Introduction: Why This Book Was Written
“Just about everything that you have ever learned about public speaking is wrong!”
—Doug Staneart
When I gave my first business presentation, I was absolutely terrified.
I was just a few months away from graduating from college, and I was an intern for a huge oil company at a time when the price of oil had plummeted to about $16 per barrel. We were told that in earlier years that as long as an intern did a good job while working for the company, the company almost always extended an invitation for a full-time position upon graduation. However, I was in the acquisitions and divestitures (A&D) department of the company during the internship, and for the entire time that I was there, we never acquired any oil properties or oil interests. We were selling everything. As we did, more of the full-time employees were being laid off and being hired back as temporary contract workers.
I could see the handwriting on the wall, so I called the director who was in charge of the intern program and asked her what the real prospects were of me actually having a job when I graduated. She paused for a good 4 or 5 seconds before answering the question. She said, “Doug, my understanding is that, in this economy, we are probably only likely to permanently hire, at most, 4 of the 20 interns. In fact, I just found out that the company is discontinuing the intern program for at least one year.”
“Are you out of a job?” I asked her.
“No, it is not quite that bad yet. The company is moving me to Bakersfield. It is a lateral move, but they are taking care of me. By the way, you’ve got a good shot at getting one of the permanent positions, because of your experience in A&D. Just do well in your exit presentation, because some of the vice presidents have been impressed with your work so far.” I knew what she really meant, though; I had a good shot at getting hired because I’d work for a salary that was about a third the size of the employees who were getting laid off.
At that point in my life, I had been told that to be successful, I had to go to school, get a good job, work my way up the corporate ladder, and become chief executive officer (CEO) by the time I was 34. Now what I saw was my entire future at stake, and this particular future depended almost entirely on a single 15-minute presentation. No pressure, right?
In school, I had always been a decent speaker. My presentations were nothing to write home about, but I muddled through them as I advanced from one grade to the next. I had also been an elected officer in a couple of clubs, so I didn’t feel like I needed a lot of help presenting. However, the semester before I started the internship, I took a class called Business Communications. My entire grade that semester was determined by three presentations that I delivered about three or four weeks apart. On the first presentation, the graduate student who was teaching the class gave me a 94 percent which was an A. Immediately after the presentation, she gave me a pretty fair critique. She complimented me on my content and delivery, but she gave me a couple of items to work on before the next presentation. She told me that I said uhm seven times in the presentation and that it was a distraction. She also told me that when I stuck my right hand into my pocket, I looked nervous.
I spent the next three weeks working on saying uhm less and keeping my hand out of my pocket when I practiced. I said uhm 14 times during the second presentation, and I ended up getting an 84 percent. I didn’t stick my hand in my pocket, but every time I caught myself almost sticking my hand in my pocket, I would stop abruptly, and I reacted in an odd way. I also knew that the teacher was counting off how often I said uhm, and it threw me.
When I delivered my third presentation, I focused very little time on the content and spent a lot of time on trying to fix what my teacher was telling me were problems. I ended up getting a 74 percent on the third presentation. I ended up with a B in the class, but I was just glad there wasn’t a fourth presentation. When the class was over, for the first time in my life, I felt like a failure as a presenter. I got worse every time that I presented, so I assumed something was wrong with me.
About four months later, I was at the top of a skyscraper in downtown Dallas giving a presentation to all of my peers (the other interns who were competing against me for these four permanent positions), the head of the intern program, my boss, all of the other interns’ bosses, and three vice presidents from the home office.
When I walked into the room, I was the only person who wasn’t wearing a jacket. (I didn’t even own a jacket.) My nervousness edged up even more.
The first presenter was introduced, and he stood up and started with a joke. When everyone was laughing, I could tell that the speaker relaxed. His presentation was lively and somewhat entertaining. (I didn’t have any jokes . . .)
Second up was the woman who worked with me in A&D, and she gave a great presentation about a single project that she and I had worked on that summer. She had the marketing department create some colored slides for her overhead projector. (I didn’t have any visual aids . . .) I had assumed that the presentation had to be about what I did the entire summer, so my presentation wasn’t very focused. I hadn’t even thought about picking just one of the cool things that I had accomplished and delivering the entire presentation on just that one thing.
I was panicking. I was next, and I knew that what I had designed and prepared wasn’t even close to the level of the first two presentations. I could feel the beads of sweat forming on my palms and also on my forehead. My heart was racing as I walked to the front. Since I didn’t have any visual aids, I turned back to the flip chart behind me and tried to draw Oklahoma (where I had spent a lot of time working); it ended up looking like a lame parallelogram. I started speaking, and I spoke really, really quickly. I gave my 15-minute presentation in a little over 5 minutes; I said every single word, so I knew I was zooming through my presentation.
I rushed back to my seat, and I was hoping that a black hole would open up under the table and suck me in. I didn’t want to have to face any of the people in that room. I didn’t want to have to look them in the eye. I was so embarrassed that I wanted to flee the room. But I had to stay there and listen to presenter after presenter—all of whom did a much better job than I did. I was devastated. I knew that I had just destroyed any hope that I had of getting my dream job.
I got mad. I got so mad that I told myself that I would never fail like that again. Over the next year, I began to study great presenters. My dad had invited me to a business conference where a number of professional speakers were presenting. One of them was Bob Burg, who stood up on stage without any notes or visual aids and had the crowd in the palm of his hand. Bob was promoting his new book at the time, called Endless Referrals, and because I loved his speech so much, I bought the book at the conference. I read the book in a couple of weeks and was hooked. Every nonfiction book that I had ever read before this one I had found to be boring and not very helpful. But this one was practical. In the next few months, I read a couple of more books that I had checked out at the library. I read each one of them even faster than the first.
I began to see that my success had little to do with how many degrees I had acquired or how much money I had. I realized that if I wanted to succeed, I just had to make the decision to do so.
About that same time, I had been nominated by one of my professors to be the international student of the year for my degree. This was based on my grades, the organizations to which I belonged, and the work that I had done in the industry prior to graduation. But after a few months, since I hadn’t heard anything, I assumed that I didn’t win the award.
I graduated from college and was lucky enough to get a job earning about $20,000 per year (which was just under the poverty level in my area). But I knew that this first job was a stepping-stone. A month or so after starting this job, the association that regulated my industry called to say that the officers had chosen me to receive the student of the year award. They wanted to fly me in to the international convention to accept the award.
I knew that I’d have to give a short presentation when I accepted the award, but I wasn’t the least bit scared this time. In fact, during the evening of the presentation, as I was walking through the crowd, I met the woman who had previously been in charge of the intern program. She seemed genuinely happy to see me again. During our conversation, she mentioned that the layoffs at her company had continued and that she was one of the latest casualties. There were more than 300 people in our location who worked on contracts when I was at the company; a year later, they had downsized to only three permanent people working on these same oil contracts.
I was feeling kind of smug now, because I began to see that the failure I had experienced just a year before had been a blessing in disguise. She asked me if the company that I was working for had sent me to the conference, and I told her that the association had invited me and paid my way. When I told her about the award, I smiled inside when she looked at me and said, “You?!” I could tell that she was confused, because the last impression that she had of me was the bumbling stumbling kid who blew the big speech. What a difference a year makes!
Later that evening, just before I was announced as the award winner, I was thinking, “What would Bob do?” referring to Bob Burg, who I had seen captivate the crowd less than a year prior. When I delivered my acceptance speech, I started with a funny, self-deprecating story based on my short time in the oil business. Just as the first guy who presented in the boardroom the year before, the laughter from the crowd made me feel more relaxed. When I finished, I received a huge round of applause and had dozens of people come up to me afterward to compliment me on my speech.
Within six months from the time that I delivered that presentation, I had received almost a dozen job offers from people who were in the audience (the price of oil has risen sharply). I turned them all down, though. I had realized that if I spent the next 30 years working for a big company, then my potential success would always be determined by someone else. I knew that I was capable of more.
I spent the next eight years studying with some of the most successful salespeople and presenters in the world, and in 2002, I founded The Leader’s Institute. Since then, I have personally trained more than 20,000 presenters, as well as some of the most successful presentation coaches in the world. I didn’t have all of the answers when I started, but over the past decade, our team has uncovered some little known presentation secrets and worked extremely hard to make presentations easy.
Since I wrote my first book, Fearless Presentations, in 2002, I have traveled all over the world to teach presentation skills. In fact, just in the past year or so, I have delivered professional speeches on the island of Madeira, Portugal; in Frankfurt, Germany; in Dublin and London; and in every major city in the United States, from Anchorage to Miami and from New England to San Diego. I’ve had the privilege of visiting 47 states and more than 15 different countries. And I’ve been able to accomplish all of these things primarily because I present well. Every time I speak, I generate, on average, about $10,000 per speech. (Trust me, if the kid who blew the intern speech can become a professional speaker and the expert in his field, you can too!)
Since I founded The Leader’s Institute, my instructors and I have been able to uncover some pretty important presentation secrets that I will be sharing with you in this book. Follow our simple guidelines, and you will become the expert in your field.