many more multiple stages that they could be truly, as you say, which I love, out caring.

Yes. I think perhaps even it sounds contradictory, but to have a shot at the trophy, I think you need the other platforms. There is a great potential danger in doing only the contest speech thing because it starts to look like the contest speech thing. And I think this plagued my early speaking to a huge extent. And I suspect if you were at, say, even the 2004 contest and you saw one of my corporate keynote presentations today, you would not recognize the same presenter on the stage. It's totally, totally different. And I hope better, and I think better. And I think there is so much that you learn rhythmically, almost down to the level of muscle memory from doing longer presentations, from. From doing training, from doing broadcast presenting.

Preach it, brother.

Preach it.

Yeah. It changes everything. Everything. And you also learn how to be playful in different ways. By which I mean, if you have a scripted speech for five to seven minutes, there are certain things you can do and certain things you simply cannot. But if you have an hour on a stage in front of a massive audience. Firstly, that's addictive. There's something special about it. But secondly, it changes the dynamic in the sense that you can spend 20 minutes telling a story, then you can have five minutes of intimate conversation with your audience and it feels different. It does not feel like the ballet performance of a keynote and it changes how you react to an audience. It's transformative.

You know, you talk about being in front with the audience and feeling that energy and feeling so confident. You just told us you were a mighty mouth shy kid who didn't want to speak much. But I look at some of your videos of you. You're doing university presentations and corporate talks and you have such confidence, such ease, such poise. And there's something about this out caring that I think shows in the way you run your business as well. Let me clarify what I mean by that. I can recall our episode 88. We interviewed Les Brown, who of course is a living legend in the business. And he and I had a talk one day and he told me he was going to South Africa. And my first instinct was, don't know if you remember this. I said, oh, I know someone there who could help you, Les, to do a public program. And I got hold of you and I put you and Les together and it was just your heart. How can I get this great man in front of many people here to benefit from his learning, his wisdom and his expertise? Tell us a little bit how as a presenter you value supporting those who are upcoming and even using people, not using, but working with people like Les, who's a legend. What is your mindset when you see this opportunity? What goes through your mind? What do you want to do for your audience and for your country?

There is no zero sum game in the world of ideas. More is better and more quality can change things. Now, coming from the South African background, I think is quite a, quite a relevant one. We have massive poverty rates right alongside astonishing potential. I mean, it's a nation that has self made millionaires who have grown up in shacks. Elon Musk came from South Africa. So we are this weird melting pot of incredible potential right alongside incredible heartbreak. And in fact, one of the topics that I've been speaking about for corporate groups primarily for the past four or five years has been what I call how to become poverty proof. And it's everything that I wish someone had told me about money and wealth and prosperity and what creates poverty. How do these families get caught in intergenerational cycles? Of poverty? How do you get out? You know, it bothers me that these ideas become best kept secrets. And sometimes they're so simple, but if you don't know them, you get caught in the same pattern that has preceded your life. I think I've been very blessed to have people share good answers with me and if I can facilitate or if I can myself, share those good answers with someone, someone else. What else can you do with your life that makes your life worthwhile? Wow.

Well, thank you for saying yes and for hosting, Les. And thank you for hosting me on two occasions. I must digress for a second, Darren. Please forgive me, but my second visit there was Ed Tate. We were there together, I think, but you had to introduce me. And a speaker had not showed up. Yes, extra time. But you, being the consummate, consummate MC, told a little story about technology and PowerPoint and you were giving a talk one day and the wrong slide showed up. I've written that. It'll work. Please regale our audience. Make us laugh. Tell us about that real quick.

What's the age restriction on this show, Mark?

Well, you can do the general audience version of the story. How does that sound?

So here's the art of making your audience the main character. Imagine the scenario. There you are on a stage and you have the audience going with you. And what actually happened in this particular case is that I had arrived at the last second at a venue and exactly as you suggest, the sort of speaking order had changed and I was ushered to the front. Even as I was being introduced, the IT guy comes and meets me halfway and he says, give me your presentation on a flash drive and I'll just take care of it. You can start so long. So I do, and I walk to the front of the room, trying very much not to look flustered and greeting the world and looking as confident as I didn't feel. And in my peripheral vision, I see this guy fiddling with the flash drives and the laptops and so on, and he pushes it in and he clicks on something and there's the sudden gasp around the room. And you do the obvious checks. You check your fly, you check that everything's all right, all right. They're not looking at me, they're looking over my shoulder. So I turn around and I discover to my great horror, that the flash drive that the IT guy used contains pornography and a thumbnail that looks Y sized on a computer screen is, of course, this big on a wall. So, you know, you turn around and you realize the immensity of the scenario. And after the shock wears off for you as the presenter, it dawns on you that they think this is your presentation. So you're standing facing the other way thinking, what on earth do I say to this group of people? Yeah, eventually I came up with something brilliant. Like I turned around and I said, that's not mine. And that was, that was about the best I could think of under the circumstances. But, Mark, the story continues A year later. I go and speak for the same corporate group and I walk in the door, the first guy who greets me goes, did you bring your flash drive?

That's a callback right there.

That's a great caller of visuals.

Nice. It was.

It was unforgettable.

Yes.

Yes, it was. I still wake up. Yeah. In cold sweatshirt.

Douglas, as we start to wind down here, Mark, if you want to gather your keepers, if you were sitting down with someone who was an eager professional, they're still figuring things out, but they've got some experience, they're comfortable, they're confident, but they really see you. They look up to you and they're open to whatever you have to say. They look at you as a mentor. What would you tell them about how, how to be unforgettable?

Right. The, probably the most profound lesson is the simplest one is, for example, if we're talking outside of the contest arena, and we can come back to that if you'd like, but let's assume that you are an aspiring professional speaker. You want to do this for a living. The single most powerful thing you can do is just to get a good brief from the person who books you. And that will transform the entire thing. When I started out, I mean, it must, must have been three, four years before it even dawned on me that I should ask the person booking me, what are you trying to achieve here? And isn't that bizarre? And I think that's one of the sort of the knock on effects from perceiving speaking as something theatrical, contest based, versus perceiving it as the value that the audience takes away. It's a whole different set of dynamics. And once I started to ask the people booking me, the conference convenience, what are the issues, what are they struggling with, what are the fears, what are the problems? What cultural issues or what problems on the landscape are these folks dealing with right now? That changed everything for me because all you have to do is address that and you can take the content that you anticipated delivering and all you have to do is shift it toward that and you will have people walk out of that auditorium saying validating things like, like I felt like he was talking directly to me and there's nothing quite like that. And afterwards you get the great feedback from the convener saying that was exactly what we were looking for. Of course it was. You told me what you were looking for. But it does take that little bit of effort to ask and place your emphasis on the negatives. What's wrong in their scenario? What are they struggling with, what's not what it should be. And that will unearth gold for you. That, that really changes everything.

Wow, well said.

That is gold actually. Which lead me to ask a little follow up question for you from you, Douglas. Do you find then that most emerging speakers certainly South Africa, I know you're in the uk, in New Jersey, but do you find that most emerging speakers tend to focus so much on what I'm going to do, on my speech, on my topic, on my stories, on my, my, my. That they may. That they don't really take time to shift their perspective and to think of what the audience is dealing with. What's your experience in that, in that area?

We had a particularly bad one, Mark, and one of our professional bodies actually had a word with this young man. Very talented speaker in the business world. But several of the stories that he told were demonstrably untrue. I'm sad to say that it worked anyway. And he's had quite lucrative a of career as a result of sharing things that are simply not true. He spoke about. There's a sort of weird mix of things that he really did do and things that he didn't. One of them for example. And to his credit this was true. In his mid-20s he earned his first Porsche and congratulations to him. It's a good story. However, I distinctly recall speaking to a 44ish year old CEO who walked out saying what am I supposed to do with that? I'm, I'm in my 40s, most of my leadership team are late 30s, 40s, 50s and up. And, and here we are being told about how successful you were straight out of your teens. What's the value to me? Congratulations. I'm sure you feel good about telling that story. What do we get out of it? Now the interesting thing there is you can tell that story and deliver audience value, but it's got to be done in such a way that you're not simply there to glorify yourself yourself. You are making a point and the story merely illustrates it. Then you fall back on the, the structure that we sometimes talk about which Is PSA point story application. That was just a story. There was no point to the story and there was certainly no application for the audience. What do you do with that? How do you go out and do likewise? Now, if, for example, he was speaking to a group of young people and the. The point really, really was, here are the five ways you can go and do likewise, then you've got a whole different creature on your hands. But that one was just to a general audience and he wanted to brag about his life. So you've got to be very careful about that. It's about the audience, it's about their benefit. And counterintuitively, when you understand that, you become the hero and get all the praise and adoration that speakers, being egotistical creatures, craven desire. But it doesn't happen when you are there trying to get it. So give and you shall receive all.

Of his wisdom quickly. Don't you get bombarded with requests for coaching people who want to be like Douglas Krueger?

It does sometimes happen, Mark. And of course, you've got to distinguish between people who are serious about it versus someone who has kind of looked around and said, gosh, I'd like some money. Can, can you transform my life in the next, oh, five minutes? So there are real requests and there are terrible ones. I've often tried to share the idea that asking someone to mentor you is not dissimilar to a marriage request. You can't just walk up to a stranger in the street and say, hey, will you devote the rest of your life to me? And in the same way, you can't do that with a mentor. It has to start gently. You introduce yourself, you take, talk about your background. You mentioned something perhaps that you've been struggling with. And generally you'll find that a potential mentor who has an answer to that will then want to share some, some thoughts with you. And it develops organically from there. But you don't walk up, get down on one knee and make the proposal.

I also found it helpful to give, give a hoop for them to jump through, because I remember when I reached out to Alan Weiss and some of my mentors, I would not approach them again with another request until I did the first hoop that they gave me to jump through. As Mark gathers the keepers here at Douglas, if somebody wants to reach out to you, learn from you. Get one of your 12 books before you come out with the 13th. How would people follow Douglas Kruger?

Sure thing. The easiest one is just the website, which is my name, Douglas Kruger. All of the YouTube videos and so on are listed on the site. I believe there are links to all of the books. I think it's completely up to date with that. For interest sake I recommend audiobooks if you, if you are interested in any of the Douglas Kruger books. I myself love them. I said that earlier and I've read all my own audiobooks and I think there's something a little different if you're talking about say presentation techniques, things like that in hearing the authors just tone of voice. It's that something that says this is how I mean it. But yeah, Douglas Kruger.com or perhaps check out the YouTube site. If you just type my name into a YouTube search it'll take you straight there.

There you go. And Mark, as you give the keepers I'm going to look up demonstrably.

You've got demons, Douglas.

The running joke is I am the resident wordsmith. I'm a self word nerd. And Darren gets his. He keeps a dictionary handy in case I wax eloquent at some point in time.

Come on.

By the way, Darren, I can't imagine how difficult the search was to find someone to do the voice of all his audiobooks. How could he find somebody with a deep resonant voice? Must be the long search. But wasn't the Douglas to find him?

Well, I tried to approach Mark Brown but he doesn't mentor anyone and he has difficult to read.

Well I tell you what, I want to thank you for what we call here dropping knowledge on us and everyone today. Truly you are delightful Douglas. And you gave us some wisdom up front. You were very direct with us. You told us to never pander to the audience and don't do to your audience that which you don't want done to you.

Wow.

Write the book you want to read and write the speech that you want to hear. Such wisdom there. Keep your mental feelers switched on or antennae for Darren's purpose. Okay. And you want to turn static ideas into moving pictures. Your recommendation? The book the Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. And as a presenter, if we think that our event is happening in the audience's mind that will establish a great connection. We must stay well grounded but be bold, be artistic and be creative. Always out care your company competition and you're starting out. Get a good brief or a pre event information from meeting planners or conveners as they say in South Africa. And for your audience, find their struggle, give them value. Use the PSA technique. Your point, your story, your application, not the psasa, the professional speakers. Never mind. And remember Remember, it's about the audience, it's about their benefit. And when you find a mentor, remember the cert must be careful because finding a mentor is a bit like entering into a marriage relationship. Douglas Kruger, I thank you. I'll let Darren close out.

Awesome, Douglas, thanks for being here. Please, if you're listening to this, go check him out. He's got so much wisdom. Thank you for spending some time time with us. You bet. Brought a little more eloquence to our show.

Demonstrably so.

Yes.

There you go.

Amen. And I love the out caring mark. We gotta do something with When Douglas meets David Brooks. Out preparing and out caring. Boom.

There you go.

There it is.

Who's eloquent now?

Yeah, there you go. Bam. Well, you got being in your aura, the two of you. Look, if you're listening to this podcast and get anything from this, we don't charge for this. We love this. This is part of our passion. So please do us a favor. I ask you, please share our podcast with two of your favorite presenter friends so we can kind of spread the love to help change the world one presentation at a time. So, Douglas Krueger, thanks for making us better. Thanks for sharing your time with us. Thanks for helping us be unforgettable.

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