Another important real tension is to not make any escape routes, no escape routes. Don't just make it easy to listen to make it impossible not to listen to. So a lot of times in presentations, people talk about the idea of Tell me what you're going to tell me. Tell me and tell me what you told me. That's an old adage of presentations, and I actually really believe in it. But the art is in how and what you really reveal.

So again, tell me what you're going to tell me is really start with why it's your thesis. But don't tell me everything. Don't tell me the punchline. Don't tell me Don't give it all away. But tell me kind of what you're going to tell me. I'm going to tell you a story about an embarrassing thing that happened to me, great.

Then you're going to tell me you're going to tell me that embarrassing story. And then at the end, you're going to wrap it up and tell me what you just told me within context. So you're going to say, and that's why it was the most embarrassing it's ever happened to me, and I'm someone who's done some pretty embarrassing shit through my life, and you're going to really wrap it up and that's going to make a complete three act story. Again, when you're presenting you want to tell them what you're gonna tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them. This keeps going people engaged, it gives them something to look forward to. And it makes them feel complete at the end.

You want to make people feel when you create tension, you connect me to you, you control the show. Now, when you're doing a presentation, like I'm doing right now, I'm walking you through the exact rate at which I want you to see a presentation. One of the biggest pet peeves I have is people who make a presentation and they just leave all the words up in PowerPoint, they just do this. This is the worst thing you can do. This is the quickest way to tune your audience out if you're giving a presentation. So if you're giving a presentation, don't give away all your words right away, your audience will try to jump ahead of you to try to read it ahead of you.

They'll try to get out of there fast they can get on their lunch break very quickly. What you want to do is you want to lay it out exactly at the pace and speed at which you want them to understand. It will also let the concepts land so much more. You'll keep control, you'll keep engagement and you'll keep focused on what you're wanting them to. Again, don't just blurt it all out, lay things out, give them things to look forward to even the empty space of a presentation can be tense. It's like ooh, what Are they gonna do?

Are they gonna fill in the rest of this? It looks like Oh, sure enough they are, I got to find out what's gonna show up at the bot. Oh, there was make them feel control the show leave no escape routes are some of the worst things you can do especially in digital is by leaving an escape route where it gives the audience time to tune out. Maybe you've gone on a tangent or you've let a shot take too long or you've let a long take go on far too long more than it should. And now your audience is disengaged. They don't want to pay attention to it anymore.

These are called escape routes. And in digital, they happen all the time for just about anything. And you can tell in the metrics when your audience tuned out. It's like oh, well 12 seconds and we went to the mom story. Instead of his story or instead of her story. Us decided to go on a tangent and now your audience ding Do you by tuning out.

Keep your engagement no escape routes.