In the next lecture, we're really going to get into the nuts and bolts of designing your speech, your presentation, and then getting on to the important part of practicing it. But before we do, I want to step back for a minute. And just offer you a challenge. I really want you to put your engineers cap on, when it comes to presenting this speech and creating this speech. There's this perception among a lot of engineers that public speaking coaches like me, want to try to force them into doing something that's out of character, that we somehow want to teach you to be touchy feely and not care about facts and just tell a bunch of warm stories and be all loosey goosey with the facts not really care if things are right. That's not it at all.

I actually want you to be more like an engineer. As an engineer, you should focus on results. So if you speak and people don't remember what you're talking about, Guess what, you now have empirical evidence that your speech failed. I would submit to you that you don't have a single shred of empirical evidence that the way you've been giving presentations is effective, ie this idea of gathering every fact every data point, lots of complex charts and graphs, gathering it together, putting it on slides, and sort of quickly going through the numbers reading blah, blah, blah, blah. You don't have a single shred of evidence that that works. Well, why do we do it?

Because it's easy for us to do it that way to gather the facts and have people emailing us stuff plus, we maybe saw our boss do it that way we've seen others in our corporation or organization do it that way. But you know, everything I just said is the same reason people use leeches and you know, burned witches and all sorts of things. There's no evidence for So I want you to take the exact same approach you do to designing and building a bridge, a skyscraper or anything else, I want you to use the materials that work. And to test it. You can't just throw every single thing into building a bridge. If you try to build a bridge, and you're using bricks, and steel, and iron, and straw, and everything, it's probably gonna look awful and probably won't be that sturdy either.

And yet, isn't that what we do with our speeches, we just tried to put every single fact every data point, bring together 10 other colleagues previous PowerPoints, so there's more and more stuff in it doesn't work. So I'm going to give you all sorts of tips in this course I have already I'll continue to you can ignore a lot of them. But one thing I really want you to focus on is having engineers mentality of designing something that works based on evidence. So here's the thing about PowerPoint. You'll hear me talk about this later. And I'll go ahead and give you a heads up now.

It's very easy to find out what works with PowerPoint, you give the presentation. When you're done. Ask your audience what slides they remember what the content was. If they don't remember, it didn't work. Throw the slide in the trash can. I'm serious.

You build a bridge, and every single car just collapses and drives and goes in the ocean and people drown. Are you going to keep building that bridge? Or would you say you know what this bridge isn't working? It's a deathtrap. It's exactly the same thing with your presentations and your speech. So if you are giving a presentation, whether using PowerPoint point or not, when you're done.

Ask your audience what they remember, any important point that you really wanted them to remember, if they can't throw it back in your face, you now have empirical evidence that the way you presented it didn't work. You failed. Take that part of your presentation. If it's on paper, tear it up and throw it in the garbage can. If you came to me and said, You're you want to build a mansion in the Caribbean, and you want to make sure it withstands hurricanes. And I say sure, I'm the engineer for you and I've engineered this beautiful straw hut.

Are you just gonna take my word for it? Are you gonna want some testing? I think you're gonna want some testing before you pay me a lot of money to build that straw hut to support you and your Family and protect you and your family during a hurricane. It's the exact same thing with your presentations. You can test them. Now it's very easy to test people think of public speaking as a so called soft skill like it's a little puppy a little bunny.

Oh, it's a big mystery as to what? No, it's not. If you are giving a technical presentation on some engineering project, to 40 colleagues in your company on Thursday or to your board of directors, find three colleagues on Tuesday at lunch, give them your presentation. When you're done, ask them every message that remember any message they remember, congratulations, you design that part of your speech. Well, you delivered it well, it succeeds. It's ready to go from prototype to the final deliverable.

Any idea that was important to you that you're Three colleagues couldn't throw in your face, you now have empirical evidence that you failed miserably. It doesn't work. Throw that part of the speech in the trash can same with the slides, test the slides. It works if they remember it, and then remember the ideas and why it's important. They don't remember the slides work. And that's the real problem.

We'll go into this in more detail in a future lecture. But that's the real problem with putting text and a lot of numbers on PowerPoint slides. I like text I like to read I've written eight books. I don't have any evidence that putting text on a slide while you're talking and projecting and moving things around is an effective way to get people to remember ideas. Guess what, you don't have any evidence either. So don't take my word for it.

Test with your audience. If you want to be serious about being an engineer someone who respects empiricism, respects the idea of design respects the whole idea of evidence, then this is really my challenge to you, no matter how you put together your presentation, whether your style is quiet, not moving or bold and, and lots of j however you do it. I don't really care. All I care about is that you have an engineer's mentality of testing after the fact to make sure it works. You build a skyscraper and the elevator stops, every single time it's 100 storey skyscraper, and every single time it stops at the 30th floor and releases and people crash to their death. You're not going to say well, you know, that's the building in the woods opened up to the public.

Now that's just the way you wouldn't do that. You would fix the problem. Before adding more and more people in, I want you to take that same mentality with your speeches, practice your speeches test. If people you tested on, don't get it, you've got to change your speech. This is very different process than the way most engineers and most business executives in general prepare. Most people spend their time gathering more and more data more and more data, checking the data, checking the slides, spell, checking the slides, changing the font size, changing the colors, emailing it to other people for approval, and then they stand up.

And for the first time ever, they're talking out the speech in front of investors or clients or customers or colleagues or the board of directors. That's a disastrous way of doing it. So that's the one thing I really want you to promise me is this idea that you're going to test and if it's doesn't pass the test. Shut down the job operation. redo your presentation test again. Don't give your speech until it's tested positive