Ellen Finkelstein The Master of PowerPoint Presentations

Speaking with TJ Walker, the show where we dissect how and what world class leaders communicate.

Do you believe that PowerPoint causes death? Well, you're gonna want to listen to today's show because our expert really knows about PowerPoint and how to make it effective. You won't suffer that death by PowerPoint, and you won't just get by. If you follow her techniques, she'll actually be great. When you deliver your next PowerPoint, you'll definitely be more persuasive, and you won't be one of these horrible hacks who just uses a PowerPoint slide as the poor man's, the poor woman's teleprompter. Whatever you do, don't do that. Folks, Ellen Finkelstein is with us today. Those of you who have followed PowerPoint over the years in its evolution, you know who she is. She's written countless books on the subject. She sold hundreds and hundreds of thousands of books on the subject. She's one of the very few PowerPoint MVP, most valuable professionals in the world. There are only. Well, there are less than a dozen of those in the world. She's in webinars, online courses, speeches, trainings, you name it. She is omnipresent when it comes to sharing her expertise on speaking effectively, using PowerPoint, and communicating effectively. I'm very happy to have her as a guest today. So tune in now for my conversation with Ellen Finkelstein. Ellen Finkelstein, thank you for being our guest today. How in the world did you decide to become an expert on PowerPoint? That's not something most little boys or little girls grow up aspiring to be.

Actually, it's a funny story, TJ because I didn't aspire to it at all. It happened almost completely by accident. And it was just that I had the nerve to say I knew something I didn't know. So I had written a book, a couple of books about AutoCAD, which is a dream drafting program, and A different publisher, McGraw Hill, asked me if I would write a teacher's manual for a book on PowerPoint. And that basically meant questions and answers, which was based on the book. So I said, you're going to give me the book, and then you want me to write questions and answers based on it? And they said yes. And I went, oh, I know PowerPoint. So I learned PowerPoint by reading that book, and then I wrote those questions and answers. And from there, I got jobs writing other books on PowerPoint, and I hadn't really used it at all, so it was a little strange.

So you became an expert before you became a beginner, essentially.

Something like that. Yes, something like that. I had some experience writing, but I didn't have experience with PowerPoint and I've done that a couple of times in my life. Said I knew something when I didn't really know it, if it was clear that I could learn it along the way. And so I wrote that book and then some other books on PowerPoint and just had the program and went through it and figured it out myself.

And we should point out, as noted in the introduction, you're a prolific author, numerous books. You've sold way more than a quarter million copies of your books, which for anyone who knows anything about publishing, if you can sell more than 3000 copies, you are a superstar in a lot of publishers eyes so widely published and widely successful. What do you say to someone who meets you? Because this happens to me. I'm sure it happens to you. You're at a cocktail party or networking event at a conference, they find out what you do and they say, oh, I've got to do a PowerPoint next week. Any quick tips? How do you distill your dozen or so books down to just that thumbnail 30 second handful of tips? Version.

First of all, there are two parts to it. PowerPoint is not the only part of presenting, of course, as you well know. So I really like to break it up and then and talk about what is your goal, what are you trying to communicate? And those are the first things anybody needs to be thinking about. Who's your audience? And once you're pretty sure about that and the real problem, you know, you know, the real problem is just the slides. I actually have a system that I teach. It's called Tell and Show, the Tell and Show method. And it's based on some research done by a professor at Penn State's School of Engineering. He called it assertion evidence because he was doing scientific things. But the basic concept is that you make an assertion on the slide and then you show evidence for what you've the assertion you've made. And in his case it had to do with engineering. And I call it tell and show, which is basically the same concept but a little bit snappier, I think. And so it says that on the slide you say your point and then you show it. And I usually use a slide of a little boy, cute little boy with an open picture book, a big picture book. And on one side there's the text that tells the story and on the other side there's this big picture that shows the story. And I use that image to show my point. So I'm telling my point and I'm also showing the point. And there's a corollary of that. And that is as much as possible, you put one point on a slide, so you tell one point and you show one point.

Now everybody says that. I say that I actually follow that principle when I'm giving a PowerPoint, but I never ever, ever see any clients do that. How do you actually get people to follow that rule?

Well, I do some one on one training with people and we make over slides and you almost have to show people the before and after for them to get it and to see how easy it is to to take one slide with many points on it and break it up into as many slides and then some way visualize each one of those points. And that's not to say you don't sometimes summarize, make a list of things. Occasionally you do, but as much as possible you break it up. And people are sometimes concerned that it'll take longer, but it doesn't take any longer to show five slides with five points than it does to show one slide with five points. You're still saying the same content. So when people see the difference, then I think they get it.

Now, Ellen, you're a subject matter expert, you are an expert in PowerPoint AutoCAD presentations. But I really think of you as sort of an information entrepreneur. I feel like I've known you for decades. It seems like I've been on your newsletter list and have known of you for what seems like 20 years. You speak and present in a lot of different ways. I'm interested in how you differentiate your preparation, what's different about how you speak. Because giving a keynote speech is different from giving a half day or day long workshop. That's different from a teleseminar, that's different from a 60 minute webinar. That's different from how you communicate in your membership site. So you have all these different ways of sharing your expertise. Walk us through how you prepare each one a little bit differently.

First of all, I do give clients a form that they can use to prepare. And I use the same type of form. And there's a short version of it and a long version of it and the short version of it. You basically write down your goal, who the audience is, your main points, and how you're going to start it and how you're going to end it, because those are especially important for the impact that you have. And when I do a Key I don't do a lot of keynotes, but when somebody does do a keynote, your goal is going to be very different. It's not going to be training. Keynotes often have to be somewhat entertaining. You want them to be highly visible. If you're using slides at all, not everybody does. And you want to have an emotional impact on people, some type of impact on people. When you're doing technical training for half a day, it might be very different. So in that case you need to do the technical part of it. But because people's attention is not very long anymore, but never really was anything more than 15 to 20 minutes, you need to break it up. So then you use principles of training, which really says you give some content and then you make a change up and do an exercise with people, have people divide up into groups or some type of workshop where you take questions or you ask questions. So that's a totally different type of structure that you might have. When I do a webinar, let's say an hour long webinar, depending whether it's a sales webinar or it's a training webinar, different types of webinars, but again, there's a much more of a focus on content. But with a webinar, it's different than speaking in front of a live audience. So then you need to take that into account.

You don't get any reaction, you don't get the applause, the laugh, the quizzical look.

You don't hear it and you can't see them. So what I was going to say is that you have to use the interactive features of the webinar, the chat box or polls, so that you kind of force them to interact with you and to pay attention. Because it's so easy for them to multitask. They know you can't see them, so it's not so embarrassing for them to go check their phone. But also they're at their computer, so easy for them to do something else. So each type of presentation that you do, you really have to think about what's the value for the audience, where they are, what they need, what will work best for them. So rather than think of yourself as a presenter, you need to think of yourself as a medium through which you can help your audience gain value.

In a moment I'll ask you, what is your least favorite medium? What's your most favorite? I mean, personally, I like speaking in front of live crowds. If you have any sort of ham in you, that's always going to be the best you get the reaction, you get, the more in depth questions, you get to actually shake people's hands. It's also typically the best way to generate new business. And it's frankly just fun meeting new people. But you have to perhaps spend a whole day to get there. No whole day back. Sometimes if you're in another continent, a whole day of jet lag. So it could be the best and the worst. The hardest I find is the video webinar where I can't see anyone, I can't move around the room. Yeah, I can ask people to type in a response or maybe even have a mic at the other end, but it's generally less responsive. I find that's hardest for me. And because you're just looking at a little camera in a room, it's harder for most people. And yet the plus side is I can still wear my bathing suits and flip flops and nobody knows. And I can be, you know, relaxing with my daughter at the pool five minutes after it's over. So just curious, what's your least favorite and most favorite type of presentation, venue and mode?

I think I see the same pluses and minuses as you, so I'm not sure. I think my least favorite, to tell you the truth. Tj, I hope this isn't embarrassing is just audio. That's what we're doing now because I really like showing people what I'm talking about. So I guess I would say that now I live in Fairfield, Iowa. It's four and a half hours from anything, so four and a half hours from Chicago, four and a half hours from Minneapolis, four and a half hours from Omaha, and four and a half hours from St. Louis.

And sorry, you sound like an obnoxious New Yorker, but how in the world did you end up there?

Well, we ended up there because there's a university here. My husband was a professor here, and I grew up in New York, too. We were discussing that beforehand. So I'm also a New Yorker, as people who have a good ear will hear a little bit of that accent left and maybe think of the funny phrase, you can take the girl out of New York, but you can't take New York out of the girl. But we love it here. And I love. It's a small town of 10,000, small university town. I'm looking out, seeing only trees. And so I really like it here. We have a great community of people here. So. But because of that and also because when we came out here, I had two children, six months and two years old, Traveling wasn't an option. And I did need to supplement my husband's salary. So the combination of being here and having small children meant that I had to work online. And I started out writing, which worked very well. But eventually I ended up doing webinars starting in 2007 for a third party company. They just paid me a flat fee each time. And then in 2009 I started doing my own hosting my own.

And I appreciate you have been nice enough to include me in some of those before as well.

That's right. You were a speaker last year on my Outstanding Presentations workshop series, which we did the seventh one this year, seventh annual one. And yeah, you were a great.

Well, thanks for our listeners who are thinking of putting on either a webinar or webinar series for their organization, their company or their government agency. What do you want them to think about? Because for a while webinars were just the rage. Every day I'd open up my email and there was invitations to 25 new webinars. And this was, I don't know, 10 years ago. And so many of them were just, I would say, thinly disguised. They weren't even thinly disguised sales pitches. There was just no value. And then it seemed like it started to differentiate. Some of the professional trade associations would charge 300 or plus dollars. And then the rule was there can't be any pitching if people are paying. And so it seemed like there was a high end and a low end of the market. Maybe I'm just off some of those lists or I'm not noticing it. I'm not hearing as much buzz these days. I want to get your sense of the marketplace.

I think webinars are alive and well. I see them. They are used a lot for sales, but usually when they're used for sales, people know now that you have to give a lot of value, that you have to provide content because that's the hook that you get people on the webinar with. So there's some good content. And then once you've done that, in a sense you have permission. Well, now I've given you something for free. Will you listen to my offer? So I see that a lot. I also see lots of, in the professional world, lots of free webinars that are used like white papers. So there really isn't any selling at the end. But there is a free offer to get onto your mailing list. Now a good example is Training Magazine, which has something called Training Mag Network and they offer free webinars, I don't know, three, four, Times a week, a lot. They're all free. They're all up there forever. But you have to opt in to access it and people do it for the exposure. So I just did one for them two weeks ago and we got 2,849 people to register, which is astounding. They said they thought it was a record. And we had over 500 people live on the webinar.

And for any of our listeners who haven't put on a webinar lately, that's fantastic. I mean, there's so much free stuff out there. If you can get five people, that's. And I'm embarrassed to say this, but I've put on webinars. This has been many years now where I had one person show up. And that's. Talk about feeling awkward and phony and contrived lecturing to one person.

No, that's happened to everybody, tj. So you shouldn't feel embarrassed at all. And they have been doing this for a long time. So they have an amazing marketing system. I would say out of that, those 2,849 people, about 350 came from my promoting it as well. But then I made a free offer and that brought over 200 people onto my email list as a result. And then they have little groups in there in the network. It's its own social media thing and they're little groups and I can post there. So it's great exposure for, for me. And so that's something that people are doing, I think, in the industry, in different specific industries. I'm sure somebody's doing that in the insurance industry and somebody's doing that in the who knows what. I know somebody who does that in the yoga teacher industry, for example. So you put on free information and then at the end people just make a free offer. So you're right that there are also. I've also done webinars. Remember I mentioned I started doing third party webinars and they paid me and so those people who attended paid for it. And I did a couple for an organization called, I think it was called like the Chief Financial Office. Yes, CFO Magazine. And they would.

I smell money there. That sounds like a good one.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And in fact, I got some clients that way, but they were paying me and the people were paying to hear it. And so I couldn't make an offer, but I could get exposure. So I think webinars are used in a lot of ways.

And in your mind, what's the difference of a webinar versus a live online training versus just an on demand. I know you have online courses. I have online courses. You and I have not talked about this, but I'm guessing you maybe have some of the same problems I do, which is I give great content and great insights and lessons in my online courses video based. And I give people the same thing they get if they hired me for a day and paid, you know, a lot of money. The problem is with online, I can't be there to force them to stand up and speak and video record and watch themselves. Therefore I don't really think I'm helping them get that much better. How do you, how do you help? Do you have similar frustrations with online training? And how do you actually get someone to take your knowledge and recreate their slides to make them great and to make more important to make their presentation great?

I definitely have the same frustration. T.J. when you give somebody a basically self study course, a lot of people will buy it and not do very much with it. The more they pay, the more likely they are to actually do something with it. To tell you the truth. And I'm that way too. I have a lot of things that I've bought that I never actually implemented. So it's definitely an issue. One thing that you can do is to have a community. So I often use a closed Facebook group, but you can have your own discussion forum that you host on your website and there are third party places that do that too that host an environment. Coaches sometimes use this where people can have discussions and people can ask questions. And it's very similar in a sense to a learning management system in lms. So in fact you can give people tests if you have a facility like that. So there are things that you can do that engage people on an ongoing basis because the people who implement it are more likely to recommend it to other people because they got more value out of it.

Let's go deeper in an example. For for example, you have a high persuasion PowerPoint presentation program and we've linked to that in the show Notes as well. How do you use these tools for a program like that?

These are videos, so it's a self study program, but they also get an invitation by email to join a Facebook group. And on the Facebook group they can ask questions as they go along and they can actually answer other people's questions. They can communicate with other people so that hopefully helps people implement it, but you can't force them to. You're right.

And how do you go to get enough people into a Facebook group. So you get past that initial threshold of seeming real. If one person, it's like a restaurant. Somebody pops into a restaurant that's completely empty, could have the best food in the world, they pop out. No one wants to go into a restaurant that isn't already crowded. How do you get that first crowd into your private Facebook pages?

You just have to keep promoting it over and over again. So you kind of relaunch it is what I would call it. And the first time it might not be that way, but over time you can get more people into it. I can't say that all of my private groups are wildly active, anything like that. So I think it's a frustration that a lot of people have. And another thing that you can do is just offer people the opportunity to work with you one on one. And sometimes people realize when they buy a course like that, you know, there are people who like to learn on their own, and then there are for people who say, no, I need to go to a class and have somebody teach it to me. And sometimes people realize they would like to do it on their own, but it's not going to happen. They don't have the initiative to really go through the material and implement it unless somebody is holding them accountable.

As you mentioned, how do you balance what people say they want versus what they say they're trying to accomplish? I'm always, you know, a bit perplexed by people who come to me and they'll say, well, tj, you're the big media training expert and you've trained all these celebrities and presidents of countries and you're an author. We want you, by the way, we want to do it just a half day. And we want three executives and we want each one of them to have a private 90 minute segment. And I'm like, whoa, you just said you wanted to rely on my expertise, expertise. And you're now trying to structure every second of the day and you're doing it in a way that I think would basically destroy the ability for your people to learn. So it's a bit awkward. At some point, the client is the client. On the other hand, what people think they need and think they want are often very different things. I had to imagine it's that way with PowerPoint too. They may come to you and say, well, We've got these 50 slides and they've each got 89 bullet points on them. And legal and investor relations and marketing have already signed off. Now we just need you to give them a facelift at that point. Isn't it almost impossible for you to do anything that really is going to help them?

Yes. So I will tell people I'm not here just to give your slides a pretty background and that won't solve your problem. So sometimes you have to turn down a client because of that. Now another thing that I do, and I think this is fairly unique when I'm not a designer and so when I work with people one on one, it's a combination of me making changes on their slide but with them, and so they learn how to do it at the same time. So it's a combination of makeovers and training. And part of the reason I do that is because I've discovered that I can't really know what the purpose of any slide is unless they tell me. It might have all this text on it, but it's not going to be clear. It's like, what are you really trying to say here? And so very often when they tell me that I can get rid of of a lot of the text or we can split up the slide into multiple slides and I help people rewrite their content a lot because very often it isn't clear. So I just worked with somebody this past week and he's creating a video from PowerPoint slides for his website and it's an introductory video on the front on his homepage. And you know, those things should be like two minutes. And he came with 75 slides, so that wasn't going to work. So we cut it down to 50. And in the time we had, which was two hours and two separate sessions, I said to him, you need to speak this out and time it and see how long it's going to take. But another thing that I do, depending on the nature of the person and whether they're into it or not, is if it's a lot of material, we'll go work for two hours. And then I say, look, you see what I'm doing? So now between now and the next time we meet, go through and make over the slides your own. I'm training you. And then we can do it much more quickly because they've done a fair amount of the work themselves. So it goes more quickly and they learn more that way by implementing it on their own.

All this talk about PowerPoint, let's be both a little shamelessly self proclaimed. If you want to be better at delivering PowerPoint presentations, I'd urge you go into our show notes and click on Ellen's website. I'd urge you to do what I did many years ago sign up for her newsletter. It's always chock full of a lot of great tips. And Ellen, what else do you have for people who are trying to learn more right away about PowerPoint?

So thank you for that little thing there, TJ. So I mentioned high persuasion PowerPoint presentation program. It is a four video course which really has in it all of the compiled altogether, all of the tips that I have for creating presentations that are meant to be persuasive. Now that could be a sales presentation, but it doesn't need to be. In fact, one of the testimonials I have is a trainer. And she said to me, no, you're wrong, Ellen. Training is not just informational. We need to persuade people that it's important or they won't implement the training. So she kind of taught me this lesson that training also needs to be persuasive. And she wrote me a couple of months later and she said, ellen, this works. I just gave training that I've done 70 times before and I can visibly and I use these principles and I can visibly see the difference. And she's doing live training with people. I can visibly see the difference. They're listening, they're paying attention. I can see the difference. So it teaches those types of techniques for you to create slides that are powerful and persuasive and clear so that your audience understands and remembers what you have to say and hopefully is persuaded to take action.

So check out that link to high persuasion PowerPoint presentation program that Ellen offers and you'll find out more about it. Also, at absolutely no cost whatsoever, you can go to the Media Training Worldwide site and get our online course on how to deliver better presentations. This is video based. There is a whole section on how to deliver PowerPoint more effectively. So please check out that if you write to us, you'll be given access to the online course at absolutely no charge. Ellen, I'm going to ask you two questions, one hard, one easy. And I ask all of my experts who deal with PowerPoint. This first question is going to be who do you think the best business speakers are in the world today? Or really any speaker in any field alive today that you admire and respect. The second question is where it gets hard. Who is the best user of PowerPoint slides today in a business or any other situation? And if I'd open it up to the last 20 years, most people would say, oh, Steve Jobs. But he's not around anymore so I'll.

Let you answer those slides point too because he definitely had a reputation for being A very good speaker. And to tell you the truth, it's hard to hear business speakers because very often the speaking that they're doing is private. And not all of this gets online, but I think at least the best place to hear good speaking that in a way that's available to anybody is to go to Ted.com and there are talks there and they're only 18 minutes long. And there are talks there that have millions of views and you can get an idea by that of who's giving a really good presentation. And so wide, wide range of people. So there are lots and lots of people who are doing a really good job of speaking on various topics. And I think that's a better way to go than to pick one person and listen to how that person speaks.

And people always talk about ted. Oh, I want to give a TED Talk. And isn't TED great? And I do think TED is great. But so much of what makes TED great is they simply have a few basic rules for their speakers, which is you can't put a bunch of text on slides, you've got to use images, and you can't drone on and on for two hours. You got to stick to 18 minutes. I mean, if most business speakers follow those, those two rules stop at 18 minutes. And by the way, I don't think there's anything magical about 18 minutes. But it does, it does put a discipline on forcing you to throw out extraneous information and using pictures without text. If you do that, your average Monday morning staff meeting could be as good as a lot of TED speeches. Do you buy into that or am I missing something?

I do. I still think it depends on what you're trying to get across. And TED talks very often are meant to be inspirational, and so in that case, just a picture is enough. They're not trying to train people or give people information that they're going to be tested on afterwards. So the Monday morning meeting might be a little bit different because you want people to take notes and you want to assign certain tasks to certain people and you want people to take action. So I don't think that all talks are going to be like TED talks, but definitely having lots of text on a slide is there's actually a scientific reason for why it doesn't work, and it has to do with the limitations of short term memory. And so when you put a whole lot of content on one slide and expect people to take all of that in, it just becomes overwhelming to the brain and people remember less as opposed to more. So I Do like the idea of having some text on a slide in a business type of setting that says your point and then showing it with some type of image. And what I mean by the title saying the point, let's say you're doing third quarter sales. So instead of saying third quarter sales on the slide, you say third quarter sales are up 5%. And that way people don't have to figure out the graph, the chart that's on the slide. They know instantly what you're trying to say because you said it. And then you give them the details you do delve more deeply into it. So again, it depends on the purpose of your slide. The more inspirational you're trying to be, the less text there should be.

So let me challenge you right there, because you mentioned science, you mentioned memory, what scientific evidence is. And I make a lot of my PowerPoint friends angry when I go here, so I apologize in advance. But what scientific evidence? Evidence is there that putting up text on a slide actually makes people remember the message more? Because I gotta tell you, I test audiences all over the world routinely. Nobody ever remembers a slide with text in it. They only remember pictures. And using your example of third quarter results, up 5%, wouldn't it perhaps be a greater trigger to the memory to say, this represents last quarter and put up a dollar and say, this represents this quarter. Here's a dollar with a nickel on top. Yep, we're up 5%. Wouldn't that perhaps make that idea more memorable?

It would. But in many cases, the requirement in that business situation is that people see the numbers for the different divisions in the company and they actually see the numbers. So again, it just depends what your goal is and what information you need to impart. So when Michael Alley did his research, most of the research that's been done has been done in an academic setting. And Richard E. Mayer is another person who wrote a book called Multimedia Learning. And what they did was they tried different configurations of slides. With Richard Alley and Richard E. Mayer, it was just computer based learning, not PowerPoint specifically, but they did different configurations of the same knowledge and then tested different groups of students and compared how well they did on the tests. So I already told you what Michael Alley said. Richard E. Mayer said that, and he talked about the value of having auditory because he's talking about computer based learning. So if you say something and then you show a picture of it, that works very well also. So he just said things have to be close together if they're related, and you can't have too many words. Also that kind of thing. So there's been quite a bit of research. There's also research showing that animation usually reduces learning because it's probably because it's distracting.

So again, that's my next question to you. What do you think of Prezi?

So, first of all, Prezi does a very specific type of. It's not really animation. It's more like what you would call in PowerPoint would be a slide transition between the different things. A lot of people find it dizzying because it always kind of zooms out and zooms in. And actually the latest version of PowerPoint has something somewhat similar where you can have slides that pictures that show each section and then you can zoom into them and zoom out of them. But I find it a little difficult to work with just conceptually. And it is missing a lot of the features that PowerPoint has, such as complex hyperlinks or even animation on one slide.

You just bring up a fascinating side issue there. Hyperlinks. I certainly understand if you're emailing someone a slide deck and they're looking at it on their laptop, their computer, having hyperlinks would be great. If you're projecting it onto a 50 foot screen and you're in front of 400 people, there's zero use of a hyperlink at that moment because people can't jump out of their seat, run up 50ft and touch the screen. And that begs the question, should you have one slide deck for both purposes against an area where I've been wildly up, unsuccessful is getting my clients to buy into the idea that you should always have two completely separate PowerPoint presentations. One that you're projecting only when you're speaking in front of an audience and you're standing up and it's on a screen. A completely different one that you're emailing or giving as a handout or putting on a website. But I'm interested in where you fall in that divide.

Overall, I agree, although I think there are some simple ways to create the second one. But it depends how interactive you want to be. So, for example, let's say you're doing a sales presentation and you're speaking to five people, the sales manager and four salespeople. And you have prepared pretty much. And you're selling software prepared slides on pretty much everything, but you're not quite sure what's important to them. So at the beginning you can show them a slide and says, these are all the modules that this software has. What are your problems and what's most interesting to you? And what would you like me to cover first. And they can say, well, we would like to cover topic C. And you can just click on it right there and go straight to topic C. So by doing that, you create a menu. And it's also a nice way to create interactivity while you're speaking, asking the people in the audience what they want to hear and when they want to hear it. So not all presentations need to be linear. So that's one point. Now, to make your point, I'm just going to give a cautionary tale here. So there's a story about the Challenger, which was the rocket that blew up, unfortunately, and there was a slide that somebody presented, we don't really know who to people at NASA saying that the heat tiles had not been tested to the level, to the temperature that they were going to undergo actually out in space. And it was an awful slide, all text. And the main point was like the last line of the text. So it was really unclear, but we don't know what the person actually said. The person might have made it clear live, but that presentation was sent around to people who didn't attend the meeting. And as a result, there was no way that they were going to understand the point.

So.

So when you have any time that you're going to send around your slides, since you shouldn't put all of the text on the slide, that you need some way to give people what you're really saying. And there are several ways of doing it. A simple way to do that is to put the text of what you're going to say in the notes pane in PowerPoint and send people what's called the notes pages, so they get a PDF with a picture of the slide and then all of your notes. And that way they get the entire thing. If it's something mission critical like that was, I would recommend taping, doing an audio tape or a videotape of the whole presentation. And you could add audio files into each slide so that people get the the same type of experience and they hear what you said.

It's a great idea. I recommend it to my clients. I personally do it and I'll do the video as a rehearsal for the speech I'm going to give in real life. So there's no wasted time. The other value for that, if you're doing a live webinar or a live keynote speech through Skype, if you've done the whole thing in advance and sent it to the organizer, then you've made everybody's life so much easier. Because if all of a Sudden they lose Internet connectivity or your Skype goes down, the organizer can just throw up the video. And I tell you, they really appreciate that. And it takes all the pressure off you. You're still going to be able to communicate to that audience. But I guarantee you, one out of a thousand of my clients, at best, has done that. What's your success rate?

Yeah, so I agree that it's very hard to get people to do that. And people are busy and they're rushed and they find out they have to do a presentation 24 hours before they have to give it. And they don't think about the people who don't attend. And people who are their boss's boss ask them for, for the slides so they feel like they can't refuse. There are just so many reasons that impede good practice in any type of organizational structure. But at the very least, if you, like you said, you do a video because you're practicing anyway. And even if a person doesn't do a video practice, and I know you recommend that, and I agree with you very much on that, but even if a person does, doesn't do that, you should write your script, what you're going to say. And one of the things that I tell people all the time is usually you have a given amount of time to speak and you have absolutely no idea how long it's going to take unless you speak it out and time it. And so, yes, that practice should be there, but at the very least, you should take your script and put it in the notes pane so that you can quickly and easily hand out something to, to people that is complete. And then when they ask for the slides, you give them the notes pages.

Ellen, you're in Iowa, which sees a lot more than its fair share of speeches made by politicians. So I'd like to, for you to share any experiences there that you have. But you also grew up in New York City, which is, was and is the media capital of the world. You had a lot of colorful speakers when you were here, whether it was Bella Abzig or John Lindsay, you name it. So I'm interested in who were your speaking role models, whether they were politicians or media figures or talk show hosts growing up.

So I have to tell you, T.J. that I grew up without a television. My parents didn't want me to have a television. They wanted me to, to read. And I certainly, I guess they're happy.

You'Ve now written dozens of books.

I guess so. I guess so. And I certainly wasn't paying attention. So Much to speeches. But more recently, of course, I have, and I. There are certain people, politicians, who I found inspiring. Barack Obama, for example, is well known for the fact that he was. I mean, it was pretty amazing that when he was a junior senator, I think he had two years of experience, and he was able to go to the Democratic Convention and give a talk that was so inspiring to people that it launched his whole career. And so that's.

And he was a state senator, we should point out. I mean, he wasn't even in the US Senate when he made that keynote speech in 2004, and it did, in fact, skyrocket his career.

Right. And so I think the ability to be authentic and be inspiring and yet be honest at the same time is very, very. Can be very, very powerful. And so you need to think about what your goal is, what you. What people need, and how you can inspire people. And there's an arc when you do something that's meant to be inspiring. There's an arc that you create. You start with a problem, and then you talk about the solution, and then you might talk about the obstacles to getting the solution. And then how do we overcome those obstacles? And by the end, you should have people really inspired.

What does. I want to zoom in on one phrase. You just used one word, authenticity. You said speakers have to be authentic. You hear that all the time, but it really means different things to different people. Now, this show is not a political talk show, and we're not here to persuade or push politics on anyone. But in this year's presidential race, there are tens of millions of. Of Americans who think that Donald Trump speaks with an authentic voice. That's so refreshing, not politically correct, not the usual claptrap. And there are others, myself included, who think that he is the most inauthentic human being in the history of the world. So it does beg the question, what is authenticity?

Well, I think that Donald Trump has a career in show business. He has his business career, but also has his career in show business that taught him how to speak in a way that attracts people's attention, even though. And have people believe him, even though nonpartisan fact checkers say that he's not telling the truth. And, of course, that is disturbing, the fact that people will believe something that's not true and it's possible. And that's how it just shows how speaking can be so powerful, both for good and for bad. And we've seen that over the years. You know, there are lots of people that we, you know, you can talk about Hitler for example, for example, I'm not comparing Donald Trump to Hitler, but I'm just talking about people who used speaking to convince people of things that really weren't true, to frighten people, for example, that kind of thing. And then you can talk about people like Winston Churchill who also, in a sense, frighten people a little bit, but to do it for good. And so we do have to be careful as an audience, especially in political speech. You really have to step back and then think about what you heard and whether it makes sense.

The way I put it is speaking is a tool in the way a knife is a tool. A knife can help you cook a great dinner. It can also stab you to death. Death. It's not inherently good or bad. It really comes down to how you use it. Public speaking skills.

Celebrity is a really powerful tool for people and people sometimes get overshadowed by that or overly influenced by celebrity. And some people can wield that celebrity in one way or another. Yeah.

And I realize you probably still don't watch 12 hours of TV a day, even though you are an adult and can do what you want. But is there a particular celebrity you think really communicates with authenticity in a powerful way whom you respect? I mean, for many years people would say that about Oprah. It's harder to find her show now. But is there anyone else you really respect?

Right. I think I'm going to pass on that because first of all, I don't watch that much tv and a lot of the people that I do watch are comedians. And comedians can be very amazing. They can help you to, they can give you insights into things while you're laughing very hard. And so I really respect the comedians who do that. And there are a number of them.

Comedians I have tremendous respect for because in a sense, it's the hardest type of public speaking. The average business speaker, you go to a convention or board of directors meeting. As long as you don't bore people to death, everybody loves you. With stand up comedy, the, the audience's attitude is, Ellen better make me laugh every 10 seconds or I'm going to hate her and boo. That's pressure.

It's very difficult. It's very difficult. And there is pressure to be very coarse because that can make people laugh. So I really appreciate those comedians who try to prepare, provide some type of more meaningful insights.

And you look at the contemporary political scene in America today, it's often the comedians driving the show and able to get to, I think, more essential truth better than a lot of so called straight journalists. Many, many Commentators have noted that if you were just to watch Trevor Noah on the Daily Show, Bill Maher, Samantha Bee, you might have a much better insight into the candidates than if you watch CNN or MSNBC or certainly fox.

Jon Stewart was a good example of that when he was doing the Daily Show. Yeah, absolutely.

Tremendous passion, obviously very funny and really talked about importance stuff other than the two times I was on the show and they made fun of me, but they were nice to me and I. But that was a fascinating speaking experience. The Daily show came and I spent two days in my training facility interviewing me. This was back when they did long form interviews. Like they were surprising people and they made people look like idiots. This, it's now been like 10 years ago, but it was, it was a fascinating experience. And I mean they spent more money and effort on a three minute bit than a lot of movies. It was a big, big production. Wow. What other comedians do you, do you like not only their comedy but their political messages? It doesn't have to be that. But who else, who else do you find inspiring?

So you mentioned, who were the two you mentioned?

Well, Samantha Mead, by the way, I got to spend a day with her once. She had been hired to be a spokesperson for I don't know if it was Clorox or some company to clean the germs off your kitchen counter and floor. And she was hired to do a satellite interview saying, you know, the two second rule isn't real. If you drop your food on the floor, you really can't eat it. So I did a rehearsal with her in my studio and she was, as you can imagine, a delight and a joy to work with. Any other comedians you like who you think are really great communicators?

There's one whose name I can't think of. He, I think he used to be be on the Today show and he does what's it called, the Tonight Today or something like that.

Talking about Seth Meyers or Stephen Colbert?

No, he has a show on now and he does these long form.

John Oliver on hbo.

Yes, John Oliver.

He is fantastic.

I really like it because he's very funny. But he, he goes seriously into these issues and does a huge amount of research and really makes you think about things. And they're not overtly political, left or right necessarily, but they're very, very powerful. He did one on waste of Food that was very powerful, for example. So I like him a lot.

He goes really, really deep, quite often in esoteric yet highly important public policy issues. And I think it does show that it's not about being short. He can spend 20 minutes on one subject and you're never bored because he's consistently interesting. Too often I think people, they come to me, they come to you and they say teach me to be concise. I want to be concise. And they stand up and they give a two minute speech. I'm like, okay, that was of kind concise. But nobody, you didn't say anything interesting. Nobody's going to remember it. Focus first on can you actually be interesting and memorable? And John Oliver sure does that. Yep.

I agree.

Wildly entertaining. Well, Ellen, we appreciate your insights and your humor and your fun being with us today. Again, I would ask people to check out in the show notes your website, especially your high persuasion PowerPoint presentation program. Can you leave our listeners with just one final tip on how they can make their own next PowerPoint presentation more effective?

I guess I just want to go back onto the topic of thinking about what will be most valuable for your audience. And even if possible in some situations it is to ask them in advance. I recently had a speaker tell me that she had an experience where she went in to do some training and the bosses had come up with a list of things that they wanted her to teach. And she went into the classroom and they said if you're going to teach that, we're going to revolt.

That's a great way to start the.

Day to a training job. Yeah. But the point is that you really need to find out what is going to be helpful for people, useful for people. And if you want to change the world and you want to make the world a better place, however small or big you're thinking, you need to know where people are now and what will help people move forward. So just always start with the needs of the audience and then on top of that, think about your goal and then make sure everything you do is in aligned is in alignment with that.

Alan Finkelstein, thank you for being our guest today on Speaking with TJ Walker.

Thanks for listening to Speaking with TJ Walker.