Are your presentations packed with facts but still falling flat?
Learn the storytelling techniques Hollywood uses to keep people glued to the screen, and learn how to apply them in your very next meeting.
Welcome back to Speak Up, the podcast for high-performing introverts, including you, social introverts where we reveal the charisma and communication secrets of A-listers so that you get the recognition and the opportunities you have earned.
I am your host, Laura Camacho, your magical executive presence coach, godmother, and strategist.
And by the end of today's episode you will know a storytelling framework used by professional television writers to structure engaging communication.
Practical memorization and delivery techniques, especially tailored for introverts.
And then how to turn data-heavy presentations into compelling narratives that move people to actions.
All right, everyone.
You have great news for you.
Today we're going to talk to someone who knows how to write for television and podcasting, and he's a keynote speaker.
But listen to this.
So if you want to be a writer in Hollywood and you want to eat like you care about feeding your family or yourself, you have to be good at holding people's interest and getting people to tune in.
So we're going to learn some of his tricks so that we become better communicators.
Welcome to the show, Lee.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Yeah.
So I am finding myself repeating all the time that communication we're talking about the business context, that it is not simply the transfer of information.
Now that's part of it.
But that's what I think the people listening focus too much on is transferring all that great information and all the details.
So what are some communication tricks?
Would you say storytelling is like the umbrella tool for getting people interested and excited about what you have to say.
So how's that for a welcoming question?
Something light.
Something light.
Something easy.
Yeah.
Storytelling is a wonderful way to frame things.
And when I think about storytelling, I'm not necessarily thinking about in the beginning.
And then I'm thinking about a story arc, which is the emotional journey that your listener goes on.
So this idea of a story arc becomes super important.
Whether you're giving a talk, a presentation, whether you're doing a podcast, you need to have a sense of a hook for the listener, something that gets them interested.
And then you have to pay that off.
The simplest kind of story arc is a setup and a payoff.
You just asked me, well, if you were going to write for TV, you know how to hold people's attention.
So that's a bold statement right there.
If I had opened with that, if I turned that around and said I used to write for TV and I can hold people's attention.
You got to do it for 26 minutes or you get fired.
That's a bold statement and one that you need to be able to back up.
But I would say, thinking about the way you communicate in this framework, in this story arc way, where you set up something interesting and then be able to deliver on it and pay it off at the end, that is probably the biggest tool that I use.
It applies to almost anything you can think of, including, say, websites or podcasts.
Yeah, but what about somebody who's going to give say, a 10 to 15 minute presentation, say a finance person?
They're going to tell you how the money's doing, where it is, what's happened, opportunities and risks, something like that.
How can you take a mundane message like that and make it better?
That's a great question.
One way I would think about it is If you start reciting a bunch of numbers, that may be your job, but it's very hard to hang on to and listen to.
If you think about the story, the numbers, tell or use case or a person who personifies those numbers, anything that lets me get my mind around it in a more concrete, personal way, that's going to help quite a bit.
One thing to think about is thinking about how your audience is going to receive and retain what you're talking about.
When I used to direct documentaries, I would do a lot of things on architecture and engineering and science.
And the scientists and architects and engineers who I interviewed.
They always wanted to come out with a list of numbers or some kind of statistical thing.
And it's like, well, look, stop the camera, stop recording.
That's OK.
I know that's your job, but that's not what people are going to remember.
People are going to remember how you felt about that.
I know that can be a tall order for a scientist, but people are going to remember contextually some kind of emotional arc in that.
So it does involve taking a step back and saying if this is a fourth quarter report, so what's the good news or bad news and how will my audience react to it?
And kind of back engineer from that.
An interesting way to do this often, when I spoke earlier about a setup and a payoff.
Yeah, I love that.
We have to know the payoff, right?
So it kind of helps to think about the end of the meeting.
I know this is a little strange, but think about the end.
How are people feeling at the end?
How are you gonna leave people?
And then you can usually back engineer and go backwards.
I know that sounds kind of odd, but it does totally work.
Yes.
And what I'm thinking of.
You know, those of us who are introverts like don't crave the time and the spotlight.
Although I know all of us introverts, we sometimes give like amazing presentations and speeches.
But the tendency is like, oh, my gosh, I got to the end.
Thank God.
And then just kind of like, oh, well, thank you for listening.
And that's terrible, right?
Because what people remember more is the beginning and the end.
So I really like your process of taking your message.
And what do you want people like?
You think about a takeaway?
Is that how you would frame it?
You know, like what is the thing that you want them to take away?
Definitely.
A takeaway works.
Or I really think about.
I visualize and this is an important part of being an introvert and giving public talks I will visualize how people feel at the end.
If it's a very difficult topic, will they be all sad and slumped down in their chairs?
And is that what I want?
Probably not.
A big preparatory aspect of speaking as an introvert is If you can get into that space before you talk, if you've never been there before.
Get into that space and stand where you're going to stand and look out over the empty seats and visualize yourself making the talk and visualize how they're going to react, what it's going to be like at the end.
Even if you visualize, say, rapturous applause, I mean, terrific, whatever it is, right?
Right.
And even if you've been in that room a million times but maybe you've never presented in that room before, owning the space is a big part of the preparation.
And one term that you used just before we got on, Lee mentioned an interesting term.
He said that he pre-thinks.
And we all do that, but more, I think, those of us listening.
Our pre-thinking is all about analyzing if we've gotten.
Like have we told them everything or are we getting across all this huge transfer of data and information?
But I think you have a different approach to that pre-think.
And since everybody listening here is an over-thinker, tell us how we can pre-think better and what that means.
You know, overthinking is a superpower.
Introverts tend to rehearse and tend to, in their mind maybe, and maybe some of that rehearsal is about anxiety and worry, but it's, what is it, the expression, you know, worry is like a rocking chair.
You do a lot of stuff where you don't get anywhere.
Pre-thinking to me means recognizing.
There's a couple of things.
First of all, There's no way your audience is going to remember everything that you remember about that talk or about that presentation.
No way.
No way.
They're going to remember maybe three things or five things.
You know the human mind.
I think it's seven things you know when they do scientific studies of random number sequences.
Seven things is the top, top, top, I think.
I usually say at the end i build into a lot of talks if you remember one thing from what i brought up today.
It's kind of leveraging that, because i really only expect them to remember one or two things.
So the pre-thinking is a visualization and it is a bit woo-woo.
You know, i'm in, i'm in california, so we do here and you know, Visualizing yourself giving a great talk is a very good idea.
It totally works.
And taking a stance that's strong and feels good to you totally works.
And trying to keep out of the worry and making the practice of the talk.
If you need to practice it, practice it.
What's wrong with practice?
You can't practice enough.
And I can go into some memorization tips that I have.
But basically I feel if you're going to give a talk and you don't want your face in your notes all the time, you're going to have to practice that talk and you're going to have to enjoy the practice process.
It's kind of embodying the words in your body almost.
There are many things you can do, but I think that's all part of the pre-thinking process.
I love that.
Well, tell us some memorization tips, because 99 of us listening our memorization technique.
First of all, we're talking about things that we know.
So it's not like I'm talking about architecture, for example.
But that's what the slides are there to remind us, you know, those three things.
But it would be better, right, if we didn't even need that.
What parts...
Should we memorize a whole thing?
I know you recently delivered a keynote.
Did you memorize the whole thing?
Close, but not quite.
I knew I didn't have to.
The way I did that is, first of all, no one's going to know if you forgot something.
Correct.
You have the whole thing in your head, right?
You have every word and you've rehearsed it in front of the mirror or driving around in the car, whatever you do.
But no one's going to know that you dropped a line.
Right.
Pretty much.
So relax about that.
What I do is I write out a script and I will do a pass of reading that script.
But memorizing a script is not about looking at the paper and going, you know, like saying it to yourself.
That's not going to get it in your body.
You really have to speak it aloud.
Sometimes I'll do that in front of a mirror.
Some people like that.
It's not my favorite.
Sometimes I'll record myself speaking it and then I'll go for a walk and listen to myself speaking it.
First of all, walking is a tremendous mental empowerer when you walk your thinking.
Hearing it in a different context helps.
I use good old-fashioned index cards, and I figure...
I don't load up my slides with a lot of things.
I don't want them to read my talk.
No, exactly.
You could just email it to them.
I have a few prompts for myself, a sentence or two.
And I basically, if the software I'm using has prompts, I'll bold the first line of things.
But basically, I'll use index cards with prompts.
And I figure well if I could memorize the first three, four cards worth maybe the first 10 minutes.
People don't mind if you look at a note.
It's really okay, right?
I mean, you can make contact in the beginning.
It's very important.
The hello, and I'm Lee, and I'm here to talk about this, that.
Get through your first three to five cards, and then you do have to nail the ending.
So my usual approach is to Memorize the first roughly 10 minutes and then definitely repeat to myself ad infinitum as many times as possible to get the ending.
Yes.
Because I want to be able to, at the end, kind of do that gesture where you set aside the cards or set aside your notes and just talk to the people.
Yes, yes. comes very powerful.
I find that repeating it over and over the good, old-fashioned way of just repeating it definitely works.
People use an interesting visual way, too.
It's actually used by the Romans, where you walk through a park and you attach an idea to each statue or each tree that It does work.
Like you walk around your house or your apartment.
Right.
And you give the talk and now I'm looking at the plant and now I'm looking at the bedroom door.
And, you know, and you for people who are visually oriented, it definitely works.
So do you set out the ending and the beginning to answer each other?
It sure helps.
For example, I gave a talk to architects recently and my setup line was well, I have to tell you I'm an introvert and I'm here talking in front of you.
And I've learned how to do that because I know that talking in front of groups of people is an important way to get information across and to get more business, and I gave my little spiel.
And then at the end, I brought it back and said, remember when I said I was an introvert?
Well, here's how I gave some ideas of how I worked with that to be able to show up.
One interesting thing about storytelling is that it's a fallacy that if you get up there and tell a story about yourself that's so fascinating, everyone's going to love it.
Yes, thank you.
It's not necessarily true.
Your story has to connect with something that they, your audience, needs.
There is a gap.
It's sometimes referred to as a story gap.
Well, give us an example.
My favorite example is Nike, the story of Nike.
Now, Nike addressed a story gap in that athletes needed shoes with more traction.
The shoes that they had, the track shoes, were too slippery.
So one of the founders of Nike went into his garage with a waffle iron and made waffle-soled shoes literally made them by hand.
And then Phil Knight, the other partner in Nike, took them around from track meet to track meet and said here you should try these shoes.
They're going to make your people better runners.
It's a great story.
It's an origin story.
And often business origin stories are entertaining like that.
The setup and payoff is it started in a garage and now it's a global company.
So you have all those pieces working, but the reason it works is because it addresses a need of the track coach.
And the story comes around to the story gap of the track coach.
So you have to address a need of the audience.
Even if your story was entertaining and interesting and fills in things, it still has to serve the listener.
Right.
And in the business context, that's going to be like the connection.
And then in your business, the connection is with what is your message, whether it's finance coding compliance whatever, like.
Who is that affecting?
How is it affecting them?
Could you give us an example and make that into a story, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, examples help.
Use cases really help.
Thinking about, we've all heard the term your why, the capital W-H-Y, the Simon Sinek term.
And thinking about your why really matters.
It can help you, give you a context for whatever talk or whatever report or whatever you're talking about.
Another good technique is before you give a talk, no matter what it's about, think about your why.
Why are you there?
And it should be a deeper motivation than just, well, they're paying me.
Oh, absolutely.
That's boring.
That's boring.
Right.
It's boring, actually.
Yeah, it should be like because I care about people, or this company can take care of people, or we have a product that I genuinely believe is better than the competitor's product.
And here's why, you know, all that kind of background stuff.
That's what introverts also do really well.
That kind of introspection and digging in and turning it over in your mind to come in with that kind of like vitamins that you've taken before the talk or before anything.
Really it's incredibly powerful.
Do you have a structure when you talk about putting together a message?
Do you use different structures?
Or what is your thought on structure?
Well, it definitely needs to have an emotional arc.
Okay, tell us how that works.
Yeah, you have to step out of, OK, you have facts.
Let's say I'm telling a story.
I'm giving my quarterly report.
Right.
Facts are the numbers.
And we sold more widgets this quarter than last quarter.
Great.
But what do you want the audience to feel?
And often that's a bit of a showstopper, like feel.
I don't care what they feel.
They just have to listen to what I'm talking about.
But of course it's going to be a successful, much more successful talk if structurally, you can think about what's a set off, what's a bold statement, what's a set up and how can you pay that off.
And can you think about the extremes.
So what I mean by that is, I was teaching a course recently for startup founders telling their stories.
And they were all scientists and they were all doing medical things, medical startup things.
And I started to talk about these extremes.
And I said, when you're telling your story, think about the extremes.
Think about You started in a garage and now you're a multinational.
And they said, hey, we're scientists.
We don't do extremes.
You know, we can't exaggerate.
That's not us.
I said, OK, granted, I get it.
But, you know, think about a Netflix romcom where the couple starts out.
They may hate each other.
There may be some friction there.
And then by the end, they're married.
Well, that's a little bit of an arc, isn't it?
And that's an extreme.
This structural, I often look at that very simple arc.
Where are we going to start?
Where are we going to end?
Can we really make those two things pretty far apart emotionally?
Before our product, so-and-so was this, and now they're that.
We've seen that a million times.
Rags to riches, these sort of structures are used all the time.
But I like to think of when you're delivering emotionally, And thinking of your presentation, if you can, as a journey.
Some kind of journey, some kind of there's maybe a mystery to be solved or there's a puzzle to be cracked, or what could it be?
It doesn't always have to be that dramatic, but it helps if you're thinking dramatically.
Does the setup, is it usually a bold statement or could it be a question?
Like what are different ways to set up a message?
It can definitely be a question.
Depending on what you're doing.
It's very powerful to ask questions of the audience, even a show of hands.
Okay.
Because people will get into kind of a passive listening mode and maybe you don't want them in a passive listening mode, depending on what you're doing.
If it's a meeting, okay.
You know, if you're just giving a brief talk, okay.
But if it's a bit more substantial.
I would say even a short meeting, asking a question like what do you think is our top trend in this area this year?
I mean, it's just going to make it more engaging.
Well, it goes back to the, can you deliver on a bold statement?
And how bold can that statement be and still be true by the end?
And that kind of Reverse engineering, kind of teeter-totter thinking will give you.
When I teach in the classes I often draw a diagram of like we start here, we go up there and if it's really good, we end up even higher.
Or we start here, we reach a crescendo and then we go back down to the status quo, which is not as good.
Or we flatline, which is the worst, where it's just kind of reading your PDF, which you definitely don't want to do.
So I would say the setup and payoff, it's very malleable.
It can be what you need it to be, but you should be thinking about, if you can, a dramatic difference between beginning and end.
Let me just recap a little bit, and then I want you to tell me what I should have asked, what I forgot to ask, or something.
So the story arc, the purpose of your message is not to transfer information.
That's just part of it.
You want to get the people interested in what you're saying. the setup and the payoff.
And Lee recommends thinking first of the payoff, meaning your call to action, or how do you want people to feel?
And then really, I would invite you all to be creative with your setup.
What is the boldest statement you can make or unexpected question?
But nailing the beginning and the end.
Even if you don't have time to make a perfect middle, get a good ending.
And an intriguing beginning and do some pre-thinking.
Visualization is a good tool for handling the nerves and getting into the energy.
I think of the talk.
He gave some great memorization tips, including walking and associating every idea with something that you're seeing and when you're making your message Into a story of some sort, with that arc which is like there's a conflict and resolution of the conflict in some way.
Be creative as far as looking for the extreme use case, or even if you make it funny.
It's like oh, he was 10 feet tall.
Well, we know he wasn't actually 10 feet tall, but he seemed to be right.
So the emotional connection, the empathy is really the goal, not the.
If you're just going to transfer an information, send an email, right.
Right.
And Lee has reminded us that introverts we're actually better.
But don't tell anybody except we're better, except when it comes to being asked a question we're not prepared for, or maybe dinner party conversation.
Although we do ask questions, so we get through that way.
If there's one other tip Bonus tip.
If you're giving a talk, give it to somebody who knows nothing about it and use the introvert superpower of observing people to see when their eyes wander or when they're bored, or even ask them when did I lose you?
Yes, yes, yes.
Because that's a good point to know about.
But we as introverts were very sensitive to other people.
So look at the audience.
Watch them.
You know, are they engaged?
If you're practicing, you can ask.
If you're in it, you can learn.
Right.
And that's very valuable to tune into where they are.
Right.
That's so good.
Well.
Thank you so much, Lee.
I think that's just been such a blessing to everybody to get lessons from.
I mean, Hollywood writers are the best in the world.
So yeah, you're welcome.
Thank you so much, everybody.
I want major improvements in your next presentation.
Have a fantastic day.
Thank you, Lee.
Welcome.
I loved talking to Lee.
That was incredible.
What I really took away was the pre-think strategy.
Pre-thinking is a better framing for overthinking and using that as your superpower.
So if you're an introvert high performer, either in very senior leadership or headed that direction, and you feel like your presentations are not landing where they need to or you're not connecting with people in the meeting room because connection is so important,
That's why the storytelling connects people to your message.
I have the executive presence scorecard that will help you self-assess your strengths and opportunities in executive presence on the day to day.
The link is at the top of the show notes.
Have a fantastic day and I will catch you on the next episode.
