How To Give a Memorable Presentation, Lecture, or Keynote

By Lon W. Schiffbauer, BA, MBA, PhD, SPHR

If you were to ask me what I consider to the most important skill for professionals today, presentation skills would be somewhere in the top. I’m not the only one who feels strongly about this. TED CEO Chris Anderson says, “Presentation literacy isn’t an optional extra for the few. It’s a core skill for the twenty-first century.”

My own career is a testament to this. Whether as an HR manager with Intel Corporation, a business consultant with such companies as eBay and PayPal, or as a business management professor and lecturer, presentation skills have been a cornerstone of my career.

But why? Why are presentation skills so important?

The French novelist Victor Hugo is credited with saying, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” While I agree, there’s an all-important step that stands between a passive bystander and the idea whose time has come, and that’s the power of communication. When you think about it, an idea is nothing more than a chemical process that takes place inside a 3-pound squishy organ we call a brain. And the only way one person can move an idea from their head into another’s—replicate their own chemical process in the chemical soup that is another’s brain—is through communication. Communication is the key to engaging, persuading, and inspiring people toward action. This is the ability waiting for those who work to develop their presentation literacy skills.

Presentations, Lectures, and Keynotes

There are any number of ways to approach presentations, lectures, and keynotes. In fact, the book TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson, CEO of TED, should be required reading for anyone interested in developing top-notch professional speaking skills, so now’s your chance to stop reading this article and go pickup that book. But if you’re still here, then let me share with you what I strive to do in my own presentations. It’s called the “5 E’s” of presenting, and while it’s not entirely of my own invention, I’ve modified it fairly significantly to reflect my own research and presenting philosophies.

The 5 Es are as following:

  1. ENGAGE
  2. EXCITE
  3. EDUCATE
  4. ENTERTAIN
  5. EMBOLDEN

With all this in mind, let’s do a bit of a deep dive in each of these and see how they combine to make for a powerful presentation.

PRINCIPLE #1: ENGAGE

Engaging the audience’s faculties, imagination, aspirations, and yes, even fears, early on is key to communicating your message and influencing those in attendance. This is often called hooking the audience. We’re not talking a slow-burn here; we need to grab and hold their attention right off the bat. As Chris Anderson of TED puts it, “First there is the 10-second war: can you do something in your first moments on stage to ensure people’s eager attention while you set up your talk topic? Second is the 1-minute war: can you then use that first minute to ensure that they’re committed to coming on the full talk journey with you?” Think of it as setting your bait for strike then setting the hook.

HOW YOU CAN DO THIS

Asking a compelling, thought-provoking question

Questions are a great way to provoke curiosity—curiosity that wants to be sated. According to Chip and Dan Heath, citing George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University, “curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.” And this gap causes discomfort, a discomfort that can only be assuaged with knowledge. In other words, piquing your audience’s curiosity helps ensure their engagement.

Telling a story

Storytelling has been the mainstay of establishing and proliferating social values and expectations for as long as the human race has been around. Stories are how we experience, understand, and recount the human condition. Campbell Walker, a YouTuber at struthless, once said, “Research is great because it gives authority to a concept, and story is great because it makes that concept memorable.” According to Chip and Dan Heath, an effective story, one that engages the audience, is “a simple unexpected concrete credentialed emotional story.” In their excellent book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, they go into detail on each of these criteria, but when it comes to hooking your audience, unexpected is money in the bank, so let’s explore that.

Making an unexpected or provocative statement

Another way to open your presentation is to offer an unexpected or even provocative assertion, something that challenges the status quo. For example:

  • Greater choice brings about greater unhappiness.
  • Greater pay doesn’t necessarily result in greater productivity.
  • Everyone is a socialist; it’s only a question of who one includes in their social circles.

Statements such as these are likely to provoke a reaction and get your audience’s attention (provided they care about these topics). In literature and cinema there’s something called “subverting expectations”. It’s the idea of overturning something that is considered foundational to the audience. It jolts the audience out of their passive content consumption, grabs their attention by the shoulders, and shakes them awake.

They can also make for compelling, thought-provoking questions. Just add the phrase “What if I were to tell you that…?” before each statement and you’ve got yourself an engaging question.

“What’s In It For Me”

No matter how you begin your presentation, your hook needs to include a strong WIIFM component—“What’s In It For Me”. Truth is, your audience has limited time and mental energy to commit to all the demands placed upon them, so they are going to be stingy with these resources. If you can’t connect your presentation with something that matters to them then you’ll struggle to grab and keep their engagement.

PRINCIPLE #2: EXCITE

Once you engage their interest, you then want to excite the audience. Ultimately you want to inspire those in attendance to take some sort of action. This can only happen if they feel a sense of excitement at the prospect or seizing the opportunity. Excitement creates a state of arousal, and this in turn leads to action.

HOW YOU CAN DO THIS

Help them see and feel a future state

Share a vision of what your audience can accomplish with the information they are about to learn. You’ll want to do this in such a way that they can both envision this future state as well as feel it. They need to be emotionally attached and invested in the benefit waiting for them on the other side. Only then will they be willing to invest of themselves in the endeavor. Once again, stories are your friend:

  • Share how these practices helped you and others accomplish challenging goals. Help the audience connect the benefit of success with the actions they need to take. The idea is to provide a proof-point and show how this content has real value.
  • Share how these practices helped you and others accomplish overcome fears and pain. As strong as the vision of a brighter future may be, a stronger motivator may be to connect that benefit with the promise of fear and pain reduction.

Appeal to their identity

By making the action intrinsic to how they want to see themselves, you invite the audience to make that identity manifest in their actions. For example, rather than telling a student to study, appeal to their self-held identity as a smart, ambitious, capable person with a future. And what do smart, ambitious, capable people with a future do? They study. Now they’ll take action, not because they should, but because it’s who they are.

Help them see the benefit of the benefit

Often times when we look at the benefit of taking a particular course of action, we only see the immediate benefit—the surface layer. For example, the immediate benefit to studying is a good grade, but what is the benefit to a good grade? Maybe a sense of pride and accomplishment, the opportunity to apply for scholarships, the chance to apply to prestigious academic programs, or maybe just a reduced level of stress and anxiety. As Chip and Dan Heath put it, “Spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.”

PRINCIPLE #3: EDUCATE

Now that your audience is excited to take action, they need to know exactly what action they need to take. This means educating your audience, giving them the skills, insights, understanding, and tools they both need and want to be successful.

HOW YOU CAN DO THIS

Make the material concrete to the audience

Abstract ideas and concepts have their place, but abstract direction more times than not brings about abstract action. You want to make your content specific and actionable. This means connecting the abstract ideas and theories with practical steps to solve real-world practical problems. Remember that quote from, Campbell Walker at struthless? “Research is great because it gives authority to a concept, and story is great because it makes that concept memorable.” Well, there’s a second part to that quote. “But in my experience, change only works if you take practical, specific, achievable actions.”

Make the material meaningful to the audience

Going back to the all-important idea of “What’s In It For Me”, you need to make the content meaningful to your audience. If they don’t see how what you’re offering has anything to do with them then excitement isn’t even on the table. Don’t fall into the self-important nonsense that your audience will listen because they “should” care about what you have to offer. If you can’t figure out how to connect your content with their aspirations then you’re standing in front of the wrong audience. Don’t expect them to make the connections you can’t.

Get them invested in the learning process

Depending on the type of lecture you’re giving and the venue, audience participation may not be an option. However, this doesn’t mean you want them to be passive. If only in their heads, you want them asking questions and looking for guidance. Consider what Chip and Dan Heath mean when that say, “To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from ‘What information do I need to convey?’ to ‘What questions do I want my audience to ask?’” You want to help your audience formulate questions in their minds so they will tune their attention to what you have to say in and effort to find answers to these questions.

PRINCIPLE #4: ENTERTAIN

It may sound frivolous, but entertaining your audience with humor, joy, insights, and well-I’ll-be-damned’s will help your message land. Humor helps us connect with the audience, making us more a real person and less of a talking-head. As Chris Anderson put it, “Laughter blows open someone’s defenses, and suddenly you have a chance to truly communicate with them.”

HOW YOU CAN DO THIS

Tell humorous anecdotes

Tell humorous anecdotes that both entertain as well as illustrate your message. And if you want to take this to the next level, tell self-deprecating stories. This demonstrates your willingness to be vulnerable in front of the audience, which in turn builds connection. According to Chris Anderson, “When you can pull together humor, self-deprecation, and insight into a single story, you have yourself a winning start.” (Something to consider when engaging your audience with a story.)

Build humor into your visuals

Remember that you’re not the only communicator up on the stage. You likely have a PowerPoint or some other presentation media there to help you get your message across. Use this media to help lighten things up. This can be especially fun when you play the “straight man” against your visuals. Let them tell the jokes while you present the material.

Embrace your “weird”

Most of the time we work hard to hide our weird so we can blend seamlessly into the crowd and not draw any undue attention. That’s fine, but when you’re lecturing, now is not the time to fade into the background. Now is the time to leverage your unique asset: your weirdness. Trust me when I say great things can come from this. In an NRP report published in 2011, Alton Brown shared the story of when he came up with his vision for his show Good Eats: “I wrote down Julia Child, Monty Python, Mr. Wizard and thought if I could put those three things together, that would be fun.” If that doesn’t have weird written all over it, I don’t know what does.

Be unexpected

In psychology there’s this concept of “schemas”, the idea that, through our life’s experiences, we mentally codify and organize the world so that we can better anticipate, predict, and understand life as it comes at us. For example, someone walks up to us with their hand outstretched; they’re reaching out to share our hand. That’s what our schema tells us so we respond in kind. A great way to wake up and audience and throw them for a loop is to mess with their schemas. Do or say something unexpected to help rouse their senses and give them a laugh.

Be authentic

No matter how you bring entertainment to the party, it’s important that you do so with honesty and authenticity. According to Chris Anderson, “If you’re just an ordinary person, don’t try to fake some big intellectual style; just be you. You don’t have to raise a crowd to its feet with a thunderous oration. Conversational sharing can work just as well. In fact, for most audiences, it’s a lot better. If you know how to talk to a group of friends over dinner, then you know enough to speak publicly.” He goes one to say that, “If you’re not funny, don’t try to be funny.” If you’re uncertain, Anderson recommends testing your material on friends, family, and colleagues. The feedback will be their smiles and laughter. If you don’t see it, skip the humor.

Isn’t humor a minefield?

Yep. One person’s hilarious joke is another person’s off-colored remark. Something that would just kill it in a nightclub can be completely cringe-worth in a lecture hall. It’s a dangerous world, humor, so if you have any doubts about a given joke then steer clear of it. It may not be worth the risk. The, again, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It’s your call.

PRINCIPLE #5: EMBOLDEN

The final ingredient is helping your audience believe in themselves. Embolden them with a sense of confidence and self-worth. Truth is we’re forever surrounded by messages telling us that we’re not good enough or unequal to the task. The last thing the audience needs is more people chiding them, telling then what they should do to become a better person. What they need is validation and affirmation that you consider them awesome people and equal to whatever task is before them.

HOW YOU CAN DO THIS

Respect who they are and who they want to become

Treat the audience with respect and affirmation, validating their desires and aspirations. Speak well of their futures and their ability to reach their goals. Show them that you have faith in their ability to affect some great outcomes.

Validate how far they’ve already come

Point out that, because of the decisions they’ve made and their hard work and determination, they’re already well on their way to accomplishing their goals. The idea is to be a cheerleader for your audience, helping them believe in themselves and in their abilities to do great things.

NOW GO OFF AND DO SOMETHING AWESOME!

So there you are, the ingredients to a memorable presentation, lecture, or keynote. I hope this was helpful to you. And do me a favor and tell me in the comments where you used these techniques and how it turned out!

References

Anderson, C. (2016). TED talks: The official ted guide to public speaking. Mariner Books.

Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2008). Made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die. Random House

NPR. (2011, September 3). Alton Brown Takes A Final Bite Of “Good Eats. NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/2011/09/03/140165889/alton-brown-takes-a-final-bite-of-good-eats

struthless. (2022, November 3). How a space can improve (or destroy) your life [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikz3ECL5NEk

Lon is an Associate Professor of Business Management at Salt Lake Community College and holds an MBA, a PhD, and is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR). In addition to his academic background, Lon spent close to 30 years working and consulting for such companies as FedEx, Intel, eBay, and PayPal, as well as a variety of small to mid-sized companies around the world.