Crafting Compelling Messages with Chris Hanlon. Transform Your Future w/Eddie Isin. Podcast Ep. 003.

Then in my process, what we work on is your call to action. What is it that you're going to ask them to take action on? And you're ending and really hitting a good solid ending. And then the last thing we work on in crafting the talk is the hook in the opening. And you may have an idea of what your hook's going to be, but we always work on the opening last, and it seems counterintuitive. Most people obviously start with the opening. But the problem with that is if you start with the opening and

you craft this talk, you keep going back to tweak the opening because you've changed where you're going. It's much easier to do the middle first, the ending last, and then do the opening so that you can go, ah, I can foreshadow all this stuff and tell you where this is going to go. And it'll save you a lot of time. Papaya, here we go. Welcome to another episode of Transform Your Future with me, Eddie Isin, where we sit down with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and high achievers as they identify

areas I can improve on and guide me to further my self-improvement practice. Together we look at practical applications and ways to improve current systems and processes and stay focused on my mission. These are honest and open conversations designed to transform your future. For more information and monthly topics of interest, please go to transform your future.com and join our newsletter. Our guest today is Chris Hanlon, a renowned speaker coach who empowers individuals to communicate with cl

arity and passion with over a decade of experience. As the head speakers coach and curator at TEDx Ruakura, Chris has honed the art of public speaking and brought countless ideas to life on the stage. His extensive work with startup accelerators has seen him guiding startup founders through the nuances of investment pitches, ensuring their visions are heard and understood, driven by a mission to amplify the voices of business owners, authors, scientists, and activists. Chris is dedicated to help

ing those with groundbreaking ideas shape their narratives. His approach is tailored to crafting messages that are not only engaging, but also resonate deeply with audiences facilitating the spread of innovation and inspiration across various platforms. Chris will share his insights into transforming your speaking skills into the most powerful tools for change. Welcome, Chris. Hey, Eddie. Great to be here. Thank you. That's a great intro. I love it. Had a lot of punch in there. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

So what sort of experience have you had with speaking? I'm curious. I like to know where we're starting off with. Sure, absolutely. I love it. I love it. Yeah, so my background, I've been speaking and getting up on the stage ever since about 1998/1997 and putting myself out there. I've used it to forward my business endeavors. And I think in some ways I will say that I was an introverted person who became extroverted. I had to learn how to be extroverted. It didn't come naturally to me to just s

tand up and speak in front of an audience or present my ideas. I had to learn how to have the confidence and ability to be able to do that. And over the years, I've refreshed my knowledge of speaking and looked at whatever the latest trends are and what gurus are talking about and tried to apply them to my life. And so most recently, I've looked at the story braid, the story braid model of heart, head, heart offer, that kind of model of connecting with the audience through the heart and then tal

king about from the head what it is you do and what it works, and then going back to close with the heart again, that kind of concept. Oh, that's great. But I'm very interested to learn everything I can because obviously being a great speaker and being able to inspire audiences and connect with audiences, this is what it's all about. And I think that's a good place to start, actually. For listeners, and this is not for you so much as maybe for other people listening, I think you get it. But if y

ou can really articulate your message from the stage, and when I say stage, stage can be like this, a podcast or a zoom call or whatever, but we'll call it stage for the purpose of this conversation, if you can articulate your message effectively from a stage, it doesn't matter what your business is, you become then someone that people chase rather than a business owner chasing those prospects. And so I think that's important to start out with that. There's a why for this. It's not just to strok

e your ego. And many of the best speakers that I've dealt with were really reluctant speakers. They just didn't really want to get on stage, but they either had to because somebody was pushing them to, or they just felt that that was the only way they were going to get their message out. And when you're in that position, it's easy to lose that confidence, right? You're not sure about whether people are actually going to receive your message or what sort of lashing back you're going to get and al

l that sort of thing. So I have a process that I work through that really works to create that confidence as well as articulate your message. So yeah, if you're cool, I'll tell you a little bit about the process. I'll give you a bit of an overview. Yeah. I would like you to do that. I also wanted to just mention that what you're saying is very much resonating with me. When I was in college in 1997 of the classes that I took as an elective was public speaking. So you had to go in there and I forc

ed myself to be in it, and I learned what I could in the class, and then I would present my ideas, and then I learned how to improve what I'm doing and all that. But I won the little award for the best speaker in the class for my talk that I gave at the time, which was very personal about things that I was very much interested in. So I had some real connection to what we were talking about, obviously. So it wasn't like I started talking about something I didn't care about. And so that was very h

elpful. But that was again, how my confidence started to build right there during that process. That was the beginning of building my confidence, which really affected me in more ways than just my ability to speak in front of audiences. That was pretty awesome. So really what you're saying is really resonated with me, man. So yeah, take me through the process. Yeah, actually just before I do, I'll say going back, what really built my confidence was martial arts. I started martial arts quite youn

g. I was pretty shy when I was very small. I grew up really small. I didn't start growing until I was like 18, and I think I was 16 when I started martial arts, but a quick study and I loved teaching. I ended up having to, the green belts would teach the yellow belts or whatever. So I got into that and I ended up teaching adults as a kid because I knew my stuff and it was painful at first, but I got better, did it week after week and I might take a 15 minute out of the two hour session or whatev

er. But looking back, that's what grew my confidence in the first place. But the key is to know what you're talking about. Anyway, let's go through this process. Basically there's a seven step thing that I worked through, and the first thing is clarity. You need to have absolute clarity about what it is that you're talking about, but also why are you getting on stage? Why are you doing this? Because if you jump on stage with a poorly formed, why, then the results you're going to get are going to

be poor because you don't know what you're trying to achieve and you're not going to put together a really good talk that gets your audience to a particular point if you dunno what that point is. So the first thing is clarity. And we spend a lot of time on that generally, and people get frustrated. They go, I thought you were going to teach me how to use my voice and stuff like that. Yeah, that comes. But if you don't spend that base foundational time on clarity and really understanding strateg

ically why you're doing this, what it is you want to achieve and that sort of thing, then everything later becomes harder. The more you can solidify that at the beginning, the easier everything else becomes and every step that I've got in my processes like that. So the next one is understanding the audience and understanding the audience is right. First of all, knowing who your audience is. So if you've got a target audience, if you're a business, you've got prospects, you've got that avatar tha

t you want to attract as your ideal customer, that's cool. But you should also realize there's two audiences every time you're speaking. Even now with this podcast, I'm effectively got two audiences. I've got people that want to speak, and then there's a whole lot of people that will watch this video that aren't really interested. They don't have a business, they're not interested in speaking, which is fine, but if I leave one behind and just focus on the target audience and leave the other audi

ence behind, then particularly in a live environment, they start fidgeting. They start not paying attention, I'm not talking to them, and the whole room feels that vibe and it brings it down and it's less effective. You want it to craft your talk. So you're talking to both audiences. In fact, I used to call it target audience and non-target audience. I changed it a while ago to target audience and your viral audience because those non-target audience, your viral audience, they're the ones you wa

nt to impress with your knowledge because they might not be your target audience. If, for example, if your market was women over 40 for whatever reason, and you are speaking to a group, well, roughly half of them are men and a bunch of them are under 40, right? So if you just talk to the women over 40 and you don't talk to anybody else or capture them in your talk, then you'll lose them. But all those men, most of 'em will have wives or mothers or whatever, and young people have mothers. They kn

ow people in your target market, so you want to bring them on the journey as well. So when they go home, they go, Hey, mom, or hey sis, or whoever, you should check this guy out and that's your viral audience and it takes you viral. And that virality is before the internet. That's like, that's how viral worked before we had the internet. Let me interrupt you one second before you go on. So what you're saying is so really timely for me because I've been meditating about this idea, and it seems li

ke there's a lot of people out there trying to boil people's messages down to one sentence, I help X to do Y, I help X to do Y, I help X to do Y. And so they build all of this talk and all of this stuff around I help X to do Y. What I've been thinking about, which is totally in alignment with what you're saying, is that there's a very small percentage of people who are ready to do whatever it is you're talking about right now, but there's a much larger percentage of people that they're not even

aware that this issue is affecting them and in some way that they could do anything about it. And then there's another group of people who are maybe aware that there's an issue, but they haven't looked at maybe doing anything about it. So it's like a very large part of your market. Wherever you're talking on whatever stage, whether it's a webinar, a podcast, or you're standing in front of an audience or whatever, there's a large group of people who are going to be there that are in those other g

roups, and you've got to open up your talk to talk to everybody. And then yes, you're going to whittle down there at some point to talk about some special thing, but you need to include everybody because like you said, these people, maybe they don't know about it or maybe they don't need it today, but they need to have an open mind about what you're talking to, so you're going to help them. Yeah, I think it's very timely. I think. Timely. Yeah, you're talking about funneling down or the way you

described that, I'd like to think of it as two tracks. You've got two tracks and you're going to take your audience, the whole audience on a journey, and the journey you take, your target audiences is probably focused. Let's be fair. That's your focus and you want to take them to a call to action at the end. Now that call to action might be simply, if you want to know more about me, sign up for a newsletter or whatever, that sort of thing. Or it might be depending on the room or where you're at

by my product, there's a call to action of some description, but you want to have a second track for those that aren't your target audience. You acknowledge that they're not your target audience, but you are taking them to a different call to action. And their call to action is if you know anybody that this might be useful for, share this message with them. Here's how. And that builds that virality into things. That's understanding your audience. And the key thing to understanding your audience

other than understanding there's two of them, is where are they at right now? Now, if you are in an industry event, these people might know a lot about the product or industry or whatever it is you are talking about if you're in a general event. So I coach the TEDx for ages. That's a general audience. They don't know about whatever the speaker's talking about, the smart people, they know a lot of things, but they don't know about butterflies or whatever it is that the speaker's talking about. So

you need to cover enough that you are not throwing out jargon that they don't understand. So you need to know where audience is at, what they already know and what the common misconceptions are that people in this sort of audience might think about what you are talking about. And because always some things, right? And what the competition is or what competing ideas to your idea is. So that's the understanding your audience piece. And again, the more time you spend working that out and figuring

that out in sort of general terms, and then when you've got a gig booked, that particular audience get an idea of where they're at, the easier everything else becomes, and it builds your confidence. And confidence is the thing that everybody worries about or complains about. I'll share some tips on how you can bolster that a little bit later too. So those are the first two, understand your audience and clarity. Then the next thing, once you understand your audience, that's the starting point of

the journey. So you start here and you're going to go to here. So what's the end point? And the end point is that call to action, buy my thing or whatever it is. I want you to believe this thing. Currently you believe this thing. I want you to believe this thing. Now, there are two journeys going on. Again, two tracks, and you sort of mentioned it before with the braid method is that there's the logical and then there's the emotional journey, and you want to take them on both. But I focus on the

logical first and the logical is this is what, this is where I want to take you. This is the journey we're going to go on. And through that journey, there's a bunch of gates, I call them objection gates. So these are some objections that people have because if they didn't have any objections, they'd already believe what you want them to believe. So you need to start listing those objections. And they might be, grandma always did it this way, this is the common way things are done, or I don't be

lieve that's possible. I didn't even know about that. Whatever those objections are, and noticeably money as an objection if it's a sales type environment is one of the last ones because you want to put them in order. If you answer them in the right order, people will follow you on the journey. But if you answer the wrong thing or answer it in a wrong order, so we talk about money first. People aren't interested because they don't see the benefit and they have other objections. And if you're ans

wering these objections as you go along, and then they're going, no, I'm thinking about this other thing. No, I don't believe that. I don't believe that. And then you answer their objection and they go, oh, that makes sense. What was all that other stuff you talked about? They weren't paying attention. So you've got to get that sort of in the right order. It doesn't have to be perfect, but in basic terms, and those objections we answer with stories. It's not a lecture we are going to create or u

se stories that already have, but we want to know which objections they're answering in what order, and then we layer on the emotional journey. And like you say, there's an up down emotional journey which we go through. So that's the heart of crafting your talk. Then in my process, what we work on is your call to action. What is it that you're going to ask them to take action on and your ending and really hitting a good solid ending. And then the last thing we work on in crafting the talk is the

hook and the opening. And you may have an idea of what your hook's going to be, but we always work on the opening last, and it seems counterintuitive. Most people obviously start with the opening, but the problem with that is if you start with the opening and you craft this talk, you keep going back to tweak the opening, you've changed where you're going. It's much easier to do the middle first, the ending last, and then do the opening so that you can go, I can foreshadow all this stuff and tel

l you where this is going to go, and it'll save you a lot of time doing that. And then after the opening, we work on performance. So you've got your whole talk, then you've got your opening close, your whole middle thing. Then we do the performance. And what is amusing, well, interesting, and it's human nature, is that most people jump straight to either the performance or the opening and closing. That's where they go first and they forget all that other stuff, which as I said, is the foundation

for everything else. And then after performance, one of the more advanced things I deal with is q and a, because there's a whole area there that most people don't worry about. And there's some real interesting stuff you can do through q and a, some. Real opportunities. Yeah, because if somebody asks a question and you answer that question, well, really articulately answer that question, you get more credibility and authority for answering that question. Then if you put that same thing in the ta

lk, because they're like, oh, of course you would've said that because you practiced it. But the feeling is that if they've asked you that question that was off the cuff, and if you answer that really well, they go, wow, this guy really knows what he's talking about. They can just memorize some speech. And yeah, you've practiced that and you've come across some amazing salesmen in your life, we all have, and you can throw out a question and they can handle it so well, and you go, damn, you're go

od, right? But they've done it a hundred times, a thousand times. So they come across as being in the moment, which they are, but they've spent the time crafting their answer. And so if you craft some particular answers that are curly questions that will come up at some point, even common questions with a really good answer. And instead of putting it in, you talk, you seed it into the question. So people ask that question and you answer it in that way, you'll get far better credibility and autho

rity from answering the question than you would if you talked about it. Yeah. I see that dynamic, how that works. Yeah, absolutely. Great opportunities and questions. Absolutely. Yeah. And I will say one other thing about q and a, which I'm absolutely passionate about and do, tell me to shut up and stop talking if I go too long. I love this stuff, but the q and a, never end your talk with the q and a, just do not do that. It's the absolute wrong thing to do. So what happens, and tell me if this

resonates with you, if you've come across this before, but what happens with a q and a is you finished your talk, you've come up to some crescendo of a point call to action, all the rest of it, and you go any questions. And the first couple of questions are fantastic. They're really good, and they go deep into it. And then there's a bit of a pause and somebody asks you a question that's not so good, and there's a bit of a pause and somebody asks you a question, and then the quality of the questi

ons just drop down until it's like, what did you have for breakfast this morning? And it's just meaningless. And then you walk off stage to a whimper, you've lost all that momentum. It took the thunder out of it. And I've seen it a hundred times. I'm sure you've seen it before as well. So this is what you do if you want to do q and a, which you don't always, and in TEDx we didn't do q and a, but if you want to do q and a, which as I said is a good thing, you craft your talk and you have a false

closing sort of round off and you go, so what I'm going to do before we finish up, I'm going to ask a few questions and then I'm going to round it all up, and then you take your questions there. That way when you get the feeling that, oh, the good questions are gone, I'm starting to get into the not so good questions, you go back to your finishing off and your last piece is just a little bit of a recap on what you did, maybe a twist, whatever, and build that momentum backup, and that's where you

r call to action is, and then you can walk off stage at the high point. That's my big tip for anybody speaking particularly at conferences and things like that, whether the common thing is, oh, and at the end we have q and a. Yes. Yeah. So the first one in your process is clarity. Yep, clarity. That's the first step. So in clarity, you mentioned to really understand why you're doing this, what is your purpose of doing this? Can you expand about a little bit about that? Because I think sometimes

people are a little bit too reductive and their answers are, well, I'm doing this because I want new clients, but I don't think that's what you mean. I think you mean real clarity about why you have a passion inside of you or a reason that you are doing this and talking about this thing, your connection to it. That's really what you're kind of talking about, right? Yeah, absolutely. But there are different levels and you do need to cover the different levels. So what you say reductive, there is

a strategic level, so the clarity around the strategic is important as well, or tactical I should say. So tactical is the lower level, and tactical may be the whole point for this talk is these are people that never heard of me and I want 'em to know who I am and I want 'em to sign up for my newsletter or something like that. So that's the tactical level, but you're right at the higher level, the strategic level you clarity is right. Why do people need to hear this message anyway? What is my mes

sage? Why do people need to hear my message? What is that going to do for them? And I mean really do for them, not, oh, they're going to make some money. No, what does they're making some money for argument's sake mean to them. What's that going to do in terms of their lifestyle or their change of their job or whatever? So I've done a lot of work with activism of different types through TEDx mostly and stuff like that. So social and cultural change or climate change is a good one. So if you were

doing a climate change, getting that clarity about what is it that people are going to get out of this talk, we don't want them to feel doom and gloom, like they're powerless. That's not going to help anyone. It's just going to make them feel bad. You're going to feel bad. It doesn't win. There's no win there. So what's the point of the talk is maybe to empower them or how can we empower them? And so that's what I mean by clarity, getting really in the granular level of both the high level of w

hy am I doing this at all? And also at the tactical level. So the ultimate outcome of this particular talk to this particular audience is this. That's what I really want to happen here. So yeah, that's my clarity of strategic and tactical objectives. Does that answer your question? That does, that does, that does. So I like it. And the second step was. Understand your audience. Understand the audience, and what's a way that we can understand our audiences? Obviously we're on a stage, maybe it's

a podcast. And so understanding the audience of the podcast and who are the people who are going to be interested in transforming your future and transforming their lives to better themselves and grow personally and professionally. So there's a couple of ways to do that, and it depends on what this speaking opportunity is. So if you're, you are in the industry and you have a specific target audience and you are in front of that target audience, you pretty much would know that audience in a gener

al terms, your target audience, and if you are doing accounting for businesses, what businesses are like and what their problems with. So there's that level, but there's also, like you say, more the tactical level. I'm going on this stage in front of these people. So there's a couple of things with that. When I was coaching the TEDx, we knew our audience really well. We had people come back year after year and we knew them, and we went to other TEDxs in the area, and the same audience moves arou

nd them, they go to any of them. So I knew that audience really, really well. So when I was coaching our speakers, I knew what the audience was, so that was easy in my case, and it helped those speakers. If you are speaking at a particular conference, it helps if you've either been there before or if you can say, Hey, if you've got videos of previous conferences, can I have a quick look at them? I just need to get an idea of where this is aimed at and if that's possible. That's one thing, talkin

g to those people that you're going to speak in front of. So if I was to speak for a particular industry group and I didn't really know these guys that well, I would ask the prior and say, Hey, can you get me in touch with four or five people that are going to be attending that? I just need to have a bit of a chat with them so I get an idea of what they expect out of the conference in total, my talk in particular and where they're at. And if I can do that little bit of a survey, jump on the phon

e or zoom just for 15 minutes with each of 'em just to get a feel for it, that can make a huge difference, right? Sure. Wow. And then what I did with you for this. That's a big nugget right there. Oh, good. What I did for you with this is I don't know any of your listeners, and I assumed you, well, I didn't ask that question of you, but what I did was watch your previous episodes so I could see where you're at, where you're going, and from that, I sort of get a feeling for who that audience is.

You know what I mean? So if you are going to be on a podcast for anybody out there, if you're going to be on a podcast, definitely don't just show up to a podcast without watching it, at least a few half a dozen previous podcasts just to get a feel for what the vibe is, what you're trying to do, all that sort of thing. Yeah. Very good stuff right there. I really like the surveying of attendees. That is so much of a gold nugget that you just gave everybody. It's a pro thing too, right? Because yo

u know that the majority of the people speaking there won't do it unless it's a very professional event. So if you want, one of the whole points of doing the speaking thing is to stand out. If you do it well, you stand out. That's the whole point. So you do these things. So then maybe even when you find out these information about, you find out these individual pieces of information about why these people are 10, what is this going to give them? What are they trying to accomplish? Then you can t

hen steer your talk a little bit in those directions so that you can engage with that audience. I think that's awesome. Yeah, because often what you'll find is I talk about one subject, but there's a lot of aspects to that subject. And if I was talking to somebody, it might come across that actually these guys don't have any problem with confidence. They know their thing. What they have problem is putting the story together for argument's sake, or it could be the emotional side. We're really goo

d with the logic. We're not very good with emotional. So I can go, right, that's what I'm going to really hit home on the, or give them something they can take away on that talk. So that's really useful. Your process when you're coaching people on this to become a better speaker and to engage with the audience, how do you incorporate the tactical, strategic, emotional, logical? How do you help them to put all of that together? Yeah. So I've got a framework, as I said, I call it the pitching pyra

mid. I wanted my own pyramid scheme. No, I call it a pitching pyramid because the talking triangle sounded lame. So it is a pyramid diagram that the whole idea is the bottom layer is bigger and you can't build the next layer until you've got that one through. So we go through that process, but the first part is really just getting them to talking and getting that clarity and talking through it. When we get to start crafting the talk, what I do is I play, it's very much you need to play. I strong

ly believe, and I cannot stress this enough, there is no right or wrong answer in anything in life really. There's a better way of doing it and a worse way of doing it. And we want to try them and go with the better try them and go with the better. So I'll often say to somebody they're putting something together and go, why don't we try switch the order around? So instead of talking about that first, you're talking about that they won't understand it straight away, but it gives them more of a pa

yoff when you give the next thing. So we'll switch that order and try it. You draw them in suspense. Yeah. Yeah. So I call it, so the linear structure is like A, B, C, D. It's linear. And when it's linear, if it starts out linear, even if you've got a surprise twist at the end, people start to lose interest because they think they know what's coming. What I like to use is, I call it the puzzle structure of a talk is where you throwing them into different places and they're like, I don't understa

nd where you're coming from. And it engages the brains because we are human beings. We're puzzle solving people. So a great example of this is Quentin Tarantino films, right? Yes. Love it. You watch the first scene and you're like, who are these people? How did they get here? They've got guns at each other, what's going on? And then it goes to a next scene, which might've been three years prior, and you recognize one of the characters and they're doing something. And every one of those scenes ha

s to have its own power and its own internal thing that keeps you going. But in the back of your mind, you're putting the pieces together and you're solving that puzzle he presented at the beginning. So that near the end you go, that's how they all got there. Now I know what's going on. Ooh, what's going to happen next? So we want to do that with our talks as well. If you're going to do a really good talk. Now, I have to sort of probably say at this point, there are things that you will jump on

stage and talk about what you know, and I haven't created a talk for this podcast interview, but if you are going to end up on a TEDx stage, which is going to be on the TED platform for the next 50 years, that'd better be a damn good talk. And you're going to put a lot of work into that. And so that talk, you're going to use this puzzle structure, all the tricks that you, but you're not going to do that for the Rotary Club down the road maybe unless you're practicing it. You know what I mean? Ye

ah. Yeah. Or maybe it's a different format. The format of this show is more of an interview than you just speaking on a stage. Yeah, absolutely. No, I love it. And of course I love it when you talk about movies. I've been a filmmaker since I was 16, and it informs my life, and it's what my big love every day I have to watch a movie. So yeah, I love the inclusion of the movie narrative there. And Aristotle's Poetics set it from the beginning "in medias res", start in the middle where there's the

action, and then you go back and tell them how we got there. Yeah, that's awesome. Cool. I didn't know you did the movie making thing because I've been doing filmmaking for the last, no, probably 10 years as well. So. Oh my God, all these devices have to talk. It's like you like the talking in devices, and then when you want them to be quiet, I need one button that'll just make everything silent. I remembered to mute my phone before we started. I've had that go before. I'm like, yeah. And I like

the puzzle framework. I like that idea. Yeah, it just seems like, well, it's the way we think is linear. That's kind of like how we think, right? So I'm going to tell a story and I start at the beginning of the story and take you to the next part of the story and the next part, and then it ends here at this part, and then this was when it all came together. So I like that idea of cutting it up and mixing it around to make it more interesting and to draw the viewers in so they follow you. Yeah,

I could see how if you go A, B, C, they're going to like, well, next is obviously D because that's. Next. And even if you've got a surprise plan, they start drifting off and they start thinking about what they're going to have for dinner tonight and stuff. But what I started answering, to be honest, my long roundabout way to answer your question is in the coaching I will say, let's switch these things around and let's try it. And 50% of the time, maybe we'll try it and I'll go, no, that didn't w

ork. Let's switch it back. And sometimes it'll be better, but most often it won't quite be there. But we've changed a few things here and there and we go, Hey, what if we do this and this? Put those together and suddenly you've got magic. You've got something that you never would've got to before. So I really do a lot of that play with people. Now, some people don't handle that well, so we get some engineers sometimes and they're very linear thinking, and there's a right and a wrong, and you are

saying, no, no, let's try this. Let's try that. Because like I said, there's no right or wrong. There's a better and worse, and our job is just to find it. So I really believe that. So I have a little problem with gurus as a rule because gurus will always say, this is the way to do it. And it's like, no, that's a way to do it. It's not necessarily a bad way, and it might be a good way, but it doesn't mean it's the best way. I think that's always a better way. We just haven't discovered it yet.

So yeah, that's my coaching philosophy. I also really like the way that you do it in a playful open way to let's just try some different things out. I mean, I think a lot of the success in my life has come because of my willingness to just try some different things and see does it work? Does it not work? What are my results? Maybe I need to change it. And just being open to do that rather than being so stoic and fixed in my ways and my ideas. Yeah, that's a good point actually. And I hadn't come

across this till recently, this piece of advice that I'm going to give now, but if you're listening to this and you are thinking, well, I don't know how to get into that play thing, I'm so regimented in the way I approach things. What I'd recommend you do if that's you, is to find a local improv group and just join. They have beginners classes. And like I said, it's only been, I mean, I've watched it on TV and stuff, but it's only been in the last five years I think that I started, I went to an

improv group and I felt pretty comfortable with it anyway with what I do, but I could see how that would really help people that have got into quite a regimented way of thinking, and this will help open you up to be able to do that. So very powerful. Yeah. So I'm just curious. I know I might be jumping around a little bit, but we were talking about audiences and how we treat the audience with crafting our talk for the audience to keep them engaged and involved. What about how you interact with

the audience, with your body and your eyes and things like that? Yeah, so when we've gone through this, when we get to the performance stage, the performance stage incorporates a lot of stuff. So I'll go through just an overview of the whole lot and we'll get to justice particularly. So it incorporates the words you use. A lot of that is actually in the writing, but the way you speak them and where you put pauses in and where you get excited and really go for it and where you slow down and bring

it back, and all of that is this performance aspect. And I always, with the TEDx speakers, I was like, I want you to think of this as if you're giving a play, you're doing a song, it's a performance, it's not a speech. You're not standing behind a lectern reading and talking. This is a performance. So in that performance, there are moments, there are big moments, and those big moments you want to really put things across. One of those is using a gesture or it could be using the stage to your ad

vantage. So I remember, well, there's a couple of examples in the people I've coached where if they were talking, so they're talking about past and future. If they're talking about the future, they'd take a couple of steps this way and they talk away. And when they're talking about the past, they'd sort of move and they talk from this way. And as they go through the talk, they only had to move and people knew where they're at because we quickly connect those things in our mind. And you've seen c

omedians do that where they're playing two different characters and they'll be hearing and each other. You only have to see it a couple of times and what's going on. So there are a lot of movement things that you can do that add to your talk that don't cost much, but it's just a little bit of thinking and a little bit of practicing. So movement and gestures, I use my hands a lot. You probably notice you should be however you feel most comfortable. If I tried to talk and keep my hands by my side,

it would look awkward because I would feel awkward. Equally, if you are naturally sort of relaxed and you have your hands by your side, then you trying to do gestures doesn't really work. Although when you do the big gesture for that big point, that's really important. Stagecraft and performance also comes down to a lot of props. So we talk about props quite a bit, and the biggest prop of course is PowerPoint, right? Your slides. So this is really important, and this is one of my bug bears As m

uch as possible, I tried to wean everybody off the slides. I don't want to see a bunch of text on the wall and that sort of thing, just like a. Bullet point, just like put a bullet. Point of doing something, a bullet point, or even just an image that you are going to talk to. So you want the spotlight on you because it's about you, right? If you have put up a slide and you've got this major point and everybody's looking at the slide, when you make the point, they're looking up there at the slide

, and then that's what they remember is the slide, not you. So what I always do, or what I usually do is we'd start off with a black slide. We'd have blank slides in there all the time, and we'd have them interspersed and you start off with a blank slide so that they're not looking at the slide, they're looking at you and you click a slide, they'll look at the slide and you click it to blank, their heads just turn and they're looking at you. So when you get to those main points, you might be tal

king through something and sometimes you need slides, abstract theories and things. You just can't do it without a slide, and that's all good. But when you get to that point where you really want to hit the impact, you click it, the slide goes black, and all their eyes just come to you, and then you deliver that with impact. And who do they remember? They remember you. They were looking at you when they heard that. And it's such a simple thing and it's so powerful. And people, I see people not d

oing it all the time because they dunno. Yeah. So I dunno if I answered what you wanted. To know about. Well, no, you answered a lot about that. What about your eyes focusing your eyes? I've heard a lot of different people who specialize in coaching people for speaking and speaking their messages, and I've heard a lot of different opinions about your eyes. Do you scope the room? Do you focus on one individual? Do you actually take the time to focus on different individuals around the room at dif

ferent times? What is your belief on that? Okay, I'll tell you what I do myself and what I coach others to do. And again, I'll do that caveat. There's no right or wrong. There's different ways. So the way I like to do it is I will, even when I'm practicing, it's an important talk that I'm crafting and I'm really working on, when I'm practicing in my room by myself here, I will look at different points for different parts of the sentence, and then at a sentence break, I'll probably move it around

and then I'll get to a point and I'll then look somewhere else and I'll practice just looking around as I'm giving the talk just to get comfortable with that. Now, the reason that that's quite good to do in a blank room facing a wall is because a lot of people don't realize with a lot of these talks, and I've been there many times, is you get on stage and you cannot see anyone. The lights are too bright. You might see the first row, but if you are talking to the first row the whole time, all yo

u can see it looks terrible. So if you've practiced facing a wall and doing this, and then I just switch from six quadrants there, middle up there, up there, down middle, down there, down, and I sort of switch from where to there. If you practice doing that, when you're practicing your talk against a wall, when you're on stage and the lights are so bright, you can't see anyone, you're not discombobulated. The body knows I've done this before. When I do this, I just switch every in a natural brea

k in the sentence or whatever, and I'll switch to another view and keep going from the audience point of view, that makes it feel like the speaker is engaging you because they're looking at different people in the audience rather than looking like a deer in headlights looking straight ahead. So for what it's worth, that's what I recommend from a confidence point of view when people lose it, right? So we've all had that moment. This isn't exactly to your question, but this is one of the things th

at comes up so much. We'll talk about it. People have a stress reaction and they lose the plot sometimes. And psychologically what happens is you end up in a loop in your head and the loop goes something like, oh my God, what do they think of me? Is usually the type of thing. Are they thinking I'm this, and then, oh, I better not forget something, or else they'll think I'm stupid, but I can't remember what it is. And you end up in this loop and you can't get out of it. And the key to that is tho

se loops always happen when you start thinking about yourself. If you're thinking about the audience, you won't have that. And one of the ways to do that is if you start feeling that I'm thinking about myself too much, focus on one individual in the audience and think, is he getting it or she getting it? Are they getting it? And keep talking and watching them to see if they get it. And when you bring that focus out of your own head to that person to see if they're getting it, you've lost that lo

ops broken and you are good again, and then you can go back to moving around. But that's the only time I really say focus on one person, and it's to help you by not focusing on you. Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. So. Please go on about the process. So I forget already. Yeah, yeah. I know we were talking about once you were talking about the hook at one point and redoing the hook. Yeah, so once you've done the audience journey, there's the logical and emotional journey.

And I guess we haven't talked about the emotional, so I just mentioned that briefly. Yes, please. The key thing with emotion we need to realize is that emotion is all about contrast. You can't have, I want to do a happy talk, and it's just happy the whole way through. That's, that's boring. It doesn't work. You can't do that. You've got to have contrast as a filmmaker, you've got to have the ups and the downs or it's not going to work. So when we are creating an emotional journey, we want to ha

ve an idea of where they are, start with, and we just baseline, we assume neutral, but if possible, if we know who's going to speak before us and where they're going to, that would be handy to know maybe. Or we might be after lunch, which we know they're feeling a bit dozy, so we have an idea of where they're at the beginning. We need to understand where we want them to be, what we want them to feel at the end. And the fairly base emotions, one of the most common you'll want at the end is inspir

ed. You want them feeling inspired or motivated, right? I mean, there's a bunch of people that want people to feel scared at the end. The building fear, I'm not a big fan of that, but whatever it is, you want to be at the end, inspired, motivated. So if inspired, motivated is the end, you've got to work your way back and you sort of go, right? So where are these contrasts that we're going to do? So we've got to have it down before that, and we've got to have it up before the down, and we've, and

we're going to work that back. And you already have an idea, now you've got your logic of your talk, your bulk written out, and the stories you're going to say. And any story you know can tweak the story to get a particular emotion out of it. If you've got a particular emotion, you go, this has got to be happy. So I'll just put more emphasis on that solution at the end. And yes, we won, or same story, we need to bring it down. At that point, we're going to put the emphasis on how hard that was

the problem and how it almost broke us or whatever the fact is. So that's why I write the talk, the logical journey first. So we know the stories we're going to tell what order we're going to tell them in. We've got that sort of worked out. And then we go, okay, now let's overlay this emotion. Where do we want to end? How are we going to contrast? So you've got the up downs, and it depends on how long that talk is. If it's 15 minutes, you may only have one or two ups, and that's it. You're endin

g on the second up. If it's a 90 minute keynote, which is the biggest thing, then obviously two ups is not going to take people through the whole thing. And basically you're going to actually, the way I look at a 90 minute anyway is three 30 minute talks stuck together. That's how I do it. So you've gone up and down and that section up and down and that section up and down, that section. So that's the emotional journey. Then the hook and opening we work on that is we want to grab their attention

, give a bit of a promise, but also have a little bit of a takeaway where we're teasing them, right? We're teasing them with something we are going, we talked about before the Tarantino thing, we were presenting them with something and they're like, I don't get it. I don't know how that works or I don't understand what you mean, but in a tantalizing way, in a compelling enough way that you want to find out. So Tarantino does that really well. There's high stakes in the scene that you created. Yo

u're going going on, but you can't just turn the TV off then and walk away. You're like, no, I need to understand what's going on. So you need that with your opening. And so you want to tease them. You want to make a bit of a promise. You want to grab their attention, but you want them questioning and wanting more. Obviously, it's easy to say that harder to do it, and I can't give any more specifics about that. It's a case by case thing, right? It's a simple idea, but not so easy to just make it

happen. Yes, I understand. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. So that's the opening. We talked a bit about performance with performance. One of the other things I'll mention, so I talked about this loop that we can get into, and it doesn't matter how experienced you are, you can fall into this loop mental loop at a moment's notice, even if you're really experienced. I've had it myself, right? I'm like, how come I dropped into that? I know this stuff. I've been years since I've had a moment l

ike that on stage. But it happens, right? So what we did, I developed this years ago, and it works beautifully. Well, at first I think it worked because I told them this was the way it worked, but I'd made it up and I didn't know if it actually worked that way. But just the fact that they had this thing we called the escape hatch, just because they knew it was there, that knowledge that was there meant they didn't need it and they were good. But one year somebody absolutely had to use it. So let

me explain the escape hatch. If you find yourself way into this loop, you need to break out of it. It's really hard to do. So what we did is at the corner of the stage, just at the back of the stage, just behind the speaker, so you've got the red dot with TEDx, we had a little side table, three upside down glasses and a jug of water. And I said, this is the escape hatch. If you end up choking, you're just like, I'm freezing. I want you to cough, just need some water. Go to that thing, turn over

the glass, pour the water into the glass and have a sip. Come back. And the psychology of this is when your brain has to do something, you're in front of 400 people, I think we had in the room. Most of the time, you're pouring water in front of 400 people. You're not going to spill it all over the floor. You are focusing on that water being poured into the thing. You have a sip, it breaks that loop. And our speakers knew what they were talking. We drilled them for three months, three or four mo

nths. We worked with each of our speakers on their talk, so they knew their talks really well. Had the sip come back. By the time you got back, you are out of the loop and where you're at. And so this one girl, she did that. I know I knew her talk all my speakers, I knew their as well as they did. I've been working with them for months on it. And sometimes people would swap things around in the moment, and it was fine. The audience would never know, but I knew exactly what they were doing and I

could tell. Anyway, she sort of froze and then she did this coughing thing and she went and had some water, came back, and she just gave the rest of the talk perfectly. No problem at all. But I was interested. So in the break later, I said, oh, what did you think about this woman's talk? Oh, it was great. What do you think about when she had to take a glass of water? And they just looked to me like, whatcha talking about? They didn't even remember it. And of course, the video doesn't show that w

e edited bit out, so it works beautifully well. So I recommend that to anyone who has that anxiety about this sort of thing, to create that mechanism that will get you out of the torque. The water thing was just perfect for that sort of thing because all of us know what it's like with a dry throat. Oh, you grab some water, we don't think about it. We don't judge you for having to drink some water. And it takes your mind out of the situation and gives you that time, just that moment to come back

and you'll be fine straight after. So that's valuable. Yeah, I think it's great visual also, because I'm reminded John Houston gave an acceptance speech many years ago when he was alive and when he came into the Academy Award to give the acceptance speech, he had a bottle of champagne and a champagne glass, and he started his moment to accept this award by taking a moment to pour the champagne into the glass and hold it up to the audience. And that's the only thing I really remember about the ta

lk because it was such a what confidence this person has to come up to the mic and hold everybody with just pouring some champagne, a glass. So I just think the visual of somebody confident enough to stop, let me get a drink right now, pour the water and take a drink. It's a good visual. That is showmanship. That really is when I talk about performance, that is performance. Because one of the hardest things, and you're probably aware of this, is that one of the hardest things to do on stage is t

o have silence and just shut up and look at your audience because everything in your brain is screaming. They're looking at you. You need to do something or say something, but the more you can hold that moment, the more power you have. So all of our speakers, we would get them out there and I say, right, you walk out onto your dot, you stand on there, take that moment to breathe, route yourself in, look at the audience and smile because you are there for them, but they're there for you as well.

So welcome them with your eyes and take that moment of pause, get yourself stabilized, and then start. One of the best things that Tedx did, it was brilliant, really was having that red dot and people don't realize it. And this goes back to what the question you asked before about the movement, which I didn't really address to this level, was they have that red dot because you stand on the dot and you give your talk and it stops this movement. So a lot of people will walk back and forth across t

he stage. Now I'm naturally a walker. I used to pace around the coffee table when I was a kid, when I had something on my mind. I like to go for a walk when I'm trying to think things through. So I get the idea of that, but you do not want to walk and talk. You want to stand and deliver when you're talking. If you are going to move, you stop talking, you move, you get rooted and then you talk. You never walk and talk. So the red dot has that function, but the other part of that is that all the l

ights and all the cameras are set for that red dot. If you were walking across the stage, you're in shadow, your lights going up and down, the camera's got to focus in and out. It's appalling, but they have this red dot because they light everything perfectly for the dot because obviously the TEDx thing or Ted thing is all about the video. It's a big part of it. So you want to have that right. And then when we talk about that sort of thing, the performance also includes what are you going to wea

r? So this is what I'm wearing now is the closest I could get to a patent top without going crazy into the Moray thing, which is that you get that sort of illusion of certain pattern tops for those that don't know. So you don't want that. If you've got a black background, you don't want to be walking in there with a black shirt and a black pants. You're just a floating head on the video. So equally, if it's a red curtain behind you, you don't want to be wearing red. You don't want to disappear i

n the background. So you need to think about what you're going to wear. You also, particularly for the women, you have to think about, okay, there's going to be a mic pack. Where's that going to hang? We had one girl who picked out a dress before she even got the gig, I think she was like, I'm going to wear this dress. I bought this dress. I'm like, you have to put a belt on it. I don't want to put a belt on it. Where are you going to put the mic pack? You've got to put a belt on it. And it's li

ke, oh, okay. So little things like that. And also dangly earrings. If you've got the mic thing on your head here, those dangly earrings will hit the mic, your head mic, and it's really annoying. Not to mention the visuals could be offputting, but so there's a lot of little things that I cover in performance that includes that costuming stuff always recommend or you always said with the guys, bring what you're going to wear and a backup change of clothes with different colors just in case. And w

e had a dress rehearsal with the cameras there the day before anyway, and that was good. If you can do that, the dress rehearsal day before with everything looking the same is fantastic. Because what we also did when we did that is we had our cameraman there taking photos. So the practicing on the stage as it's going to look in the same clothes and we have the cameraman taking photos of her and that afternoon they're writing little quotes on those photos and then on the day when they're giving t

hose, our social media team's just posting those out in the moment as they're giving, it's a very effective professional way to do it. That is awesome. I haven't heard many speakers who speak about speaking and becoming a better speaker. I've never heard anybody as thorough as you about all the aspects of it. I think it's fantastic. Cool. I told you you have to stop me talking. I love this stuff and I could just go on for dates. Clearly. Clearly. And you've thought a lot about it and you've prac

ticed it a lot, and really I think that shows, I think it really a hundred percent shows. So what have you learned out of this? What will you do different from what I've said today? I'm curious. Well, one thing for sure is I haven't considered really understanding the different audiences when I'm speaking, and that's definitely was a big nugget that you gave there of really some useful ways that I can understand what they want, what they want to avoid, why they would come to an event like this,

what are they expecting to get out of it that I could see would be really helpful in organizing my talk around that and including that so that I can engage them. I think that was for me, the biggest one. But I think there was so much though. I like that it's much more about performance also, that we need to consider all these things just as if you were an actor going out on stage doing a performance, including costume wardrobe changes and speaking when you're not moving and all those kinds of th

ings, which I think sometimes I feel like I'm a good speaker and I know what I'm talking about and I know how to connect to an audience and I could just wing it. Don't worry about it. I could just wing it, but I could see how I could be much more effective by not winging it. I could be much more effective by not talking when I walk and stopping centering myself and then doing it again. I think in general, mostly I notice I need to take more natural pauses when I'm speaking rather than just speak

ing. If you deliver a big line, you want to stop on that line and let it sink in. Too many times people are nervous, they drop a gem and then they keep talking and it doesn't give the audience time to take that in. And I see it all the time when my speakers are practicing and it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You drop that. That's a mic drop moment. You let it sit and let them get that. Often when you do that unintentionally, it's not the intention of doing that. You'll get a round of applause

at that point because the audience knows what you've said gets the importance and you've shut up. They feel it's their turn to do something and you obviously often get applause, although that's not the reason you do it. So yeah. I've had a great time talking to you about all these things and I do feel that we could continue to talk and I could learn a lot more from you right now, but I don't want to monopolize your time today. And I do know you have an offer and I definitely want to be part of t

hat offer. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so I've got this thing, so this is my thesis at the moment. AI is huge right now. I mean, I use AI for different things, a lot of research type stuff and trying to work out different ways of saying something or doing something. It's a great idea generator, but what I think is going to happen is that there's going to be a flood of information generated by ai. Any course you will be created by AI and they're all be for sale or free or whatever

. And a lot of them will be fairly low value really. And so courses are not going to be the thing in the future. I think the big thing that's going to happen, or what I believe will happen anyway, is that workshops where we work together. I'm not sending you on a course, I'll give you a little bit of information and teach you how to do something, but you are going to do that and I'm going to give you feedback. So that's sort of what I want to send to my business around this year is this idea aro

und doing smaller workshops for people. But again, this is a thesis, so I'm still putting it all together. So at the moment I'm working on a hook and creation workshop, so we're just working on how to create a hook and opening for your talk, or it could be for an offer or a product because the same sort of thing. And it's going to be a couple of hours and it'll be a smallish group. I'm thinking six to 10 people maybe. So I'm still testing this. So what I want is some beta testers, so it'll be fr

ee to do this workshop with me on the basis you give me some feedback and maybe a testimonial if you like to, that sort of thing. So anybody, if you're listening to this and you're interested in doing that, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm sure we'll have the link there. And just when you do the connection in that little connection box, write the note hook and create hook creation workshop or hook creation, and I'll put you on the list and as soon I'm ready to start doing that, I'll get you in t

here and we'll do some work together. It'd be great. Excellent, excellent. And you totally delivered on powerful tools for changing my talk to the better. For sure. I've got a lot of work to, I got to roll up my sleeves and get down and dirty again and redo my whole talk. I think it's awesome. That's good. Well, I appreciate what you're doing. I think this is a great focus for a podcast, the Transform Yourself and the episodes I've watched so far. I really enjoy it. And I think you're a great in

terviewer. Thank. You. Yeah. Hey, I'm grateful for the great people that I meet and build relationships with. I mean, I found you, we started talking, we hit it off, and now you're on the podcast. We'll see what's next for us together. Absolutely, absolutely. Before we go, is there anything that I haven't asked you about or we haven't spoken about that you want to bring up? I do know that I actually think it was kind of interesting. You were talking about Spookers and how you were involved in th

e Spookers and how you've learned some things and you're exploring your ideas of how to scare people and still get a result that you want. Yeah, so just to give context to that, I was working at Corporate Telecom New Zealand, in New Zealand, and I was working at Telecom New Zealand, and I got made redundant. I was a trainer there and that sort of thing. I got made redundant. I was like, I got a decent redundancy payout. I'm like, what do I want to do? I don't want to jump into another corporate

job right now. And so I spent a year acting and I did ads and TV series AMC and different networks and bits and pieces. It was great. I had a ball, I'm not like an A-list actor or even B list. There was a lot of extra work, that sort of thing basically. And because I was into filmmaking, I was more interested in watching how they were doing everything. And I was getting paid to be there. It was great. But one of the jobs I took on was a local scare attraction called Spookers in New Zealand. And

so it's a live show. People come through, there's a couple of acres of forestry and haunted house and all that sort of thing. And I would be do the makeup thing and be a spook. And what I found was I took notes on this because there was a lot of elements of what I'd refer to as social engineering to give the audience the experience thereafter. And so that comes down to the sounds, the music that was played and the sound effects that would happen around the rooms. The lighting was huge, having th

ose shadows that you could literally just step out of. So I could see, I'd be in the shadows, I could see them, they couldn't see me. My eyes had adjusted and the lights were on either side of me and I could step out and really give people a fright. And then the little act that you would put together for that night of the story, that would be intimidating or even funny sometimes, but it's a scary, funny, those sorts of things coming together. And it was a great experience to do that work. And li

terally I took pages and pages and notes over. I did it for about a year. I finished just before Covid because Covid started coming out and the attraction shut down and I haven't gone back to it. But yeah, that was an interesting experience. And I know you mentioned that your talk would be, what was it? What was the title of the talk? What I Learned About Social Engineering by scaring people? Yeah, I thought that would be an interesting Ted Talk, and I'm still keen to do that. I've just got so m

any other things on at the moment that it hasn't happened, but it's been stewing my head for a year or so now. And after I mentioned that to you, I went back and started reading through those notes. I'm like, yeah, absolutely. I should put this together. Yeah, it sounds fascinating, really, and so important. I think even in just speaking, understanding that we have to have the right environment, the right situation that's going to support what we do. I look a lot at that. When I see other speake

rs, I look like, what was their music? Did they have music? Did they start out with music? What kind of music was that? And if they had any other elements like that within there, obviously the lighting and the. Costumes, the slides, the images. You use, all of that kind of goes together to get to the right results. So I think it's fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Chris, I appreciate your time. G'day to you. And I'll be back in touch. Absolutely, a hundred percent. And. I'll put everything in

the show notes. Okay. Thanks Eddie. Alright buddy. Thank you so much. For more information and monthly topics of interest, please go to transformYourfuture.com and join our newsletter.