Transform Your Presentation Skills

I'm really happy to present our speakers we have Anne Ricketts and Hillary spriter who are going to teach you about transforming your presentation skills thanks very much hi everyone Hey so as a presentation skills coach I'm always on the lookout for examples of great presenters and recently I was online I was looking for some videos and I stumble across a video from the 1980s and this video appeared to be of a woman in her 80s giving a presentation and as I watched her I was blown away first of all her delivery was so confident there was about a hundred people in the room and she was owning it it even looked like she was having fun in addition she

had this great connection this great rapport with the audience even though she was doing the majority of the speaking it felt like a conversation she was telling jokes getting interaction and then finally her content was so simple and clear she was giving a technical presentation to a non-technical audience and to make this idea understandable she had this prop this piece of wire she's holding in her hand and this analogy that she was using it was super easy and engaging do any of you know who this is she knows the Grace Hopper Grace Hopper and what do you know about her you can yell it out what are some things you know about her what's that Cobalts okay bugs yeah she

was a she was a lieutenant crown yeah she was a very impressive lady and a pioneer in computer science and I knew some of those things but until I saw this video I had no idea that in addition she was this fabulous presenter and watching grace got me thinking about what she was doing in the 80s compared to what we often do today in presentations today this scenario is not super uncommon for internal presentations I'm sure you all see presentations all the time what do you notice about presentations today that is not engaging powerpoints okay laptops yeah so if the audience is on your laptop when you're presenting that's difficult we've got PowerPoint maybe a lot of text

the PowerPoint and as the results you have this loss of connection with with the audience and we can recognize when other people are doing that that it's not great but when it's our turn we do the same thing because we think well that's how everyone's doing it well not anymore in the next 50 minutes we really want to go back and master the essentials of a previous time and the way that we're gonna do that is we've got three topics we call these the three C's of effective presentations first we're going to talk about confidence how to look and feel more confident how many of you could benefit from feeling more confident when speaking in front of a

group okay I see a lot of hands yeah then we'll talk about various techniques to build connection and then finally we'll talk about a few ways that you can make sure that your message you have clarity that it's clear and simple and our goal is that if you're presenting later today or tomorrow at the conference you've got something coming up this week you can immediately use these techniques to be a more effective presenter before we go further my name is Anne Ricketts and I'm the owner of lighthouse communications and we do workshops and one-on-one coaching around the Bay Area on different communication topics I'm Hillary spriter I'm also a communication coach I work mostly with technical

professionals around the bay area who are working on developing their presentation skills I'm also a communication coach at the business school at Stanford University I get to work with a set of the students there to help with their speaking and writing great let's talk about confidence first and as we talk about confidence there's two pieces that we're gonna discuss there's the external how you show up and there's the internal how you feel both are really important I want to start with external I'm gonna show you a clip in a moment of somebody who my team worked with and I want you to see how the smallest weeks the smallest changes in delivery can make a really big game

impact and how confident when you come across this speaker is named Lucas and he's a technical director at the company Unity Technologies so let's take a look in the first clip is before any coaching

do we have audio one second we'll get audio in this clip I should speak up oh he should speak up yep voice is too low there's one second here we'll go back

and I should mention so Lucas is a non-native English speaker and didn't want to do these keynotes but everyone at the company thought he was pretty good so now all of us in every quarter he's having to speak in front of this live streamed audience hundreds of people in the room quite a big deal we're good okay let's try it again here we go Lucas before coaching I think it should have sound I could stick with us for these demos because we have a lot of demos to run through so the next version of unity that we're going to ship is five five we've been cooking on it for quite some time already and as usual you

can get the latest beta version from our website today all right now let's look at after coaching not that long by the way about an hour [Music] everybody let's have some fun I'm gonna show you see today I'm gonna show you how a scene was made and when I first saw this scene I didn't really believe it was put together in a few days let's take a look I have it open here on my in my unity editor in Maschine view and the first thing that you will see is that I have a whole okay what differences you can yell it out what differences do you notice hopefully you got to see clip 1 versus clip 2 the stands confident and

tell me more how does he look more confident happy to be there yeah he's his posture is better and he's not in the first clip he's just pacing around aimlessly in the second clip we put a little piece of tape on the stage to try to get him to ground and it took him a minute to get there but then he settled in any other differences you notice storytelling yeah he's making eye contact instead of looking aimlessly around he just looked at a few people in the audience so that wasn't that much by the way everyone thinks he got a makeover we did not do that but just a little bit made a big difference let's

go over some of the fundamentals of delivery that we teach people like Lucas I'm gonna ask you all to stand up we're gonna do this together stand up

if we want to look confident we actually have to do that physically so we need to ground our feet and that means feet hip distance apart and weight even on both feet we call this the ready position because it's signalling that we're ready to engage with our audience as much as possible try not to shift your weight from leg to leg but just try that shift from leg to leg now this might feel good for you but for the audience this will look a little what what does this look like when I'm here yeah and maybe annoyed wishy-washy ungrounded yeah off balance so just learn to stand even now another thing often people will do to

self-soothe is will sway back and forth just try swing feels pretty good right you might not even know you're doing it for the audience I can actually make you feel seasick after a couple of minutes of this so again try not to sway and then the third thing we see a lot of is that people will get very restless and that extra energy will leak out and they'll begin to dance so unless dance me as part of your presentation stand still so it is okay to move across your speaking space as long as you do so for a reason with a purpose and you can just connect to someone on the other side let your eye contact guide your movement

walk over to them and then stop and ground again and repeat that so from the hips down very still hands what do we want to be doing with our hands yes gesturing so when we're with our friends and family and we feel relaxed our hands are just moving I don't have to teach any of you how to gesture because you do it all day long but when we're self conscious and we get nervous we tend to do strange things with our hands we might hide them behind our back we shove them in pockets or we cross our arms across our our fronts and this does not look confident it doesn't look engaging so the key is as soon as we

begin to speak move your hands and a nice thing you can do just do it with me connect out to your audience as you begin to say your first words a connecting movement once you're warmed up and your gestures are going you can begin to use them as visual aids so you could say it's a massive opportunity let's do this make sure your gesture is matching the words it's a massive opportunity yeah go even bigger if I say it's a massive opportunity you won't believe me because this doesn't look massive so go massive its massive and then it's tiny tiny widget yes or maybe if I call it climbing the tallest mountain I'll do it

really high would you believe me if I said I climbed the tallest mountain today No so you gotta make the gesture match the word and if you're doing comparisons you can say consider a and then B do that it was before and now we have the after so keep the hands moving next we have eye contact how long do you think is a perfect amount of time to make eye contact with someone one second would look like this how does this look I'm talking to you here and this is about a second of eye contact how do I look yeah nervous and scared so we need to slow things down when I'm scanning over the audience like this I'm actually

boosting my own anxiety because I'm sending a signal to my brain that there's something scary out there so we need to slow it down three to five seconds they say is the ideal amount of time to have someone really feel that you've connected with them the advantage of slowing our eye contact down not only does our audience feel that the speaker actually really connected with us but it sends a signal to our brain that it's okay to relax and so they're a double bonus so if our feet very still our hands are moving we're making meaningful connection to our audience and then the fourth thing we consider is our volume and when we coach we use a scale of 1 to

5 one would be a inaudible whisper you couldn't hear me 2 would be always like this the person next to me could hear me but it doesn't work for public speaking because there's no breath to project my voice then there's volume 3 which is conversational volume many of us get stuck in this volume but it's not quite enough it's only good enough to get to the people immediately close to us but not beyond so when we're public speaking we need to boost up the volume to what we call volume four I take deep breaths so I can project my voice the person furthest away can hear me easily so there's no effort from the audience

this part you can just enjoy the volume and then volume five would be shouting no one likes me shouted out so do not shout at your audience but we're gonna go for volume four in our presentation so now we're gonna put this all to practice all together so feet hip distance apart weight even on both feet we're gonna do a few gestures we're gonna do a big gesture and we're gonna say the fun phrase mama lo pop low at volume four let's try it all together mam low pop low mama low and then take it to your heart Momo Pablo Pablo Pablo and then maybe emphasize mama lo Popolo mama lo Pablo yes fantastic so you can take your seats

thank you those are some technique we use thank you to look and sound more confident but then and I neither encourage you it who's presenting later on today anyone anyone still to present not too many okay in your next presentations think of these techniques to look and sound more confident now we want to think about the internal confidence hands up again any of you get nervous when you present either before or jeering yes everybody it's totally normal so there are lots of techniques that we teach to help people manage their anxiety but for today I'm just going to choose three of my favorites the first is tell yourself I got this you are all highly accomplished people

many of you have moved from other countries you've learned other languages you are all experts on information security so these are things that are much more complicated than presenting so do not stress about all the things that could possibly go wrong when you present instead remind yourself of all your amazing past accomplishments and tell yourself I got this let's do it all together I've got this I got one more time I got this it really works second thing is to breathe now when we're nervous most of us get stuck in a short shallow fast chest breath and that elevates our own anxiety and makes our voice sound a little thin and bruffey so when you

present learn to take long slow deep breaths they automatically calm down the nervous system and the added benefit is that we can support and maintain our volume for so we're gonna do this together by putting our hands on our stomachs we're gonna take three rounds of in-and-out and as you inhale you should feel your stomach expand with that full breath so let's do it inhale and then exhale twice more big long inhale exhale and once more inhale and exhale whoo yeah I just wanted to add this seems like something that's obvious breathe but as Hilary said we noticed when our clients are nur our selves when we're nervous we forget to breathe so one of the things

that we like to teach in our workshops is that critical moment right before you start and you launch into your presentation take a moment breathe take a look at everybody and then start if you have that moment of breath right before you launch in it's really gonna help you the third thing is focus on the friendly faces the folks who are leaning in to listen to your presentation who are smiling and and obviously engage with their with your content how many of you though would focus on will call him mr. grumpy in the front row any hands up any of you get distracted by people who look like this in your audiences yes I see quite a few hands up so those of you

who have your hands up what might be some of the things you're telling yourself as you're looking at this fellow in the front row what do I do this dog you what else yes he looks annoyed you might be saying oh my gosh she's judging me you think I mean terrible presenter he's gonna rip me apart in QA but we don't know this poor fellow might have indigestion he might be thinking about some argument he just had or this might just be his relaxed expression so do not take your time up worrying and making up stories that might not be true instead focus on the folks who are obviously engaging with your content so those are our three

very effective tips tell yourself I got this practice on your long slow deep breath and focus on the friendly faces great so we talked about some ways that you can look and feel more confident and our second topic is how to build connection and Hilary mentioned one of the techniques that's very effective which is that sustained eye contact three to five seconds makes it feel like you're having a conversation and I want to focus on a few other techniques you can use to build connection to demonstrate this I want to show you a clip of a speaker who's not particularly connecting with his audience and then a speaker who is and afterwards we'll talk about the differences that we see this

first clip is Elon Musk he's speaking at a conference in 2016 and I show this not to make fun that the things that we're seeing him do is something that's very very common so let's take a look

all right to help welcome everyone and I'm gonna talk more about about what it takes to become multiplier of species and I just a just a brief refresher on why this is important I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we're a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species than if we're not it you want to be inspired by things you want to wake up in the morning you think the future is gonna be great and that's what what bring his face by exhalation is all about it's about believing in the future and thinking that the future would better than the past and I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being

among the stars that's why all right do you feel connected okay why not okay okay so it kind of choppy a little bit all the way back there you want to yell out

yeah he's and he's talking about space right this is really exciting even says I can't think of anything more exciting than being amongst the Stars but he's saying it very flatly and he's also not getting off to a very good start in terms of his content he's got lovely we call lovely bunch of words doesn't really mean anything like hey happy to be here good but not not anything of meaning now let's contrast that with the speaker his name is Louie von Ahn he's the technical presenter and let's take a look at some techniques that he's using to connect in his introduction how many of you have to fill out some sort of web form where you've been asked

to read a distorted sequence of characters like this how many of you found it really really annoying ok outstanding so I invented that or I was one of the people who did it that thing is called a CAPTCHA and the reason is there's to make sure that you the entity filling out the form are actually a human and not some sort of computer program that was written to submit the form millions and millions of times the reason it works is because humans at least nonvisually impaired humans have no trouble reading these distorted squiggly characters whereas computer programs simply can't do it as well yet so for example in the case of Ticketmaster the reason you have to type

these distorted characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that can buy millions of tickets two at a time now CAPTCHAs are used all over the internet and since they're used so often a lot of times the precise sequence of random characters that are shown to the user is not so fortunate so this is an example from the Yahoo registration page random characters that happen to be shown to the user where W AIT which of course spell a word but the best part is the message that the Yahoo help desk got about twenty minutes later

this person thought they needed way this of course is not a bad as this poor person who okay now all right how is he connecting what's he doing he's saying you okay so he's making an audience focused humor shared experiences self-aware II I made a beta he's he knows that what he his invention is annoying to some people he's got some humor lots of things that he's doing to connect he also seems happy to be there he's got some passion and enthusiasm if we were coaching him what would we tell him to do hilary slow down louie just slow down a little bit but so many things that he's doing to build connection and I want to highlight two

too that you can use the first one is dive right in with a story instead of starting off with your name and your agenda and you're happy to be here cut all that and dive right in with a story that's related to your topic if you do that not only will you feel more confident because your content is interesting and you'll notice the audience is giving you more engagement more eye contact but your audience is really going to understand why they should listen to you they're understanding why this topic is important what your connection is with the topic so it's a really great way to start for example do you remember how Hillary and I started today we dove

right in with the story to remember what the story's about Grace Hopper yeah so that was our that was our method to do this the other way that you can build connection is to use what's called vocal variety vocal variety is when you've got some feeling in your voice some pausing some punch and words rather than that dreaded monotone delivery and vocal variety creates connection because one of all first of all it creates it helps the audience understand the emotion that you're feeling and emotions are contagious if you're excited we're excited if you have a sense of urgency about something we have a sense of urgency and second it clues it just is more exciting to listen to so I want to

show you we took a quote for my beloved Grace Hopper and we marked it up so that you could visualize vocal variety we put words in blue that we would put a little emphasis on we put words in blue and capped words that we would really emphasize we put a slash mark for a pause and a double slash mark for a big pause so Hillary's going to read this to you first without vocal variety and then with so that you can hear the difference so with no variety it would sound and no pausing a ship in port is safe but this is not what ships are built for sail out to sea and do new things when I begin to pause

and emphasize pop the key words it sounds like this a ship in port is safe but this is not what ships are built for sail out to sea and do new things much better the second right yeah a lot of times we have these key messages and our presentations because but because we're delivering it like Hillary did in the first round your audience doesn't really get it we want you to practice this so with the person next you want were you to read it with vocal variety mm-hmm and then get some feedback is there anything you could do to add a little bit more emphasis more feeling and then do it again so you each do it two times will

give you about four minutes to do this go ahead sorry

together how was that doing vocal variety good great this is a you can visualize if you have a script or maybe you've got a couple key points that you want to emphasize in a presentation I like to mark it up this way this really helps me as I rehearse now let's get you to practice with a topic that you're excited about and we thought that some of you might be presenting at the conference later today or tomorrow but it doesn't sound like many of you are but maybe you could think about security or your work what you do your your team at your company what are you passionate about so what you're gonna do is with a new partner

you're gonna share your excitement for that topic in a few sentences for example let's say Hillary is my partner I could say something like I'm excited to present at B sides because when people present they get really nervous so if I can give them one or two tips to make them feel better that's really satisfying then she's gonna tell me on a scale of one to ten how convinced she is well it's pretty good so I'm gonna give you an eight point five okay it's probably more like a seven if she's being honest and I'll do it again and then switch see really each go two times and then switch so we'll give you five

minutes to do this please partner

four more minutes

and let's come back was it easier to do vocal variety when you're talking about your own work versus a quote yeah I'd like to get a volunteer to come up on stage and do it if we have a do have a handheld mic we could use and do talk about their work with some vocal variety does anybody want to come up okay yeah coming up what's your name Adrian

all right let's hear why are you excited about your topic what's that I will share with it what you practice with your partner using some vocal variety yeah so why do you like what you do I like what I do because I am a citizen engineer I like what I do because I get to talk to people every day as well as being technical at the same time so you get to have the best boat the best of both worlds where I can you know be social as well as soft technical problems nice job woohoo and I saw you to use some of Hillary's techniques like I get to do this and this nice job

how about one more volunteer anybody want to come up I'm gonna come up come on come on what's your name Luciano I could tell from Luciano's body language that he was like indirect great lesson thank you hey how's it going everyone this is my first time presenting at besides besides a few times I've been at that card great conferences great conferences for my son he's uh he's now his first year in college and I figured you know what this is the best time to actually get into you get him to come in and participate as well cuz he's gonna get to the point where he's gonna have to choose a career right this is probably

the best time to actually get into InfoSec because you have a lot of new people a lot of diversity and I wanted to introduce him not only that but what he really wants to specialize in is the legal aspect of site cyber security policy in law so I brought him here so I can introduce him to the FF there's anybody out there from the FF please come down here talk to me [Applause] that was great he had some emphasis and words he was gesturing I got the emotion that you're happy to have your son here nice job nice job okay so to summarize the connection piece there's lots of ways to connect but two very effective

ways are to use some vocal variety and to dive into your presentation with a relevant story we've talked about how to look sound and feel more confident and then Ann was telling us about the importance of connecting we're gonna move on to our last topic which is clarity how to make your content clear and concise so it's easy for your audience to understand as communication coaches and and I hear a lot about three common pitfalls when it comes to people's content in presentations and meetings the first one that we hear a lot of is that there's no clear point so by the end of someone's presentation we understand the topic we have some new information but we're not sure of the

main take away the second pitfall is that there is too much information presented so the audience ends up feeling overwhelmed and they go home not actually remembering that much of what they heard and then the third pitfall we hear of a lot is that the information wasn't relevant or if it was relevant to the audience the presenter didn't actually connect the dots so people go home and they don't really know what to do with all the information that they just took on so we've come up with a tool called the focus questions you should have a piece of paper in front of you if you don't have one we'll e-mail you one afterwards but it's a tool that

we give our clients our clients love this they answer these focus questions before they begin to create any content if you use these focus questions you'll be amazed at how much more clear and concise your content is you will come across as a more articulate speaker and it will save you a ton of time and energy so I highly recommend them for times sake right now I'm just gonna highlight four of the points on here and the first one is number three the relevance how is your information going to Benna fit your audience and remember that people are most interested in the things that matter to them so the first thing you have to do is make sure you've

considered your audience's needs and interests and make sure your content actually is relevant to them and then the second thing is to explicitly state how your audio your information is relevant to the audience don't assume that the audience understands it implicitly connect the dots for them so make the relevance and explicit statement in your introduction let's move down to number seven emotions how are you going to get your audience to feel something and what do you want them to feel do you want them to feel excited or inspired or scared and was talking about the variety in the vocal quality that's important to keep the audience engaged and if you think of the presentations you listen to that are the

most engaging you'll probably realize that it's the presentation that makes you feel a variety of emotions so the stand-up comedians have a fun demonic it's called make them laugh make them cry make them laugh say goodbye puts the audience to this nice rollercoaster a variety of emotions now as presenters we don't necessarily have to make our audiences laugh but we do want our audiences to feel contrast in the emotions as we present if you do this if you get your audience actually feeling something viscerally they will remember you and your content much more so make them feel something if I can add here and work presentations it's so come that contrast is usually the pain of a

problem contrasted with the excitement the relief of a solution yeah number eight what is your insight your fresh perspective on your topic we're often asked well what do we do when we have an audience who are already expert in what I'm presenting on how do I keep them engaged come up with a new metaphor or analogy to put a fresh feel into the topic tell a personal anecdote to put your own personal touch on to the topic but come up with something new a new fresh perspective it can take a lot of time to come up with these insights but the payoff was really big if you do and then the final one number nine is what is your

main message if you want your audience to understand your main message you have to know it first I like to write it down make sure your main message is concise most of us have a hard time being concise it's much easier to be long-winded but again if you take the time to write down a clear concise main message include it in your content your presentation is gonna land much more powerfully and again it's gonna be more memorable so use these focus questions they're really helpful save you a ton of time and energy and we're gonna get a copy yeah I'll email them out and it's a fillable PDF so you can use in the future just just fill it out yeah so as

well as our content being clear and concise and relevant we also want to consider how our slides are communicating for us many of us put on way too much information on our slides and they actually end up overwhelming and confusing our audiences more than they help them understand our content the thing to remember is that every single little thing you put on a slide is demanding part of your audience's attention so anything that is not actually communicating meaning remove it that includes extraneous information like diagrams you don't reference words that are too small you can't read decorative backgrounds take all of that what we call noise off the slide so that you have a really clear signal coming

through we have an example of a noisy slide here it is noisy slide I like you to turn to your neighbor take a minute and just brainstorm how would you make this slide less noisy so there's a clear message coming through take a minute and I'll wave my hands when I want you back

come back I'd love to hear some of your thoughts what do you think why they're all the words yes so first thing to do would be to critically think of your content you can see these messages are slightly different it's ambiguous so now I'm confusing you with two messages so instead think critically what is the main message and write it on your slide what other thing would you do yes hmm how might you convey a percentage more effective yeah yeah yeah so maybe a whole different visual would set this up more effectively other things other suggestions you came up with

yeah there's extra information yes and also consider your audience's needs you do the audience is the audience really gonna remember all eight data points and if they're not gonna remember them why are you showing it so maybe make it less information yeah there is another hand up over here yes yeah the background sucks get rid of all those decorative gray squares that's just clutter and noise yes way up in the back yeah yes it's confusing you and how easy is it for you to track your eye from the top of one of the columns and try to find where it lands on the y-axis that's not easy so we can see there are things to be done here's a possible

revision there's certainly more to be done but here we put one clear message on top we've got rid of the decorative background we put the numbers directly on the columns we've got rid of the XY access next step might be well how many data points do we really need or it might be maybe a whole different visual maybe a pie chart would be a better way to do it but think three years examine whatever is not meaningful take it off so that the audience isn't overwhelmed or confused with having to search through all the noise to get to the actual meaning so clear concise relevant content through your focus questions and clean up your slides

thanks Hilary so today we talked about a lot of things in 50 minutes we talked about how to look and feel more confident we talked about ways you can build connection and then finally using the focus questions and cleaning up cleaning up your slides in order to provide clarity this can feel like a lot to think about especially when you're nervous and you're presenting so our suggestion is to think about one or two things to start just one or two things for example maybe you're going to be loud be at that volume for slow down or clean up your slides just a few things and then once you master those things then you can add on more later if you're

interested in more information workshops or one-on-one coaching you can contact us here and we have some time now for Q&A so if you have any questions in the moment we're happy to take it now yeah oh do we just want to yell out the questions okay it's a really loud voice

I'm gonna take this me yeah I can answer that first question for what size of font what we suggest for your main message the most important takeaway a 28 bolded thawne serif font so a font that does not have little tails on it so it's clear a 'calibri calibri Arial are great fonts to work with so 28 bolded to make it pop and if it's not the main message you can go down to 21 to 24 size font when it gets down to 18 and lower it's really hard to read and then you question whether it's helping the audience in any way I've also heard no more than 20 words for the man who does

that right yeah the research shows that people do not read beyond the second line of text so if you're someone who uses a lot of bullet point slides and lots of text there's a cognitive overload you'll set up with the audience they can't listen and read your slides so move away from really text heavy slides try to make them more visual next question

that's so remote presentations are really hard for the remote presentations I would really focus on the eye contact so creating that connection I like to put a little sticky at the top of my computer to remind myself rather than looking at my own picture reminding myself to look up at the camera that's helpful also pausing going slower creating moments for interaction so it's not just one way and they're more likely to engage and not be focused on their work and then and then in person always one way to engage is to stand a lot of people are in the habit of sitting down but you're gonna have more engagement if you're standing and you when you're

presenting so in a previous career I was a english-as-a-second-language teacher and the big thing is volume volume volume so that volume for and remember when we had the Grace Hopper quote and we visualized the keywords if you've got a loud volume and you're popping important words that's the big thing it doesn't matter if you have an accent but people just need to be able to hear you and rehearsal is always helpful as well I think we have time for one or two more questions we would suggest you might try to play with using formulas structures to help you organize how you're actually going to deliver so there are lots of different structures but one you might

use is oh you have you ever been to an interview or an interview and the interviewer says tell me about you and your mind goes blank using a structure could be something like past present future so you could say well five years ago I was with company X focused on this kind of work today I am delving into this project here with company Z looking to two years from now I hope to be doing this so a structure just helps you organize what you're gonna say and it gives you a little bit more brain energy left over for the actual details other structure are things like problem-solution benefit what the what of the issue the so what

why does my audience care about this and then now what what's my plan of action so if you use structures your impromptu speaking you suddenly become a lot more eloquent and articulate then you might have been previously if you just go for a stream of consciousness which will easily lose your audience we've got some videos on those on youtube if you look for lighthouse communications another thing is just to focus on your nonverbals the volume slowing down making eye contact because even if your contents not that good if you look confident that's helpful okay one more question yeah so the question was what do you do if like a key player a decision-maker seems to be skeptical or

is asking questions is that right mmm that's so difficult yeah I would first of all take a breath and realize that it's not about you it's about so I would instead of getting defensive and shutting down I would take it breath and tell me more David can you give me more information can you give me an example let him talk a little bit and then once you breathe and calm down you'll be able to think more clearly on the fly so just breathe trust that you know what you're doing and you got this I could suggest on that too people might argue the facts with you but they can't argue with your experience so a comeback might be you

know thank you very much for your comment in my experience when you have factors x and y the outcome has been a and B but I'd love to hear more from you let's talk afterwards and then director I contacted someone else move away from this person and they always see a hand over here said take away that energy a little bit thank you so much have a great conference we're gonna stick around in the hallway if you have any questions feel free time [Applause]