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Join the Nerds!
Welcome to the funtastic world of the Fabulous Learning Nerds! Scott Schuette and Daniel Coonrod and Zeta Gardner are Learning Executives with over 50 years’ experience between them. Together they share new ideas, learning tools, approaches and technology that increase learner engagement and impact. All while having FUN! To participate in the show and community please contact them at learningnerdscast@gmail.com
The nerds are all about creating a community of learning, innovation and growth amongst educational professionals: Instructors, facilitators, instructional designers, learning and development professionals, trainers, leadership development professionals, learning metric gurus, sales enablement wizards and more. So, if you want to learn, connect, grow and have a good time doing it, The Fabulous Learning Nerds Podcast is for YOU!
Scott (00:01.134)
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another amazing episode of your Fabulous Learning Nerds. I'm Scott Schuette, your host, and with us tonight, you love them, Dan Coonrod's in the house.
Scott (00:14.705)
And this is where our
Dan.
Daniel (00:19.864)
Scott! What's up Scott, how you doing?
Scott (00:22.094)
I'm doing all right, I'm doing better than maybe you are. Do you mind telling everybody what kind of happened tonight or don't you wanna talk about it?
Daniel (00:28.504)
man, no, no, that's fine. So I'm doing, I'm doing great. But Zeta was walking the dogs minutes before we sat down to record and the dogs being rambunctious, tangled her up, caught her in her knee and dropped. So right now she is got her knee up with some ice on it and I hope she feels a lot better real soon.
Scott (00:54.48)
Well, that's good. You shouldn't be tussling with dogs like that, because that's kind how you can get hurt. Yeah. Hold on. Shut up! All right. So that's it.
Daniel (00:59.542)
Hahaha!
Daniel (01:07.7)
That was a great drop. That was great.
Scott (01:10.47)
Sometimes sometimes I hit it with the drop. Sometimes I don't. But no, that that has happened to me as well. Dogs, dogs can kind of get in the way. I've got nothing but ankle biters. And so we just have to be careful that, you know, from a dog perspective. But yeah, by the way, next time it's all anytime something like that happens, like it's always an opportunity to tell an even better story. Like we were walking down the street. Chuck Norris jumped out.
Daniel (01:14.336)
Ha ha ha!
Daniel (01:40.088)
It's fair, it's fair. I could have, I could have. And you know, that version of the story probably would have more entertaining.
Scott (01:45.834)
It could and it probably exists in some multiverse somewhere. That story is so somewhere someone's listening to this episode of the Fabulous Learning Nerds are hearing that story and man, they're having a great time, but that's great. No, that's totally OK. No, and they probably have a different saying than.
Daniel (01:49.366)
Yes, yes.
Daniel (01:57.592)
I'm sorry that it wasn't this one.
Scott (02:10.572)
Yeah, yeah. So that's groovy. We hope that she gets well. I'm glad you're doing OK. Everybody's super busy. We've got a really special guest with us tonight. I'm super, like I had the opportunity to speak with this individual a few weeks ago and I was super excited. He actually pinged me on LinkedIn and said we need to talk. I want to tell you what I'm working on. And I was like, wow, that's so cool. And folks, we're going to go ahead and not bury anymore the lead. We're going to introduce our special guest.
a very special section that we call, What's Your Deal?
Scott (02:48.512)
Neal!
Neil Thompson (02:50.963)
Hi guys, how you doing?
Scott (02:52.534)
Neil, what's your deal, my friend?
Neil Thompson (02:56.063)
Well, I mean, my deal is helping technical people with their presentation skills, all stemming from back when I worked as an engineer and wasn't all that great at it, but I got a lot better at it, so now I work with people like myself.
Scott (03:09.43)
Awesome. tell me a little bit about, I it has to be that journey, right? So as much or as little as you want to share, mean, you started off as an engineer and then all of a woke up one day and went, well, this is kind of what my calling is and I should be doing this. So talk to us a little bit about how that went down.
Neil Thompson (03:29.685)
Sure. I was working at a medical device company as a product development engineer. I was brought into my boss's office one day and he told me I was going to be a project lead. I didn't know what that meant. So I asked him and he said, well, you're going to be in charge of a group of those working on a particular project and you're going to be the one responsible for reporting project status to upper management. Because every month, all the upper management folks, we're talking CEO, CTO, CMO.
Seafilm, the Blanco, all the Cs. They'd all sit in one of the conference rooms and listen to all of the projects that were being done at the company. So we're talking 10 to 15 minute presentations each, but it's an all day affair because we're going through every project that's going on at the company. And I was responsible for one of them. Turns out the company was just too cheap to hire project managers. So they pushed that responsibility onto the engineers.
Daniel (04:24.514)
Ha! Ha!
Neil Thompson (04:26.633)
So there I was having to give these types of presentations in front of management. And those first few presentations were rough at best. I didn't know it was possible to sweat that profusely from one's body. And yet there it was coming out of everywhere. mean, your fingernails don't even have pores. So why were my fingernails sweating? It was ridiculous. But I realized that I wasn't doing all that well because after the presentations, I would get questions that I thought I had answered.
Daniel (04:47.544)
no.
Neil Thompson (04:55.679)
during the presentation. So now after the presentation, if I wasn't sweating profusely before, afterwards, now it's really pouring. And you thought I would have gotten a little better after that first presentation, maybe the second, but no, I didn't. I would get up there, I would read slides and try to get out there as quickly as possible. But I never got out there as quickly as possible. And one day my project got canceled. And that was the wake up call that I needed to say, you know what, maybe this whole speaking in front of people, trying to convince them to keep projects going.
maybe that's something I should get better at. So what I ended up doing was joining Toastmasters. For those of you all that don't know, it's an international organization. They have chapters all over the world. And it's really helpful in getting a forum to practice your public speaking skills. And now, as opposed to trying to avoid giving presentations, I'll look for opportunities to give them because now I see the benefit of getting better at it. And then I also noticed that a lot of the other engineers that I worked with, the same ones that also had to
give presentations in front of management because we had no project managers. They weren't all that much better at giving presentations than I was. So I thought, well, I'm not a unicorn here, so there's possibly something here. So I developed Teach2Geek to help people like myself, people that work in the technical fields who see the benefit of improving their presentation skills or public speaking generally. And it's great just working with people like me, people like engineers, scientists, people in the technical fields on improving their presentations.
So what I do with Teach the Geek is I developed a course, an online course geared towards technical professionals, and it's called Teach the Geek to Speak. So that's where it all started. And then once I developed that, then I thought, you know, I should be going into organizations and doing presentation skills training for the technical staff. And then so I do that. And then I also, I have a book and a workbook that can go along with the course. I have a YouTube channel where I offer tips on getting better at giving presentations for technical people.
And then I was on a podcast where I interviewed technical professionals about their public speaking journeys. The podcast has been so interesting because people can start off in one place and end up somewhere completely different. In fact, one of the past guests that comes to mind, Christine, she started off in civil engineering. Then she went to law school, was a lawyer for a few years. Then she was a stay at home mom for about a decade. And now she works as a personal stylist.
Scott (07:04.142)
Mm-hmm.
Neil Thompson (07:20.625)
This is probably somebody I never would have came across in my regular travels. So it's been really cool getting to know these stories of these types of people, not just their public speaking journeys, but their career journeys as well. So that's basically Teach the Geek in a Nutshell.
Scott (07:34.284)
That's awesome. So I have to say something. We're going to back up like this whole sweating profusely thing. Like you shouldn't feel too bad about it. I actually had a trainer on my team who, mean, this, this, this is what were paying him to do. We were, were paying him to train. Right. And so, he, he had a towel. Every time he got up to train in front of everybody, he had a towel.
Daniel (07:34.892)
That's awesome. Yeah.
Scott (08:03.246)
was black. Thank God. Thank God it was black because you couldn't tell how wet it got. And he would just wipe himself with the towel. And we were working with him for the longest time like, dude, we got to figure something out. You to get rid of the towel because it was kind of distracting and also kind of gross. But it is one of those things that I think that people can deal with. And the other thing around public speaking that I think is really important, you know, it is the I correct me if I'm wrong, Dan, isn't it like the
Number one fear people have aside from death. So we fear death the most and then public speaking.
Daniel (08:39.296)
It's up there. Like public speaking is up there. There's so many people who the idea of standing in front of a crowd of people and speaking just like sets them off.
Scott (08:52.902)
yeah. So, you know, if you're sweating a little bit, sweating through your fingernails, totally get it. Hopefully you didn't have a raincoat or poncho or towel like other paid trainers that were on my staff at one point in time. So I think what you're doing is awesome. And I can't wait to learn more about it. And folks, we're going to learn more about it in today's topic of the week.
Scott (09:22.392)
All right, topic of the week is developing speaking training programs for technical professionals, which is why we have Neil here. But before we get into the nitty gritty of it, I just have one question for you,
Scott (09:40.878)
Yeah, so what? is this important? Why are we going to spend the next 30 minutes or so talking about public speaking for technical profession?
Neil Thompson (09:49.621)
Well, the technical professionals within an organization have all this expertise and it'd be a shame if it just stayed amongst them. Especially if they're in positions like mine where I had to speak in front of people to try to get a project going or to keep it going. If you're not adept at communicating with others with persuasion and just having the confidence to get up in front of people, then projects get canceled and well, you may be out of a job. Luckily, that wasn't the case for me.
when my project got canceled, I was just assigned to other projects. It definitely put the fear in me to think, well, if this happens again, who knows what will happen? So it's definitely a benefit to the technical people, just getting better at speaking in front of others, especially non-technical people.
Scott (10:38.414)
Yeah, I totally hear that. So listen, you've been working with a lot of technical professionals. What are some of the biggest opportunities that they have? What are the bigger opportunities that technical professionals have with public speaking?
Neil Thompson (10:51.571)
Well, I think it's, as I mentioned, the idea of I have the answers, but I need somebody else to provide them because I'm not comfortable doing it. It actually reminds me of a conference that I went to during the summer. It was put on by an engineering society. One of the sessions that I went to, the person presenting was the business development person. And the questions that he got after the presentation were all technical in nature and he couldn't answer any of them.
Luckily, there were two engineers in the audience who answered the questions from their seats. And this room was small enough that even though they didn't have microphones, it was easy to hear their answers. But it got me wondering, why didn't one of them give the presentation? It made way more sense, especially since they were speaking to a group of technical people. It's very likely that they'll have technical questions. And well, who better than the technical person to be able to answer the technical questions?
But I get the sense that in a lot of instances, engineers are all that comfortable being up in front of people, perhaps they're worried about being judged, perhaps they think it's not their responsibility and it should be someone else's. But truly the people that move up within organizations, those tend to be the people who are the most visible. And a great way to be visible is to be a speaker, is to communicate with others. If not for anything, to just communicate your value to the organization.
Daniel (12:18.424)
You know, I got my start in like being a technical person. was doing technical support. had done even before then, like PLC to PC transition, like for another life forever ago. So I've always been like that very technical background. And I think like many people in learning and development, I fell into learning and development because I was in the right place at the right time.
maybe not the right person, but I can't tell you, like standing in front of my first classroom of people was just like, was terrifying, was absolutely positively just shaking. And the fact that there was this whole skill set, like I had to, I had to find it. Like there wasn't anybody like, yeah, like, Hey, here's how, as a technical minded person, you can develop these, these speaking skills. had to like figure it out because otherwise I was going to bail out of this job that I really liked.
And I was like, gotta get better and I gotta get better now. So I absolutely love what you guys are doing. Absolutely. It sings to my
Neil Thompson (13:21.299)
Yeah, I hear what you're saying. And like yourself, I also had to find means to get better at it myself. I mentioned that I joined Toastmasters, but that was through my own motivation. It wasn't even something that the company suggested I do. It was just something that I did some research, found out about, and thought, this could help me. But if an organization were to offer something like a speaker training program to technical staff,
I think a lot of them would take them up on that offer because it's there for them to take advantage of. And then they'll get better at giving those presentations and it will help them in a host of other ways. Especially as I mentioned, people move up. Those are people that can speak well. And I mean, if you stay not speaking all that well, well, you'll be that engineer in their cubicle mad because someone else got the promotion that you thought you deserved.
Scott (14:12.108)
You know, one of things that I think is important too, from a delineation, I want to get your feedback on this is, you know, the, speaking part is like, that's like half the game, right? Neither half are the presentations. Now my experience with technical presentations is, the game is how much stuff can I put on one slide before I move to the next, like white space on a slide is just not something that I've seen.
Analysts or technical people like do really well with so can you speak to a little bit about you know? The design aspect of what we're talking about
Neil Thompson (14:50.581)
Yeah, you're absolutely right about this, guys. It's as if it's a competition as to how much text you could put on a slide or how many images you could put on a slide at one given time. There's so many instances in which I've been in the audience looking at attending such presentations. And you have this sweaty engineer with their laser clicker trying to point at whatever we're supposed to be paying attention to on the slide. But because their hand is so shaky, you don't even know what they're pointing at at any given time.
Daniel (15:02.208)
Ha ha ha ha!
Neil Thompson (15:19.771)
And there's a whole lot of text on the slide. And I'm thinking to myself, man, I could read probably faster than you can. So I mean, you could have just sent me the slides. I didn't need to hear you read. I assume that you could read. So again, there's definitely an issue there, especially with technical presentations. And you're right. More white space is needed. Less text is needed. Less images on a slide is needed. And what that does is for the presenter, it forces them to know their
material well enough to be able to speak to it extemporaneously at times even. And they don't have that crutch of being able to just read the slides. And then also for the people in the audience, it eliminates that option of reading the slides. So now they're going to either listen to you or ignore you. So by eliminating that option of them reading the slides, now your odds of them listening become one and two as opposed to one and three. I like those odds.
Scott (16:16.238)
Yeah, that's great. And nothing by the way is worse than, and I've seen from, again, professional trainers read slides. And in all honesty, I think I'm completely guilty of it myself from a, Hey, we're going to go ahead and take content. We're going to throw it on the slide. I want to make sure I have everything. So you've got, you know, all these bullets, you know, in a row and make sure that it makes sense from the story flow perspective. But you're right. I could read that.
And many trainers do to get up and to start reading the slide like here you can let me read this with you in case you can't and we're going to go ahead and do that. So I think that's great. Is that something that you that you coach on as well from a presentation design perspective? Are you pretty much sticking with some of the you know the basics?
Neil Thompson (17:03.601)
no, I mean, it all goes together. So I certainly do advise on presentation slides. But I'm also a big fan of telling speakers that you speaking to people, that should be the primary focus. The slides should just be an accessory to your presentation. They shouldn't be the main course. They should be the dessert.
Daniel (17:26.968)
Love that. 100 % agree.
Scott (17:27.0)
That's.
All right, so I'm gonna be your protege, okay? Scott, the technical professional, and we're gonna pretend that I'm not really good at public speaking, which is probably pretty closer to the mark than we wanna admit, but hey, where do you start, right? So like if you were gonna go ahead and provide coaching to someone, I mean, what do you look at first? Where do you start? If we're gonna start to...
reshape and turn our technical people into storytellers. Where do you begin that journey?
Neil Thompson (18:06.825)
I think the first thing you need to do is see if the person is even open to hearing what you have to say in the first place. I mean, if you had, if, if when I first started giving presentations, someone had offered the course to me, I'm not sure I would have taken it at that time because I hadn't fallen on my face yet. My project hadn't been canceled yet. So I'm thinking I'm probably pretty good at this. So I'm gonna do it a few times and see where it goes.
But then I think I mentioned that even after that first presentation where I got a whole lot of questions afterwards, I I had answered. I still kept on giving presentations after that without making any sort of modifications to my approach. So I think the first thing you need to do is to really figure out whether this person is even open to hearing what you have to say on speaking in the first place. Once they are, I think the next thing is to actually listen to one, give a presentation. And so when you do that,
and hopefully you can record it. You can go through it with them, just tell them, well, these are some things that you have done really well and some things you could possibly improve on. In fact, I actually worked with someone a couple of years ago. He sent me a video of him giving a presentation and I went through it and I counted the number of filler words he used. Filler words like you know, so. I got the transcript of it and I noted every time he used it, what I went.
at every instance, minute and second even. And in a 40-minute presentation, he used the word a hundred times. Now, I highly doubt he would have known he'd use that word that often if I hadn't showed him the video or showed him the transcript to just to tell him this is what you've been doing. If I just told him just based on my own memory without showing him anything else, he had used it that many times. Who knows if he would have believed me. But because he sees it in front of him,
Well, now he knows this is possibly something I need to get better at because many people are bothered by filler words. One of such people is my mother. it reminds me of a story. So I think I may have mentioned that I have a podcast and I had a guest on and my mother called me after this guest appeared on the podcast and she said that after five minutes, I couldn't listen anymore. This was a 30 minute conversation, but she said, this person said, so many times,
Neil Thompson (20:30.557)
just bothered her to the extent that she just stopped listening. I just remember thinking, that's a shame. And I also remember thinking, I wonder how many other people think like my mother and stop listening to my podcast because of it. Maybe I should do more editing. But then I also thought for the person who was the one using those words as often as he was, I wonder if he was even aware of how many filler words he used. And maybe he would have, if it was brought to his attention through an actual video or some sort of evidence,
they use as many words, well, maybe this is something you would think to get better at. So I think the first thing first, this first has to be open to listening. And then the second, show them, actually go through a video of a recording of them giving a presentation, offering feedback on what they did well and what they couldn't prove on.
Daniel (21:18.68)
When I was, when I was young and I was, you know, first getting into like facilitating, there's this phrase and it's, it's everybody in my family does it, but we go, I'm an, I'm an, I'm an, I'm an, and I didn't realize I did it. And one day, you know, this person was observing me training and they came up to me and they're like, Hey, what is I'm an, and I was like,
I don't know what is I'm gonna he's like, I don't know, but you say it a lot. So I'm just like, is it's what are you doing? And I was like, you know, I had started to think and I caught myself. And I got very, very fixated on avoiding. gonna and I'll when I go to like family reunions and stuff, I'll be hanging out with folks in my family and I'll hear it now I can hear it because I'm listening for it. they go, I'm in. Yeah, then we did this. We did that. I'm gonna
think it took an hour, but it sticks out now, but it's one of those things that like you start counting. If I started counting ums, I think that would break me. I know I say a lot and any who's, that's my usual go-to turnaround phrase, any who's. And I've had people be like, hey.
Scott (22:33.397)
Well, you
Scott (22:37.344)
I think we've all suffered through that. don't care how good a public speaker you might be, how good a facilitator you might be. You struggled with that when I started out. People in the class were tallying. I can't remember what the filler word was, but they were tallying it. yep, there's another filler word right there. And so I remember my coach that was with me when we were done. They're like, yeah, they're
counting how many times you say this phrase. And I was like, really? I had no idea. So this idea of we're going to go ahead and give you some perspective or at least some awareness of it I think can help solve for the problem. One of the things that's really hard with filler words is because we are so afraid of the pause. Like pauses are fine. It's just a verbal pause, really. is nothing more than a verbal pause.
but it's more comfortable to put something in versus letting that silence be there. And I think the silence is okay. And once you get okay with it, it's perfectly fine. I don't know how you feel about that, but that's been my experience.
Neil Thompson (23:46.719)
I agree with you and something you mentioned, Scott, was it was comfortable for you to instead of using the pause to insert the filler word, but is it comfortable for the audience listening to you to listen to the filler word as opposed to the pause? I suspect they would prefer the pause over the filler because often I hear people saying that filler words are distracting. I've never heard many people say that pausing is distracting though.
Scott (24:13.27)
No, not so much. And one of the things that I think is really important to think about from the pause perspective, there's a lot of power in the pause, especially if I'm coaching somebody, right? Like I'm to go ahead and ask a question and then we're just going to sit. And the typical response for most people is after 30 seconds of quiet, we need to fill it with something. And so you immediately destroy the opportunity for people to fill in with their own information and reply back to you by just asking another question or filling it with something. so.
those are interesting things to think about when we think about technical professionals. we got the filler words. What's another big opportunity that you found with folks with their public speaking that can be easily coached through your program.
Neil Thompson (25:03.315)
minimizing data dumping. I think a lot of us technical people are real keen on presenting the data and thinking that it speaks for itself, but it doesn't, especially if you're speaking to a non-technical audience. And if you were to think about it, why would you think it speaks for itself? You're an expert in this data. Of course it speaks to you. I mean, if it doesn't speak to you, who's it speak to? But the people you're speaking to, especially with non-technical people, it's not gonna speak to them because they're not experts in it.
You're going to have to put it in such a way that these people can understand. And a great way I've found to do it is through storytelling. This is not even something that I thought was appropriate, given a technical presentation. But especially if you're speaking to a non-technical audience, couching data within stories is a great way to just keep people's attention and to have them actually remember the data that you were talking about. I remember hearing a
I think it was a phrase. People don't remember what you said, but they remember how you made them feel, something like that. That's terrible. I didn't go through this whole time of putting a presentation together for you to have a feeling. Especially if you're giving a project status updates like I was, there's something that I need you to do. And if that's the case, then I'm gonna need you to remember what I actually said. And...
Scott (26:07.328)
Mm-hmm. Yep, 100%.
Neil Thompson (26:28.125)
I think storytelling is a great way to make that happen as opposed to you feeling good or feeling bad or just having a feeling after I finish the presentation. That wasn't the point.
Scott (26:41.23)
Well, pretty powerful. know that for me, like, when I put together any kind of presentation that's got data into it, having the opportunity to really talk to and provide analysis around the data is super important because it really kind of does speak to that idea that, I'm a thought leader in this space, right? So 26 % inside that red arrow that is pointing to the bar chart over here.
is nifty and cool, but what does it mean? Right. And then then what does it really mean in the context of where we're at? That's, that's the next level of it. Right. So just here's this chart and as you can see in this chart, these are the numbers and they're not great next. It doesn't necessarily, you know, cut the mustard. I've, I've always found that that you're right. That level of storytelling around.
This is why this number is important. And in the context of what we're talking about today, this is how it's really important. And I love what you said about having a call to action. I struggle with my subject matter experts and stakeholders on this all the time. I cannot tell you how many video scripts we've got that are designed to change behaviors where we don't have a call to action. What is it that you expect our people to do? Because if you don't tell me what it is, I'm not going to do it. I might.
accidentally do it, but I'm certainly not going to do exactly what you want me to do unless you tell me what you want me to do.
Neil Thompson (28:16.405)
Well, 100%, Scott, communication is hard because you have a sender and then you have a receiver. And when the sender sending out, they have an intent. But then what the receiver receives, you will hope that whatever they receive matches as best as it can what the sender intended. So there very well could be a mismatch there. So in the event that there is, I mean, there has to be some sort of workaround to that.
And I think a great way of having that workaround or just a solution to that issue is having that call to action and making it as clear as possible. In fact, when it comes to presentations, I tell people to figure that out first and then work backwards. Now that you know what your call to action is, what you want people to do after your presentation, what points do you need to make that will naturally lead to that call to action?
what introduction would make sense to have that would lead to those points that would then naturally lead to that call to action. And what that does is it eliminates any unnecessary information that perhaps you would have added to the presentation if you had done it the other way around, as opposed to working backwards, if you were working forwards. Because it's so, especially for technical people, it's so common to add things that you think is important, but did it lead to that call to action? And if not, then it has something to leave out.
Daniel (29:42.2)
100%. You know, I couldn't agree. I've had the blessing to spend the majority of my leadership career working with creatives. And creatives, myself included, always want to explain how something came to be. Like, this is the thing, this is the goal. Let me tell you how it came to be. And I think oftentimes those executive levels of leadership
aren't always interested in that, that how story they're interested in the, the what's like, okay, this is what it is. This is what it does. This is maybe this is how it makes things better. And I've always told creatives, I've always told those folks I work with, like, know, like communication has like half levels, you know, the 10 things that you know about the project, your next direct leader needs to know five, the person, their next leader needs to know three and two, then one. And as you're
thinking about these different audiences, get tuned in to like, what does this audience need to take away from what you are sharing with them? So I love your focus on that. That's awesome.
Neil Thompson (30:51.795)
Thank you. I mean, as I said earlier, I had to give presentations in front of management. And these were presentations that were meant to take 10 minutes tops. I could only imagine if every engineer that had to give a presentation spoke to the or wanted to speak to the senior management on everything they thought was interesting or important about the project, about the projects they were working on. Those senior management would probably still be sitting in that conference room right now.
Daniel (31:18.316)
Hahaha!
Scott (31:21.698)
Yeah, go ahead, Dan.
Daniel (31:21.826)
So I was gonna say, you had like the big three for those folks who are like, who have a technical background, who are having to communicate and maybe it puts worms in their belly, so to speak, whenever time they have to communicate, what are like the big three takeaways you would advise them to do that they could do like today?
Neil Thompson (31:46.773)
Well, number one is to, and this might sound weird, but have empathy. You weren't always the technical expert that you are. So back when you weren't that technical expert, could you have understood the technical presentation that you're now ready to give? You want to include all of the data. You want to include all the jargon. You want to include everything that you know about this project because you think it's important. Could you have understood that?
back when you weren't the expert? And the answer is probably no. So what makes you think that the non-technical people that you're speaking to can understand you? Likely they can't. So harken back to that person, the person you were when you weren't the expert. What kind of presentation could you have understood back then? And tailor your presentations to that. So that's one. Two, I think you need to eliminate or minimize the technical jargon as much as possible.
These are words that are common to you. You hear them. It's obvious what they mean. But it's not obvious to your audience if they're non-technical. I'm a bigger fan of using more commonly used words. And when I think about that, I think about those first few presentations I had to give in front of management. I mentioned that I worked in medical devices. But more specifically, I worked in spinal implants. And more specifically than that, I worked in the orthobiologic
Now, I were to just continue this conversation talking about orthobiologics, you probably wouldn't know what I was talking about. But what it is is orthobiologics is using human cadaver bone to create the implants. Implants can be made out of a number of things. They can be made out of metals. They can be made out of ceramics. They can also be made out of human bone. So I was part of that group of designing the implants made out of the bone.
and bones made out of a number of cells, two of which are osteoblasts and osteoclasts. When I first started giving presentations, I used those terms at will, osteoclast this, osteoblast that. But the people that I was talking to had no clue what an osteoblast or an osteoclast was. So now I'm getting all these questions afterwards that I I'd answer during the presentation. I mentioned osteoblasts like 50 times during this presentation, and you'd always ask me what an osteoblast is? But what's helpful is
Neil Thompson (34:09.075)
instead of using those words at willy nilly, at least explaining what they mean at the beginning of a presentation so that if you were to use them later, people can harken back to, okay, that's what osteoblasts mean. That's what osteoblasts means. So that's number two. And then number three, and this maybe is just a pet peeve of mine, but I suspect that it's also bothersome to others, is watching your timing when you give a presentation. There have been so many instances where I've been at conferences and there's an agenda.
You're looking at the agenda. You're sitting in the audience of a presentation. You see this presentation is supposed to take 15 minutes. 10.30 and 10.45, it says in the agenda. So why is it 10.50 and this person is still talking? Now the agenda is thrown off. The person that comes on after, well, they're supposed to go from 10.45 to 11, but now they're starting at 10.50. Are they going to reduce their presentation by five minutes? Probably not. They're still going to go for their 15 minutes.
So now they're going overtime. The whole agenda gets thrown off whack. So I'm a big fan of when it comes to preparing for presentations is to prepare certainly to be within time. But if you're given 15 minutes, practice so that you finish within 13. Because inevitably, you will say something during the presentation that you didn't practice. And at least if you do that, you still have some buffer to play with and still be able to finish within time.
Daniel (35:38.21)
singing my song.
Scott (35:38.446)
Yeah. We used to call that getting in the weeds, right? And I can't tell you how many times I've gotten the weeds. Like I've got 45 minutes and somebody ate 15 of it. Now I got 30. So how am going to adjust my presentation to get 45 minutes worth of learning into 30 versus the, well, I guess we're all going to be backed up. My audience doesn't like that and they're going to blame somebody and they might blame me.
so getting out of the weeds was always something that I'm not sure. That's probably a topic for another day, but that's, that's advanced facilitation skills right there. Like what do I make sure that I hit and what can I skip and, or allow my audience to kind of gleam from whatever I've got. So the groovy thing about this conversation is it's just flown by, we're getting to that point where we're going to need to start wrapping up Neil. But before I go.
What I would love to do is give you an opportunity to go ahead and talk about something that maybe you felt very passionate about that we didn't get to, or maybe it's an opportunity to kind of wrap things up and really explain what's in it for me for our audience perspective. What would you like to leave with our audience before we say goodbye?
Neil Thompson (36:57.279)
Sure. Well, as I mentioned, I'm a big fan of organizations developing speaker training programs for their technical staff. And the big reason for it is that everyone benefits. The technical staff benefit because they develop skills that will help them in moving up within organizations. And they can be the person giving presentations as opposed to depending on someone else to translate their tech speak for them. So there's that.
And then the organization benefits because it now has more versatile employees. The engineers or the technical people don't just have to be those tech geeks who sit in front of their computers and design things or work in the lab or wherever, whatever environments they work in. They can be used, they deployed in various situations. One of those engineers I mentioned earlier, sitting in the seats at that conference, one of them could be the presenter.
One of them could be the person standing at the booth talking about the product at a conference. So they become way more versatile and the company benefits. technical professional has an avenue to actually get better at giving presentations because the company is providing it. So they're more likely to take advantage of it. There really is no downside really. So that's what I'm about. I saw my own life improved.
When I got better at giving presentations in front of others, and so I want to pass that along to others like.
Scott (38:35.362)
Neil, thanks so much for showing up and bringing the awesome today. It's really important public speaking for professionals, public speaking for all of us. I think it's great. Hey, could you do me a favor? Could you let our audience know how they could connect with you?
Neil Thompson (38:49.801)
Sure, you can go to teachthegeek.com and I think I mentioned that I have a YouTube channel. If you want to check that out, that's at youtube.teachthegeek.com. And I also have a podcast called Teach the Geek. You can find that at podcast.teachthegeek.com.
Scott (39:07.288)
Great stuff, really appreciate it. I'm gonna have to check out his podcast, everybody. There's gonna be some really great things there, I'm sure, and really great stories that we can all listen and learn from. So that's awesome. Daniel San.
Daniel (39:21.825)
Yes, Scott.
Scott (39:24.216)
Could you do us a favor? Could you let our audience know how they could connect with us,
Daniel (39:28.228)
Absolutely. All right, party people, you guys know the drill by now. Email us at nerds at the learning nerds.com. Ask us any questions you may have. I think for this week, what we would love to know is what is the scariest talk you've had to give, whether that was in front of a large audience, small audience, maybe with a spouse or a child. We'd like to know. If you're on Facebook, you can find us at learning nerds. If you're on Instagram.
Fab Learning Nerds, and lastly, for more information about us, what we do and updates, www.thelearningnerds.com. Scott, back at ya.