Michael Davis - Speaking CPR

Good morning, everybody. It's Jeff Goldberg for the Sales Pro Network. As you may know, I'm a sales coach and trainer. I work with both individuals and organizations internationally to help them achieve measurable and sustainable sales increases. And I founded the Sales Pro Network to elevate the profession of sales, to give salespeople and anyone who sells a place where they can hang out, network with each other, learn from each other, ask questions and get great coaching from all kinds of experts. And if you've been with us before, you probably know that every Friday at 10am Eastern, I either do a live training or a live interview with somebody who can add value to the profession of sales. And once again, my friends, today is no exception. If you're watching us live, please say hello in the comments. And if you're watching us live on Facebook but have not connected your account to streamyard, it's just going to say Facebook user. So please be sure to include your name. If you have any questions for today's guest, please put those in the comments and I'll pass them along as we're talking. And finally, if you're watching us on the replay, please put replay in the comments. Good morning. John Hill. He says, I'm looking forward to hearing what Michael Davis has to say. Me too. So let's introduce him. Thank you, John. So this gentleman is a presentation skills trainer. He is a consultant, an author, a professional speaker and he's the founder of Speaking cpr. Please welcome today's guest, Michael Davis. Good morning, Michael.

Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be here with you. And you're being modest. You're also quite the comedian.

Thank you, sir. Michael and I were just chatting about that before we went live. I am a stand up comedian. If you've been with us before, I never take a. I never miss an occasion to let you know that. And I'm actually in a comedy contest right now here on Long island, where I live. And last night I advanced from the semifinals to the finals. So I was pretty excited in sharing that with Michael. But today, Michael, it's all about you. Maybe could you give us the two or three minute version of your background? What brought you, brought you up to this point?

Yes, My journey to being a presentation skills coach started on a desk in first grade when I was humiliated in front of my class by one of my teachers. And that was the day I told myself, I will never stand in front of people again. That was awful. And for the next 25 years, I never voluntarily got in front of a group of People until I was a fairly new financial advisor and I was voluntold that you're going to go out and give these presentations to attract new clients to our firm. And Jeff, they were, they were lousy. But my boss told me verbatim, you're a lousy speaker, your story suck, and you've got 90 days to turn this around. So out of desperation, I found the group called Toastmasters. Your listeners are probably familiar with that or heard of it. And I thought, okay, I'll go here for a few weeks and I'll solve this problem and I'll go about my business. Well, there were lessons in there about speaking and being a presenter that I had no idea. I didn't know it was a learnable skill. And the more I got into it, the more I realized I had some talent for it. And everybody's had bad experiences, everybody has a fear of speaking at some level. And I can learn this. And as I went over through the years, I discovered I also had a talent for helping other people. And it one day I woke up, I'm not going to say it was an epiphany moment, but I realized this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Financial planning is fun, it's nice, but this is my calling. And I started my business extremely part time in 2011 and in 2018 went full time thinking, oh, nothing big is going to happen in the next couple years that could change my business plan. So let's go for it. And then Covet hit. But I was set up for Covet because I'd been doing virtual training and coaching since 2017 and that was such a unique opportunity because I knew having gone to networking events and talking to people, they weren't ready for being online 24 7. So that played into my business model and that led me to, to where I am today, where I'm coaching, speaking and training.

Wow. Love it. Good morning. Bruce Kesseman, a financial advisor who helps people outlive their money in retirement. And something you just said. I've got a million questions for you because I'm fascinated by what you do. But something you just said struck a chord for me. You said, was it in first grade you were humiliated? Yes, yes. So something similar happened to me in eighth grade. You know the play or the movie west side Story?

Sure do.

So my class was doing west side Story for assembly where, you know, the whole school sitting in the assembly hall and they're watching you do some stupid play and there was a guy who was going to play the part of Riff, you know, when you're a Jet, the tallest guy in the class. He was, I think six, two, even in eighth grade. So he got the part of Riff. And we're all backstage ready to, you know, have the curtain open. And this guy, his name is Vahan, I'll never forget him. He had a panic attack and he said, I can't do it. I can't sing in front of an audience. It's not going to happen. And the teacher tried for a couple of minutes to convince him and he just could not do it. And she turned to the rest of us and said, does anybody know the song? And you probably can guess. I raised my hand and she goes, okay, you are now Riff. So at the appropriate time, I stepped forward in front of the entire school. All the teachers, the principal parents are there to sing the Jetsong. Except in eighth grade, I still had a very high tenor voice. In fact, I sang in the Chicago All City Chorus, where I lived at the time. I sang with the sopranos. That's how high my voice was. So when I stepped forward, instead of, when you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way. It was, when you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way. And to this moment, I'm seeing it right now, the entire audience is in hysterics, laughing. I still see Mrs. Carrot, the principal, slapping her knee from how funny this was. And I made a decision at that point. I gotta get people to laugh with me, not at me. So it's funny how humiliation can really change the course of your life. Incredible.

Yeah. And if you're watching this, whatever Jeff and I have explained, you've also had the same experience, some point in your life, were you embarrassed? And I love your solution better than mine, Jeff. It's like, I gotta turn this around. I was 6 and I thought, oh, I'm gonna hide from this. So you had a better outlet, I think.

Yeah. I don't know that it was actually a conscious decision at that point, but in looking backwards on my psychology and what made me me, I'm. I'm pretty sure that's what brought me to stand up comedy, that. That not wanting to be laughed at, being. Wanting to be laughed with. And now I'm. I'm joyously allowed to give the gift of laughter to audience. But let's talk about you. You mentioned something that I was going to bring up later, but you mentioned Toastmasters. For those who aren't familiar, could you explain what that is and why you're still an active part of it. Yeah.

Toastmasters was founded actually 99 years ago by a gentleman named Ralph Smedley out in California. It was to help business. At the time, it was businessmen stand up and give presentations because 100 years ago, presentations weren't very good either. So he decided to create this outlet and it grew over the century. And I still occasionally do go to Toastmasters because it's a great place not just to handle your nerves, but to have a live audience, an in person audience. And as you know from your, especially your standup world and in sales, you can practice in a room all by yourself all day long, but until the, the your best laid plans meet the object, the opponent or the audience or the potential customer, you just, you need that practice. You need that one on one with people because that's where your nerves kick in and you got to learn to manage those. And you need to face to face to manage those experiences.

That's great. And I know you're also a member of the National Speakers association, nsa. Can you tell people what that is? What's the difference between that and Toastmasters? And why are you in nsa?

Best way to describe the difference, Jeff, is Toastmasters are for the speaking skills. Especially if you're not comfortable with speaking. How do you put together a speech, how do you deliver it? NSA will work on that, but it also is the business side. How do you create a speaking business? That's the major difference.

Yeah, I was a member of, excuse me, of NSA for a while and I went to the national convention. It's worth joining NSA just for that because of the amazing breakout sessions about the business of speaking. And the other thing that I found amazing, I think there were like 3,000 speakers there in San Diego. And the people who got to speak on the main stage, I consider myself pretty talented as a speaker, but boy, oh boy, I just sat in amazement like, wow, that's a real speaker. That's what I can aspire to. So it's just a great place to be. I want to talk to you about storytelling because that's very big for you. Can we start by defining storytelling? Is it as simple as you're just telling a story or is there more to it?

This is an excellent question because storytelling has become so popular in the business world and storytelling isn't just giving us a bunch of facts about your life. In business especially, story is a narrative with a message that will benefit the audience. If you tell a story for story's sake, people are going to sit there and think, okay, why do I care versus you have a message. If you're in the financial world, which I was in for years, it's okay. This couple faced a similar problem to you, Mr. And Mrs. Jones. Here's how they got over it. When I'm working with clients now, it's like, I'm going to use you as an example. I was working with Jeff. He was struggling with this issue when giving his presentation. Here's what we worked on. Now he's a more successful speaker. You gotta have a message. And the best stories are about transformation, how somebody was struggling with an issue and now they're not. They're confident. And it also gives the listeners hope. Hope that they can overcome a similar problem they have to the character in your story.

Yeah. You just said something so important. I hope that anybody who's watching now or on the replay heard that. I teach salespeople for a living, and I teach them to tell exactly the story that you just talked about. I call it a verbal proof or verbal truth story. And that's a story about somebody else, like you, Mr. Or Ms. Prospect, who, by doing business with me, lived happily ever after. And it's crucial because the way brain science works, as I'm sure you know, is when we're making a buying decision, we automatically think negatively. What if it goes wrong? What if I make a mistake? What if I get fired? What if it doesn't work out? And telling a story about somebody else like them, who it did work out for, helps people relax into it, really change their own mind to, oh, I'm worried about losing my job if I make this decision to, oh, this could work out well for me, too. I find the other thing about stories, and I'd love to hear your take on this, is stories make things sticky. I believe that stories are why I can remember the words to almost every song from 50 years ago, even though I can't remember what I had for breakfast. Because. Because songs tell a story. Is that your feeling, too?

Yes, because one of the purposes of stories to generate emotion and the way we generate emotion is to create visuals. You did a terrific job of describing what happened when you came out with the high voice. You didn't just say, I came out with a squeaky voice, you demonstrated it. And then you took us deeper into that scene by talking about how much people were laughing. And you talk about your principal slapping her knee. That evokes such an image that we're right there with you. And what you're also doing is creating empathy. It's like oh, you poor kid. And then we start to think about, oh, I remember when that happened to me. I told my first grade story. You automatically thought of your eighth grade story. And when you're telling, sharing narratives like that, you're connecting with people. People. So absolutely, we want to generate emotional responses in our audience. And a point to make here, Jeff. The word emotion confuses a lot of people. When I was first in Toastmasters and then I went to a National Speakers association meeting, I heard a speaker, well known speaker at the time, he said, if you want to get audiences on your side, you want to connect with them and influence them, you got to get them laughing one minute and crying the next. Okay, I can get people to laugh crying. And that's. It's not my style, but okay, I'll do it. So I intentionally wrote speeches and stories with the idea that I'm going to make them cry here. And the feedback I got was, you're inauthentic. It felt forced. I felt like you were trying to manipulate me. And those people were right. I was doing all that because I got this advice. I didn't understand until a few years later when I heard another speaker, David Brooks, who said, if you want to connect with an audience, we all share six common emotions. Happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, and fear. If you can tap into at least one or a combination of those, you'll connect with an audience. And I thought, I can do that. I've got stories filled with those emotions. So it's not limited to laughter and crying. It's all, all of the emotions. If you can evoke those. And you did it in such a strong way with the sensory, we call it vaccinating your speech. V A K S visual, auditory, kinesthetic, smell. I know the correct word is olfactory, but vaco doesn't work for my metaphor. And taste is in there. The more of those you can invoke. So you did that. I could see the.