CONFIDENTLY PRESENTING WITH MERIDITH GRUNDEI

Jason Dion:
Hi, and welcome back to another episode of Your Cyber Path. My name is Jason Dion. This week I’m going to be your host because Kip is actually not here in the studio with me. Kip is actually on a travel assignment right now and he has been for the last couple of weeks and he’ll be getting back next month. But because he’s now currently about 12 or 13 hours off cycle of us, I decided that we would do the episode without him this week. And my guest today is Meridith Grundei. Meridith Grundei is a public speaking coach and she is the owner of Grundei Coaching, and she specializes in public speaking and presentation skills. Really the thing that she does is she helps conscious entrepreneurs, leaders, and CEOs inside of tech, to learn how to polish and spark their creative juices when they’re presenting these complex topics in a more non-technical way to a non-technical audience.

So really what we’re going to be focused on today is this idea of soft skills that we’ve talked about time and time again on this podcast, because whether you’re trying to present yourself to an employer during an interview or you’re working in the field and you’re working as a consultant and you need to get the CFO or the CEO on board with what you’re selling, because they need to understand this technical concept in a non-technical way. That’s really what Meridith helps people with. So we’re going to talk about some tips and tricks today that she uses as well as how she got in this business and you know who the ideal person is that she likes to help and how she might be able to help you. So with that said, I want to welcome Meridith to the show. Welcome Meridith.

Meridith  Grundei:
Thank you, Jason. I’m delighted to be here.

Jason Dion:
Thank you for joining us. And did I miss anything in your bio that you want to highlight? I know you have a background coming from the theater area. Do you want to talk a little about that?

Meridith  Grundei:
Sure, I can do that. My background is I have a master’s degree in performance. I have been performing since I can remember, started off as a dancer and it was from being on stage where I was invited by our choreographer to say the line, when I grew up, I want to be just like Wonder Woman. And someone came up to me afterwards who looked oddly like Linda Carter, if you’re from the, when was that? The 70s, the Wonder Woman Show. And she said I should take acting classes. And at the time I was actually quite, I guess you could call me an extrovert, though I was really terrified about using my voice because I didn’t ever want to sound stupid and I didn’t want to give the wrong answer, so I would just hide in the back row. And so when she said, you should take acting classes, I hesitantly said yes, and okay, I’ll go do that.

But what I discovered was it really opened me up to becoming a more confident speaker, though I was still hiding behind character and script. It got me out of my head more. And then it wasn’t later until I discovered improv, I moved to Chicago specifically to just study improv and ended up teaching at the Second City for four years. And it was through improv where then I had to insert my point of view and work collaboratively and communicate differently with people. And through improv, I then started work in corporate America, working with teams and building trust, heightened communication and loved that, loved that work. And I’m always so curious about what people do for work. And largely I was working with manufacturing companies. From there, people would then ask me, from HR, hey, we’ve got this C-suite who has an upcoming presentation, can you help them with that? Or they have a conference that’s coming up, can you help them with that?

I started doing that more as supplemental income. I was freelancing as an artist and doing that work. And then at the beginning of the pandemic I was one of those lovely humans that a lot of us did pivot. So I pivoted and decided to go all in with building my business, Grundei Coaching. And so I’ve been building that. It has been wonderful and I have been predominantly working with people in tech, in these technical industries and I love it. It’s like I’m the yin to their yang.

Jason Dion:
I think that’s awesome. And as you were talking, I heard you say yes and I was like, oh, she’s going to bring up improv. I could tell. But yeah, I love that. I love going to see live theater. I do a lot of observing of live theater here in Orlando where I live. There’s lots of different great theater places and lots of great improv comedy things, and I’m always amazed at how the improv folks are able to just take anything and make it go and work with it, and the creative thinking that happens on the spot is just amazing to me. I love that background. And as you said, I think that you found a really good niche with these technical folks because a lot of technical people, we are so analytical and we have a hard time presenting things in a way that non-technical people can understand sometimes.

And I know in my own career that’s one of the things that has made me very successful, is my ability to take things and use analogies or stories or other things to make complex topics go into a very simple formula so that people who aren’t technical or have a technical background can still make decisions about what we’re teaching and what we’re doing, to be able to get the funding we need for our projects, to be able to get the leadership buy-in or whatever those things are. So those soft skills, I find that just to be critically important. One of the things I know that you’re really focused on is how to communicate these complex ideas and information, and so people can actually almost teach the other stakeholders what they’re talking about.

Can you talk a little bit about how you do that and what tips you might have for our audience as they’re trying to take a complex concept to their boss or other stakeholders and get their buy-in?

Meridith  Grundei:
Definitely. It’s about simplifying and it’s about finding that structure and knowing where to start first. And oftentimes what I have noticed working with clients is that we’re given a deck or we have this information that we need to relay. And so we’ve got complicated architecture, we’ve got all of this imagery that we’re using, and oftentimes what people will do is they start there first. And where people should be starting is really asking the question, who is my audience first? And doing the deep dive, whatever due diligence you need to do to understand who that client is or who that stakeholder is, customer is, so that you can really speak to them in their problem where their pain point is and then solve that problem for them.

Then once you’ve established that and exactly what it is that their needs are, then you think about what is my objective? What is my end in mind for this presentation? What do they need to leave doing differently, thinking differently or feeling? And then once that’s been cleared up, then you can figure out what are those key takeaways? What are the need to knows that lead to that end in mind? And usually people can only retain three to five things. Someone will argue that people can retain seven. I’m not one of those people and it’s awesome if you are one of those people. But then to figure out what are those key takeaways are? And then once you have established all of those things, then you look at your visuals and you ask the question, what visuals that I have here in this deck are going to best support that end in mind and the message that I’m trying to convey?

Then once all of that is established, then it’s about how do I simplify communicating the information, especially some of these slides that are just chock full of information. And I do work with a ton of clients who are dealing with compliance issues as well. So they have to deliver what’s on that presentation or on that slide. They can’t change anything. It’s already been approved by legal or HR or whomever. So then how do you get the attention of the audience and keep their attention and be able to convey that information in a way that they’re understanding what you’re saying and usually it’s about orienting them and being able to be clear about where they need to be looking and what you are saying needs to be matching up with what they’re seeing.

So there’s a lot of elements there, but those I would say that you begin with the audience, end in mind, key takeaways, then the visuals, then we can talk about how to present it.

Jason Dion:
I think that’s a great perspective. And I know in my own career when I was working with the military and government contracting, there was one person I worked with who had just a great format whenever he was briefing a senior decision maker. And whenever he came in, the first thing he would say is, sir, ma’am, today we’re going to talk about X topic. At the end of this presentation I’m going to be looking for Y outcome. And literally he would say, I’m looking for a decision on whether or not you’re going to fund this or this is just an informational brief to bring you up to speed on what this thing is. We’re going to come back in three weeks with a decision brief, and he would queue that up at the beginning. So the person behind the desk there who’s making these decisions, knows what is being asked because we’re going to go into an hour long presentation and we might dive really deep into some technical stuff or really deep into financials.

And if they are thinking they’re going to have to make a decision and all you’re doing is telling them about tech, they’re listening for things that aren’t what you’re trying to present. On the other hand if you’re saying, I want a decision, I need you to make a decision on whether or not we’re going to spend one or $2 million, they’re going to be really focused in on the finances. And knowing that upfront helps them as they’re going through the presentation to take notes and ask the right questions. Then the next thing he would do is say, okay, so in this presentation we’re going to talk about this. This is the outcome I’m looking for. Now here are the three big things we’re going to cover. We’re going to cover A, B, and C. And then it’ll go, okay, first we’ll talk about A, and he goes on for 10 or 15 minutes on A. Goes to B, goes to C, and then he goes, so now in summary, we talked about A, B and C, and now I need your decision on X that I told you upfront.

And usually the answer is yes, no, or I need more time, come back tomorrow because I need to think about this, right? And any of those are fine, but by having that discussion and knowing what is happening and really taking this educational type approach to it, really gets the buy-in a lot easier from these senior decision makers. And I’ve noticed that when he was presenting, we would usually get a project approved or denied within a couple of days, whereas some other people, it would go on for months and months because they would go in and do their whole brief and then they’d go, we want a decision. The guy’s like, you didn’t tell me you wanted a decision, so I wasn’t paying attention that way. I need to go back and look through all this stuff again. And that’s another hour out of his day as well.

I think that as you said, presenting upfront what are we going to be looking at, is really, really helpful from a soft skills perspective. And I know anybody who’s taken my courses probably has noticed that I use that format in my videos all the time.

Meridith  Grundei:
It’s amazing.

Jason Dion:
I say in this video we’re going to talk about this. I give you an analogy so you can relate this technical concept to something. Then we say one, two, three are the things we’re going to talk about. We dive into one, two, three and at the end, so remember we talked about one, two and three, here’s your definitions, here’s your key takeaways, and off we go. And all that happens in a five to seven minute video. But what you’re talking about is also for a longer presentation that may be 30 minutes or an hour and the same format does work.

Meridith  Grundei:
It does. It does work. Because your audiences, people have to keep in mind that when your audience is sitting there, they’re asking three questions. They’re asking, who is this person? Why should I care? And how are they going to solve my problem?

Jason Dion:
Exactly. And that’s one of the things that I’ve noticed in my own career when I was working with a lot of non-technical leaders, because I was a communications and cyber expert, and I would be at a place that has 500 people working there and I’m the only one or two technical people that are there, is me and probably one other person. And so our boss are people who are airplane fighter pilots or ship drivers or things like that, and they don’t understand the cyber stuff. And so when we do a presentation, I think it goes to your second point is, you have to be engaging, you have to have an interactive presentation and you have to simplify these complex ideas into things that people can understand.

So what are some things that you teach people as far as making an engaging presentation? Because at the end of the day, that person you’re briefing, they’ve got eight other hours of meetings today, how are they going to remember you and what you’re saying? And I think a lot of that goes into your engagement and your interactive presentations.

Meridith  Grundei:
Well, one is find, and this is difficult to do, easier to say, difficult to do is, but find what makes you uniquely you and how you are going to engage differently. So like I said before, people are wondering, who is this person? Why should I care and how are they going to solve my problem? And what I find most people do when they’re presenting is they start with themselves, which actually we don’t care as much as you think we do, we really don’t. We need to know who you are for credibility purposes, but what we really want is to hear how you’re going to solve our problem first and foremost. I always say start with something like a story or an open-ended question or a hook that’s going to get your audience to really lean in and listen to you differently, because they have an expectation.

Most people, because they start the same way, we anticipate that that’s how the next presenter is going to start. So why not shake things up a little bit? I tell, we need to have that emotional connect with our audience. I don’t care how dry or technical you think your material is, you still need to have an emotional connect. You need me to care. So ways we can go about doing that. One thing I do with my clients is I have them brainstorm story. So I don’t want you to think about work related story. I just want you to think about stories. And I have worksheets that I’ll give them that will prompt them to think about stories maybe they haven’t been thinking about or haven’t thought about in a really long time. I’ll give you an example of one client who does work in the AI space who has this, he had this very technical, it works with ad agencies.

It was like a brain that would send information out to several different places to streamline the process. So it was this very robust AI tool for ad agencies. And so he needed to go and talk to customers about why they would need this product and how it was going to help them. So he brainstormed a lot of different stories and he came up with a story about, it was a little vulnerable, but he felt safe saying it and telling it, which was his child was neurodiverse. I think he was about three or four, maybe five, I don’t remember at the time. And they noticed that every time he walked up the stairs, he would use both hands on the railing. So it would take him a really long time to get up the stairs. I think he was older than three, he was probably five.

And so the mom, he comes home from work one afternoon and his wife is at the base of the stairs with their son trying again to get them to go up the stairs just using one hand to just trust that he’s not going to fall. But he keeps going up the stairs with the two hands on the railing. So my client goes out to the garage, he just stands there to think, what can we do? What can we do? What’s different? What can we do? He grabs a hammer and he brings it into the house and he gives it to his son. He says, son, hold this hammer and then walk up the stairs. So the son held the hammer in one hand, put the other hand on the railing and walked up the stairs. Then they did that a few times. Then they took the hammer out of his hand and now he can walk up the stairs with one hand on the railing. So they accomplished the goal, they solved the problem.

And so he shared that story and then he led with his presentation with that story out of the gate. And then at the end of the story he said, we are your hammer. So just simply it was a simple like, we are your solution, we are your hammer, we’re going to simplify this AI technology for you. And that really got people to lean in, and that’s what they remembered. It’s like this is a guy with a hammer.

Jason Dion:
I think it’s interesting because a lot of times we always think we have to, everybody else presents this way or everybody else does it this way, so we should do the exact same thing, because we want to fit in. And one of the things I think is interesting is that when you fit in, you get lost in the shuffle as well. And this goes back into even the hiring process. If you go back 10 or 15 years of people where actually put their resumes in with paper as opposed to just submitting it through email. I saw a lot of creative things that people would do to try to get your attention. Some of them are good, some of them are not. And it all goes to how you’re going to present your resume. I’ve seen people who have bright pink paper and they printed their resume on because when you open it up in the pile and there’s a pile of all these resumes with white paper and there’s one that’s pink, it stands out and it grabs your attention.

It does make you go, what the heck’s going on here? I’ve seen people who put in little glitter and things into their envelopes. When you open it, all of a sudden there’s glitter on your desk. I’m like, don’t do that. That makes me mad. But I’ve seen things like that. Or they’ll have, the way you do your resume, instead of having these standard format of block A, block B, block C, block D, they’ll shuffle it around because that can grab the attention of somebody differently. And for our audience, if you’re using the resume template that Kip always promotes, it is a little bit upside down compared to some standard templates that are out there. But the reason we do that is because it works and it grabs the hiring manager’s attention because it is a little different and it does seem them a little bit odd.

That being said, don’t use some weird fonts, don’t use crazy things that are there just for attention. But if you are a little bit different or you’re approaching things in a different manner in the way you’re presenting your information, it can really grab somebody else’s attention. I think that’s important. And the other thing you mentioned was we talked about presentations and sometimes there are things you have to have, like legal compliance stuff if you’re a financial company. There are certain slides you must have. But one of the things I thought was really interesting is as I started getting into this whole teaching thing over the last five or 10 years, the traditional way that teachers use PowerPoint slides is a wall of text. It’s like a full page of just dense paragraphs of text. And honestly, that’s not the way to do PowerPoint.

As I’ve learned more learning and design in how people’s brains work, we have found that if I’m talking for 30 seconds, there shouldn’t be 30 seconds worth of text on the slide, there should be one sentence or one picture, and it should really be focusing on you’re hearing it, but what is on the screen is the thing I really want you to remember. And that’s one of the big differences between my courses and other courses. When people go to my courses, they’re like, how come you don’t have everything on the slide? I’m like, because that’s actually not good for you. I’m telling you what you need to memorize. And if you pay attention to what’s on my slide, that is the most critical information you need to know to be able to pass this exam because those are the key takeaways.

Whereas other people, they just have the whole wall of text and people just get lost in it or they’re reading the text and they’re not listening to you present.

Meridith  Grundei:
And you can’t do both.

Jason Dion:
Exactly. Most people can listen or read. They can’t do both. And especially in tech presentations now, you’ll see almost every Silicon Valley deck, it’s three to five words on a slide. One picture, maybe two, or maybe in animation, but that’s it. Whereas you look at the old corporate America slides or government slides, when I worked in the government we had this thing called a quad slide, which I hated. And quad slide is just what you think it is. It’s four slides I can see in one. It’s literally take a slide and cut it in quarters, and each one of those has five to 10 sentences. So now you’ve got 40 sentences. And they would go around and go, because what happened was they said, well, to cut down on the slide work, we only want people to have one slide per department.

So what they did was they said, okay, if I only get one slide, I’m now going to have four quadrants. And it’s what did I do before? What am I doing today? What am I doing over the next three weeks? And then long-term future plans, anything beyond three months. But it was all this one slide that just crammed in all this information. It’s like, guys, whenever you put this up on in front of the screen, someone’s now reading the slide instead of listening to you and you’ve lost them forever.

Meridith  Grundei:
Forever. And because people think they need it. People think they need it. And I always say, you can give them the deck or you can give them your notes later, you don’t need to have it on the slide.

Jason Dion:
And that’s one of the things I had started doing was, in PowerPoint you have the slide up top and the notes in the bottom. So you can have all your speaker notes there if you want. And if you want the slides to live by themselves, if you could just email, people can open up and see your notes and they can read it themselves. Because that was always the excuse I heard from people as well. I have to have all that information in this slide because if my slide gets emailed out and I’m not there, they need to be able to know what they’re looking at. I’m like, yes, but you can do that in your speaker notes.

Meridith  Grundei:
You can do that in your speaker notes. 100%.

Jason Dion:
I think engaging and not over killing people with text is important. And having a interactive or different presentation different, you shouldn’t do different just for the sake of being different, you should do different to be better. But if you are different, that usually will grab people’s attention. So that’s why I think it’s an important thing to think about.

Meridith  Grundei:
It very much is. I think less is more, to be completely honest with you. And if you can do a presentation without the slides and out without the visuals, then all the power to you and yes to that.

Jason Dion:
Most definitely. The other thing talking about different is that I think it’s important that you look at your presentation and your story and you adapt it to different audiences and that’s one of your keys.

Meridith  Grundei:
Agreed.

Jason Dion:
So when you talk about adapting to different audiences, what do you mean by that? And are we talking about the audiences as the person listening to you, as a stakeholder, as the other people that you’re working with? Who is the audience in that case?

Meridith  Grundei:
Well, that’s why I went back. You always start with your audience. Who are they? Because this audience may not need, maybe you’re delivering the same presentation, but there are different things that this particular audience needs to know versus the last audience that you just spoke to. One thing I do invite my clients to do is think about multiple stories, multiple hooks, multiple open-ended questions that you could use that are interchangeable depending on who your client is, and that you might have to adjust those key takeaways as well. So this is going to take a little bit more work on your part, but then the result is going to be so much more effective for you. You’ll get people listening to you because they’ll think that you’re speaking directly to them.

And so once you’ve established that audience, it’s also important to figure out who the person is in the room that has the least amount of knowledge or who the decision maker is. And then being able to give them a name, they’re someone you actually know that you are speaking to, because then that way you can’t convince everyone, but you can convince one person. And if your audience is, just like on camera work, the one thing I was taught early on when I was doing commercials, was that I am speaking not to a bunch of people sitting in their living room on a Tuesday afternoon, but I am speaking to one specific person. I am speaking to my mom as I am selling her barbecue sauce, whatever. And that is much more effective because the person who’s watching the commercial feels like you’re talking to them.

And it’s the same thing with presenting, and especially when you’re doing these virtual presentations or webinars, people want to feel like you are speaking to them. And so that’s why it’s important to do as much research as you possibly can on who that audience is and the problems that they have.

Jason Dion:
I think that’s important. And then I think the other thing is the choice of wording that you use, right? One of the things that I’ve learned as I’ve done a lot of learning and design information and study is that people like hearing their own name. Well, when I teach it an asynchronous format, it’s really hard for me to use their name. If I was in a room and I’m presenting and Meridith is the person I’m trying to sell, I would be, even though there’s probably 20 other people in the room, I would be saying things like, right Meridith? Right? And get her engaged and get her to say yes and get her to agree to me even if they’re small little agreements or whatever those things are. But if I’m doing that in an e-learning environment, it’s harder to do that. And so one of the things you’ll notice in my courses is I always say things like you or we.

And those are the forms of, it’s a generic enough thing that it can apply to anybody. But when I start saying, you’re going to learn this, you’re going to be able to do this, we are going to teach you how to do this, right? It’s not about us. It’s about you. And you’re able to internalize that. When you hear you, you’re substituting in your name, Jason, Meridith, whatever. And when you hear your name, we have these little endorphins that go off and we pay more attention because we think people are talking to us, even though we may be talking to 20 people in the room. I think the other thing with identifying your audience, and in the context that I used to work in, in a military context, it’s really easy because everybody has a little thing on their collar and you know exactly who’s important and who’s not, based on how many lines they have and what little symbols they have.

You can walk in the room and say, they’re stars. That general or Admiral is the person who I need to convince. And that person who’s got two bars who’s only been in the Navy or the Army for four years, they’re not nearly as important in that context. And so identifying that is important, and knowing who you’re talking to and what their background in is important, like you said. So when I go into a room, especially as the communication or cyber person, there is somebody there from accounting, there’s somebody there from supply, there’s somebody there from operations, there’s somebody there from planning, there’s the admiral or the general who’s making the decision overall whether we’re going to fund this thing or not. And while the admiral or general is the person I’m really talking to, and I want their buy-in, they still rely on their advisors too.

I can’t forget those other people in the room. But as I’m going around and I’m making my presentation, I should be looking around the room and seeing the look on their faces. And if the finance person is checking out, I need to start talking a little bit about numbers to bring them back in. If the operations person is checking out, I need to start making sure I’m talking about planes and tanks and trucks and ships or whatever it is, to get their mind back engaged, because they’re like, you’re talking about money. I don’t care. And that becomes a hard balancing act is sometimes you’re presenting in one room, but you have different audiences even inside that room because they’re all thinking about it through their lens of, What do I care about? And I’ve done the same thing as the communications lead, as the IT director where they’ll be talking about something about ships and planes, and I’m like, I don’t really care except can they communicate?

And I have to start thinking about, okay, if they’re going to be over here, are we going to use satellite or line of sight or blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. But we do the same thing. And if you think about this in your own life, for you and the audience, when you’re sitting in a presentation and there’s 20 people in that room, how are you listening to it? Most of the time you’re thinking, what is this about? How does it affect me? Do I have to make a decision or am I learning? Is this something my boss is going to care about? And you’re putting it through your own filter. And so when you’re on the other side of the table doing the presentation, you need to think about that too. So you can hit as many of those marks as you can to get people engaged.

Meridith  Grundei:
I think that’s why story is so effective. And when you tell story, and what I’ll also going to just share that, what I have noticed as well, is that people will tell stories or their idea of what they think a story is, but oftentimes they’re very generalized. I went to the store for milk. It’s very different than I live in New York City in Washington Heights, and there’s this little market that I like to go to on 181, and I always say hi to the woman who works at the register, and I grab my 2% and then I head home and I run into a neighbor and I say, oh, I see Martha often. Adding the details in really helps people because then the person sitting in the audience is like, oh, I know exactly where she’s talking about. That’s by the George Washington Bridge. Or I live in that neighborhood, or I don’t drink milk, disgusting. Why doesn’t she order oat milk? I don’t know.

So whatever thoughts that you have, it helps draw people into the storytelling. It’s just those little tiny details. And really when you know your audience, and I think that’s why the open-ended question, especially in virtual presenting, just to touch upon that a little bit is so important. One thing I love to do is ask the question, for example, what’s a pain point you have as a speaker? Then people can put that in the chat. I can reflect it back, and now I have information that I can pull into my presentation later on, and then that person will perk up when they hear their pain points.

Jason Dion:
I think that’s really critically important. And the other thing I’d say about story is that a lot of us make the mistake of making the story about us. We love to talk about ourself, right? But think about it the other way. The person in the audience doesn’t care about us. They care about them and whether it affects them. So if I use a story, I always try to use a story. If I’m going to make it about me, it’s about what you can learn by the stupid thing I’ve done or the great thing I’ve done. So, hey, I’ve taken this exam before, when I did it, this, this, this happened. Make sure you don’t fall for those traps, right? That’s okay. Still not a great story. In general, you want to tell a story that really makes your end user or your end consumer, the person who’s listening to your presentation, feel like they are the hero, and it becomes all about them.

This goes back to the you and the we and all that kind of stuff. But you could say things like, have you ever felt this way? Has this ever happened to you? And they’re like, oh, yeah, that has. Well, this one time it happened to me and here’s what we did, blah, blah, blah. And to overcome it, you can do X, Y, and Z. Or you probably didn’t make the same mistake I did because you used whatever. And those things where you do the stories and get them integrated into the story, it’s meeting your audience where they are. It’s getting them engaging, it’s getting them to participate, and all those things are going to help them listen to your story and pay attention. And if you can use some comedy, that usually helps because sometimes you get bored-

Meridith  Grundei:
Yes, a little humor goes a long way.

Jason Dion:
… in an eight-hour meeting. So humor is great. I know I used to see people put up memes of things and icebreakers and all that kind of stuff. And even in listen to your presentation, I think that’s okay. Again, it depends on your audience. It depends on what impression you’re trying to make. If you’re talking about surgery, you don’t want to be cracking jokes. But in tech, there’s a lot of things we can joke about and that’s okay to do. And a lot of times people are afraid to use comedy, and I found that to be pretty effective if you have a funny boating that you can use.

Meridith  Grundei:
100%. The more clear you get and the more practiced you are. And that’s something I want to touch upon too, is that I know a lot of your listeners are probably very busy. They probably have a lot of deadlines. So the idea of practicing a presentation over and over again so they can find the spaciousness to incorporate things like humor or audience engagement and interaction, might sound hard but if that is what makes or breaks a great presentation, is the lack of practice that I see often. And so one little antidote that I would offer for your listeners is to, if anything, if anything, practice the heck out of the introduction and practice the heck out of the call to action at the end of your talk.

Because then at least you’ll have a confident on-ramp into the rest of your presentation. You’re very clear about your ideas, what the takeaways are, the story that you’re telling, the hook that you’re doing, whatever it is, however you choose to start. I hope it’s not, hi, my name is, but another more effective, engaging way. That’s going to be really helpful to you. So if anything, practice the heck out of that opening and that conclusion, that call to action.

Jason Dion:
And one of the things I learned, one of the things people may not know about me is I actually went through seminary and I actually learned quite a bit about storytelling in that. And a lot of that stuff I do inside my courses from an L&D perspective when I present information. And one of the things that we always talk about in there is if you’re writing a 30 or 45 minute sermon, you don’t need to memorize a 30 or 45 minute sermon. This is not a play, it’s not a monologue. What you need is, is you need the roadmaps and the guideposts. And so literally, most preachers when they write their sermon, if they’re doing it good and expositionally, they will basically have their intro written down, like you said, one or two paragraphs, they know exactly what they’re going to say.

They know what the summary’s going to be, one or two paragraphs. They’ve got exactly what they’re going to say. But in the middle, generally it’s going to be like, here are the four bullet points I want to talk about. I want to talk about peace and love and whatever. And here is the Bible verse. They have that written down to make sure they don’t mess that up. And maybe a couple of words of how they’re going to relate it. And so we always talk about the hook, which is that intro, and that story gets somebody’s attention and has this ever happened to you and do you feel about this way and has this happened, blah, blah, blah. And then we go into the book, which is like, okay, we’re going to talk about this particular verse from the Bible, and then we’re going to do the look, how does that apply to me and my life?

And then the took at the end is the takeaway. Okay, now that we’ve talked all about that, here’s what I want you to do. When you go out this week, take these actions. And those same things happen in presentations all the time, it’s just we don’t talk about it in that manner, but having that hook, that reference, whether that definition or textbook or study or white paper or whatever it is you’re talking about, how does that apply to you and your business? And then what should you do moving forward? It’s where are we at, where are going, and how are we going to get there? I think the last big thing we probably need to talk about when we talk about public speaking is probably the number one thing people think about with public speaking, and that is fear, anxiety, just they’re afraid they’re going to get laughed at.

Most of us don’t like being in front of other people talking all day. I talk all day for a living as an instructor, but I’ll tell you, when I go and speak in front of a conference that has 500 or 1,000 people, it still is nerve wracking to me, because even though I talk all day, I’m usually talking in front of a camera or in a room by myself or talking one-on-one with somebody like you. Yes, there’s thousands of people who are going to listen to this, but really right now it’s just you and me talking. So it feels not anxiety filled at all. Right? But if I walk out in a room, there’s 500 people out there, I’m going to feel anxiety. How do you overcome that anxiety when you want to deliver your confident presentations and things like that?

Meridith  Grundei:
Well, there’s a couple of things. One is to recognize that nerves and feeling anxious is completely normal, and that there are things and techniques that you can do to help manage the nerves. I will just speak into a couple of those things first. One is you can do breathing exercises at calming the nervous system or that vagus nerve, which is what kicks in that fight or flight response, doing box breathing exercises or inhaling through the nose. I do one that’s inhaled through the nose on a four count, exhale through the mouth on a seven count, just noticing the rise and fall of your abdomen or your chest and dropping in. Another way is to turn it into excitement. So take that nervous energy, whether that means I used to do pushups before I got up on stage just to get the adrenaline rushing, get those heebie-jeebies moving in a different direction.

And I would count out loud. So that was also warming up my voice at the same time. Doing power poses in the bathroom, the Amy Cuddy power poses with your arms up or your hands on your hips. Anything that you can do to warm yourself up. But it’s about intentionality. And what I’ve noticed is that a lot of people don’t take enough time before they present, to warm themselves up, and to really drop in and figure out a way that they can best manage those nerves. I call it the pre-presentation ritual. And so I invite your listeners to think for themselves, what’s your pre-presentation ritual? What do you need before you get on stage or before you give a virtual presentation? So if it’s running in place or listening to your favorite music or doing vocal warmups or standing in a stall doing Amy Cuddy poses or breathing, find something that’s going to work for you.

Another thing is that if you get the opportunity to meet and greet your audience before you get on stage, I’ve noticed for myself, that’s an incredible way to manage the nervous system because I’m making eye contact with people in my audience. I get to shake some hands, I get to ask some questions, I get to know who they are. And that I found has also been very helpful. It really depends on what your setup is and what your individual needs are, but use it as a superpower.

Jason Dion:
I think that’s a great point. And I really like your last tip, which is getting to know somebody in the audience or a few somebody’s in the audience. Most of the speaking engagements I have done have been as part of a larger conference where it’s a one or two or three day conference. And if I’m speaking on the end of the first day or middle of the second day or on the third day or whatever it is, I’ve already had a chance to meet a lot of people. And so by the time I get there and I’m on stage, as I’m looking out over the audience of 500 people, I can probably identify five people in different parts of the room that I know just from having talked to him over the day. And so as I’m doing my presentation, I’m like looking back corner over there, there’s John back corner over there, there’s Susie. Right up in the front, there’s Mary.

And so as I’m talking, I look like I’m going around the audience to various people, but it’s like the five or six people I met earlier through the conference and I already had a connection. I’m like, oh, John’s not going to make fun of me. He and I are friends, we’ve already talked, we’ve had a couple of beers over the last couple days or whatever. Or me and Mary, we’ve had a lot of conversations. So it’s okay. And so when I’m looking at them, it looks like to everybody around that person, you’re talking directly to them because you’re constantly moving your eyes to the different places, but you’re actually looking at one person. And that is, it’s like your anchor in this crowd.

The other thing I’ve done, if I have to go straight out on stage and I have not had a chance to meet anybody, first presentation of the day, I’ll just stare towards the back wall and move from the left wall to the right wall to the center, left to the right to the center. And so it constantly looks like I’m looking around the room at everybody, but really I’m looking at a blank wall because that way I’m not freaking out that there’s a thousand people in front of me all staring back.

Meridith  Grundei:
And the other thing too is you can, because usually you can only see the first two rows because of the lighting. So you can do a focus and finish. You can look at somebody on stage or audience left, give them eye contact, it’s okay. And then finish your thought, move to someone in the center and then move someone to the right if you didn’t have the opportunity. But that takes practice too, and it takes a level of confidence to be able to make that. It’s not creepy eye contact, it’s just one thought in your head, but also helps your audience feel that you’re connecting with them as well. The other thing I always like to tell people, since you brought up conferences, last year, I got to work at the AWS, Amazon Reinvent Conference.

And so one thing I was telling them was like, I know all of you are networking and you’re having some drinky drinks, and then you’re probably getting up early in the morning and drinking coffee. And we’re in Vegas and it’s dry. So there’s also other things that we can do that we may not be thinking about that’s going to help us with our nerves and to present with more confidence, which is you’ve got to be super hydrated, which means that you start that three days beforehand and don’t be drinking coffee just before you walk up on stage, because that can also cause a little bit more anxiety that’s unnecessary for you. I’m just saying party with caution if you’re at a conference.

Jason Dion:
And also knowing yourself and what works for you. For some people they can’t get out of bed without that cup of coffee in the morning. For me, I’m a Coca-Cola person, it’s in the morning as we’re talking, and people probably see on the video stream that I keep grabbing my Coke can and I’m drinking it. That’s my coffee in the morning. But knowing what works for you and knowing that, hey, if I have a presentation at 10, I’d better be up by eight so I can be up, dressed, move around. I’m not waking up at 9:45 to be jumping on a call at 10 because then you’re rushed and you’re feeling more anxious because you’re up against a deadline. Give yourself more time, get a little more relaxed. Be comfortable in the environment you’re in. I think those are all things that will help.

And then the other thing is, as you said, practice does make you better. The more you do it, the better you’re going to get. I was not a great presenter on my first presentation. Now I’ve done 15, 20, 30 different conferences that I’ve spoke at. I’m really good and really confident at it now, and I can do it pretty well. That being said, the nerves will never go completely away for most people. I know one person who they go and speak on a different stage every single week and every single time before he gets up on stage, he throws up, because the nerves get to them. And that’s part of his pre-show ritual is he knows that if he’s going to be there at 10 o’clock, at 9:30, he’s probably going to end up puking because he gets so nervous. But he loves presenting.

And once he’s out on the stage, after that first couple of sentences, he gets into his flow and you’d never know. But if you were behind stage with him five, 10 minutes earlier, he was there puking in a bucket, right? Because he was just having that feeling. And that is somebody who gets paid professionally to speak every single week. So what chance do the rest of us have?

Meridith  Grundei:
Broadway actors take beta blockers. There’s some of them that are just, they’re so nervous, everything, and they’re getting on stage eight times a week. I think that’s important to just understand you’re not alone in that. In fact, I feel nervous if I’m not nervous, to be completely honest with you, because there’s just a beautiful energy about how those nerves can be transformed on a stage if you use them as a set. I appreciate that very much that you just shared the person that you know throws, poor guy.

Jason Dion:
For me, I think after for a couple weeks, and if it wasn’t going away, I’m like, okay, I’m finding a new career. But he does it. It’s great.

Meridith  Grundei:
Well, there’s one thing I want to also add in too, which is so funny because I’ve been blurry this whole time, I just want to call that out, which is being adaptable. That just reminded me of, you never know when stuff is going to go wrong. Even if you’re at a tech conference, you don’t know when stuff’s going to go wrong. So that’s also why practice is incredibly important, because the more you know your material, the more adaptable you can be. And so if things don’t go, like your lavalier mic isn’t working or your handheld isn’t working, or the slides aren’t working, to be able to just roll with it and not be apologetic about it and to be able to stay in connection with your audience.

Jason Dion:
And the slides is a big one. I was at a conference once where the speaker’s slides weren’t working. Essentially the remote died and they couldn’t get it to advance, and it was just stuck on the title slide. And literally they could not give their presentation because they were so queued to the slides. If the slides weren’t there, they weren’t able to know where they were supposed to be. So always have, I like to have a little backup. So for me, I have little index cards, that’s my outline. If I have eight slides, I would just say, one, title, two, mission, three, vision, whatever those things are that I’m covering. And that at least will give me, if the slides aren’t working, I can pull that out and go, okay, this is my outline. I can keep going. But being comfortable with your material helps with that.

And slides can be a big issue. The more tech you get, the more interactive you get, the more chances there’s things that are going to go wrong.

Meridith  Grundei:
More chances are.

Jason Dion:
But you do have a better presentation, it’s more interesting. But it’s okay. You just need to be able to work through those things because sometimes the tech will not work. Sometimes the slides won’t work, sometimes the projector bulb burns out, sometimes the mic goes out. There’s all sorts of things. I was in one presentation where there was about 300 people in the audience, and the mic didn’t work because they forgot to charge the thing. So I’m in the presentation, about three minutes into it, I get through my intro, one of the lavalier wireless mics, batteries die. So what do you do? You could sit there and be like, hey guys, come up here. And so I just started speaking louder and trying to yell for the next 30 seconds. And then somebody ran over with a handheld mic and they gave me that.

And then as I kept going, after about 10 minutes, they finally got the lavalier back up and we got it working, but we didn’t stop. We just kept going with it and worked through the adaptation. And I think that’s really important too. And this goes back to your background with improv. Yes and, whatever it is, let’s just keep going with it because we got to get there.

Meridith  Grundei:
Keep going. You just got to keep going and not be apologetic. And sometimes those mistakes can become gifts. So say the mic never worked and you’re like, well, I guess I’m just going to go out into the audience now and deliver this talk or whatever. It could actually create an environment that you hadn’t anticipated for better learning. So there’s all sorts of different gifts that can come from mistakes. The other thing I wanted to add too, since the conference thing and confidence monitors is one thing that I want to bring up as well, because I also noticed that people get really stuck on their confidence monitors. And for your listeners who don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s usually the screen that’s put down at your feet.

Oftentimes that’s where it’s placed, that will have your slides and your slide notes on it. And I will notice that people who are presenting will use those confidence monitors as a crutch. It’s like their script conveniently at their feet. And sometimes those will go out too. So you cannot ever depend on any technology, period, When you’re presenting.

Jason Dion:
I’ve used those conference monitors a lot. And you’re right, the first time you get up there, it’s one of those things that you’re like, oh look, my slide is right there. And you start looking down to, especially if you have the wall of text slides, you’ll look down there and start reading from there. And so now you’re doing this the whole time looking at your feet essentially. Everybody’s like, what the heck is he doing? Right? And so I really like when they have these slides in the back. That way I have to look up and back so I can see what’s going on. That works a lot better in my opinion.

Meridith  Grundei:
Agreed.

Jason Dion:
Or if you, again, use very small text or very small images on the slide, you can do a quick glance down at the confidence monitor, go, okay, this is a picture of plane, that goes into this story about when I was on a plane one time. Or this was a sentence of this, now let me tell my story about that thing. And that helps keep you on track too. But if you have too much stuff, you’re just literally reading it, people are going to know. So you want a quick glance and then go back to what you’re doing.

Meridith  Grundei:
Agreed.

Jason Dion:
So yeah, so we covered a lot of stuff, so I-

Meridith  Grundei:
We did. I could talk with you for hours. I feel like I have more to say, but I know your listeners, oh, here, always leave them wanting more.

Jason Dion:
There you go.

Meridith  Grundei:
That’s why we don’t want you to read every single detail off of your slides. Don’t give them the whole enchilada.

Jason Dion:
And the other thing is we always want to summarize what we talked about and then we talked about it before. We tell them what we’re going to tell them. We tell it to them, and now we’re going to say, okay, so remember we covered these things. I always remember that from 5th grade writing my five paragraph essays back in school to like, first paragraph, tell them what you’re going to tell them. Paragraph one, first thing you’re going to tell them. Paragraph two, second thing you’re going to tell them. Paragraph three, third thing you’re going to tell them. And then the final paragraph, tell them what you told them, right? And so now that we’ve told you all of our different tips, right? I just want to do a quick review. We talked about communicating complex information and turning an expert into educators. This is where you folks or our listeners are in a complex technical field, but your audience may not be.

And so a lot of times if you’re going to a senior decision maker, you need to be able to dumb these things down into stories, into analogies, something that makes it interesting that you’ll get their attention and have them listen to you and understand what you’re talking about. There are so many times where I’ve taken technical concepts and I make analogies such as when I talk about random access memory being the desktop of your desk and the bigger desk you have, the more stuff you can have open at once. That’s an analogy, and I’ll tell you non-technical people understand that. But if I just start talking about you need more RAM in your computer, they’re like, why? I don’t understand. It doesn’t make any sense. So taking those complex topics and then turning them into something more simple to understand, definitely number one tip there.

Number two tip that Meridith gave us, was delivering engaging and interactive presentations. Remember, you’re trying to hold the attention. Everyone is so used to dopamine hits these days with short form content and TikTok and YouTube and everything else. If you’re not interested, they’re going to tune you out and they’re off to the next thing. Or they’ll pull their phone out of their pocket and start playing Angry Birds, right? You’ve lost them and they’re off in their own world.

Meridith  Grundei:
They’re off the races.

Jason Dion:
The third thing we talked about was adapting to different audiences. You’re going to talk differently to a technical audience than a non-technical audience. You’re going to talk differently to a senior decision maker than a junior decision maker, while you’re talking up the hierarchy or down the hierarchy. And identifying that and being able to adjust your stories to that is why it’s so important. And that’s why we talked about having an outline of your script and not a script of what you’re going to say. Because if I walk in the room and I see, oh, there’s a whole bunch of people here who look like me, I can use stories that talk about a middle-aged white guy experience, but if I walk in the room and it’s all women, they’re not going to relate to the stories that I might tell as a middle-aged white guy. And so I need to change my stories to that audience.

Or if I walk into a place where it’s all people of color, they have different challenges and struggles in our field than I do. And so being able to meet people where they are and adapting to those different audiences is definitely critical. And then the final thing we talked about was anxiety, right? How do you overcome anxiety and deliver confident presentations? We talked about the fact that you should be there early. You should make sure you go through your pre-show ritual, whether that’s some exercising like pushups and jumping jacks, which I’ve done myself to get your body flowing. So you’re like, okay, I’m awake now. I’m ready to do this.

Meridith  Grundei:
And you get buff.

Jason Dion:
And you get buff. And you look better, you feel better. Just don’t do it too hard where you’re now going on stage, you’re listening to the sweat. This isn’t a full workout folks, we’re just talking about a little bit of getting your energy up. But things you can do to calm yourself and center yourself, whether that’s looking at people in the audience, looking at the back wall, moving your eyes across the stage, being prepared, not relying too much on your confidence monitors, all those things are things that can help you overcome anxiety. So that was our big summary.

And with that, before we close out the episode, I do want to turn over to Meridith so she could tell us where you all can connect with her if you want help with doing these type of things and learning how to be more confident in your presentations and doing more of your public speaking and soft skills. So Meridith, over to you.

Meridith  Grundei:
Thank you so much for that. I’m going to add one more little nugget, which is trust. That word, trust. Trust the process and trust that you know your content because you are the expert. So I wanted to throw that last word in there. People can find me at grundeicoaching.com. That is my website. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me giving presentation tips on TikTok if you would like. And pretty much if you just Google me, you’ll find me. You might even find my actor website.

Jason Dion:
Nice. And so we’ll put that in the show notes as well, because Grundei is, if you’re not sure how to spell it, it is, G-R-U-N-D-E-I. And we’ll have that in the show notes as well, so you can click on that and go right over her website. It’s a great website. She’s got lots of good information there, and I definitely recommend checking out everything that Meridith has to offer, because if you’re in this area and you struggle with soft skills, I will tell you that getting a coach like Meridith can really help break you out of your shell. I am not naturally an extrovert, I am naturally an introvert, but I’ve had to become an extrovert over the years to be successful in my career, especially as I wanted to move up into things like the CIO or the IT director.

As you get into those executive positions, it’s a lot more about talking and networking and communicating. And if you’re somebody who just likes to be in the basement in a dark room with a keyboard and a hoodie on, you’re never going to make it to those levels. So getting that soft skills down is critically important and being able to communicate with other people. So that being said, I want to thank you all for joining us for another episode of Your Cyber Path. We’ll be back here next episode with some other great information as we go back into our SDP and our security design principles, again, with me and Kip. And after that we’ll have other great guests coming on as we continue to expand the portfolio and the collection of information we have.

And once again, I just want to thank Meridith for coming and joining us over from Grundei Consulting, and I think you guys will get a lot of great information from her. And so I’m really happy that she was here and able to be with us. So thanks again and we’ll see you next time on Your Cyber Path.

Meridith  Grundei:
Thank you.