Main stage presentations, keynotes speeches, ballroom talks. If you’ve been invited to address a large group, you’ve got a unique, exciting opportunity ahead. How do build a presentation with impact that lives up to your star billing in the spotlight?

In this podcast we delve into storytelling, pacing and passion, and how to put them to use. You’ll leave your audience wanting more, and excited to share what they’ve learned from the expert. The chance to grace the main stage at a conference is a rare chance for most presenters. Make the most of the opportunity!

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Hello and welcome to P3, the Perfect Presentations Podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, from Perfect PlanIt, and today’s topic is how to give a great ballroom or main stage presentation.

When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was be an actor. Starting from grade school, where I got the lead in our school Christmas play, it’s all I wanted. I loved the nerves before going on stage, and learning the lines. And counting all of your lines to see who had the most. All through high school, I tried out for everything, and because I went to a pretty small school in the middle of nowhere, I usually got the part I wanted. I think what I didn’t realize is that for as much as I craved being on stage, I wasn’t actually all that great at it. I could memorize the lines and deliver them with gusto, but I never really owned the lines. When I watch a great acting performance today I’m just blown away at the realization of the huge gap between delivering lines and acting. But I kept that dream up and entered college thinking about an acting major. The first thing I did was to seek out the drama department. I tried out for plays and got a few parts. But the more time I spent in the drama department, the more I realized how clique-ish it was. There were a lot of would-be artistes, as it were. And there were also some talented people that I could already tell could do things I couldn’t. But there was this sort of thirst for attention that I’d always felt and now that I was seeing it in others I had this really negative reaction to it. And like a light switch, it just shut off for me. I suddenly relished my anonymity, and aside from one last role in Jesus Christ Superstar, which was a long-time dream for me and my roommate, I was done. Like, completely done.

When graduation came, the heads of the journalism department asked two people to speak at commencement. And I was one of them. And suddenly, I had to be on stage. And for the first time, I was nervous in a new way, because A, I’d had this epiphany that I didn’t want to be on stage at all, and B, because as opposed to reading someone else’s lines, these were going to be my own. And as a natural procrastinator I also waited until a few days before graduation to get started. And at that point the full weight of it hit me and I was terrified. This might sound pretty familiar right about now.

So I dove in and worked like crazy to write something I thought people would like. And I decided no one cared about much of anything except getting out of the room and celebrating. So I turned it into a roast of the professors, all of whom were sitting behind me. I kept it good natured, except perhaps a couple questionable references to one professor’s writing being more suitable for penthouse magazine than esquire, or something like that. It’s a haze. I got a lot of laughs. But even in college, I knew on a level I couldn’t have articulated that I needed to end with a good story. And I ended it with a story about being at the mall, and walking up an escalator that had stopped. And as I and others climbed the steps, the escalator started moving backwards. And I was looking up and noticed immediately, but others had their heads down and kept on walking, making no progress. And I told my classmates I hoped that as we went through life, if the escalator kept us moving in place, we’d be the ones to keep our heads up, see things others couldn’t, and know when to take the stairs.

I got this big applause, and it wasn’t like anything I got for acting. Oh man, I was hooked again.

When you nail it, it’s like no other feeling. It’s beyond knowing you did a good job. It’s knowing you made people stop and consider themselves and how they fit into your story. You feel like you changed something for the better.

That’s what we’re here to talk about today. How to give a great keynote or ballroom presentation.

I mentioned on the first podcast that we won’t focus on speaking techniques and traditional presenter training. There are some places, however, where there’s inevitable overlap. If you’re not a confident speaker, I can’t solve that with a few words of advice like “own the stage.” But we can talk about tips that focus on how you pace yourself, and how you walk out ready to go.

This could be broken down into one of those “5 tips” sort of articles, but I’d rather just have a conversation about what we’ve found helps our clients succeed. And the first thing comes out of one of our training sessions we give to new presenters. We have a client who made us part of their new hire training process. They’d bring in about 25-30 new summer hires each year. These were kids right out of college and this was their first job. So we focused on creating a way of thinking about presenting that gave them tools to simply get on the playing field. And one of them, I realized, is one that’s useful for CEOs as well as newbies.

We live in this post-Steve Jobs world. He changed the game for what a presentation could be, and what a presenter could do. Now, there have always been great speakers, since the dawn of time. But what Steve jobs did was to popularize the idea of a powerful presentation in a way that hadn’t been done before. Today, people like Elon Musk of Tesla carry on that tradition for giving a great presentation.

Unfortunately, this legacy creates a lot of tension for some presenters. They feel like they have to live up to that expectation from the audience. What we work with their clients to teach them is that going into a presentation with that approach is a sure recipe for disaster. Instead, we show them examples of short 3 to 4-minute speeches given by others. Things like Ted X talks, or even youtube videos that they might be familiar with. And then we asked them what resonates with them about that video. Do they think they were great speakers? What stood out most to them? Almost universally, the response we get back comes down to one word. Authenticity.

So when you think about yourself and the presentation you have to give, don’t try to become the next Steve jobs or Elon Musk, or Tony Robbins. I think one of the reasons I succeeded when I gave that college commencement address is that it was the first time that I wasn’t pretending to be somebody else. I was free to express myself the way that I wanted and that put me at ease in a way that I hadn’t been when I was on stage before. There’s always still an element of a performance when you’re on stage, but when you’re playing a true version of yourself you’re much more likely to succeed.

This can embody itself in interesting ways. If you’re the kind of person who likes to pace back and forth what you talk, chances are you going to want to do that when you’re on stage as well. So set yourself up for way that you can do that comfortably. If you also rely heavily on speaker notes, you’re going to want to find out if there are reference monitors at the foot of the stage that you can look at. If not, you have some decisions that you need to make. What’s more important to you, pacing or the notes?

Part of being authentic is also knowing your limitations. Some people get paralyzed by the idea that they need to be funny. Somehow we got drilled into our heads that we’re supposed to start our presentations with a joke. If humor is not your forte, again, this is a recipe for disaster. There’s nothing worse than starting a presentation with a joke that falls flat, because it primes the audience to expect that the rest of the presentation isn’t going to go so well either.

Which leads to the next topic. Instead of relying on humor, let’s focus on stories. Stories resonate like nothing else. And the research shows that listening to a story lights up part of our brains that don’t get activated when we’re looking at spreadsheets or other analytical topics. And you might be thinking to yourself, how can I tell a story on the topic of accounting, or plastics, or Health Care. I promise you can. Start by asking yourself, how can I make this personal? For years we managed a conference for a client on the topic of bedside barcode safety. It was about the devices and techniques that hospitals use to ensure patient safety. So basically when a nurse comes into your room before she gives you medication she would scan a bar code on your wrist tag and then the medication and make sure that they matched. That ensures that you’re not getting the wrong medication. One of the featured speakers at the conference relayed a story about how a medication error that she personally had made had resulted in the death of one of her patients. As you can imagine, you could afford a pin drop in that room. She didn’t have to embellish, or be dramatic, the topic did that well enough on its own. And that story was deeply relevant. She was in a room full of colleagues, most of whom likely had their own stories.

Now, you may not have a story that’s life and death like that, and I hope you don’t. But she was there to talk about the changes that her facility had made around patient safety, and she started by relaying it in a way that made it very personal and the audience instantly knew how important it was to her. It was also directly relevant to the topic at hand, and therefore the information she relayed afterwards was grounded in this incredible and moving story she had told. So how is your topic important to you? If you’ve been invited to be keynote speaker, or mainstage presenter, somebody has seen something in you, or you’ve achieved something in your industry that gained you enough recognition that others wanted to hear what you had to say. I’m going to assume that that means you have passion around the topic. And if you have passion around the topic show your audience were that passion comes from.

A great story consists of a couple of things. First it creates tension in the audience. Think of every movie you’ve ever seen. Without tension, there is no story. Will the Wicked Witch get Dorothy? Right? By creating tension your audience will come to share the emotions of the people involved in that story, and even after the story ends they will continue to hang onto those feelings. Second, a great story creates triumph over adversity. There’s a reason we have sayings like its two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Or the chips are stacked against you. It’s that idea of the underdog, or the person who’s just on the edge of defeat could then turn around and succeed. It’s the basis for every feel-good movie ever made. You don’t have to have an epic journey, what you do have to have is an authentic story that you believe in, that was transformative for either you or your company, and that showed the you persevered to over the odds. Now that might sound like a daunting task, but it’s really not. Think about your topic, and then sit down with a piece of paper and just start making a list of all the ways related to that topic you struggled to succeed. Or that your company had to change and grow and evolve to succeed. This is a great time for freeform thinking. Let your mind wander in see where it takes you.

Another thing that can keep your audience engaged as you walk through your topic is to keep your stories personal. What I mean by that is this. You can talk about how a topic relates to customers, clearly, but what will be more impactful is to relay how it will impact “a” customer, singular. This is a technique politicians love to use. You see it in the state of the union address all the time, where the president looks up into the gallery and talks specifically about one person in attendance and how it might relate to one of the initiatives that are championing. It’s hard to care about a customer base, it’s much easier to care about an individual who struggling with a problem.

Let’s talk about pacing. One thing our clients tell us frustrates them is gaining the audience’s attention to start with. If it’s a lunch speech, or after a coffee break, it can be a struggle just to rally everyone to even listen. Tip one: don’t ask them to put their phones down. No one wants to hear that, dad. Here’s a better tip to get their attention. Do nothing. Stand there, prepared, looking at the audience. You’ll see something fascinating start to happen. After 10-15 seconds, you’ll see cell phones start to go down, and eyes start to lift. You’re asserting authority to be there, and asking (without asking) that your audience stop what they’re doing and provide you the attention you expect. Polite, respectful, and incredibly powerful.

Now, I talked about passion, how important passion is in making sure your audience is on your side. Passion and pacing can go hand in hand. As you start to think about your topic you also need to think about the timeline. How you’re going to start how you going make points that you want to make and how you going to get out. When I was as a junior in high school, I was in the band. It was one of the saddest bands you’d ever seen, something right out of the end of The Music Man. And I played the tuba, and I may have been the saddest of all of them. But the band was there to play at graduation for the seniors, and we were sitting right in front of the stage. We played the national anthem, and pomp and circumstance. And then mostly we just sat there. The speaker that year was a World War II veteran. And he cared immensely about the topic, and therefore so did the audience. For about the first 25 minutes. Unfortunately at about 20 minutes in it started to turn political, and then went from political into a rant, and it continued on for another 40 minutes. This was a small town, patient crowd, used to showing respect for others. But finally, the father of one of the graduates stood up and started screaming at the guy to let the kids graduate and get off the bleeping stage. He was so pissed he had to be escorted out. After a few choice words back and forth, the gentleman wrapped up his speech, and the entire room breathed a sigh of relief. If he’d have stopped at 20 minutes, his pace and his passion would have been perfectly matched. There’s a balance that you got to respect. At some point a story can tip over and you lose your audience.

So for timing, if you’ve got ½ hour of content to fill, how do you do that? I can’t fill in the meat of your presentation for you. What I can say is, the most effective presenters are not afraid to use that first five-10 minutes to become familiar to their audience. Those stories, the background. The setup. That’s the time you use to win the audience to your side and to your cause. What follows – the meat of the topic – is how you prove it. You’re arming your audience with a new way for them to think about the topic. During that time, continue to bring it back to real stories about your company, what you’ve learned, how you’ve changed. And the wrap up is a great time to personalize it again.

You might be thinking I’ve just told you to tell one long campfire story where everyone roasts marshmallows. I’m not. What I really want you to hear is that a great presentation doesn’t feel like a presentation at all. You’re not being sold, or explained, taught. You’re being enlightened. You’re there for a reason. You’ve already brought your authority with you. You’re on the stage. You were invited. Give them something useful and personal.

I do want to talk for a moment about visuals. And I’ll go back to TED Talks here, because they’ve turned presenting into an industry, and done it with a technique that they replicate and stick to fairly rigidly. If you watch a TED Talk, you may see some visuals. And that’s what they’ll be. Visual. Not copy. Not bullets. Those visuals enhance the story, they don’t tell it. They don’t explain it. Those presenters are set up in a way that the focus is on them. Take that lesson to heart. Main stage presentations take many forms and you may need to show content on a screen. If you’re presenting results of a study you’ve conducted, you’ll likely have some data to share. If so, that’s fine. But the content should not be your speech. It should be something you are speaking about. I hope that distinction makes sense. If you’re reading what’s on the screen, you’re losing. If you’re describing what’s on the screen, you’re winning. If it’s a chart, then make sense of that chart. If it’s the results of a survey, don’t just recite the results to them, focus on what the results tell the audience.

And keep it as simple as possible. One slide = one idea. Period. And the ideas on all of those slides equal your central premise for your talk. Does that make sense? You’re building upon an idea, and every building block should support that idea.

Finally, remember, your audience will not retain details. They’ll retain ideas. They’ll go back to work and say “this presenter had a really great idea about X.”

The last thing I want to say is about practice. If you think back to when we talked about telling a great story, unless you’re a natural speechmaker who can walk onstage in just wing it, you’re going to need to practice. Don’t believe that spontaneity will improve the impact. The story becomes more powerful the more times you tell it and comfortable with it. You’ll start to realize that there are little nuances of it that you’ve been missing, and you want to add in. As a universal rule, when it comes to practice use the 24 hour rest test. Practice until you’re comfortable with the subject matter and feel like you can walk through it fairly consistently. Wait 24 hours, and then do it all again. If you have time in advance of your presentation you should be doing this every day. The shower is the ideal time for me, so I tend to run through my talks there, and I always find places to improve and change. So by the time you get ready to walk onstage perhaps you practiced 5 to 7 times. It’s almost impossible to overstate how comfortable that can make you feel when you walk onstage. You’ve seen the guys who’ve lost their place and look like a deer in the headlights. You’ve probably not noticed the guys who’ve lost their place, but it doesn’t matter because they’re so familiar with their speech they can do it without support.

A mainstage or keynote is a real opportunity. For you, your company, possibly for your career, but especially for your audience. Make the most of it, and leave them wanting more of your time.

I hope you’ve found today’s topic helpful. I look forward to your feedback. Until next time.