[Music] all right it's one question friday where we answer one question from one of the listeners if you want to submit your question go to mfmpod is it dot com and click the little microphone to submit your question this one came in through text message somebody said hey uh hey dude i'm giving a my first
talk at a conference i got invited to speak at this conference i'm giving my first talk uh i'm excited about it but a little bit nervous like he's like i know it's gonna be fine but i just don't want it to be lame he's like you and sam are really good at doing these kind of public speaking things you know what's the trick you know what do i do
to make this good uh what do i do to make this not just the same old same old so i thought we would give maybe our take on what we do to make public speaking fun slash interesting um what do you got well i would say first public speaking is a skill so a lot of people think well i speak all the time and i speak in
public therefore i'm probably going to be decent at public speaking it doesn't really work that way so public speaking some people are talented and they are just better gary vaynerchuk's like that i think he's just better than everyone else but for most people it's a skill so i highly recommend like reading a book on it or like googling like how to be
better at this it's a skill set and so there are tricks i don't think that this is like the best time for us just to say like what all the tactics are but a few of them are just like on storytelling and it's very similar to stand-up comedy which again some people are just born better but a lot of people you just have
to learn and try and so buy a book on it and i think that's actually the easiest first step is there a book you'd recommend on it or just not the top of your head yeah i think what's the one that you and i were reading on storytelling uh by the guy who like won all the muse to come story worthy i think yeah i think soy
worthy was awesome that i had a bunch of takeaways from that and then speak like a ted talk or something like that it's called like the ted talker ted talk speakers guide or something like that that's quite good but the story worthy i actually thought was pretty phenomenal so i'm gonna tell you what i told him i said um
uh and by the way he had also said he's like i wanna bring that showmanship that you guys talked about so they think he's picking up on on what we talked about so i said all right three things i said number one um be in peak state it's very easy when you're nervous to go kind of like inward you're kind of low energy your mouth's a
little dry your shoulders hunched over um like fundamentally as soon as you walk out there people are gonna read your body language they're gonna read your energy and they'll start to respond to it when somebody comes out and they're electric you can feel that they're excited that they got a like a
bounce in their step you're paying attention because you want to know what they're all about i said so just make sure before you go out there do some push-ups go run a wind sprint do some jumping jacks do whatever you got to do physically to literally just get blood flowing and be in a like more uh like high performance state i said
think about it athlete doesn't go on the field until they are warmed up until they're ready a singer or a dancer a performer they're not going to go on the stage until they're warmed up and they're feeling loose and warm it's the same thing if you're going to go talk you want to feel loose and warm both in your voice but also your body so
that's the first thing just do the physical get the physical part right the second is remember this is this is the first of many you'll do this 500 more times so this might feel like a big deal now but a year from now this will be an afterthought you'll just you won't even really remember how it went um just treat it as a practice
rep one of 500 times you're going to do this it's a chance to experiment with some things that'll depressurize this moment for you and it'll teach you to remember that like this is just like you said it's a skill you got to get good at it to get good at any skill you need practice reps i said the last one i said storytelling i said
have a back pocket story right so what's a backpacker story it's like you started the podcast uh that we just recorded with the um dude i gotta tell you this funny story on you know there's something that happened to me today before we do this i was walking through the park and these nannies were getting attacked with this
guy and i'm they're in my fanny pack and me and the fanny and the nannies we all fought these guys off basically it's like this funny story and it doesn't need to be a hilarious extreme story like that it could be anything it could be like let's say you're at a conference um you might be like
you know before we start i just talked to this guy in the back and he asked me a really interesting question i want to ask you guys this too because i honestly i think we might be really split on how we answer this question already you really want to know what it is and i've taken control of the scenario and i've made it already an
interesting talk before we jump in and say hi my name is this i'm from this and today i'm here to talk to you about blah blah blah so have a have a story in your back pocket it could be fun interesting controversial whatever something that's going to kind of get them and the trick is i said just you need to be excited by it if you're
excited by it they'll be excited by it remember the um the lesson that what's her name miss excel that like woman who's she basically teaches you how to use use excel better but somehow that's like going viral on tick tock and why is something as boring as excel tricks going viral on tick tock one of the reasons is
she like comes out with this crazy energy she seems really excited by this stuff and it's just enjoyable to watch her do it even if you're not even going to use excel that day it's just enjoyable to watch somebody do that and she says this in her interview she goes content is the transfer of emotion i got to get myself into the emotion of
being excited about something if i ever want you to be excited by it i have to get myself to be fascinated by something if i want you to be fascinated by it and she's like i just get myself into that state then i run to the phone click record and i start to start to do my thing and it's like that's actually what
it is content is the transference of emotion and so what most people try to do is they think about what they're gonna say which is intellectual that shit's words people don't remember the words that you said um they will remember if you had some emotion some energy behind you and they'll remember the vibe they remember
how you made them feel and they'll take away just a few nuggets out of what you said most of what you said 90 of what you say will go in one ear and out the other our software is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crms are a cobble together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous i
think i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better and that's a thing i was i tell people all the time i told you this when you early on when i was maybe six months ahead of you in terms of content you're like i want how do i write these articles and i was like it's not really
about what you want to teach it's about what you want to make someone feel and oftentimes when people give presentations they think well i'm talking about this like i'm talking about like mosquitoes and how they like cause malaria in africa and this is like a really serious thing it's like yeah it could be serious but you need to weave
in some stories and you need to do some crazy and it's no different than a comedy show or a play where you capture attention yes you're doing it about something important and isn't just entertainment but you have to leave that in there one of my favorite tricks i've saw is when they brought up malaria is when
steve uh bill gates or someone let uh talked about uh malaria and mosquitoes and he goes i want to show you why this is an important deal and he opens up this jar and mosquitoes fly out all over the place he goes i'm going to tell you about how many people die from malaria which comes from mosquitoes just like this and like so people like are like
you know that's showmanship and so it's the same way with any talk you're doing you don't have to do something that extreme but it starts with the story it starts with an emotion and then i would say the last thing is you have to treat people your audience regardless if they're smart you kind of got to treat
them dumb meaning a lot of people what they do is they put way too much emphasis on the slides and in my opinion most talks should be able to be like at least a b level without any slide the slide maybe makes it go from a nine to a ten but the slides to me um it's kind of like when you are in when you're in a band
it's about how do i make this song great it's not how do i make this one little guitar solo awesome it's like no dude the guitar solo exists to make the song great the song doesn't exist to make that solo awesome it's the other way around and so it's about my my it's about my performance and it just so happens that this powerpoint is just one
piece of that and i need to treat people stupid and assume that they're not going to read the small text and it's up to me to use my words my body language in order to make them feel something and the the the slides are just an extra added effect that's right uh all right i think that's great there's a ton more i feel like we
could probably like there's probably 10 more things but really the reality is you don't need to know all the things if you just do the things we talked about right which is basically you know show up with energy have some showmanship through either a little magic trick or a story or something like that and treat it like
practice because you're you're going to need to do this 100 times before you're you're any good at it if you just internalize those three you're going to be you know ahead of head of the curve you'll be ahead of you know 80 90 of people practice not the game we're talking about practice yeah we're talking about practice [Music] you