Presentation and Writing Skills w/ Michael deLisser
And when you looked at the actual difference, Kennedy looked composed and confident and calm, whereas Nixon was not as comfortable in front of a camera, he was sweating, he was uncomfortable.
And so he did not appear to be as confident, and because of that, his messaging didn't resonate as well. So ultimately, people who listened on the radio thought Nixon won because they couldn't see his physical.
But the people who saw it in person thought Kennedy did because he looked confident.
The main things to recognize is how you come across, will strongly influence your ability of your audience to buy into it and feel like you know what you're talking about.
Welcome back to The Speaking and Communicating Podcast. I am your host, Roberta Ndlela. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.
Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development. By the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review. Now, let's get communicating.
Now, let's get communicating with our returning guest, a friend of the show, Michael DeLisser. He's joining us and he's a leadership accelerators author, a leadership strategist who started on this journey when he observed his death at the age of 15.
As he was coaching leaders back in the day, Michael himself has been doing this work for over 25 years, has also been teaching at Tissier Institutions, the writing and the presentation skills, which we will be focusing on in this discussion, which is
part two of our conversation with Michael. And before I go any further, please help me welcome back Michael DeLisser to the show. Hi, Michael.
Hi, thanks for having me back. I'm excited to continue our conversation.
And I'm excited as well.
The reason we decided that we should have you back is because on our first episode, we focused more on the leadership skills that are necessary in order to become successful as a leader and to lead a team with high performance, results driven.
Why communication determines leadership success
However, today we decided that we're going to focus on the presentation skills and the writing skills. And why is that important?
Well, there's four communication skills that I think are critical for leaders. In the last session, we covered two of them, really, interpersonal communication and the other one was meeting management.
And even though we didn't get into meeting management, we did talk about key things you can do to help people feel valued and things like that. The other two that I focus on is presentation skills and writing skills.
And so when you think about anything you do as a leader, right, if you're getting results through others, there's almost always going to be four means of communication you're going to use.
You're either going to be presenting, writing, doing it in a meeting environment or doing it one-on-one.
And so today we're going to focus on the presentations and the writing portion of it, because it's equally as important as the other two that we focused on last time.
Here's the thing. And you've taught people in colleges and universities. What is their first exposure to a presentation?
It's funny, a lot of times it's because they had to do it at school or something, right?
Sometimes, and a lot of the people that I coached in the MBA programs and I taught in, they were professionals that did their MBA nighttime, and then they came to school in the evenings and they worked during the day.
And so they had some very real situations that they just wanted to improve on.
But the real reason that I even got teaching at the university level was because the university I was teaching with, they were getting feedback from the people that were hiring their students, that, look, they're all brilliant, they're all smart, but
they really need to work on their communication skills. And so we determined as we were designing this course, that there needed to be four things you focus on in presentation and writing, or two of them, because you could be as smart as you want to
be. But if you can't convey what you need to convey in a way that others can be receptive to it, it's going to be hard to really have the ability to be effective. And so those are the reasons why I ended up getting into teaching that.
But Presentation Skills is probably one of the most notable ones where if you make a mistake, everybody sees it because you're up in front of a group, right?
It can be similar in writing as well, but in presentations, your ability to convey the message is critically important if you want to be heard and remembered.
As a college professor, so you are on the other side of it, you are presenting to the students and you are teaching them that when they go to their workplaces, they must make presentations.
Are you modeling how they should make presentations at work, or are you just feeding them information that they need to know in order to do well in the MBA program?
It's about at work for the most part. And quite honestly, the fundamentals of presenting are universal. I mean, the context could be you're presenting in your community because you feel strongly about some change that needs to happen.
It could be in the workplace. But the fundamentals are the same no matter what the context is. And for the most part, the goal of this program was to have people walk out the door with increased skill in their ability to present.
And we definitely achieved that because we focus on the very core things. Two areas, really. One is how do you make your content more persuasive?
How do you make it more powerful so your audience is engaged through what you're saying? The other one is how do you deliver that content? How do you do it in a way that is powerful and conveys confidence and that people can get behind you?
There's some very interesting studies out there, but one of the most well-known one is one of the first political debates that was ever televised in the United States was between Nixon and Kennedy.
Those two presidential candidates, the people who watched the actual presentation on television for the first time ever, they all thought that Kennedy had won. But the people who listened to it on the radio all thought that Nixon had won.
And when you looked at the actual difference, Kennedy looked composed and confident and calm, and he came across as authentic presenting, whereas Nixon was not as comfortable in front of a camera. He was sweating. He was uncomfortable.
And so he did not appear to be as confident, and because of that, his messaging didn't resonate as well.
So ultimately, people who listened on the radio thought Nixon won because they couldn't see his physical, but the people who saw it in person thought Kennedy did because he looked confident.
The connection between writing and clarity of thinking
And that's one of the main things to recognize is how you come across, will strongly influence your ability of your audience to buy into it and feel like you know what you're talking about.
So let's go to the Nixon example. So those who thought he won because they listened to what he had to say, does that mean his message was more impactful? So they were focused on how he looked?
Yes, he had a very strong message and he presented it well.
It's just the people that heard the message, they were hearing what he wanted them to hear. The people that were seeing the message were seeing that he was uncomfortable or seeing that he wasn't as confident as the other person.
It really shows the whole picture here is a lot of the messages in your tone of voice and your nonverbal delivery, but that whole verbal delivery piece really, if it's not done well, can detract from the quality of your message.
Which then is a parallel to podcasting.
That's why they say it's such a powerful medium because listening, that's what people connect with more rather than when they watch, for instance, they're going to watch this YouTube video, but you find that there's more of a response and engagement
Yeah.
And so it all depends on what people are stimulated by. Some people are more visually stimulated and they want to see it. But if what you're conveying with sight is not in alignment with your messaging, it can actually work against you.
But when you're just listening to the messaging, you don't see the person, all you have is the words to be distracted by, so to speak, or to be drawn to. You don't have any other distractions. Like I work a lot with executives.
If they get up in front of a group, a lot of the executives I work with are actually introverted in nature, and they're not necessarily comfortable in front of groups. They'd rather not be doing that.
And so the big challenge is how do you get them to change their mindset to the point that they can see it as an opportunity or see it in a more positive light, as opposed to going in thinking, I'm not going to enjoy this because I don't like being in
front of groups. And so a big piece of presenting effectively is going in with a mindset, regardless of the situation, is how do you get your mind in the right place so that you feel confident up there, as opposed to listening to the voice in your
Yes, because obviously the podcasting is not going to be applicable in the workplace.
Everybody's going to see you. So now let's talk about the actual presentation itself. When preparing, and we've always had this debate in the show in the past, how many slides, Michael, should I have on my presentation?
How many is too much? How many is too little?
Well, the less, the better. It's really why are you creating the slides, right?
So I mean, if people are creating slides because it's more comfortable for them to get people to look at the slides instead of them, then that's not a good reason to create a slide, right?
You want to make sure your slides are minimalistic as much as possible. A lot of people will put talking points on their slides, and they'll put six or seven bullets to help them remember what they want to say.
Again, not as effective because if you're just going to read what's on the slide, why don't you just give them the slides and not present at all? The most important thing you could do is have a clear purpose for every slide, right?
And as you go through your presentation, I always talk about people when they're reviewing the presentation, look at the slide itself and ask yourself, what is my purpose for this slide? What is the thing that I want to convey?
What's the one most important outcome that I want them to get from the slide? And what's the minimalistic way I can do that? Is there an image that can drive it home?
Is there one or two bullet points? Is there a way to emphasize the most important thing? And are there words that I can use to drive home what I want them to remember?
There's this thing where they say, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them, right? It's the idea of, now I'm talking about the structure of the presentation as a whole.
Here's what I'm going to talk about, do a preview of it, go through it and then remind them of the most important things in the end, right?
And so, as you're thinking about what should I put on the slides, well, what are the few things that are most critical to cover?
And then the big mistake that people make is they try to cover too much in the presentation instead of finding other means to convey that information.
For example, I could have 20 slides or I could have five slides in a handout covering the rest of it, right?
And when you cover too much information, what happens is the more information you give, the less likely they'll remember the most important points.
And so that is true. If you just give them the whole elephant instead of just picking what? Three pieces of it?
One of the key things I always tell the people is decide what are your most important points.
And as you're putting together your outline of your presentation, prioritize them. And you can list all 10 things you want to cover.
And then stopping, you apply the 80-20 rule and say, what are the two or three things that I cover that will have the biggest overall impact?
You're better off covering three things, it will have a big impact and putting the rest of it in a handout, then trying to cover all 10 of them.
Because ultimately what's going to happen is you're going to inundate them with information instead of having them focus on a few things, it'll have the biggest outcome.
Hence the phrase they use lately, which is this could have been an email.
Yeah, that's the biggest mistake that people make is they don't realize, what was the purpose of getting them in person to begin with? Was it necessary?
Structuring powerful presentations
Because if you're just going to read from your slides, it probably wasn't necessary. You could have sent them to me. But if it's because you needed them to feel a certain way, did you create content that made them feel the messaging?
Did you present in a way that made them feel the messaging? Those are the key things that I work with people on. And a lot of times, if you have bad content, it's hard to do anything to make the presentation powerful.
So it starts with having great content, narrowed down to the few most important things. And again, great content is not defined by you, it's defined by your audience.
So the question is, did you come up with content that speaks to what's important to them as opposed to just speaking about what's important to you?
And that's another mistake people make is they spend too much time focusing on I, I, me, me, instead of turning that message into, here's how it impacts you, here's how it impacts our customers, here's why it's important to the organization, things
The message that feels important to them.
Do you do any kind of research to say then, okay, here's what's going to be important to my audience instead of me thinking, oh, let me just tell them this is what's going on in my department and this is what they need to know.
You should be researching your audience. I mean, the more personalized you make your presentation, the more powerful it is. I work with sales teams a lot, and frequently someone will present what they're going to present to the client to me.
And if it feels like a generic presentation that they do for all of their potential clients, I will give them that feedback. I'm not going to be inclined to buy your product when you present it to me in a very generic way.
And so what a lot of people do is they create a presentation, they get comfortable with it, and then they want to deliver it the way they're comfortable. But if you really want to be impactful, you have to know who is your specific audience members.
What are their needs? What will they be doing with your presentation after you give it to them?
For example, if you're presenting to someone who's not the final decision maker, and maybe you're presenting to your boss, but it's your boss's boss that has to make the decision.
Are you also considering what handouts or resources are you giving to your manager because they're going to have to turn around and present it to someone else, and they're not going to know the content as well as you?
So you always have to be thinking, who's my audience and who's the audience behind the audience?
Because if I know that who I'm presenting to is going to have to share this with someone else, I'd better give them some tools or resources to make it easy for them to be successful when they share it to the person behind the person.
So you must know your audience's audience as well.
Yeah, depending on the context. But if it's a situation where you know they're going to need to turn around and use that information, are you making it easier for them to do what they need to do next?
And it may just be that, let's say I'm teaching you how to do something, but you have to turn around and do it when I'm not there.
Even if there's not another audience, so to speak, I need to be able to set you up so you have the tools and the information in your hands that you can turn around and be successful.
And so I have to be thinking, what will my audience for this presentation be doing with the content? And then I have to stop and say to myself, okay, if I know they're going to be doing that, what can I do to make it easier for them to do it?
What are the key things I want them to remember, and how do I make them stand out? What job aids or quick handouts can I give them that will allow them to be successful after they leave the room?
Those are the things that really good presenters do, because they're not just thinking, I want you to hear this information. They're thinking, I want you to be successful with this information, so I'm going to give you what you need to do that.
When you are teaching MBA students, were they able when making a presentation to make a distinction between, I'm making a presentation for my peers, so these are the slides, versus I'm making it for my seniors or I'm making it for the board of
directors. So I summarize, I just give numbers, whatever the case is. Were they able to make those distinctions?
Because I've seen scenarios where sometimes people are not able to distinguish between, this audience just needs the headlines, this one just needs the summary, this one needs a little more detail because they are tech or they need more analysis.
Some people, they just put everything on the presentation on the slides, and they're not able to make that distinction.
Yeah. What you're hitting on is probably the single most important factor that will distinguish between a good presentation and a great one. A great one is customized to each audience differently.
So what you may present to your peers, they will probably use that information differently than what an executive team will do with it. Did you adapt your presentation for your peers to speak to what's important to them?
And did you adapt it again to your executives to speak to what's important to them? And if you don't make those little adaptions, you're going to run into trouble. Here's a great example.
Another thing that people don't think about. A lot of times when you're presenting to an executive team, they are already in a meeting and or meetings, and whoever went right before you might have taken too long.
You go in there thinking you have a half hour to present, and I can't tell you how many times they get in there. They're like, hey, Michael, we're a little bit behind schedule. Can you present what you need to present in 15 minutes?
So you have to have the short version, especially with the executive audience. You always have to have the short version ready. You have to know in advance which slides will I skip over if they tell me I can't use the full time, right?
And that's another thing. You know, when you have an executive audience, you have to know there's a good chance that they've been in meetings all day or that they might be behind if they've been in meetings all day.
So you have to prepare for that and know that if that happens, I will be able to seamlessly without thinking, just skip over some slides and get the same output done, or even have a different alternative slide deck ready, just in case.
Yeah, because you need to know if these are the highlights, this is what they need at most. Because even with keynotes as well, you find that you have a 45-minute keynote and they say, Michael, we are running behind schedule.
Please just shorten it to a 20-minute speech. So you should know that, okay, my audience in these 20 minutes, these are the most impactful things that they need to know from my presentation.
Yeah. And to your point earlier, what is important for your peers to know may be very different because whatever you're proposing to them or presenting to them may impact them differently than an executive team, right?
So it's always about knowing your audience and customizing your presentation is a big part of it.
Overcoming nervousness when speaking
The other customization to consider is in any audience, you're going to have four personality types, right? And I do this all the time.
If you know what your most dominant personality type is and what your least dominant personality type is, those two things will dictate how you come across to others. So for example, I'm a people person and I'm not very structured.
So for me, if I go in with a presentation, I have to spend extra time on making it more structured or I'm going to lose people.
And if I'm going to an executive audience, I also have to be very concise in what I'm saying because they don't want all the details. They just want to get to the bottom line.
So, in any audience, you have results-driven people or people that lead with that energy.
There are structured people, there are information-driven people that really want to fully understand things, and then there's a people person, you know, someone that's more relationship-focused.
So, as you're building your presentation, can you stop and say, what's the one or two things I can do to speak to the people needs?
What's the one or two things I can do to make this more structured, to make it flow more logically and give better evidence for the people that have high structure needs? What can I do to make it more concise for the results-driven people?
Can I put certain things in handouts? And then for the understanding-driven people who will have lots of why questions, you may even want to send in information out in advance.
So, you're answering the why questions before they come in the room, right? And that gives them a chance to process the information as well. So, it's very interesting when you're stopping to think about these things.
Even if you know nothing about your audience, if you just know that I need to speak to results-driven people, structured people, understanding-driven people, and the people are more relationship-focused, and you can build elements of those four
Yes.
That's very important, the personality types, as you mentioned, because sometimes we, especially in the workplace, we never show whether, do I just hand out the information, or do I take the time to get them engaged, ask questions, make them do
something, because this is what we sometimes encourage when somebody's giving a keynote to an audience of like 500 people, get them to do something, get them to do an exercise with the person sitting next to them. All those different environments
Yeah.
And it also depends on the outcome you're trying to achieve. Are you trying to get someone to remember something? Are you trying to get them to be able to do something?
And all of that dictates how you approach it. You know, because if you're just trying to get and remember something, you know, you can find an analogy or something, you know, that would be very relatable, that would allow them to remember it.
If it's an actual skill they need to demonstrate, then having them get into the breakout person next to you and practicing the skill, that's a whole different thing, right? And so you have to be clear, what's the outcome I want to achieve?
And this is, by the way, a big mistake people make, is they don't stop and say, when this presentation is done, what are the three or four outcomes I'm trying to achieve?
And if you don't stop and write them down for yourself and say, what are those outcomes? Then you could end up covering more things than you need to.
But if you stop and say, this will be successful if I achieve A, B, C, and D, then you have to stop and say, okay, now how do I make A, B, C, and D relatable to my audience? And then you focus on just those four things.
Now you have a much more powerful presentation because you prioritized, you thought about the outcomes you're trying to achieve, and then as you're designing your content, you say what design is going to result in remembering this?
What design is going to result in skill improvement? Whatever it might be. But if you don't take the time to create those outcomes before you design your presentation, then your presentation will be all over the place.
It won't be as concise and focused on the few things that are most important.
Which ties back to the point at the beginning, which is if your presentation has impact, and if it achieves whatever goals you set, then you will focus on those.
Because, I mean, the purpose is not to just deliver everything you've ever known in your entire life. Because I think that's what some professionals make, that mistake of thinking, I need to tell them everything I know right now about the subject.
Yeah. And there's certain personality needs that, like, let's say, if you are a very structured individual, and you're going to present, you may want to present A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and make sure you never miss anything.
You want to be organized in the way you do that. And that might be too much information for most audiences, right? If you're more understanding driven, you might over explain things, and you may give too much detail as well.
If you're results driven, you may not give enough detail and leave people with lots of lie questions, right?
And if you're a people person, you might be up there having fun and making it real personable, but are you really staying focused on the outcome that you need to achieve?
So it's really critical that you know yourself well enough to know, what are you going to do naturally well? And maybe you have to tone that down a little bit for certain audiences. And then what's the one thing that you don't do well?
And then how do you find ways to work around that so that you don't have that be a weakness in your presentation?
Right. The personality types again. Now, let's talk about the writing skills.
As I've already said in the past, that us who started working about 30 years ago, before Google, before ChetGPT, before the Internet, there was always this thing of really striving to sound as professional as possible with your correspondence, with
clients, with management, and things like that. clients, with management, and things like that.
Executive presence and influence
As time has progressed, things have become a little bit more casual because you now have texting language entering the system. And so when you help your clients with the writing skills, what are the first things that you tend to address?
Well, more often than not, their personality type is going to impact their writing more than anything else.
And some of the things I just talked about with presenting, if you are more of a structured individual and or you're more of an understanding-driven person, you're probably going to include too much detail, potentially include too much detail in your
writing. The key is, can you find ways to accommodate the different personality styles and know, you know, if you're more results-driven, you're probably going to write things in a blunt way that may cause people to interpret it like you might be
angry or something else, you know, because you're just getting to the point. And so can you soften it up and add a little bit of people skills to it?
But more often than not, there's a few habits that people have, you know, that most likely have the biggest impact on their writing. For example, there's this thing called reading level, right?
And a lot of times people are not even really aware of what reading level means. In a nutshell, the readability of something means, did you write it to the education level even of your audience, right?
So let's say you're someone presenting and you have a master's degree level presentation, but some of the people in your audience maybe only have a high school level.
You know, when you're writing to them, you're going to lose them by using too many big words and too many complicated things because you're not even writing to the level. I was working with hospitals and clinics and they were doing safety training.
And the safety training was for people that were doctors, but it was also for people who were either janitors or some other role like that. They're all going through the same training.
But if you write it to the level of doctors, if you have a doctor write it, it's not going to resonate with the people that might be, you know, at a lower level education or even English as a second language or whatever, you know, you have a lot of
people that may not be speaking the language first. So you have to lower your reading level as well because they're able to read, but not necessarily at that Ph.D. level, for example.
So one of the most important things you can do is stop and ask yourself, in my audience, what is the overall reading level that I should try to achieve, you know, to make sure everyone can do that?
Because in the hospital, if it's safety training and you have people in there cleaning the rooms that a surgery just happened, they need to be just as safe as the surgeons, right?
And you don't make it at a level that they can understand, you may risk their safety. And so that was the context where I learned about readability.
And I realized that, you know, there's things you can do when you need to make sure that everybody understands it. You need to think about the way you frame it in the easiest possible way.
For example, you can cut down on extra words and make your sentences less wordy. You can break long sentences into shorter ones or paragraphs into shorter paragraphs. Only convey only one idea per paragraph, things like that.
If it's a technical term, you can use analogies or definitions and things like that to make sure that people fully understand it.
But you have to make sure that you're doing everything that you can to make sure that what you've written is going to be understood by everyone in your audience. So readability is kind of something that nobody thinks about.
But I work with people all the time on looking at their own writing. The best way to do it is look at your writing and even softwares like Microsoft, they have built into the spell check an ability to do readability statistics.
So if you go into your spell check options and select readability statistics, every time you do a spell check, it'll tell you the reading level of what you just wrote.
And if it's written at like the 12th would be like high school level, 14th grade would be more of a master's level, 18th grade would be more like a PhD level. So it'll tell you what your reading level is.
It'll tell you how many words per sentence on average you use, all sorts of different statistics.
And just by looking at your readability statistics, you can realize I'm writing really long paragraphs, I'm writing really long sentences, and I'm writing at a level that's higher than the target audience. So it's pretty interesting.
Readability level, that is something us and the audience definitely need to look at. So when I was in the United States, I had some of my friends who were, I remember this one in particular, she was doing a PhD.
And she said to me, she had noticed that because as South Africans, we were more in the British system. So she said our English sounds a little more formal, the way I phrased some of my expressions.
And so she said to me, Roberta, please look at my assignment. And what I noticed was, even though technically what she's studying, I may not be well versed in it. But I used to say to her, you write the way you speak.
You know what I'm saying? Her writing sounds like she always talks on a daily basis. But you find that when you write with us, at least here in South Africa, when you write, your writing is a little more formal.
You don't write as if you are talking to your peers, which when she was writing her assignment, she sounded like she was just talking to me about it. You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So those are the differences that I noticed.
Have you found that when, like you said, the masters and the PhD level students, if you've dealt with them, that's also the challenge that they have, that they write as if they're just having a conversation?
I think to some degree that's true for everybody. I mean, it's just like when you're presenting. In many cases, if you use a lot of filler speech when you're presenting, you're going to use it in one-on-one conversations as well.
If you're saying um and ah when you present, you're probably doing that when you're one-on-one. So similarly with writing, some of the habits you'll have will show up there as well.
But it's pretty interesting because when you have a high awareness of where your writing strengths are, you can leverage those. And when you have a lower awareness, that's when you can really find workarounds.
Like, for example, when I wrote my book, I knew I was not results-driven. I knew I was not very structured.
I went out and found reviewers that were very structured and very results-driven because I wanted to find people that thought differently from me to give me feedback on the book so that I can see beyond my blind spots, right?
Right.
And initially, the book was supposed to be twice as long as it was.
AI and communication: tool or threat?
And the reason we cut it down to half way is because I got so much feedback saying you're trying to cover too much because I'm more of an information-driven personality type.
I decided, okay, we'll do half of the book now and we'll make it, you know, call it Leadership Accelerators and focus on interpersonal skills.
And the other half of the book will be more focused on those core four that I talk about, and that'll be a different book eventually.
But I learned all this because I deliberately found people that thought differently from me, and I got feedback from them that made me realize I was trying to cover too much information in one book.
Right. And I think also the opposite is true. If I wrote a book and I wanted to resonate more with an American audience, then I would ask you and my friend to be my blind spots and say, Roberta, this sounds a little way too formal.
Or even the vocabulary and the expressions that you use is not going to resonate with an American audience. Maybe these are some of the things that you can tweak.
Because I think the point is at the end of the day, it's about who the target market is, who the audience is for the information that you're trying to deliver.
Yeah. And there's so many commonalities between presenting and writing in terms of what's going to help you be successful. Number one is having a clear purpose in prioritizing your most important few items.
Number two is having a very logical structure to the way you lay it out. And number three is, what are you doing in this presentation to speak to your audience's specific needs, right?
And to the example you just gave, if you're writing to an American audience, and you haven't had a lot of experience writing to an American audience, then it's probably better to find a few Americans to run it by first before you put it out there,
right? Because that allows you to personalize it and make sure that it matches what their expectations might be. Especially when you're trying to be persuasive.
So, you know, Aristotle, a couple thousand years ago, came up with three means of persuasion. And if you apply these three means in everything you write, in everything that you present, you will be much more effective in both contexts.
One is, it's called ethos, but it's basically your ability to come across as credible to others. And there's two ways you can do that, either demonstrating your professional credibility or demonstrating your personal credibility.
Professional credibility is highlighting the things that led you to become an expert in this or something like that, or speaking about the topic using the knowledge that you have.
Personal credibility might be getting the other person to recognize you're trustworthy or that you're even a likeable person, right? So that's the credibility piece. The second piece is the pathos or called the emotional connection.
And that is, are you speaking to your audience's hot buttons? Are you framing what you're trying to convey in a way that speaks to what's most important to them?
And so similarly, presentations and writing, you need to make sure that you are customizing your content to speak to what's most important to your audience. And the third one is logos or logic.
And that is, did I lay it out in an easy to follow way with good reasoning and good evidence so that logically they can connect the dots and see where I'm leading them and also feel like my argument is strongly backed.
And usually we're strong in one of those three or two of those three, but we're not strong in all three. So what I always tell people when I'm training is, okay, if you're trying to be persuasive, first question is, which is your strongest area?
Are you strongest in building credibility, either professional or personal? Are you strongest in your ability to speak to your audience's hot buttons or the emotional appeal and connect to them at an emotional level?
Are you strongest in logic and laying it out logically?
And more often than not, people seem to be stronger in the logic one, but the area that they usually need to work on is either spending more time building credibility and or more time speaking to the hot buttons of their audience.
If any professionals are listening right now, especially those who are just entering the workforce, when it comes to presentation and writing skills, what are some of the tools you think they can use in order to hone those skills and sharpen them and
make sure that they are ready? Because like we said, I think the landscape over the years has changed.
Yeah. The typical thing that I always say to people is there's really three questions that every audience has when you're presenting anything to them, whether it be writing or through presentation itself.
The three questions in the back of the mind is, can I trust this person? Is the information that the person is coming from, is that someone that is credible?
And you think about, anytime you watch a news program and they have a guest on who's an expert, the first thing they do is run you through all the credentials, right? Before that person ever opens their mouth.
The reason they do that is because they're building the person's credibility before they open their mouth. And now, you're thinking, okay, this person is an expert. I just heard them lay out.
So what are you doing to build your credibility and build trust with your audience? That's number one. The second one is, does this person understand me or my needs, right?
And that's more of the connection, that personal connection. Is what they're talking about even relevant to me and does it matter to me, right? So that ability to, do I trust you?
Do you speak to my needs? And the third one is, do I even understand you? Am I following you logically or you make it easy for me?
So if you go into every communication thinking yourself, how am I going to build trust? How am I going to speak to the personal needs? And how am I going to lay it out in a way that's easy for them to follow?
You focus on those three things and you'll have much better outcomes to your communications.
Daily habits to sharpen speaking and writing skills
Absolutely.
Any last words of wisdom for this generation of AI and thinking, okay, if I just ask AI to write this email for me, I'm going to sound really professional, which is something that some of us do.
But do you have any advice on how to sound authentic despite enlisting AI's help?
Yes. And so I'm glad you raised that because there's a quote from a Harvard professor who said, AI is not going to replace us, but people using AI is going to replace people that are not using AI.
And so I thought that was a really powerful statement. But in a nutshell, the message is, use AI responsibly. It's okay to use AI to help take an email that you crafted and make it stronger, for example.
But here's the challenge you have is, the minute that anybody recognizes that what you created is AI-generated, you lose credibility. We talked about those three things earlier, right?
Right.
And so I think they didn't even have the wherewithal to actually write this to me. They had to go and find AI to do it for them, right?
And part of the problem is when people use AI, sometimes they change the language when AI does a review of whatever you wrote. It changes the language to sound less like you.
Well, people are pretty good at detecting when you've, when something was written and it doesn't sound like you because they've worked with you enough. So, and look, you can program your AI and say, this is the type of person I am.
These are all the different characteristics. I want you to write it this way. You can do a lot to create the persona that sounds like you.
But when it's all said and done, you have to look at that in detail and say, does this really sound like me? Is this the words I would use?
And when it's done, you always need to tweak it to make it match who you are as a person, if you're going to use it that way.
For me, if I write an email to someone, I'll draft it and then I'll ask AI to make it more professional or change the tone of it slightly. But I still drafted it myself.
And then even after that, I will go back and double check everything they did, because it may have made it sound like it's not something I would even say.
So the minute someone even suspects it was AI, even if it's not true, you've lost credibility in your messaging. So you have to be responsible on how you use it. You have to be very skilled in how you use it.
But you also have to know that there are certain situations where AI is not the right thing to use.
In a situation where you're in a conflict and you need to have that conversation or if you're in a situation where you need to make that person feel valued, things like that, AI is not going to do that for you.
And that's why we always have to continue to work on our interpersonal skills, like we talked about in the last podcast, because it can help you to a degree, but it can't help you with everything.
Yes, because there's always, if I know Michael signs a certain way when he's writing an email, I'm always going to pick it up if it doesn't sound like you.
That's exactly the problem with what this generation is doing right now, just the copy and paste from it.
I mean, I remember when I was in school, you used to paraphrase things, and I found that when the teacher is grading your paper, if you paraphrase versus just, we didn't have copy and paste back then, but literally just taking everything from the
Right.
Right. And the reality is that the more we use AI, instead of doing the thinking ourselves, the more we're robbing ourselves of opportunities to learn.
It's one thing to have AI do all your thinking, but what was the cost in terms of your own ability to learn from the process? And so it's pretty important to use it for the right things, and to know when it's time to not use it.
And anything to do with emotional intelligence, or making someone convey how you feel, those are not the times to use AI. Unless you use it to, because you want to run your ideas past them and see, does this sound harsh or whatever, you could ask.
But it's going to be limited in its ability to help you convey how you feel to others or how much you appreciate someone else.
Final leadership insights
Do you have any last words of wisdom for someone who is listening to this and wondering, how do I then start today improving my presentation and writing skills?
There are many, many tools.
I don't know that I push to one versus another other than to say, that's a good use for AI. You know, go out and say, AI, how could I improve my presentation skills? What are the top 10 resources out there that would help me?
What are the best articles? What are the best videos? And ask them for rated versions.
That would be a good way to help you narrow it down. I mean, a lot of times I'll say, give me the top 10 of something. Those are the kind of things where it could be very useful.
But I would say in general, make sure that you are doing everything you can to focus on your ability to improve your emotional intelligence and improve your self-awareness.
Self-awareness is so key because if you don't know that your personality is driving the way you come across, or if you don't know what your weakest personality type is and how that's limiting your effectiveness, then you're going to have a harder
time. So self-awareness is key. Become as self-aware as you can of where you're accelerating or when you're doing well with communicating. And where you're weakest.
And then only focus on the one or two things that are most powerful, that will have the biggest impact. Don't work on 10 things at once. Just pick the one, get better at that, then pick a second one, then get better at that.
Because if you don't apply the 80-20 rule, you could be working on 10 things and only two of them are going to have 80 percent of the impact.
And so you want to focus on the two and put 100 percent of your time into those two until you get better at them, then work on the others.
Because at the end of the day, like you said, Michael, it's about impact, it's about understanding your personality and understanding your audience, most importantly.
Yes. And speaking to your audience.
Yes. Thank you so much, Michael. Dilister, we will put all your details from the last episode on the show notes.
We really appreciate you returning to our show and sharing this presentation and writing skills with us.
Well, thank you for having me back on. I enjoyed being here.
I always enjoy having you here with us as well. Don't forget to subscribe, liberating, and to review on Apple and Spotify, and stay tuned for more episodes to come.
