786 – Defuse your presentations: Tom talks Bomb Proofing

Episode 786 – Bomb Proofing
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 786 of Screw the Commute podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Sometimes you have to do a presentation either at work or to promote your business or something like that. Or maybe you like speaking and you want to improve on it. So this is going to be an introduction to bomb proofing. This is why no matter where I speak, I never, ever, ever bomb. And there's a lot of money on the line when I go, so I can't take any chances here. But this stuff will help you in all your presentations. And it's excerpted from it's a 16 page chapter, Chapter nine actually, of the Wake Him Up Business Presentations book. You can find it at screwthecommute.com/wakebook. All right. I hope you didn't miss episode 785. It was just Miscellaneous ten Tips that have helped me in business for years. So anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number that was 785. And make sure you pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. You will thank me for it because it's going to save you hundreds or even thousands of hours fighting with your computer. Let's you give you time to make money. How about that? Follow me at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire on TikTok and let's get to the main event.

[00:01:50] All right. How do you keep from bomb proofing? In other words, how do you make sure every presentation is great and never is? Like people are saying, oh, that really sucked And and maybe your content sucked because you had to deliver some rotten thing at a you know, work meeting or something.

[00:02:09] Well, that's why I want you to screw the commute and get out of those situations so you can only you only talk about what you want to talk about. But the first so the first part of bomb proofing is to say no. To the wrong audience. So if somebody comes to me with some audience that is just clearly first of all, I don't have any credibility on the topic. I don't believe in what the group is about. You know, I'm not going to get up there and just say stuff to keep them happy. No, I'm not. I'm going to say no to that group. So that's the first thing. Make sure the audience is right for what you talk about. Then this is probably one of the biggest, most important ones of all. I've got a whole bunch more for you here, but this is one of the biggest, most important and most speakers and presenters are lazy, so they won't bother to do this. But it has. I mean, it's made me a fortune and speaking and that's I interview people. So for the crowds that I speak to fairly, you know, 300, 400 or 500, not thousands, but 304 hundred, 500.

[00:03:21] I interview bare minimum of 15 people. Before I go, I ask them, hey, what's going on in the company? What kind of things do you want to hear about? Anything funny happened? Tell me about your competitors. Know I have this whole thing where I interview them and of course I got their name down and I can use that name during the presentation and I can say, Hey, I was talking to Joe the other day and he told me this happened. And so, Joe, thanks a lot for that. And here's some ideas to maybe take care of that situation. So you're making Joe a star and you're getting involvement with the audience because know it's one of their people you're talking about. And you can know stuff that that they can't believe, you know, as an outsider. See? So I always interview people. That's one of the biggest things of all. All right. Now, humor. It's getting tougher to not offend people with humor no matter what you do, but you got to be careful. But every audience to this day expects some type of entertainment value. So you really and that's part of most of the book I won't say most of the book, but a great deal of the book, Wake the Wake Him Up book is about the proper use of humor and how to find humor and develop humor and deliver humor and all these things and stories and all that stuff.

[00:04:44] So picking the right ones for the group is important. And you'll know if you do the interviews a great deal about the group. So you'll be able to pick Ume or better, you'll be able to use humor that they give you. But be careful because if one person thinks something's funny and it's going to offend everybody, no, you don't want to do that. You want to make sure any humor you use is acceptable all over the place and doesn't offend anybody, although sometimes you just can't help it. One time I was doing a speech, I had a joke about water and some Nigerian guy came up afterwards was bitching to the meeting planner. Water is not funny. It's in our country. It's hard to come by, you know, what are you going to do about something like that? The the rest of the audience was rolling in the aisles. They I got a three minute standing ovation, which is unheard of, you know, for one guy that's from Nigeria bitching about water. No, you can't sacrifice and just be a wishy washy nothing presenter that nobody remembers because 1 or 2 people are idiots. Well, I'm not saying I take that back. He's not an idiot. He just has a set of a set of experiences that is so far out in left field that I can't run the presentation for this one guy and alienate all the other people.

[00:06:05] See? So. So you got to be ready for that. You can't let one person dictate your your presentation. All right. So the next thing is humor. I mean, excuse me, savor lines. And these are lines that if you do say something funny and people don't laugh, you can say you can make fun of yourself for not being that funny. They've got a whole bunch of these in the book. But I remember a famous one from Johnny Carson. Somebody didn't laugh at his jokes. He said, May an aroused herd of yaks make an everlasting commitment to your sister? All right. So I wouldn't be that ornate about it. But I think another one, he said this is the kind of crowd that would watch Bambi through a sniper scope. So those are called savor lines. In other words, you're making fun of yourself a little bit because it didn't it didn't go over. Now here's where you got to really be cognizant of what's going on. If you say something funny and nobody even notices that it was supposed to be funny, you don't stop. You just keep on going like it wasn't supposed to be funny. All right. So these are things that come with experience when you're watching the audience because you got your what you're going to say down so well that you can spend your time watching the audience and seeing their reactions to things.

[00:07:32] And I'm not saying memorize stuff like Toastmasters. All right? I'm saying you've been through the material so, so much and practice it so much out loud that you can spit it out in a hurricane, say so then you can spend your time watching the audience and seeing their reactions. I mean, you might see somebody nod and so you say, Hey, I see you're agreeing with me there, Sally. So what do you think about this? And you can get people involved in it. See, so involvement is important not in the really big ones. It's harder to do unless you're really experienced, but in small groups, certainly you can get involvement out of it. Now the next thing is something every presenter should should work on, and there's loads of these in chapter nine in the Wake Them Up book, but these are called pre-planned ad libs. I'm going to give you a couple here. You should, as a presenter, expect the unexpected. You know, there's times when there's going to be noises outside, when the lights are wrong, when the room's too cold or too hot, when the microphone squeals, when the projector ball blows out. You know, all these things are are they? They could happen in a presentation. So you need to be ready with a pre-planned ad lib and see the audience thinks you came up with it on on the spur of the moment, which makes you look like a genius.

[00:08:54] But really, you thought about it ahead of time. And instead of stammering around like a pitiful presenter, that's inexperienced. You're slick as a whistle. And people, you know when you're calm in the face of trouble, the audience stays calm. Okay, we'll handle it. No problem. See, a pitiful presenter will try to ignore problems. And then the whole world, the whole audience is concentrating on the problem and forgetting about what they say. So you address the problem and all of a sudden it's a non issue. Say so. So I'm going to give you a couple of them right here. Let's say your microphone stand breaks or it won't stay up. So here's a pre-planned ad lib. I would fix this, but the only thing I learned in shop class was to call for estimates. All right. All right. Now, that's not knee slappingly funny. Just me pulling it out and highlighting it for you. But when you do it appear, when it appears to be spontaneous, when that problem happens while you're on stage, everybody is like, ha ha, That's just funny. Ha ha. And everybody's cool with it. Say, let's say the lights go out. Now, here's one. I hope my presentation hasn't left you in the dark. Let's say the projector light bulb burns out, and you you walk over and you look closely at the projector and you act like you're reading the sticker on the side.

[00:10:27] It says Last Service by Thomas Edison. So pre plan I got tons of them in in the book but but of all the different situations that come up and a whole bunch of different ones. Now the idea is don't try to memorize six different responses for one problem because you'll you'll be trying to pick one and that'll ruin the effect. So pick 1 or 2 for everything that can happen on stage and you'll be slick as a whistle. Okay. The last thing is watch your clock so they don't watch theirs. And that means have some timing device that you can watch without looking at your watch. So it's facing you and not the crowd. That's one thing. But then let me give you an example of how you have to be ready to adapt even when you're getting paid to do this stuff. So I was Monday night speaking to some group, not this Monday night, but a Monday night. Uh, getting ready to speak to some group, and the whole program is running massively late. And we're right next door to the lounge where when we're done, everybody's going to watch, what, on Monday night? Yeah, Monday Night Football. So I get on with 20 minutes till I think it's nine when Monday Night Football comes on.

[00:11:50] And I had already talked to the meeting planner. I said, Look, they're running late. They're going to kill both of us if they don't see the kickoff for this big game. So I said, you know, it's your call. I'll stay up there. But, you know, we're all going to pay the price for it and they're not going to get anything out of this because they're all going to be worried about the football game. So so the meeting planner said, fine, do what you do whatever you want. Okay. Because they didn't want to take the heat either. So I got up there and I said, Hey, look, it's 20 minutes till nine. And I was supposed to do an hour, but guess what? I ain't going to do an hour. I swear, if you listen to me for this, like 18 minutes, you'll be in that lounge ready for the kickoff of Monday Night Football. Everybody agree. Everybody's like, Oh, man, you're the greatest. I mean, before I even said anything, they thought I was the greatest speaker ever on earth, right? Because they'd been listening to all these boring creeps all day. And then here I am. All right, So. So, so pay attention to time and don't go over professional speakers. Do not go over now in my contract because of the nature of the whole, a lot of times the whole program depends on me making money for them.

[00:13:07] Then I have very specific things in my contract at my time will not get cut. You know, even if you're running late, my, you know, stuff like that. So, so if you just do a portion of that stuff, you're going to reduce the chance that you will bomb. If you get this book, there's only like 20 bucks, the e-book version, Wake them up, screwthecommute.com/wakebook. Then this whole chapter will keep you out of trouble. And then plus the rest of the book is 300 pages, one of the classics in the industry. So grab yourself a copy of screwthecommute.com/wakebook. And if you want help with this and all the other things to be successful as a professional speaker, as a Internet marketer, get in my mentor program. It's fully comprehensive and it's one on one. And we have a trip to the retreat center and our TV studio, and you get a scholarship to our school that you can give to, you know, some person in your life or keep it for yourself. So nobody puts their program up against mine. So greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. But if you just want to copy the book screwthecommute.com/wakebook and you'll be reading it and staying out of bombing in the next couple minutes. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you all in the next episode. See you later.