Bart shares some of the tools that he feels is essential for you to have in your toolbox before your next talk, presentation or product demo. They are not optional. Failure is not an option for you in your professional life and in your personal life for whatever you’re sharing from your heart.
Show Notes:
Welcome to the remarkability Institute. This is Bart Queen, your host today. Now, if you’ve been following at all over the line, the last couple of sessions, I’ve been focused on this idea of content structure. And today, I want to take it one more level into actually what I’m going to call building the conversation.
[00:01:59] Most people, when they start to dive into this, always, you use the term bar to have to go present, and I have to give a public speech. I have to public speak. I am not fond of either one of those words. If I could write the script, we would take the word presenting and public speaking out of the vocabulary.
[00:02:21] I think all that does is put fear in people’s hearts. If you look at it, the number one fear in America is public speaking. The fifth fear in America. Is death. Now, if you follow Seinfeld and remember one of his famous quotes, he said most people would prefer to be in the casket than giving the eulogy.
[00:02:44] Why do we want to put fear in people’s hearts? Because they feel like they have to stand in front of a group of people and share their message. I might toss to you whether you’re standing or you are seated. It is a conversation. But here’s how people’s minds think. If I invited you to go to Starbucks and have a cup of coffee with me, we sat at a table, sat in a cushy chair, and we had a conversation, get to know each other.
[00:03:12] We would not take one moment to think about how we’re seated in that chair. We would just get comfortable. We would not take one moment to think about what you are doing with your hands? slightly, you got a cup of coffee or whatever you’re drinking in one hand, and maybe you’re gesturing for the other.
[00:03:26] And you’re not even going to think twice about it. And most likely, we would look at each other as we have this conversation. What I find interesting is as soon as I say, now, John, can you get up in front and share with us what your division is doing? All of a sudden, John goes from the seated position of having a conversation to a standing position of presenting.
[00:03:51] I’m going to challenge you. There should be no difference when you’re standing than when you’re seated. You just happened to be standing. I don’t care whether it’s five people, 50 people, or 500 people when you’re standing with a coworker after work in your car. And you’re talking about the day and bantering about the weekend.
[00:04:10] Do you feel like you’re presenting when you’re at home in the kitchen with your spouse or significant other, your family, whoever you spend time with, do you feel like you’re presenting? No. Do you feel like you have your conversation? But because we get into this mindset of presenting in my mind, you let go of all the natural things that you do so nicely.
[00:04:36] One of the most important things we can do when we communicate, whether you’re standing or seated, is be conversational and be authentic, be who you are naturally. But here’s what happens when you put yourself in presenting mode, you put yourself in performance mode, and when you put yourself in performance mode, you put yourself in perfection mode.
[00:05:02] And when you put yourself in perfection mode, you feel like it has to be done a certain way, and then you fall apart. But when you just have a conversation, With whoever you’re discussing something with, you don’t think of any of those other things. You don’t put yourself on a performance treadmill. If there’s one thing I wish I could get all of us to do, if there were one place that I’d be committed to helping anyone with, it’s getting off that performance treadmill and letting you share your heart.
[00:05:34] I truly believe that you should let your life speak. And when you let your life speak, you’re letting your words speak and your body language, speech in congruency. And when those two things happen, you get power. I remember reading a book called to let your life speak by Parker. And he said, when your true self and your true service come together, that’s when you find your vocation.
[00:06:03] That’s when you find your groove, that’s when you find your gift that you’re going to share with the world, but you can’t share your gift with the world, whether that’s on a personal basis or professional basis if you’re in prison station mode, you could only do that when you’re in conversation mode. So I’m going to share some things with you today.
[00:06:23] They will help you stay in this idea of having a conversation and not presenting. And this still is an all-around structure. It’s still all around your ability to communicate whatever you want to communicate. I would believe that your structure is foundational to what you’re going to communicate. It is a cornerstone.
[00:06:44] You build everything from that structure, whether it’s a complex structure or a simple structure. But there are some challenges with a structure that I constantly hear. Number one, if there is a lack of structure, people are verbose. They’re all over the place. People will say I lost track. I went down a rabbit hole.
[00:07:08] I didn’t stay on track, and I didn’t even get through my information. That’s because they had no structure, no guidelines to work with. When you drive down the road, there’s a line on one side of the line on the other that keeps your vehicle. This is where you’re supposed to drive between now, as they’re passing lanes, okay.
[00:07:28] Here’s a place where I can come out of the structure and come back into the structure. But if you don’t have some type of structure, you can’t do that. You’re just all over the place. I think my greatest experience of that was the very first time I went to India. I remember when my driver picked me up at the airport and where we came out of the airport, and he’s going down this major highway, and for four or five minutes, he was in what I perceive to be a lane.
[00:07:58] And as we went down the road, all of a sudden he’s out of the lane and all over the place. And I being a little more fearful, said, don’t you want to stay in your lane? And I still remember him saying, here in India, we don’t do that. And I was fascinated how they have a lack of traffic accidents, but they’re all over the place in moving and jiving with each other in their vehicle, no structure in the way they drive, making it work, but no structure.
[00:08:29] So the typical challenges of a lack of structure. You ramble, you’re verbose. You lack clarity. And by no means, are you concise? I think the other factor that happens when you’re not, you don’t have a structure to work within; you do a data dump. This is where people show up and throw up. This is where you fire hose people with information.
[00:08:51] This is where you’re throwing anything you can to make it stick up on the wall, instead of having a focused message. And when you don’t have structure, you can’t stay on track. And when someone asks you a question, then it is not even relevant to what you’re talking about. You get sidetracked, you lose control, and then you lost your moment to drive the listener forward.
[00:09:16] Now, those are just some of the challenges that I typically see in helping people as they go to craft content. The other big challenge I get from content is a mindset by people. They will say, if you’re going to make me worth it, work within a structure in narrows me, it limits my big beef. I get all the time.
[00:09:38] The second thing they’ll say is, that’s just not who I am. I talk from the cuff, I just get up, and I am spontaneous, which is how I’ve always done it. Those are some of those mindset challenges. I hear them. I recognize them because the number one reason for those mindset ideas is they feel like the structure constricts them.
[00:10:04] But what I want you to realize is within that structure, you have the freedom to do anything that you want to do. So I want you to think about when your children were small or if you have small children. Now you may say to a child, go to your room and play and do anything you want. Or you may say, go into the backyard and do anything you want.
[00:10:29] You may say, go to the front yard, do anything you want, you may say, do anything you want, but do not leave our blocker our street. That’s just giving them some structure. We’ll work with him, artists all the time. Work with structure musicians, work with structure. Construction people work within a structure.
[00:10:53] There are guidelines that we get these beautiful buildings, but they know how to play within their structure. The first thing you have to do is realize the principle of freedom and structure, freedom, and structure. And the second thing you have to realize, you have to do the hard work, which keeps it simple.
[00:11:12] And for your message to be effective, you got to put it in a structure of some sort. And number two, you got to do the hard work and keep it simple.
[00:11:25] Now, if you begin to work with this, you will find some conflict. The first conflict I get is structure versus freedom. If there’s structure, there’s no freedom. And I just shared with you that if you work with the right structure, you have the freedom to do anything that you want. The second conflict I get a lot of is skill versus style.
[00:12:29] When I’m teaching the class and our traditional three-day program around delivery content and interaction. As I’m teaching some of the delivery mechanics around posture and eye contact and gestures, how you move in space, someone will say, Bart, that’s a style I don’t want. And I have to share it with them. I’m not teaching style.
[00:12:53] I’m teaching you the skills that enhance your style. So think, for example, bill Clinton, I’m not talking politics here. Just think about his communication style. Most people would say he’s laid back conversational, very comfortable. Now, if I gave you Colin Powell, most people would come back and say more deliberate, more authoritative in the way he comes across.
[00:13:27] I would agree most likely from his military background. Those two men, their style is as different as the color of their skin. But if you study their skill sets, they’re very similar. They twist and tweak the skills to make it work for their style. It has become seamless in the way they work with the skillset.
[00:13:54] The other big bucket that people come back to me is well, Bart, it feels uncomfortable. Bart, it feels uncomfortable. The structure feels uncomfortable. I understand that. I know when I was first learning these things early in my career, it felt stiff and awkward and mechanical until I pushed through it.
[00:14:14] And now when I’m teaching class, I have a driving, I driving idea around this idea of emotion, do not go with how it feels go with the impact it creates. Think about any sport or any hobby you’ve learned that you’ve struggled to learn as you struggled to go through it; you went, wow, this is so uncomfortable, and you may have quit.
[00:14:35] What I was trying to learn, how to play the guitar. And my first year of college, I got to the point where my fingers were bleeding. I finally just said, I’m not going to go any further here. But when it came to water skiing, I must have tried 500 times before I finally got up on those keys, but I was unwilling to quit.
[00:14:55] And when someone finally said to me, Bart locks your arms when you water ski, like your arms. Cause that was trying to pull me up, pulling myself up, felt natural, locking my arms felt unnatural, but the first time I locked my arms, I popped right upon those skis. So as I walk you through these ideas around crafting content and content structure, don’t go with how it feels.
[00:15:22] Don’t let how it feels dominate what you’re doing, what I want you to get to the places. Is it creating the impact you want? If it’s motivating people, if it’s inspiring people if it’s driving people to action, if it’s engaging people, if that’s the impact, you’re getting stay with it. Do that again and again, fight the fact that it feels bad.
[00:15:46] I especially see this when I’ve got people in the class that I’m teaching them principles around how they carry themselves around their posture. They will come back to me and say, Bart, that is the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever done. And I can look back on my first couple of times and say, yes, it is.
[00:16:03] But now that I’ve been doing it for over 30 years, it is the most comfortable thing that I do. And when I step out of that, I can feel that, but you’ve done some things for so long. It becomes natural to you. But if I got you to do it time after time with your structure and your content, you would get to a place where you’d say it’s very comfortable, and you wouldn’t have to fight that emotion.
[00:16:31] That feeling versus impact is a struggle point for all of us. Don’t go with how it feels; go with the impact to create that last idea here in these conflict challenges I want you to consider is control versus chaos. Now the guy that always says Bart, this is how I’ve always done it. I’m spontaneous I’m off the cough.
[00:16:54] Yes. To him. There is a sense of control to that. But the impact to the listener is chaos because they can’t keep track of where you’re going, but here’s where it gets cool. In my mind, if you have a sense of control, if you have a sense of structure that you work with, you have a flow, it may feel constricted to you, but to them, it has flow.
[00:17:20] It is seamless. Their experience, on the other end, is completely different. If you will think of someone you enjoy listening to, pastor Pirie, stir a rabbi, a politician, a family member, or a colleague, someone in business, a leader out in the marketplace. I can promise you when they think through their content; they’re thinking through a structure.
[00:17:44] You and I don’t see it because they’ve done all the hard work. Do the hard work. Keep it simple. Do the hard work. Keep it simple because they’ve kept it simple. They have done the hard work. We have an experience that we remember. That’s a big difference.
[00:18:03] The conflict in your mind can be huge. Now let me give you some definitions of structure. Now when I did my research and just look this up, I’m a word guy. So I like to go to the dictionary, go to Google and say, what’s the definition. So here are a couple of things that I learned the purpose of a structure.
[00:18:26] If you look that up, it says to help an organization work toward its goals. I can’t imagine that anyone of us, I don’t care what our position is from the CEO down to the guy who’s washing dishes down to the guy. Who’s the janitor down to an AA, to a director, to a VP that our goal in some form or another isn’t to move the goals of the organization forward part of the structure.
[00:18:54] If you look up structure by itself, it talks about the arrangement of parts or elements of something complex. So structure or just pieces within your keynote. There are pieces within your presentation. There are pieces within your demo. It’s the arrangement of those pieces of an overall complex talk building item.
[00:19:23] you can arrange those elements or pieces according to a plan. So think about a puzzle. If you and I are going to put a puzzle together, most likely, we’re going to do the outside framework, and then we’re going to work with you inside. It’s an arrangement. According to a plan, it’s the arrangement by the methodology. It’s an arrangement by the process.
[00:19:46] All that structure does is give it a pattern. And if you think that you can communicate in such a manner that gives that a pattern, think about how easy that makes it for the listener to absorb, because they understand the pattern and they can follow it. Suppose you’ve done it once, you can do it twice. Now here’s the benefit to you?
[00:20:04] The communicator, if you understand what that pattern is, you can eventually get up on your feet and go through that pattern. Not even think about it. One of the other definitions that I found was. It was to build something arranged in a definite way. Now, this is the repeatability of it, a structure in my mind.
[00:20:27] If you built it, once you can build it again. I love the old saying if you’ve made a million bucks, if you know how to make 1 million, your first million, you know how to make the second million. If you built a structure for one talk, you could build another talk. And the more you do it, the more flexible you get with the structure.
[00:20:44] And then the more freedom that you have. And you’ve heard me say many times there’s freedom and structure. But the definition I liked the most. Was the Latin explanation of the word structure, and it’s simply mat fitting things together. It’s fitting; you’re open and close together.
[00:21:07] It fits your key points together. It then fits your key points to your open and your key points to your clothes. It’s making it all flow nicely if you study. Good books. If you study good movies like star Wars or guitar, any of those bigger types of films, they follow structure; they follow story structure.
[00:21:36] Now there may be some variances, some give and some tape, but from a basic level, yeah, following a structure. And the reason we enjoy them so much is that they did the hard work. They kept it simple, and then we get to enjoy it. Now there are also two different types of structures that are that I found interesting.
[00:21:58] One was a hierarchy, and that kind of structure is a cascade of one to many, one to many. So that would follow more of a Ted type talk structure, one single point. And now I’m flowing to three, too many to drive that one major point or a network structure. Which is many to many; that’s the idea of three key points in what you’re doing.
[00:22:25] That’s the idea of five major things you want to show me in a demo.
[00:22:34] As we break that structure out, there are two main body structures that many people use today. There’s the 20-minute structure, typically following keener, more of a Ted type talk. That’s that 18 to the 20-minute idea. You may have also found yourself for somebody who’s heard you give a major presentation that was an hour and they ask you, can you come in?
[00:22:58] Cause we’ve only got 20 minutes. If that is the case, you make your open and one of your main points out of your keynote and your close and frame it into 20, what you want them to say to you when this is said and done. Wow, that was fantastic. I want you to come back and share the other two in that Ted type structure.
[00:23:19] It’s one single message supported by three supporting points. Now each one of those supporting points follows a structure. What’s the point I’m trying to make that backs up. My single message. What’s the story example. It proves the point in my supporting point. And then what’s the application to your listener.
[00:23:43] And typically, this is done more in rhetorical type questions. If it’s in a small group, you can ask the folks. But if you were doing one of those 20-minute type Ted type talks, where you’re just presenting in front of a group of people, you probably wouldn’t have that. So the next time you listen to a Ted talk, do me a favor.
[00:24:05] See if you can’t see this structure played out. And one of the greatest examples that I always enjoy is the assignment, Senate structure around inspiring leaders. You can find that on. Ted talk, or you can find that on YouTube, the title of that talk is inspiring leaders. Absolutely. One of my favorites, you may also see that lived out in some of Bernay Brown type of Ted talks, where she follows that principle.
[00:24:36] The other structure is that 60 minutes structure. Now, this is the one that typically falls. It was more of a keynote. This is the one where you’re going in with the customer and your PR you’re presenting your solution, tool, or product. Now with this, remember you’re either doing it three key points or four; four is your maximum.
[00:24:57] Don’t go more than four because they won’t remember it. I can’t encourage you enough, anything more than four. You’re up to that idea of show up and throw up. They’re not going to walk down the hallway and say, I just heard Bart speak. He covered four key points. Your three key points flow at a hundred thousand foot level.
[00:25:18] Your supporting points are at 50 minutes within your supporting points or 25,000 feet. I want you to realize that you’ve got to take this down deeper and deeper. Now your three key points must be three things. They must be simple. They must be repeatable, and they must be memorable.
[00:25:41] Most people, when they make a key point. There are so many words to it that you couldn’t walk down the hallway and repeat them simple, repeatable, and memorable. I’ll never forget having an opportunity to prep a CFO who was going to a Forbes conference to give a talk on business continuity. I spent half a day with him, helping him craft a message for 10 minutes.
[00:26:09] He was one member on a panel of four, each one of them. We’re only going to speak for 10 minutes. Guys, we spent a half a day crafting a 10-minute message for this man. When we got to the key points we were beginning to craft them; he came up with. First, you have to plan, pardon me.
[00:26:33] You have to assess the risk. Secondly, you have to plan for the risk, and then third, you have to execute the plan. Now there’s nothing complex about that. But what I found tremendous was his grabber; what he was going to use to grab their attention was a very simple example of King Kong. Now the movie King Kong had just been rereleased, and he was going to make a very simple analogy around King Kong, destroying cities and risk destroying businesses.
[00:27:06] So, without thought of Matt, let’s come back to his key points. So his key points were the fact that you have to assess the risk. You have to plan for the risk, and you have to execute on it. You have to assess, plan, and execute. You have to a P E ape. Now you may laugh and go, okay. Bart way too. Corny.
[00:27:28] Alright. Maybe it is simple? Yes. Is it repeatable? Yes. Is it memorable? Yes. Now I am not saying you have to have an acronym. Let me say that one more time. I am not saying you have to have an acronym. That’s just what he came up with, but he worked hard to keep it simple, repeatable. And memorable just in his key points, that was just in his key points that wasn’t diving into the content of the three major things he wanted to say about assessing your risk about planning for the risk or executing on the plan.
[00:28:12] You have to be able to do the hard work, and you’ve got to keep it simple. Remember, guys; there are freedom and structure. Now I want to add one more key ingredient to your success as you do that, trigger words, guys, get away from writing it out, word for word or word.
[00:28:29] And here’s my reason why, if you write it out word for word and it starts to say it differently than you’ve written, you’re going to stumble. But if you have put it into trigger words, You’ll look at that trigger word, and the way you share it with John will be different than the way you share it. With Mary two different people, two different audiences, the trigger word brings the thought to mind, and then you craft it.
[00:28:55] This is key to your success in being conversational. Remember, it’s not about presenting. It’s all about the conversation.
[00:29:12] Now, I want to bring in one more time structure for many of you who are in technology, and you have to talk about a particular feature within a piece of technology. What I call the functionality structures may be very helpful. Now I use this structure to talk about my company at a high level.
[00:29:34] I use this coming down to talk about one of my training programs. And I use this even deeper to talk about one of the modules within my training program. So you may say I’m going to use this to talk about my company at a hundred thousand feet. I’m going to use this to talk about a solution tool or product and give a high-level overview.
[00:29:55] Or I want to use this to talk about a specific feature
[00:29:58] within
[00:29:59] Bart Queen: a piece of software or a product tool or service that I want to talk about.
[00:30:09] There are five major pieces to this functionality structure. So if you’re listening, if you happen to be at home, you’re in your office, I’d like you to write these down. If you’re driving, I want you to, when you get back to your office, take a moment and write these down and then play with them. The very first thing you have to call out is what’s the feature.
[00:30:32] Now, I’ll get many people who will say ease of use is a feature. Ease of use is not a feature. Ease of use is a benefit. What gives it ease of use brings you back to your feature. So of the five, the first is a feature. The second thing you want to articulate is the function. The function is what the feature does.
[00:30:56]if I could get you to do this, I’d get you to do three things within that feature. Now, sometimes it only does one thing. Okay. If it only does one stay there, that’s fine. Three is your ideal. This is always a verb. So please note that this is always a verb. The function is always a verb. It is what it does or allows you to do.
[00:31:23] It’s what it does or allows you to do. So you’ve got your feature. You have three things that it does. The nut’s next major bucket is the manifest. And I would do one benefit for every function. Here’s the key feature we bring to the table. What it allows you to do is number one, number two, number three.
[00:31:46] The benefit of those functions is number one, number two, number three, it’s very simple guys. It’s nothing complex. So you’ve got the feature, the function, and then the benefits, the next major bucket that most of us miss is what I call unique business value. Now the unique business value is the, so what, but here’s where I get troubled.
[00:32:12] Many people confuse benefits. And the value they’ll integrate them as the same thing. They are not the same thing. Benefits are objective value is subjective. What I’m teaching this with the MBA students, when they do their final for me in my coaching, I tell them if you’re going to tell me the benefit of your solution, tool, or product or service, you must follow it with a value statement.
[00:32:42] I get them to do that. They’ll say something like the three benefits are number one, number two, number three; they follow that with what that means to you is because it is subjective. It is not objective. Now, if you don’t know who your listener is, you can’t get that value statement to have power. Think about Volvo cars.
[00:33:05] The key benefit today bring to the table is safety. It’s the extra steel in the door, but the, so what they always say, especially targeted to our men, is that your family will always reach their destination. So if you’re a Volvo lover, you buy that car because, in your heart and your mind, your wife, your children, whoever you care about is going to get to their destination.
[00:33:30] That’s that value statement. The unique part is to your listener, unique to the CFO, unique to the CEO, unique to the COO, unique to the technical people. Business value is always so what that is the hardest thing to articulate, but if you have done that well, you can say the key feature I bring to the table is X.
[00:33:54] What that means to you is why. What it allows you to do is one, two, three. And the benefit of that is one, two, three. So notice guys, even though I’m not talking about anything, I can walk through that structure clearly, and I can move the pieces around freedom and structure.
[00:34:14] The last component. Now, remember that there were five to this. What’s the feature. What’s the function. What’s the benefit. What’s the unique business value. The last one is the example, your proof point. Your proof point. You always want to have an example. So think about in a job interview, you’ve been in that situation where someone says, what’s the number one thing you bring to the table?
[00:34:37] And you say the number one thing I bring to the table is this. That’s typically where we stop nine times out of 10. What’s the interview’s next question. Can you give me an example? Can you give me an example in my mind, from a communication process? Please take this to heart. They should never have to ask you for an example, period.
[00:35:00] If someone’s interviewing you and they say, what’s the number one thing you bring to the table, you should come back and say, the number one thing I bring to the table is this, for example, and you give it now, remember an example has four key components to it. Number one, who. Number two, what’s the problem that you’re trying to solve.
[00:35:22] Number three of the solution, what did you bring to the table? A service, a product, a methodology, a team, and then the specific results, you should be able to go across that whole structure in less than 90 seconds. If I’m prepping someone for a demo and I’ll get them to practice, I’ll get them to articulate those pieces and then move them around.
[00:35:47] If I’m helping an executive press prepare a press and media situation, I will get them to work with. You want it to come out conversational and easy. If I could help people in technology as they do their demos, I would have them prep. Those five features that they can conversationally go through these before they ever show them.
[00:36:12] Imagine you’re speaking to the CMO, and you say now the first key thing I’d like to share with you today is this particular feature. What it allows you to do is this, the benefits that will bring to the table is this, what that’s going to mean to you. Mr. CEO is you can sleep at night, for example. And then you gave an example, and then you showed them notice the amount of content they would have at their fingertips before you ever began to show that particular feature.
[00:36:46] The structures that I’ve had an opportunity to share with you, whether at a higher level, at that 60-minute point at the 20-minute point or where you’re down into your minutiae and your weeds, they give you the freedom to communicate your message. I can’t emphasize enough that you have to do the hard work and keep it simple within that structure.
[00:37:09] You have the freedom to do anything that you want. I want you to build upon these structures. Make an application and implement them into the next situation that you find yourself in. I believe that’s going to give you freedom in your content. It’s going to give you freedom in your conversation, and it’ll give you freedom in this situation for you to adapt to the best of your ability.
