Another very important place to test your speaking abilities and your speech immediately after you've given your speech or presentation or talk. Anytime you're talking to more than 10 people, someone's likely to come up to you afterwards. Oh, good job today good presentation. Most of us in that situation say, Well, thanks, appreciate. I was good today, wasn't it? You may think that don't stop there.

This is valuable, valuable marketing research that you could get. But you got to dig a little deeper. major corporations all over the world spend billions of dollars of market research. But when you're a speaker, and you're trying to improve your speaking you can get all this market research. for free. All you have to do is ask.

So when someone comes up to me after a presentation Oh, good job today good speech. I always say thanks. But hey, do you mind me asking what do you remember? What's stands out. How would you describe this to your colleague who wasn't here today? And really listen, that's extraordinarily valuable.

Focus group research, and it's free. If they're telling you the messages that were important to you, you know, at work, if they're remembering your examples, your stories, your slides, you know, it worked. But if it's just, Hey, good job, very professional, very interesting, then if that's what they tell me, I know I failed completely. If that's what they tell you, it means you failed. Because someone could have all sorts of reasons to tell you, you're great. They may want a promotion, they may want you to hire their kid for a summer internship.

There's all sorts of reasons someone may just tell you that it was fine or great. People can lie about that. But they can't lie about what messages they remember. If you present it in a way that wasn't memorable. They don't remember it. So always ask Say thanks first but then ask them what do you remember what stands out because that is public speaking gold