395 – How To Create High-Impact, Memorable Presentations

Podcast: Download (Duration: 38:13 — 35.1MB)

Get Notified Of Future Episodes Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Blubrry | Gaana | TuneIn | Deezer | Anghami | RSS | More

High Impact Slide Example

Podcast highlights:

01:08 – What to expect from this episode
02:12 – Here’s a story about a guy and his shoulders
05:35 – The best way to get true results
06:10 – The purpose of a live presentation
08:28 – Know this in advance
09:30 – How to craft a presentation
17:01 – Space and memory
21:15 – The power of images
25:40 – Quality vs. weirdness
28:41 – What is spaced repetition?
33:32 – When people remember you for the wrong reasons
33:55 – A recap
34:36 – Some action steps

For more powerful business resources, join JamesSchramko membership

Tweetables:

Focus on one thing. [Click To Tweet].
Start with the end in mind. [Click To Tweet].
Memorable, not distracting images. [Click To Tweet].

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. I have a repeat guest because it was so good the first time. It’s great to have you here, Timothy Moser.

Timothy: It’s great to be here, James.

James: Timothy Moser from masterofmemory.com. You’ve been astounding us with your brainiac stuff, and today, we’re delving into an extended conversation based on what we’re talking about last time. We’re talking around about memory. And we thought it’d be great to have an entire episode dedicated to the idea of how to create really memorable presentations that will have the maximum impact on your audience.

So what have you got for us today, Timothy?

What’s in store for today’s episode?
Timothy: Yeah. So the last time I was on here, we kind of talked about how to remember things as a consumer. If you’re sitting in the audience at a conference or something like that, hopefully, you’re going to take something away from it and actually apply it to your life.

But if you’re the speaker, how do you try to create some sort of impact that is actually going to change your listeners? If you put yourself in the listeners’ shoes, we’re all generally overwhelmed with information and ideas, and what we really need, whether we’re looking for it or not, is some sort of simple solution and principles that actually get results.

I think this is something a lot of people can resonate with. People can resonate with the problem of having too many things out there, but also just attending conferences and not really getting anything from them, or it all just being jumbled around and not really knowing what they’re remembering.

But let’s say that you’re overwhelmed with information and you’re going to go and attend a presentation that’s actually going to cause an impact. So I’m going to present a story here that may sound a little ridiculous but it illustrates this point fairly well as to what an impact for presentation is.

An impactful presentation
Let’s say that there’s a guy in the fitness industry. While he’s attending a conference in the fitness industry, he himself is a bit embarrassed about his shoulders. So he wants to have big, broad, masculine shoulders like any man who wants to show off would want.

Suppose that he goes to this conference and he’s overwhelmed with all these information but then he sits down at just one presentation that impacts him so strongly without him even trying anything, it completely changes his life in more profound ways than the speaker thought.

So the speaker up there demonstrates, let’s say, one principle that will make your shoulders extremely muscular, square, broad within just a few days. The speaker says, “Imagine flexing your muscles back and out so that they’re pushing outwards as if you’re lying in a bathtub.” Now the man who’s listening to this starts to do that with his shoulders involuntarily because the idea of being in a bathtub and pushing against the walls of the bathtub just seems interesting to him, and it just sticks in his mind.

So this guy walks back to his hotel and he’s thinking about this idea so much that his shoulder muscles are just doing this naturally. He lies down in bed and he’s doing it while he’s dreaming at night. Now what do you think he’s going to do first thing when he gets up in the morning before he goes back to the conference?

He’ll probably take a bath in his little hotel bathtub. So he gets in his bathtub, he goes down under the water, and at this point, his shoulders are already so big and so transformed without any effort of his own that he ends up getting stuck in the bath tub and drowning.

So that is a story that creates impact because it’s memorable and now when you think about shoulders or when you think about hotel bathtubs, little hotel bathtubs, you’re going to think about this story of pushing down and out with your shoulders. I imagine that a good percentage of the audience is trying this right now with their shoulders, whether they’re trying to do it or not.

James: Right. It seems to be very aligned with the ideas of Milton Erickson, with the storytelling and people placing themselves inside that story. You have a very visual graphic scenario. Like he talks about, I’m not sure which hand, left or right, but imagine that you have a balloon with helium-filled and then tied to a string into your finger, and it’s floating up, up, up, up. People will start lifting their hand because they place themselves into that story. Did you hear it? Was it your left or your right?

Timothy: Yeah, it was my left.

James: Right. And that’s an assumptive thing that it’s going to be one or the other rather than it might not happen at all. So the words we use are very important, by the sound of it. And if we can paint graphical pictures, is that the technique you’re using there?

Timothy: Yeah. That’s part of the technique, painting graphical pictures, and also really, I think that overall, the messages that you’re presenting one clear impactful message that won’t just be heard, but it’s immediately going to strike them and also stick in their minds afterwards so that it gets basically automatic results.

You know, this guy goes home doing this without even trying. The presentation sticks with him so much. I mean you can talk about the tactics that the presenter used but really, the best way to get true results from your presentation is to start with that one clear impactful thing, one single thing that you want them to take away, and that will almost be automatic for them, if there’s any way to do that possibly.

Focusing on one
James: And also, what I’m hearing is that it might be better to spend a little bit longer on a single point and to paint it with more effort and more visually than to try and cover more topics in the same time period.

Timothy: Yeah, for sure. Especially if you’re creating a lot of blog posts and YouTube videos, that’s one thing. But if you have people sitting down in front of you and you’re at an event where they’re there just to listen to you and to get something away from your presentation, then you really want to find something where you’re just creating one impact where they’re transformed in some way when they leave the room. I think that that’s the purpose of a live presentation.

James: It seems to be that most people are trying to jam a lot of ideas in there because they think that’s going to get the high impact, if they could just sort of hammer in 20 nails. But what we’re doing here is really emphasizing this one, big, giant point and just working away on it. I think it’s harder to get people to focus on multiple items than it is to say, “Here’s this one thing.” It’s the elephant in the room. It’s just like, “Look at this. Check it out.”

Timothy: Yeah. Exactly. Like you can have the whole presentation just being an elephant standing on the stage, and which presentation at the conference do you think people are going to remember?

James: I’d remember that.

Standing out from the rest
Timothy: Yeah. Where it wasn’t a human, it was an animal. I mean, that’s just going to make a difference. Or if you had a bunch of presentations in one room and then one presentation outside, after the conference, everybody’s going to remember the one outside, but all the presentations in the room are probably going to blend together. So that’s just something else to think about. But yeah, I think that you’re right. Too many people are just trying to wow the audience with all their knowledge.

I mean giving people too much information as if, the more information, the better. It’s almost the analogous to bragging about your success. Are you making me successful by just showing me how much wealth, knowledge and fame you have? That doesn’t make sense. You want to impact me, not just show me how much you have that doesn’t give me an impact.

James: And it’s kind of when you go to an event where there’s more than one presenter, which unless you had a two or three hour preview, it’s likely to happen. It’s almost like a competition for your audience’s brain space. You’ve got other people contending for that attention. If you really want to move people, I guess you’ve got to dominate their thoughts and have them remember you. You’re in a better position to help someone if they can clearly define what it is that they were able to do as a result of attending your presentation if you’re the speaker.

Timothy: Right. You want to know what you want the audience to walk away and do.

Start with the end in mind
James: Right. And so if you know that in advance, you can build your entire presentation from starting with the end in mind. This is what I want someone to be able to do, where I want them to be moved to, as a result of this presentation. So therefore, I will put my focus on this major point, and I’m going to color it, flavor it, turn it into a fantastic vivid story, and make it super meaningful.

Timothy: Exactly. Like the one at the fitness industry. People are probably floating between different presentations and seeing all kinds of things about everything they can do, and will probably go home and not change too much or change too much about their workouts and really not get any impact. But the guy who did the effective presentation gave them a memorable image and gave them just one thing that they will go away and do no matter what else they got from the conference. So that’s I think a sign of a successful presentation.

James: Fantastic. All right, what next?

Crafting a presentation
Timothy: Well, I think that when you’re crafting a presentation, the first thing to start with is just having that one clear message. How do you want them to be flexing their shoulders while they walk out of the room? What is it that you want them to be impacted by as they’re walking out?

Now, I just thought it might be interesting to brainstorm on just any given topic in business or anything like that. If you were to craft a presentation, or if we were to brainstorm here and sort of imagine that we’re crafting a presentation, we can come up with some stories and images that would make this memorable and really cause an impact.

I don’t know James; do you have any ideas for what we might do to brainstorm on some sort of presentation, some sort of transformation?

Join SuperFastBusiness – Making it memorable
James: I can actually. Let’s say that I would like to put forward to an audience the idea that they should join SuperFastBusiness membership, that they’ll be better off. Just a wild example there.

Timothy: Yeah, yeah. Wild example. Just pulled that completely off the wall. OK. So that’s your one clear message. There are a few things that we can do to make that memorable. The first one is obviously just to establish it like we have. That’s what you know you want your audience to go and do, whether they try it or not, they might do it in their sleep like the guy with the shoulders.

One of the most powerful tools that we have as human beings is simply stories. I mean if you think back to anything in your life, that’s a pretty good litmus test for what things are memorable. What things do you actually remember? You remember situations, you remember things that happened, and the presentations that you remember are the ones that have the stories that resonate with you. We like stories as humans.

Something that I’ve used before just sort of as an illustration is it’s something that people can relate to. Let’s say parking a car. A lot of people have to park cars a lot of the time. And every time I park a car, I actually remember my own presentation about this point. There are too many things to think about when you’re parking a car. But I was illustrating the point of just thinking about one thing. If you actually only think about the back axle of the car, and you imagine that the whole vehicle swings on that back axle as a lever, then as long as you put your back wheels in the right place, you can swing the rest of the car and you can land in your parking spot.

So I use that to illustrate through something that everybody can relate to, the principle of reducing things to one point. So that’s just an example of something that people are going to walk away and it’ll be right there in their life. Every time they park a car, they’re going to remember that and it will also quickly impact their lives because they’ll be able to park more easily when that happens.

So applying that to what you’re talking about, SuperFastBusiness, what are ways that you can implement stories to convince people that joining SuperFastBusiness is the best idea that they could do while walking out?

James: Well, I do tell a lot of things that actually happened to my life because I’ve got various podcasts. I tend to tell a lot of stories, true stories mind you, because they’re interesting.

Timothy: You don’t think the one about the shoulder is a true story?

James: Is it a true story?

Timothy: No, no, it’s not.

James: Because it’s bizarre.

Timothy: Yeah.

James: But it wouldn’t surprise me. But it’s a great one. I mean bad for the guy of course, didn’t end well for him. But it’s memorable.

I would say, “Look, I went to a SuperFastBusiness membership meetup last night, I saw 20-something people, and I met five or six brand-new-to-the-community people. They just turned up and I asked them, ‘Why did you join the membership?’ And they tell me stuff like they were intrigued by the idea that they could build a team in the Philippines, and they wanted to learn more about how to do that. And one of the gentlemen literally had a tear in his eye when he was describing how much it’s transformed his life having a team over there who are so dedicated to his business, and so hardworking, and so competent, and he was explaining how he would be trying to do all these stuff and the pressure of build up, and he would feel like overload and his heart’s pumping, and he’s going red and then getting angry, and then he remembers, ‘Hang on, I’ve got my angel over there in the Philippines. I could just send it over to him.’ And just the release is like air whooshing out of a blue, and like sshhhhh, the pressure. And he had this little tear in his eyes as he’s describing this. And he says, ‘You know what, I’m going to do what you said. I’m going to go over there and meet them, and I’m just going to thank them. Thank them for making my life so much better.'”

Timothy: Wow. That’s a story. I think all of us can relate to the stress and things like that. Probably, the next time I’m stressed out about something, which doesn’t happen too often, but if it does, I probably won’t remember that story. But there will be things in there that you could pull out. Like let’s say you wanted to make that story more vivid and not just more relatable, anybody can relate to that. But we could add some dimensions to it. Like talk specifically about the things that stressed him out. That’ll connect with people and they’ll quickly see how the outcome results in less stress.

James: Right. So I could talk like go one level more detail? Like he’s sitting there, tapping in part numbers for his inventory, and then he realizes he doesn’t have to do that anymore because there’s someone in another part of the world he could just send it over to and he can move on to taking his wife out to dinner instead.

Timothy: See. Yeah. See that will come up to people next time they sit down and are doing an inventory, or even just find the thing; this is using a different principle of exclusivity. Do a survey, find out the things that make the most impact when they’re outsourced and use that as your illustration, and that’s the most likely to cause more people to relate to it, to remember it because it’ll be something they encounter very soon and will stress them out, and remind them to join SuperFastBusiness.

James: And another gentleman was saying that he’s a copywriter and he was following the Halberts, and he was listening to audio series, listening to John Carlton and all these famous copywriters, and then my name popped up in this iTunes series that the Halberts put together.

And I was reading a Gary Halbert letter, and for him it was like a magician pulling the handkerchief out of the pocket and he just kept pulling, and pulling, and pulling, and he realized that, here this guy is, in his hometown like a suburb away, is in the world scene of copywriters right under his nose the whole time, and he just felt compelled to join up and get direct access to the information that other people all around the world are discovering through iTunes, and it was right under his nose the whole time.

It was like this surprise, just kept discovering more and more as he followed through the podcast and got into the modules, went into the community, found that I run events, watched the recordings from the events. It’s just like this treasure chest that he opened up.

Timothy: Right. Yeah. And the more that you can show those treasures and the benefits in your stories, the more you can relate them to the results that they’ll get when they do this action.

James: Great. OK. Well, that’s very helpful.

Timothy: Uh-hm.

James: So we’re encountering everyday situations that we’d really just merely got to package up and tell and share.

Using locations
Timothy: Yeah, yeah. You package them up, you take those everyday situations. And actually one of the most impactful things you can do is use locations. So we have situations, we have feelings and things like that, but actually, this doesn’t occur to people but locations are the most memorable things we have, pretty much.

So if you think throughout your life, all the locations that you’ve been, if you’ve done a lot of things in one place, then all your memories in that place are all jumbled together, but once again, taking that example of the speaker on one stage and then another speaker outside, if you can relate some of your stories to locations, then that’s something that people will be able to take away and actually remember when they think about your presentation, those locations will make a difference.

So something that we could do on the subject of joining SuperFastBusiness is maybe use locations that people will easily remember who are in your audience, and perhaps locations that they relate to business, I guess an office’s little trait.

James: Well I think for most of my audience, it will be sitting at their computer at one in the morning getting frustrated that the task list is longer than they know they’ve got capacity to get to, and it’s like a playoff between, “Do I sleep and wake up to this nightmare?” or “Do I just chug away at it for another few hours until I’m exhausted and shivering cold?”

Timothy: Yeah, there you go.

James: We’ve all been through that phase when we start an online business. Well, most of us have. If we are very driven and we have invariably taken on too many projects, we’ve got far too many emails coming in our inbox, we have far too few stuff to help us out with anything, and we’re not quite sure that our business model is scalable so we don’t want to spend too much money to grow it fast because we might accelerate failure and get deeper in the whole. So I think a lot of people go through that little phase. So a story around that is one that I talk about when I was starting out, and a lot of people relate to that.

Timothy: Yeah. It’s like it’s a four-dimensional location. You don’t just have the place.

James: And pretty much, they’ll be in that situation within the next day, if they’re in that zone.

Timothy: Right, right, right. They probably will. It’s a location in time as well as in space and so it’s very specific. That’s good. You can also use the bedroom if you suspect that they’ll be lying awake at night, you could use the ceiling of the bedroom that they’re going to be staring at and perhaps imagine that something memorable is happening on that ceiling so that every time they look at their ceiling, they’d associate that with SuperFastBusiness. That would be very handy if they thought about you every time they couldn’t fall asleep.

James: That’s interesting. It really makes me want to know how many people resonate with some of the stories I’ve told on podcast. Like when I started, I had a laptop and I had this 20-meter cable to plug it into the phone line, and basically, I was operating it from the couch while I was watching TV then I was in my bedroom. I didn’t have an office or anything.

I was trying to learn how to build a website with my computer on my lap while the TV is on thinking, “This is damn hard. It’s so frustratingly hard.” And I just remember thinking, “It can’t be this hard. Like people actually succeed with this.” It was an enormously difficult puzzle with no one around to help me solve it. And that’s what I wanted to create with my community, was an environment where no one has to go through that scenario. If they’re in that scenario then they’re only one membership access away from relief, if they’re in that situation.

Timothy: There you go. Yeah. So that’s another one. That’s a location that many people will relate to, whether they’re actually sitting on the floor.

Quick recap
James: I’d say that most people are watching TV with a device these days, according to the statistics. So what I’m hearing, just to really put a full-stop on this is tie in your message, your story, with things that you know your audience are involved with or going through. So it’s all about really understanding and knowing your customer, and meeting them where they’re at.

Timothy: Exactly. That’s it. So that they will remember it while they’re walking away from the presentation and then they will also remember it when they go into their daily life, get in that bathtub or whatever. It’ll come rushing right back to them, so they remember what you’ve been teaching them.

James: Fantastic. All right.

Using memorable images
Timothy: Yeah. Another thing that is very helpful as we all are taught to do is to use memorable images, striking images. If you’re doing a presentation that involves a visual aspect with slides, then use striking images. But you want to use images that don’t distract but rather cause the audience to remember the point that you’re making.

Like if you in your presentation were to throw up an image of two men shaking hands to illustrate the example of community, I think that half of the audience would also throw up but in a different way.

James: Yeah. They’ll vomit because of the overuse of that stock shot.

Timothy: Yeah. For sure. There’s millions of stock shots taken.

James: In my slide, I only use original pictures, which are the photographs from my own phone or camera, or my team has hand-illustrated. For that community one, I generally use a photograph of my members at a local meetup, all smiling and talking and interacting, which is by the way, the unbelievable magic of having a community, and that’s how we met at someone else’s event. The community feel and vibe is what really binds a great product.

Timothy: Yeah. I agree. I agree. Now the group of people meeting together is something that people can resonate with – is that going to be the image from the presentation that they walk away remembering, or might there be a way to make that a little more vivid? So that they go, “Wow, I’m just walking along and I remember that image and it comes rushing back to me.”

James: The one thing that I know people remember from my presentation is my image of me strolling down the street with a surfboard, bare feet, I’ve got a red T-shirt, and it’s a deliberate image. I’ve actually even blurred the edges so it’s like the whole of time and space stand still, there’s this casual long board, I’ve got a brightly colored T-shirt, and I’m just cruising down the street after surf. I actually look kind of relaxed but I’ve put that image three times in my presentation and almost everyone who resonates with my message is the idea that you could actually have a business that’s profitable, and enjoyable and still not have to be a Gary V. workaholic.

You don’t have to work 19 hours a day. You could still go surfing everyday if you want, and do things you enjoy, and the business can fund that lifestyle, and that’s a very strong message where I’m really playing off against the often bandied about idea of workaholism that people should measure their success by how many hours they work, which I don’t understand. I’ve certainly fallen into the overwork phase of my life and I’m out of it. I’m helping other people wake up from that comma.

Timothy: Yeah, that’s great. And you know that that image, while there may be a few other images like that out there, I mean when I think about that image, I think about you, when I think about you, I think about the image. I haven’t even seen that image. But that’s what I think of. That’s a testimony of a strong brand.

James: It’s easy to imagine that image, isn’t it?

Timothy: Yeah, it is.

James: I actually spent last week, Timothy, driving up the New South Wales north coast up to Queensland, took a couple of surfboards in the back of the car, and when I met my fantastic friend Michael Hanson, who is this most incredible photographer and videographer, he’s an artist and his girlfriend Valquiria, and he just hang around me for a few days taking pictures, and I helped him with his business. It was kind of like an exchange of value.

He just took pictures of me doing what I normally do, doing some calls, going surfing, eating. He sent me this beautiful image library of what I’m actually doing, and these I intend to use in my presentations. One of the interesting things that we’ve done for real cut through is the bulk of them are black and white.

Timothy: Ah. There you go.

James: So we’re going against the grain a little bit so that they definitely stand out. They’ve obviously originals because I’m in them, and they’re black and white so they have high cut through. I found that people really resonate with that in a sea of color.

Timothy: Yeah, that’s great. You’re setting yourself up by quality really, by far, and some people are going to remember that. From the standpoint of my history and mnemonics and things like that, you’re also competing with some people who are putting up some pretty bizarre images on their slides. Unfortunately, quality doesn’t always jump over just weirdness.

Like you have two comedians, one who’s really clever and one who’s really vulgar. People will remember the vulgar one. I’m not encouraging vulgarity, I’m just saying that’s something to keep in mind as well. I remember most vividly from the presentation that you gave a Tropical Think Tank, which slide do you think I remember the most vividly?

James: Well there was like one or two that might make people laugh.

Timothy: Uh-hm. Laughing is a very good sign that it will be memorable.

James: Yes. I’ve observed that. I’ve seen speakers who can make the audience laugh so much, and I’m sure that they haven’t really delivered a high level, engaging, actionable content but the audience felt happy and entertained. So they’ll come away from it, I’m sure they’re rated highly. In some cases I’ve seen them buy strongly on very thin content. That’s an interesting one.

Timothy: Yeah. It’s really just something to think about, I think. If you can make people laugh at something, that actually drives your point home, a memorable image that actually illustrates by itself very clearly what your main point is, that’s something that will really create impact and will last in their minds for quite a while.

James: Well, I think if I had to guess, maybe you remember the bumper bowling?

Timothy: It wasn’t that one. It was the Minions one.

James: The minions, of course. Yes, the team.

Timothy: Right, right.

James: It’s good. It’s highly original because it’s got my face grafted onto a Minion.

Timothy: Yes, very clearly.

James: The great thing about this slide was that the team created it. They sent it to me for my birthday actually. So I like to harness the wonderful creativity and energy from my own team, which really supports that slide because the whole slide is about the fact that you need a team and you can’t do this all yourself. So the fact that my team inspired it, created it, and sent it to me, and that it got used as an example of why you need a team is very true to form, isn’t it?

Timothy: Yup. That’s it. It’s striking, it’s memorable, and it’s memorable in the way that there you are, with your team around you that are doing the same things that you would have done otherwise if you didn’t have them.

James: Exactly. That’s a great example of putting something unique. I’m sure you don’t see that slide too often. Maybe you’ll see some more of them from now. But it is good. And all of my slides are quite different and designed to match the point that I’m trying to make. Yeah, Minions is almost the perfect way to express team.

Spaced repetition
Timothy: OK. And then just one other thing as far as the presentation goes is if you design this presentation, you have all these images and these stories that we have talked about, you’re going to take your one point, perhaps make it vivid somehow with a very strong story of some kind, and then what you’re going to do is you’ll actually state that point with that illustration several times but not evenly spaced.

There’s a principle in Accelerated Learning that we use called spaced repetition, where you use it one time and then very shortly afterwards while you still remember it, it emphasizes it, and then shortly after that. But then you have longer and longer intervals afterwards.

James: Is this the one where you repeat someone’s name quickly after they introduce themselves so that you can start locking it in?

Timothy: You can. Yeah, yeah. That helps especially if you’ve attached an image to that name. So I’m saying you’re not just repeating your point but you’re actually repeating an image with that point. So let’s say for example, what we’ve just done in this interview and what I’ve been talking about, I started with the illustration of the guy at the fitness conference, stuck in a bathtub because of his shoulders that were automatically doing this exercise without him even trying. I used that several times early on in the interview, and then we kind of drifted away, but here I am going back to it.

So what do you think is probably the one thing that is going to be very memorable from this? What image is going to be memorable from this interview walking away from it? Probably that’s it. Either the Minion thing or the guy stuck in the bathtub because his shoulders keep doing the exercise without him.

James: Right. So that is along the lines of one of the opening slides I had when I spoke at Underground and a hand-drawn picture of me on the toilet with my pants down. And I started off with a story, it was like 7:15 a.m. and I’m sitting there with my pants around my ankles. Like that definitely got attention.

Timothy: Yeah, that grabs attention. And then you return to it and people will remember it.

James: They definitely remember it. And it was one of my most successful subject lines for an email that my friend, my surfing friend actually crafted it for me. We were out surfing, and I was explaining to him that one of my kids had run out of toilet paper and then used it like a hand towel and jammed the toilet up and blocked it. And so therefore…

Timothy: Used the hand towel and then flushed it.

James: Yeah. I had to go down to the local bathroom for my morning visit. And as I was sitting there, I’m saying, “This is a pain in the butt.” That really kind of sucks. I was just laughing about it with my friend Walter. Then when I got home, he sent me this email with a subject line, “It was 7:15 a.m., my pants were in my ankles…” Like I had to open it. And it went on to explain that as bad as it was that I was there and inconvenienced, at least while I’m doing that, my business is running smoothly and I’m not in any way near this situation that most business owners find themselves in, and that fortunately, the people who come along to SuperFastBusiness Live will find out how to never be in such an emergency with their business.

So he linked it nicely up to the outcome. I just cut and paste that email off to the audience because I thought it was quite good, and then I got such tremendous feedback from that, that I turned it into a slide in a presentation. And the reason I was speaking at Underground was as a former attendee of the event, I was just expressing that coming to these events and implementing the information that you’re going to learn over the next few days can be the turnaround point where you can get yourself out of a big amount of trouble. It sort of tied in nicely.

Timothy: Yeah. Congrats. You can measure your success as far as that presentation goes by whether the next time, anybody who’s heard that story is on the toilet without toilet paper, they’ll think of you.

James: [laughs] Well let’s hope that that doesn’t happen.

Timothy: Yeah, I know. But there you go; you’re taking advantage of a familiar situation.

James: I can own that space. I can own the pants down space.

Timothy: Yeah, you own that space.

James: Maybe when they’re just sitting on the toilet with their pants down, they’ll remember me.

Timothy: Yeah, maybe you have that honor.

James: Or if you’re one particular person, your pants are off because you’re using the toilet around the wrong way.

Timothy: Yeah. One particular person, inside jokes.

James: I don’t even go down that path.

Timothy: OK. All right. So these are all memorable things, and there are things that you can do that will make people remember you, not just when they walk out of the conference but when they get back to the hotel room and their shoulders are doing it on their own because your presentation is so memorable and so striking that the impact is almost automatic.

When people remember you for the wrong reasons

James: What do you do if someone remembers you for the wrong reasons, like the example we just mentioned?

Timothy: Well, then you’re kind of stuck. You have to find out something more vivid that is more positive.

James: So it’s like an arms race, you’ve got to up the ante and find something stronger.

Timothy: Yeah. I would agree. It’s pretty much an arms race in that case.

What’s been covered
James: Wow. OK. That’s very helpful. So just to recap, we’ve talked about this idea of creating memorable presentations, and that you can really move people better if you focus a little bit more on enhancing and making your story more relevant, more meaningful, understanding your customer so much that you can paint a picture that they can truly relate to, and you do it with great detail. You have some spaced repetition. We’ve talked about some of the things you might avoid doing like using generic stock photos, etc., trying to jam too much into a presentation. Where does that leave us now, Timothy?

Some action steps
Timothy: I would say you can take this away and create your presentation. I’d actually suggest that just as a fun exercise, people might listen to this particular episode again, maybe at double speed if you don’t want to take another whole chunk out of your day, but see how I used these same techniques in this episode, particularly the spaced repetition with the image of the guy that drowned in the bathtub because the presentation was so effective.

The illustrations that we’ve given for everything that I’ve talked about all coming to one main point, which is always everything serving one main point and one main impact and use that as an example, and then I would suggest with your next presentation, I think that that action steps are fairly straightforward. You’re going to find one main thing that you want the listeners to take away and that will definitely impact them, and then you’re going to use stories and images, memorable situations that people can relate to, and then just know your presentation well enough that you can improvise on those points and it will just be naturally memorable to them.

James: Cool. And I guess I could do something like you and I have done is show their presentation to someone, and then later, ask them what they remembered from it. Would that be useful?

Timothy: Yeah. That’s definitely useful. Just like customer feedback. You find out what stories resonate. I mean comedians do that all the time. Whatever jokes don’t get laughs, they don’t use again.

James: Yeah. And they also go and test regional areas first before they build up to the big city.

Timothy: Right, right. You split test before you send out the big blast.

James: They do. One of my friends and a co-host on my other podcast called KickingBack, Joel Ozborn, is a comedian. He shares ideas and insights. There’s so much relation between comedy, selling, magic; they all have similar ideas where they want your mind to be focused somewhere while they lead you there, and then usually, that’s the setup. And then they have a reveal, which is where the surprise and the delight or the intrigue gets created because you’re somewhere different than what you thought.

I think in the presentation, it’s good if you can use this vivid imagery and stories to move people along. If they can invest in that story and go along with you, then when you have the reveal, the point, or the thing, it should be like a-ha, or an epiphany, or people should just like be in their mind saying, “Yes, I’m going to do this,” or “Oh, that makes so much sense,” or “Now, I can see where I was blind before.”

Timothy: Yes, absolutely. If you’re going to impact people in that way, then that really will move them to action.

James: Well Timothy, thank you for coming back again. We can find out more about your information at masterofmemory.com. I really appreciate you coming along and sharing some of these memory techniques and ideas. It’s fascinating. The brain is such an interesting machine and you’re giving us some of the how-to manual on how to understand it better. But I think most importantly, from this presentation, if you are doing webinars or presentations, that you could actually structure it in a way that’s going to be more useful for your audience, and that’s really the goal of this particular episode. Thanks so much for sharing it with us.

Timothy: Thanks so much for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.

Get expert coaching today. Join our thriving community

Subscribe on iTunes and enjoy more episodes

Share your thoughts: What’s one thing from this episode that really stuck in your mind?

Share on Facebook

Tweet